I used to enjoy reading the journal of the Association of Women in Mathematics. Then Lawrence Summers happened. The valiant female mathematicians weren’t really discouraged, but they were angry. Angry and vocal, filling the editorials of the next couple years’ worth of issues with their outraged protests. As a female math major, I couldn’t helped feeling a little miffed. So maybe men did tend to gravitate toward and perform better in math and science. I didn’t need my advanced statistics course to confirm at least the former. But didn’t that make us female mathematicians special—the few, the proud, the non-Euclidean, or something like that?
City Journal ‘s Heather Mac Donald takes up Summer’s hypothesis this week and offers some mathematical evidence that he was right, contra a recent Title-IX waving article from the New York Times :
The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science , shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.
. . .Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges, the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.
The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews—a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork—covering everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.
The Wall Street Journal , it should be noted, had no difficulty grasping the two main findings of the Science study: that “girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests,” as Keith J. Winstein reported on July 25, but that “boys more often excelled or failed.” That the New York Times , in an article over twice as long as the Journal’s, couldn’t manage to squeeze in a reference to the fact that boys outperformed girls at the top end of the curve should put its readers on notice: trust nothing you read here.
The epiphany of NYTimes-unreliability aside, Mac Donald’s note about women’s “personal choices about career and family” rings especially true. Several women that I know could have pursued careers in theoretical math or the hard sciences, but they didn’t want to be working in front of a computer or in a laboratory all day. Of the few who did pursue studies in engineering—and I was almost one of them—the majority specialized in its more “living,” less mechanistic divisions such as environmental or biomedical engineering. They wanted a career with a visibly human, interpersonal dimension. And often, they wanted a career that would meld easily into family life.
You hear a lot about Summers’ fatal faux pas in noting that men are more number-oriented. Yet you’ll never see the headlines: “Summers fired for Saying Women are More People-Oriented.” Who decided that playing with numbers is the higher calling? As a female mathematician, I don’t think it was a woman.
