As I’ve said before the existence of any innate statistical difference between men and women in mathematical/scientific ability is of no real practical importance. As far as public policy goes we should be looking at what would be most effective in increasing the number of capable graduates in math and science related fields. However, I blog about what irks me not what matters and articles like this one on arstechnica and this summary at science NOW that falsely suggest some study provides a clear cut answer to the nature/nurture debate really annoy me.

For starters I think it’s fairly irresponsible for a publication of the AAAS to offer a statement like this as unqualified commentary

The results “essentially confirm” earlier studies–and they should finally put to rest the idea that girls aren’t going into technical fields because they can’t do the math, says Ann Gallagher, a psychologist who studies testing at the Law School Admission Council in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

The casual reader will certainly understand this claim as saying that women are not innately disadvantaged relative to men in technical fields. Yet this research doesn’t even come close to proving this claim and in light of broader trends in male/female school performance that came up previously this result is perfectly compatible with girls being innately statistically worse at doing mathematics. Given that girls tend to outperform boys generally in academics before college we must either conclude that girls have greater innate intellectual talent or that some other factor, such as a greater willingness to study or pay attention to the teacher, accounts for this general academic superiority and must be accounted for to accurately compare innate ability. While the former hypothesis shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand the later one seems more likely¹ meaning that this study is essentially useless in comparing the innate abilities of boys and girls in math/science. While the authors of the research article might have reasonably expected their audience to be aware of the generally higher performance of girls in pre-college schooling leaving these considerations out of interpretive articles for the lay reader is at best unacceptable sloppiness.

True, the sentence I quoted is technically true. Girls have the literal capability to do technical fields but the obvious implication is that they have statistically equal innate ability which simply isn’t demonstrated by this piece of research. Unfortunately the article on ars is no better.

Thus, the gender gap in math performance seems to be insignificant in grade school, which is good news. Unfortunately, that does not help explain why the gender gap widens later in life. It is possible that pressure from society eventually catches up to women and makes it difficult to stay in certain fields, as the problem certainly doesn’t seem to be innate intellectual capability.

Once again this is a technically correct claim that is nevertheless extremely misleading. For starters, just like the piece in Science NOW this remark plays to the false idea that there is a sharp well-defined distinction between nature and nurture while also implying that whatever social effects cause the gender bias in the sciences must be negative. It’s equally possible that women are relatively more likely to be drawn away from math/science by other interests (child rearing, law, other non-technical pursuits). Even discouraging social pressures aren’t necessarily bad. If women leave technical subjects because they find math/science nerds less hot or simply don’t like hanging out with them that’s not a harm against women². Moreover, there are a vast number of explanations that don’t fall clearly on either the socialization nor innate differences side, e.g., suppose women are innately less rebellious and more eager to please authority figures and thus our educational system is more likely to snuff out their interest and ability to think critically. Fallaciously suggesting that social effects must be harmful barriers to women is almost as bad as what the sexist individuals on the nature side of the debate do when they conflate evidence of innate differences with female incapacity.

As if this wasn’t enough the arstechnica article casually dismisses the results from the article about greater male variation in performance and the Science NOW article ignores them entirely. Interestingly the study found that different races favored different genders at the high end of the tests, e.g., more Asian girls than Asian boys scored at the very high end while more white boys than white girls scored at the top. Still, while both ars and the original journal article dismiss the effects found as small in a discipline requiring mathematical ability at the 99th percentile these data suggest we should find 67% women and only 33% men. Pointing out that some engineering fields have only 15% women as the journal article does only tells us there are other factors at work but it doesn’t downplay the significance of this one. In fact given that math and physics Ph.D.s are probably almost exclusively chosen from the top half percent in mathematical ability this effect on it’s own might account for much of the observed gender gap. Moreover, in combination with the normal tendency of people to clump with others of the same gender and the role of friends/acquaintances in determining classes and majors it’s certainly plausible that even relatively minor differences in gender ratio could be magnified into something larger even if everyone acted in a fair and reasonable fashion.

Ultimately, however, any conclusions you might have been tempted to draw from the results in this article are undone by the fact that none of the questions asked in the standardized tests required serious thought. I stand with the researchers in bemoaning the sorry state of standardized testing in pre-college education but unfortunately for them this undermines any conclusions they might wish to draw about gender and innate ability. Quite simply how well you can memorize the quadratic formula and plug in numbers is totally irrelevant to your ability to do higher mathematics. I’m about to get my Ph.D. in mathematics despite being almost held back a grade because I wasn’t fast enough at my multiplication tables and regularly losing a fair number of points on math tests in high school because I didn’t memorize their stupid rules.

Of course there is nothing here to suggest that the gender differences we see in technical fields are the result of any innate differences but this research certainly doesn’t show otherwise so it shouldn’t be presented as doing so. Frankly I’m quite disturbed at the persistent bias in lay scientific articles about this subject. While I wholeheartedly agree about the importance of disabusing the public about their simpleminded stereotypes about gender differences and strongly support efforts to root out remaining discriminatory treatment covering up the complexities of the issue as these articles do feels too close to being propaganda for the desired answer for my taste.