"Never Ask an Economist To Do a Scientist's Job"

Has science found compelling evidence of inherent disparieties in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular?...

"We can't get anywhere denying that there are neurological and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly are," said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women." "The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance."

... In an international standardized test administered in 2003 by the international research group Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 250,000 15-year-olds in 41 countries, boys did moderately better on the math portion in just over half the nations. For nearly all the other countries, there were no significant sex differences.

But average scores varied wildly from place to place and form one subcategory of math to the next. Japanese girls, for example, were on par with Japanese boys on every math section save that of "uncertainty," which measures probablilistic skills, and Japanese girls scored higher over all than did the boys of many other nations, including the United States.

In Iceland, girls broke the mold completely and outshone Icelandic boys by a significant margin on all parts of the test, as they habitually do on their national math exams. "We have no idea why this should be so," said Almar Medvik Halldorsson, project manager for the Educational Testing Institute in Iceland.

I don't, either, but naming your boys Almar can't be helping.

But I digress.

The point is, that, despite the differences between the sexes, there doesn't seem to be any biological reason for the underrepresentation of women in math and science. Our brains process information differently and perform tasks using different pathways, but those things don't seem to be hurdles to learning or excelling in mathematics or science.

Me? When I was pup, I excelled in math and science, so much so that when the time came, I was sent here to study Number Theory, Matrix Theory, probablility, and Group Theory, among other things. Upon my return to public school, I enrolled in College Board Advanced Placement courses in physics, biology, and calculus. I couldn't get enough of the stuff.

Then, I took the SAT, and the wheels fell off the career-in-math wagon. I produced Almar-esque results -- higher verbal than math scores -- and, once the word got out, lost my standing among the nerdoscenti. My calculus teacher no longer looked me in the eye. My elf was no longer welcome in the Math Club dungeons. There were whispers in the halls. By the time I entered college, I'd lost my ability to F(x)=0 (Sorry.) So I tossed my ideas on a unified theory of mathematics and picked up a copy of Being and Time.

And here I am. In graduate school. (And, yes, of the three major sections of the GRE, my math score was the lowest.) It's amazing what the community's reaction to a low math score can do to a man.