First, with respect to gender bias in tests, most of the bruhaha seems to be about differences in the average performance or variance. If either of these statistics really do bias a test, we can apply whatever correction is needed to render test scores equally predictive of criterial performance.

What we really have to worry about is differential validity. If a test, in some sense, is more informative or accurate concerning, say, girls’ abilities than boys’, then the test really is biased and no amount of fiddling with the scores will remove that bias.

Second, all, or almost all of the studies cited in this article are cross-sectional, and I’d bet that none of them go past the age of 21. (There are probably some uncited studies out there of the 70+ crowd.) But most folks, actually start putting their talents to good use after they get out of college. What we really need to know is how different populations fare at mathematical tasks that they encounter in real life and work in adulthood.

I think that the birth control pill, more than anything else, is responsible for women’s success in a career. The fact that there are few women who equal Einstein or Curie in professional intellect has more to do with the fact that women have, over the ages, had to take care of their children rather than pursue a career.

Men have had the luxury of concentrating on their career but women, if they had the rare gift of a wealthy family to give them independence, still had children to watch over instead of nurturing their career and intellect in a public way. Children take up an alarming amount of time and emotional energy!

My daughter is just as good as her brother in math and he is better than average with his verbal skills, in spite of being dyslexic.

I believe that nature vs. nurture is absolutely at work. My mom told me that she noticed that teachers would promote boys’ participation in class during math even though she was just as capable in solving problems.

Perhaps the people who had control of publishing the data were men? thank goodness my husband, an engineer believes in his daughter and is able to help her at home when her teachers fail; not much help for the rest of the young women in America.

Which by the way, leads to another important question about math in America; with the NCLB as the focus in schools now, will the information gained about the difference in teaching early math to European children be tossed?

U.S. children are taught to understand math by rote instead of theory while European children are taught theory and are much better until U.S. kids go to University and there, they are taught theory. Complex v. simple; NCLB v. European? I can’t see this as positive. Anymore than the idiocy that thought to teach children how to read without phonics! Which by the way, in the UK, dyslexia is much lower and they have phonics programs available on the net for kids; I have used them in the US for my son because there is nothing like that here.

Can you believe that we were already dumbed down’ and now w/ Bush’s NCLB, we are even dumber?

I am still not voting for Obama, I find that a man who can laugh at himself (McCain)is often more intelligent and all encompassing in thought than a man who is constantly telling people not to throw stones.

I won’t bother with the many citations over the years that have established this fact. A simple Google search would suffice. I received my Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1987 and this was well-known even then. I continue to look forward to the day when “cargo-cult” social “scientists” (usually of the clinical variety) will shelve their political agenda long enough to understand some statistics (I’m a card-carrying social liberal, by the way).