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Sharon Begley is one of my favorite science writers.

In an October 2008 piece for Newsweek, she exploded one of my pet peeves:

If I ever again hear the word “hard-wired” used to describe anything other than an electrical system—the human brain, for instance—I’m going to scream. Even allowing for the unfortunate fact that old ideas in science tend not to die out until the mandarins who hold those ideas are in their graves, the dogma of the hard-wired brain has endured for an inexcusably long time given the evidence against it. The motor cortex is supposedly hard-wired, its left half controlling the right side of the body and its right half controlling the left side. But therapy developed for stroke patients can coax the left motor cortex to move the left side of the body, taking over for the stroke-damaged right motor cortex. Even our visual cortex, which you’d think would be as hard-wired as hard-wired can be given the centrality of vision, can change jobs: when people spend a week blindfolded and receive intense tactile stimulation (feeling Braille dots), the visual cortex switches from processing what the eyes send to what the fingertips send, scientists led by Harvard’s Alvaro Pascual-Leone reported in August. Something similar happens in people who are blind from birth. So much for hard-wired.

She went on to discuss the dearth of women at the top levels of mathematics – and how the ratio of M:F math geniuses in the US had dropped from 13-to-1 in 1983 to 2.8-to-1 in 2005. So much for hard-wired.

Her piece this week is “The Math Gender Gap Explained,” on a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research compares the “gender gap,” as calculated by the World Economic Forum, to the “math gap.” Begley wasn’t surprised that they found countries with the highest levels of gender equity had the smallest M:F “math gap.”

Just in case you are thinking to yourself, “Why is there a math gap in the USA, women aren’t discriminated against here?” – have a look at some of the slashdot response to this research.

You’ll see a lot of insistence on gender based differences – in athletics. You’ll see a lot of moaning about anti-male sexism. You’ll also see many comments to the effect of, “well, OK, women can do math but they just choose not to because they aren’t interested.”

As has been pointed out elsewhere, it’s hard to “choose” something that isn’t on the menu.

But, Daniel Dvorkin made one of the smartest comments I’ve seen on this issue, als0  on Slashdot:

In every field which was once exclusively male, but is now no longer, it’s been claimed first, that no woman can perform alongside men; second, when the first claim is disproven, that hardly any woman can; and third, when the second claim is disproven, that maybe a few women can, but a majority lack the ability or the inclination. And every single time, as the residual sexism fades, the third claim is shown to be false as well. Business, politics, medicine: it’s a familiar pattern. Now math is next on the list.

In short, if there’s a difference, it’s not the sex, it’s the sexism. Anyone who can’t acknowledge this is a bigot and a twit.