The War Over Math and Reading
The War Over Math and Reading by Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling
There is a simmering war (of words) about boys, girls, math, reading and why fewer women become scientists or technology experts. Sometimes, as with then-Harvard president Lawrence Summer’s 2005 remark that “there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences [with regard to becoming engineers] between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization,” the war explodes onto the front pages of the papers and wildly disrupts a major institution. Other times, it softly bubbles along in the arcane pages of scientific journals. Here the battle weapons include difficult to fathom statistics and uncertain claims about educational and social policy. A recent publication by psychologists Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary (Sex Differences in Mathematics and Reading in the open access journal PLOSIone, provides a case in point.
Caveat Lector
All scientists have a point of view. This doesn’t necessarily make their results wrong, or unworthy of notice. But it does mean that readers need to understand interpretive angles as well as the actual data. One of my favorite sociologists, Bruno Latour nailed this in his pioneering book Science in Action. He compared the opening section of scientific papers — the one where the authors gather all the relevant literature and make a case fo