Mädchen immer noch nicht so gut wie Jungen in Mathe

Vor ein paar Tagen hat hier ein Gendrama-Leser auf ein englischsprachiges Blog verwiesen, das die von vielen Journalisten auch in Deutschland verbreitete Ente korrigierte, Mädchen seien inzwischen so gut wie Jungen im Bereich Mathematik. Inzwischen ist diese Info bei der Presse angekommen. So berichtet heute z. B. die "National Post":

One way or another, you probably caught the news last week that girls have caught up with boys in average scores on standardized math tests in the United States, a result that was hailed as representing the closing of a long-standing “gender gap” that scientists have struggled to explain for decades. A Reuters story quoted the lead author of a study in Science magazine, Janet Hyde, as saying that “there aren’t gender differences anymore in math performance” that could account for the pre-eminence of men in strongly quantitative careers such as math and physics.

In the United States, the controversy over the potential for innate cognitive differences between the sexes has been much more prominent, thanks to incendiary remarks made in 2005 by the distinguished economist Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University. Mr. Summers, giving a talk on diversity in the academic workplace, suggested that in some fields such differences might permanently thwart the search for perfect gender balance. He was eventually forced out of his job early thanks to the many enemies these comments earned him. In its story on the study by Ms. Hyde et al., the Los Angeles Times took the opportunity to gloat that the results “undermined the assumption — infamously espoused by [Mr. Summers] — that boys are more likely than girls to be math geniuses.”

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.

Hier geht es weiter.