We’d gotten to a point where two plausible, but very different, ideas could explain our simple finding that, after we had carefully selected women and men who had strong and equal math skills, the women did worse on a difficult math test we gave them than the men—that is, classic underperformance. Our explanation was that frustration during a difficult math test made women worry about confirming, or being seen to confirm, the societal view about women’s poor math ability, and that this worry, in turn, interfered with their performance. This is how we saw the “collar” of stigma interfering with
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Whereas Larry Summers glibly assigned weight to the genetic hypothesis. Without any data to distinguish between these two hypotheses examined here.
