I find this kind of annoying

I posted a link on Facebook the other day about a study done by the University of Wisconsin Whitewater and University of British Columbia (they're both cited as affiliations on the EBSCOhost page. I can't get access to the full article without paying $40) that showed that women do better on math exams when they use an alias after being told that men typically outperform women in math.

What they were testing was stereotype threat, which is people performing poorly due to anxiety caused by worrying that by doing poorly, they will be taken as proof of the stereotype. Since "women are bad at math" is a stereotype, and performance in math is easy to test for, this should be relatively simple for everyone to understand what the point of the study was, right?

No, this is the internet, what are you, crazy?

One of the comments on the article linked above is a guy wondering why they didn't do a "double blind" study since they were testing for math ability.

When, no, idiot, they were testing for stereotype threat, not mathematical performance.

But what really annoyed me was a comment a friend made on the link on Facebook.

I... I just. I don't even.

Look. Statistically speaking, intelligence is a normal distribution. There are outliers in both men and women, but in general, most people fall around the centre of the bell curve. Therefore, statistically speaking, the chance of randomly choosing only the women of higher intelligence than the men is incredibly small, since you make the assumption when choosing random subjects that, if graphed, they would form a normal curve, or approximate a normal curve (since the n is too small). And the majority of the time, this will prove to be the case.

Although since the subjects in this test were all university students, you can assume they would skew the curve towards the right, for both men and women.

And I am just so irritated by the idea that it doesn't "prove" anything. Well, no fucking shit, Sherlock. This isn't math, where things are provable. This is social science, where studies aim to show the possibility of things existing. This study indicates that stereotype threat can be alleviated through anonymity.

I mean, the wording is even "these results suggest [...]." There is no use of the word "prove," because responsible researchers never use the word prove.

So basically this person is ignorant of how statistics work, of how random selection works, and of the point of studies like this, while simultaneously implying that no, women are still probably worse at math than men because it's "likely" that the women chosen to write anonymously are smarter than the men and that would be the only reason they would perform as well as the men.

Had they outperformed the men, this wouldn't irritate me as much. But they didn't perform better. They performed at the same level. So by saying that the women who did as well as the men were probably more intelligent than the men were, he is saying that he believes that women aren't as good at math because they can only do it on the level of less intelligent men.

Which I take really personally. I've always been good at math, better than most of my male peers. This isn't because I'm incredibly brilliant, although I am aware that I'm not stupid. There are many people more intelligent than I am.

Stereotype threat exists for everyone. They've done other studies about race, about gender, about sexual orientation. They've all shown that being reminded of a negative stereotype about your race/gender/orientation makes people perform worse than when they aren't.

They've done studies that show little girls perform on the same level as little boys until around late elementary school. Not surprising? This is around the same time I remember being told that little girls are better at language than little boys, and little boys are better than little girls at math and science.

And then I thought "what, no, I am better than EVERYONE" (I probably really did think that. I was looking at my report cards from elementary school, and I wrote a poem in grade three entitled "I am so smart." (The teacher's comment was that she enjoyed the poem, and that I am, but still, wow @ me)), and went on my merry way of loving science and breezing through math.