The evil Communist lying New York Times lies again

A couple of weeks ago the New York Times published an article, based on a study published in Science, announcing with great assurance and fanfare that teenaged girls score as well as boys in math skills. My first reaction on reading this was that they were probably just talking about the middle range, not the top range, where the real differences between the sexes emerge. But the article went on to say that girls are equally represented with boys in the upper five percent. That really surprised me. At the same time, this information was so out of step with every other test that’s ever been done on the subject, that I figured there was something amiss and that we’d have to wait and see if the Times’ claim really panned out.

I didn’t have to wait long. Heather Mac Donald writing in City Journal explained how the Times article, written by Tamar Lewin, is a fraud. First, the Science study says that there are twice as many white 11th grade boys in the top percentile as white 11th grade girls, a fact that Lewin didn’t bother passing on to her readers. But Lewin’s lies get worse. As the Science article reported, but Lewin concealed, the test questions, which were designed to deal with President Bush’s racial equalitarian No Child Left Behind Act, were so elementary that scoring in the top five percentiles did not require a very high level of ability. Since the tests didn’t test for the highest level of math abilities, the differences between girls and boys at the highest level of math abilities simply didn’t emerge. It’s a basic liberal method: creating equal results by eliminating the best.

Mac Donald explains:

[T]he tests used in their study are pathetically easy compared with what would be required of engineering or other rigorous math-based Ph.D.s. The researchers got their data from math tests devised by individual states to fulfill their annual testing obligations under the federal No Child Left Behind law. NCLB has produced a mad rush to the bottom, as many states crafted easier and easier reading and math tests to show their federal overseers how well their schools are doing. The Science researchers analyzed the difficulty of those tests and found that virtually none required remotely complicated problem-solving abilities. That a gender difference at the highest percentiles shows up on tests pitched to such an elementary level of knowledge and skill suggests that on truly challenging tests, the gender difference at the top end of the distribution will be even greater. Indeed, between five and ten times as many boys as girls have been found to receive near-perfect scores on the math SATs among mathematically gifted adolescents, for example. 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.

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Gintas writes:

This is from David Stove’s notorious essay “The Intellectual Capacity of Women”:

Here is something which would not convince me of the equality-theory: reports by psychologists or educationists of tests, conducted within recent years, on (for example) the comparative mathematical ability of boys and girls. Such reports would not only not convince me: I do not believe that any attention at all should be paid to them. My main reason for this is not the public record of psychologists for fraud or susceptibility to fraud or of educationists for unswerving obedience to the winds of fashion; although this record is sufficient in itself to justify a hearty scepticism towards their reports. My main reason is a quite general principle: that a person’s testimony should carry no weight or little weight with you, if you are sure or nearly sure that his testimony would have been the same whatever had actually happened. If you are pretty sure that the boy would be crying “Wolf!” whether he had seen a wolf or not, you give him little credence, if you are rational, when he does cry “Wolf!”. Well, everyone can be pretty sure that, if educationists or psychologists report nowadays on a test of mathematical ability between boys and girls, say, they will report the girls as doing at least as well as the boys, whether they really did or not. If the tests seem to show markedly superior mathematical ability in the boys, the experimenters will not only withhold publication of the results, but will almost certainly themselves believe that their experiment must have been defective in some way. It is as simple as that. So, when such persons do report equal mathematical performance by girls and boys, rational people simply ignore their reports.

Adela G. writes:

I suspect that the timing and content of this NYT article was part of the media’s effort to help Nancy Hopkins and her ilk with their campaign to “title-nine” the sciences, as outlined by Christina Hoff Sommers in the article linked here.

And I expect to see more misleading and distorted arguments, statistics, etc. like those found in the NYT article from academia and its accomplices in media and government in their pursuit of “gender equity” in the hard sciences. They don’t let facts and common sense get in the way of equality, as Larry Summers learned the hard way.

Michael P. writes:

The fraudulent Times piece does not surprise me at all. But I’d like to throw you a personal story. My wife-to-be is one of the minority of women who can do math well. Her degree is in mechanical engineering. She is a member of a group that generally does well in math, and, as the MacDonald article mentions, in her ethnic group women are actually slightly overrepresented in the upper ends of the math category.

But what is interesting is that she never liked the field, and chose not to do much in it. What is even more interesting, is that she is not from a place where Barbie dolls talk down about how hard math is. Indeed, when she was growing up, the cultural propaganda showed strong women in men’s occupations (think Red Detachment of Women).

Now, her desire not to be an engineer in spite of a knack for the field’s details seems to underscore something inherent within the feminine psychology (or biology). Surely it was not simply a cultural thing which caused her to abandon engineering for something “more womanly.”

I believe that sex differences are natural, and they cross cultural barriers. I’d tell it to the Times, but are they listening?

I know my story is anecdotal, but I can supply documentation proving what I say about my fiancee’s educational background.

Laura W. writes:

The ongoing campaign to prove women possess higher math skills is revoltingly elitist, as if the secrets of the universe are accessible only to mathematicians, scientists and those with the very highest intelligence. It’s not only the lust for jobs and money that’s behind it. The whole effort reflects a mistaken view of where exactly meaning is.

Truth is everywhere and in everything. The female mind has ample opportunity to soar.

M. Jose writes (posted August 12):

I am proud to say that I predicted the explanation for the test scores mentioned in your post and in MacDonald’s article.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 11, 2008 01:05 PM | Send