BILL KURTIS: From NPR and WBEZ Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME, the NPR News quiz. I'm Bill Kurtis. We are playing this week with Roxanne Roberts, Adam Burke and Luke Burbank. And here again is your host at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.
PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you, Bill.
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SAGAL: Thank you, everybody.
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SAGAL: Right now, it is time for that WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME Bluff The Listener game. Call 1-888-WAITWAIT to play our game on the air. Hi, you are on WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME.
SHAWN OLSON: Greetings. This is Shawn Olson from St. Paul, Minn.
SAGAL: Hey, I love St. Paul. What do you do there?
OLSON: I'm a physician. I got a medical spine practice treating chronic back and neck pain.
SAGAL: Oh, wow. That's the gift that never stops giving, if you're a back doctor, I guess.
OLSON: Endless work.
SAGAL: Shawn, it's nice to have you with us. You're going to play our game in which you must try to tell truth from fiction. Bill, what is Shawn's topic?
KURTIS: Bunsen burner? I hardly bunsen know her.
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SAGAL: So we all know that males disproportionately dominate the STEM fields. That stands for science, technology, engineering and manspreading.
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SAGAL: But why do they do that? Why are there so many men compared to women? Well, this week, we heard a surprising theory. Our panelists are going to tell you about this latest explanation. Pick the one who's telling the truth, and you will win our prize, the deeply male voice of Carl Kasell on your voicemail. Are you ready to play?
OLSON: Yes.
SAGAL: OK. First up, let's hear why there are more men than women in the sciences from Luke Burbank.
LUKE BURBANK: The team of Australian researchers were stumped. Even after adjusting for a variety of long-standing gender biases in the world of physics, they just couldn't figure out why young girls seemed to perform noticeably worse on one particular test, a test where they were asked to predict an object's projectile motion. And then a light went off. A yellow light, if you will. As they wrote in their research paper released last week, two of us have observed the great delight our young male children take in urination, a process by which they produce and direct a visible projectile arc.
(LAUGHTER)
BURBANK: Yes, that is right. The theory being put forward is that boys test better at physics because they begin working on their Pee-h.D.s (ph) at a very young age.
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BURBANK: These researchers maintain that this, quote, "self-directed, hands-on, intrinsically rewarding activity leads to a deep embodied knowledge of projectile motion which is simply not accessible to girls." The paper ranges between various disparate topics, leading one to wonder if this was just a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise.
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BURBANK: To their mild credit, the team does end the paper with a call to change curriculum and the male-dominated culture of science in an attempt to help close the gender gap. Unfortunately, they decided to title this ending section Changing the Flow.
(LAUGHTER)
BURBANK: Which you don't have to be a whiz to realize...
(LAUGHTER)
BURBANK: ...Kind of distracts from the overall point.
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SAGAL: Boys are better at physics because of their early experiments with projectile arcs in the restroom. Your next story of masculinity getting ahead in science comes from Roxanne Roberts.
ROXANNE ROBERTS: Dr. Angela Marnelli (ph) wears a size three Ted Baker dress, size 42 Valentino pants, size 39 Jimmy Choo shoes and a size seven and a half sneaker. This is why women are afraid of math, says the NYU mathematics professor and feminist. For her dissertation on gender differences in number perception, Marnelli worked undercover at Neiman Marcus, J. Crew and Forever 21 to collect real time data on teenage shoppers. The average female fit into 3.6 different size dresses, 2.7 shoe size and 4.3 bra sizes. Platform shoes and heels more than four inches impaired their ability to correctly judge heights by 43 percent.
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ROBERTS: And elastic shapewear completely ruined their perception of accurate body measurements. Women are very conflicted about numbers, she told The New York Times. They understand they have meaning, but they don't trust them to reflect the truth. So if they're told zero divided by zero is zero, they'll say no way. She's at least a two.
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SAGAL: OK. According to this theory, the reason that women don't do as well in the sciences is because they learn not to trust math from their experience with sizes. Your last story in the secret advantage men have in the sciences comes from Adam Burke.
ADAM BURKE: Regarding the oft-lamented disparity between men and women in the STEM fields, one academic believes the answer might be right under our noses. Namely, facial hair. Dinesh Vanket, (ph) an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Clyde in Scotland, suggests that we seem to trust scientists and mathematicians whose facial appearance is more unkempt. In other words, we tend to think that bearded or mustachioed men are smarter and, thus, prefer them as intellectual role models. Think of Einstein. Think of Archimedes. These are people who are too busy unlocking the mysteries of the universe to join the Dollar Shave Club...
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BURKE: ...Vanket explained while proudly running his fingers through his own luxuriant chin blanket. The effect even extends to fictional role models, he adds. Look at Dumbledore, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Gandalf. You see a guy with whiskers past his clavicle, you trust he knows what he's talking about.
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BURKE: Eldon Wardell, (ph) editor-in-chief of popular tech blog Eureka and a man whose own jowls are matted with thick red tresses of face fur, goes even further, suggesting that merely having a beard has cognitive benefits. There's a theory that contemplatively stroking a goatee or vandyke actually stimulates the part of the frontal lobe that deals with abstract problem solving. It's sort of like your brain is a pug and your beard is its belly.
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BURKE: Wardell claims that the famously hirsute Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for a sort of automatic beard scratcher to help him think. For his part, Vanket plans to test the theory by handing out fake beards to female members of the university's physics department to see if their research is taken more seriously.
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SAGAL: All right. I...
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SAGAL: ...Feel I should say to all the people who are angry at us that we made up these horribly sexist stories, we only made up two of them.
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SAGAL: One of them is real. So is the proffered explanation for the gender gap in the sciences from Luke Burbank, that boys in the restroom have an early experience with physics and, thus, have an advantage, from Roxanne Roberts, that woman learned from an early age not to trust the reality of numbers because of their experience with confusing sizes or from Adam Burke, that it's all in the beard, both gazing upon it and stroking it. Which of these is the theory that was offered to explain this problem?
OLSON: Well, as a card-carrying bearded American, I have to go with Adam's story.
SAGAL: You're going to go Adam's story, the idea that because men have beards, they seem smarter. All right. I should say, Adam also has a beard so it might be self-interest.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: All right. You're going to choose that one. Well, to bring you the correct answer, we spoke to someone who knew something about this actual study.
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KATE OLSON: When we look at (unintelligible) on projectile motion in particular, we see a consistent, large gender gap, which is what led to the whole urination hypothesis.
SAGAL: That was Dr. Kate Olson (ph) of Australia, one of the scientists involved in the pee study.
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SAGAL: So, needless to say, you did not win our prize. However, you did make one other bearded man very happy by choosing his story and winning a point for him.
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SAGAL: So thank you so much for playing.
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OLSON: Thank you.
SAGAL: Take care, Shawn.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JETSTREAM")
ANDERS OSBORNE: (Singing) Jetstream, get back on your feet. Jetstream, every day and every week. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.