Thanks for posting the link to that article, Dan! If you step back a bit, it's kind of interesting that there's an article about this at all. None of this Prom Theorem stuff is really news to social scientists (aside from the way it's packaged); it's laypeople and science journalists who need to be reminded of things like this. I suspect a review article on gender differences and "danciness" in the social science literature would mention all the points that we've mentioned in this forum, and more. (I mean, most of us doing the posting are amateurs when it comes to social science --- unless we're convinced that our Ph.D.'s in math make us competent in ALL disciplines, in which case we're not social science amateurs --- we're social science cranks. :-) ) So why does the Prom Theorem show up as news? Maybe there's an Emperor's New Clothes appeal to the story ("Mathematician Refutes Social Scientists!") --- although (a) competent social scientists have always understood the Prom Principle (and the ways it both is and is not relevant to the sorts of questions social scientists ask about gender difference), and (b) David counts as a social scientist at this point given all the work he's done in economics, regardless of what it says on his Ph.D. diploma or what department his office is in. I guess it's good when newspapers offer remedial math in the guise of news. Maybe we could push this further, and have an article in which a physicist-statistician announces that causation is different from correlation. This is something that 99.9999% of educated people (myself included) should be reminded of on a frequent basis. Incidentally, when we talk about whether men are "dancier" than women, we usually don't mean that men actualy DO more "dancing" than women; what we usually mean is that if men had their way, there'd be a lot more men-dancing-women than there'd be if women had THEIR way. And there's evidence for this if we look at the amount of dancing done by same-sex dance-couples. So there's a lot to be said in favor of the popular belief that men have trouble keeping their feet in their shoes (as it were). Jim Propp P.S. I haven't read the New York Times article; only the one that Dan gave the link to. So it's possible that Kolata's Times article is different and that some of what I wrote above doesn't apply to it.