More on "girls as good as boys at math"

Seems like Larry Summers and the recent math-and-girls dust-up just go together far too well to be ignored. So some mainstream and not-so-mainstream news sources have run with the ball. This from the National Post editors, with this from the City Journal. Excerpt from the Nat:

'Unfortunately, journalists of both sexes tend to not be math geniuses. Few of them anywhere on the continent noticed that Ms. Hyde’s data actually come a lot closer to supporting Mr. Summers’ hypothesis than they do to refuting it.

The study certainly does confirm that there is probably no difference between males and females in math ability, on average. This means that, if one were to plot out the observed mathematical proficiency of a large number of male and female individuals, the resulting graphical pattern would produce two sex-segregated bell curves centred on roughly the same average point.

But that doesn’t mean the two profiles would be identical. Decades worth of data show that male populations exhibit greater variance in their observed mathematical ability (and their intelligence more generally, for that matter). This means that men exhibit “fatter tails” on their bell curve, with more statistical outliers in the far-flung domains of genius on one side, and total dullard on the other. In the case of women, on the other hand, typical psychometric findings show their abilities to be clustered more tightly around the mean.'

From the Journal:

'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.'