Diane Halpern Quoted in Los Angeles Times on Gender Differences and Math Scores

The quotation in question on a new study based upon data gleaned from the No Child Left Behind Initiative and explored in The Los Angeles.

"There's nothing in any of these data that would suggest that girls can't do math or aren't doing well in math," said Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College who was not involved in the study.

However, she noted that girls generally score better on tests closely aligned with the classroom curriculum, including the standardized tests used for No Child Left Behind.

I confess that I don't know if women are hard-wired or men are hard-wired or any of that stuff. All I know is that I cannot do math as well as I would like and so I work on it. I also know that studies based upon government results done by psychologists might be more than a little bit flawed, but I digress. (I also know that guys tend to still outperform women on the math SAT, which is a much tougher test than anything designed by the federal government.)

Here's something I don't profess to understand: If there is no difference between boys and girls when it comes to mathematical or scientific aptitude, why did Diane Halpern recently attend a conference that effectively called for Title IXing science education?

Unless, Halpern and others are using the evidence of girls scores to indicate that there must be evidence of gender discrimination by scientists and therefore that that is deserving of government intervention?