Tim Hunt, the Nobel prizewinning UCL biologist recently chased out of his professorship by a baying mob for joking that women scientists cause problems by falling in love with their male counterparts and crying if you criticise them, was recently asked if he thought the relative dearth of women in harder sciences was a problem. He said, in the purest crimethink:

I’m not sure there is really a problem, actually. People just look at the statistics. I dare, myself, think there is any discrimination, either for or against men or women. I think people are really good at selecting good scientists but I must admit the inequalities in the outcomes, especially at the higher end, are quite staggering. And I have no idea what the reasons are. One should start asking why women being under-represented in senior positions is such a big problem. Is this actually a bad thing? It is not immediately obvious for me … is this bad for women? Or bad for science? Or bad for society? I don’t know, it clearly upsets people a lot.

Although not directly responding to Hunt, prominent Spanish language website Politikon has a piece up (kindly translated for me) pre-emptively denying that the sorts of relevant sex differences that might cause these differences ‘legitimately’ exist.

Of course everyone accepts that there are huge differences between men and women in some domains. For example no one thinks than men’s thicker jaws or higher basal metabolic rates are socially constructed. No one thinks the fact that even athletically-trained women are much weaker than normal men is down to society.

But some people, including author Guido Corradi, do think that social construction is responsible for men and boys being judged better at mathematical subjects. He attacks Simon Baron-Cohen as a main progenitor of this view, and suggests the perspective is speculative and lacking evidentiary backing. He accepts that men are stronger at visuospatial skills (e.g. 3Dmentalrotation), but not that they are stronger mathematically overall.

More recent studies (Lindberg, et al. 2010) support the hypothesis that there are no mathematical skill differences. It has to be mentioned that since they started to be tracked, differences in general mathematical achievement have been decreasing. In a seminal meta-analysis by Hyde (1990) this tendency is observed.

Lindberg et al. do seem to convincingly show us that girls and boys are equally good at maths on average. But this doesn’t mean that things are the same the whole way along the scale, because men may differ more widely than women. Corradi appears to know that this possibility exists, but completely dismisses the point without considering it seriously.