A friend of mine was interviewed in the Wisconsin State Journal last Sunday on the front page of the Local Section. Janet Hyde does research on gender differences in math performance (among other research areas). In this interview Hyde told the reporter that she had taken it as a personal challenge back in 2005 when Larry Summers spouted off about women mathematicians and scientists. Summers, then president of Harvard, stated that there were fewer female scientists and mathematicians than male, because men were innately better at math and science than women.

Actually when it comes to math, Hyde had already proven Summers wrong before he opened his mouth. Hyde’s work demonstrated that it’s not nature, but cultural influences that created the math gender gap in the first place. And she’s also documented that the gap between boys’ and girls’ math scores in the 1970s and 1980s has now disappeared. Well, Larry Summers has also disappeared, replaced by Drew Gilpin Faust, Women’s Studies scholar and historian extraordinaire.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Local page of Sunday’s newspaper proved Hyde’s point as well. It reinforced the stereotype that boys “do” science and girls don’t by printing a very large color photo of three boys looking into microscopes at a science camp in nearby Mazomanie. Beneath it there was another color photo of a boy looking at a petri dish. And no girls! On the inside of the paper, you could see that girls attended this science camp as well, but their photos were much smaller and they shared them with boys.

Did the Wisconsin State Journal feel that it was following the equal time doctrine by juxtaposing the stereotype of the “boy scientist” with Janet Hyde’s research? That’s not balance in my book. The prominence of these stereotypical photos just makes it less likely that Wisconsin girls will consider science a feminine field. It’s as bad as the Barbie doll that a few years ago was programmed to say, “Math class is tough.”

When asked about Barbie’s stereotypical statement, Janet Hyde replied:

On the whole, I think [Barbie's] not a wholesome influences. She can’t even stand up on her own feet. That’s a sure sign.”

I agree!