Girls Suck at Math (or do they?)

Something on gender differences... (response to the Harvard president's statements last week)

Around 5PM on NPR, I heard a commentary from Drew Weston, a psychology professor at Emory University in Georgia.

At the end of the commentary, he brought up a study that was done that had some interesting results. Sets of an equal number of men and women were given a math and ("hard") science test. Different sets of men and women were either told that the test *should* show gender differences or *should not* show gender differences. In every case where the women were told that there *should* be a difference, on average they did worse than the men. However, when they were told that the test *should not* show a difference, they did equally well.

So some might say that just because something is a stereotype doesn't make it any less true. However, it is possible that the existence of the stereotype is what is making it true...

So that's something.