by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

There’s been a bit of an online kerfuffle this week over a recent John Tierney column in the New York Times.

Tierney looks at studies of gifted students who take the SAT at a young age (in this case, seventh grade); these statistics show that boys in this group substantially outnumber girls in getting the very highest math scores (and girls outnumber boys in getting the very highest verbal scores). From this, he concludes that women may be outnumbered by men in the sciences because of… innate lesser ability! How “daring”! No one has ever suggested this before!

Of course, his conclusions aren’t very scientific. Here are a few of the unfounded assumptions he has to make to draw the conclusions he draws:

• Most obviously, the assumption that test scores at age 13 precisely reflect innate ability, rather than also reflecting the effects of thirteen years of possibly-biased education and socialization
• The assumption that the SAT (a test known to feature many cultural biases) accurately tracks mathematical intelligence
• The assumption that mathematical intelligence is “what it takes” to get tenure at a top university (and not, say, luck, personal factors, institutional support…)
• The assumption that science is so hard that it’s really only suited for people with extremely high scores (in the top fraction of a percent among a group of students who are already in the top fraction of a percent among their peers)
• The assumption that this finding would explain the low numbers of women in science, ignoring the fact that the size of the imbalance among high-scoring seventh graders is still smaller than the size of the imbalances in many professional STEM fields

Why are people still trying to bend over backwards to “show” an innate difference in ability, that, if it exists at all, is by any evidence available still much smaller than the difference in representation? Why are they trying so hard to deny the existence of biases and unequal treatment, despite the heaps of evidence available that this occurs at every level and the common-sense conclusion that cultural factors play a much bigger role than biological factors in keeping women out of science?

(More responses to Tierney at Shakesville and Jezebel.)