How a scientific paper on male variability was made to disappear

Quillette published a fascinating story yesterday about the publication and eventual disappearance of a scientific paper. Author Ted Hill is “Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Georgia Tech.” A couple years ago, Hill decided to write a paper about a topic called the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, which asserts that there is generally more variability in various traits among males than females. This theory applies to all sorts of species including humans:

Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.

What Hill specifically wanted to do was offer a mathematical argument for why this happens. He reached out to another mathematics professor, Sergei Tabachnikov, from Pennsylvania State University for help. After some work fleshing out the idea and revisions, the paper was accepted for publication in April 2017 at the Mathematical Intelligencer, a journal which has a section devoted to controversial topics. The paper would be published in the first 2018 issue of the journal.
 And then something happened. An engineer named James Damore was fired by Google for writing a memo which touched on the topic of the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis. So when Hill’s co-author Sergei put a pre-publication version of the paper online, their problems began:

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