Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman has been on a roll debunking claims about gender differences found in the popular press. (That link goes to a post that has a list of all his posts on the subject at the bottom.)
Shockingly, it turns out that when you read a claim about gender differences (like “women say 20,000 words a day and men only say 7,000″) and decide to go check the research, most of the time the research says nothing of the sort. That particular claim appears to have been made up out of whole cloth; the available research is not totally conclusive but tends to show that men actually speak slightly more.
There are also many instances of actual studies being reported in so misleading a fashion as to make the news stories essentially lies. (Any time you hear somebody claim that men really do have trouble hearing women, don’t believe it.)
In a few cases, there are fairly-well-supported findings of gender differences, with the typical caveats that while the means are different, there’s a ton of overlap, and other traits besides sex are also good predictors of differences. Liberman concludes that post by stating:
But the most important lesson, in my opinion, is that the facts matter. Where the facts turn out to support consequential cognitive differences between human females and males, let’s try to look clearly at what those differences are, where they come from, and what individual, social and political conclusions we should draw. But let’s not let popularizers of brain-sex differences bring overgeneralizations and outright fallacies into the discussion as if they were scientific results.
Bravo.
For whatever reason, “scientific” findings about gender differences are more popular than just about anything else (except maybe diet claims). People find this stuff fascinating, and can’t seem to help projecting their prior commitments about gender onto the research, no matter what (if anything) it actually says. The chaff so greatly outweighs the wheat in this field that anyone committed to scientific accuracy really shouldn’t believe any claims without taking a look at the research.