That Liberal Media

What's wrong with this YDN article? The title is "Scientists refute gender claims," referring specifically to the remarks that got Larry Summers in trouble; the subtitle is "Professors say society is responsible for gender imbalance in sciences."

Now it would certainly be news if cognitive science and empirical psychology were able to pinpoint "society" as the sole cause of the underrepresentation of women in math, science, and engineering. But of course, nothing of the sort has happened, and if you look under the fold, the article says as much. Some quotes to ponder:

Studies have shown men and women use different regions of their brains for cognitive tasks. Research by scientists at the Universities of California and New Mexico has shown that use more gray matter and women more white matter.

And:

[F]unctional MRI studies provide evidence that men tend to use the left side of their brains while women employ more diffuse neural systems involving both sides while performing rhyming tasks.

And:

Genetics and psychiatry professor Kenneth Kidd said most neuropsychiatric disorders affect males at a higher frequency than females, and young girls develop language abilities much more quickly than boys of the same age.

And:

Robert Sternberg, a professor of psychology and education, said differences between the sexes exist for specific tasks, but most research does not confirm broad generalizations about superiority in science and math. Men tend to be overrepresented at both the top and bottom of performance scales, he said.

Neurobiology professor Paul Forscher said human brain function is too complex and enigmatic to make any assumptions about cognitive sex differences. While the importance of sex differences in lower animals is more clear-cut, he said, choices are more important in explaining human behavior.

You tell me how to interpret this. I can't interpret it as saying anything other than that there is no basis for drawing conclusions one way or the other about genetically-rooted neurological and cognitive differences between the sexes. Which of course argues (as one of the cited experts does explicitly) for further investigating these differences. It doesn't even remotely "refute gender claims," especially considering that Summers readily acknowledged (who wouldn't) that a large factor in the disparity in representation was societal. There seem to be three plausible explanations of the available data: 1) Whatever disparity exists in performance in these fields is the result of social constraints; 2) Genetics distributes mathematical and scientific skills unevenly, in favor of men; 3) Genetics hard-wires individuals to learn math and science according to differing sex-based neurological pathways, and due to inbuilt discrimination, the female pattern, though no less successful, gets filtered out. Of the three, the last sounds the most plausible to me. But it is a question we just can't answer yet, and scientists aren't capable of saying precisely what causes the gender imbalance, and they wouldn't do so.

Since I know first-hand that op-ed writers have no control over the titles of their pieces, I'm not ready to blame staff reporter Susie Poppick for her article's thoroughly misleading headline. But it's evidence of two nasty syndromes: a creative process by committee, as the headline surely was; and a politically correct Prudenization of a story.

Full disclosure: I'm putting an op-ed in the YDN later this week in which I defend Summers.