Heather MacDonald dubs the women twisting the results of a new survey on the performances of the sexes in mathematics "reality-denying feminists." I blame the feminists' fuzzy math on their smaller brains.

"Math Scores Show No Gap for Girls, Study Finds," reads a misleading headline in the New York Times. "Let me begin by raising a glass of champagne to the official closing of the math gap," Ellen Goodman writes in a recent Boston Globe column. "It turns out that girls do not lack the math gene. Nor are they math-phobic. Nor is there any 'intrinsic' difference--thank you, Larry Summers--between the abilities of girls and boys to succeed in the numbers business. There's no reason at all for inequality. In fact, there's no longer inequality." Alas, there is. And the inequality is most extreme where it matters most--at the top.

"On the contrary," Heather MacDonald writes in the City Journal, "Science's analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost [Larry] Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you're hoping to land a job in Harvard's math department, you'd better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you'd better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces--though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate."

Test scores do not measure math aptitude but rather accomplishment. There is no hope of control group experimentation here, thank God, so there is really little to discuss aptitude-wise. I would guess that any little variable would skew results especially in the small number rarified atmosphere of the math gifted. Surely the social stigma of being a math geek is much more severe for girls than boys, at least I hope so. I would not want my daughter (even more than I wouldn't want my son) to be a pinheaded mathaholic. It is not conducive to happiness.

May your daughter be happy making what she will with her liberal arts degree!

What a pinheaded remark. Petty and apparently ignorant of what non-math majors might make of their lives. Exactly what I wish for neither my daughter or son.

Belloc commented many years ago that mathematics is too simple to be considered an intellectual enterprise. It all begins with 1+ 1 = 2 and goes on from there. [cf. Principia Mathematica]. Anyone studying math must begin early. It's a youngster's game.

Women are certainly more intelligent than men, more observant, more alert.