I understand that you have no opinion about this particular topic, and I like that you are trying to understand how a supposedly educated person can reach the conclusion I reach. By the way, thank you.
> A group solving problems in 169s is clearly better than a group solving problems in 177s.
Sure, but the BBC article is titled "Women 'better at multitasking' than men", which is a deformation. I would have no problem if the BBC article were "Women were 4.6% than men on a given multitasking test", because it would communicate how small the difference is.
If I remember I discovered the article because of a BuzzFeed share titled something like "Yet another scientific study found that women are more clever than men, but they are still grossly underpaid", which is no less a stretch than the BBC article. Every word is factually correct, but they far from describe reality. Studies don't find that women are paid .77 per $1, if you take the time to read more than the title: That's an average all jobs confounded. When a study neutralizes by field, education, experience both in career and in the job, and time spent at work, they are fair to my eyes, but I havent found any yet. Averaging female factory workers with startup founders doesn't mean anything, but that becomes the headline of the newspapers and becomes an unquestionned truth, unfortunately.
The fact that you "can imagine how women can be harassed at work" is the result of hundreds of newspapers making the same mistake in article titles: Have we equally researched and communicated whether men are subject to male-specific difficulties? What if we found a relationship between x3 suicide rate, x2 homelessness rate and x17 prison rate and being a male? Would you start doing something if there was a link? What if we gave funding for those studies a much as we give funding for woman-specific studies?
If we could apply pure scientific rigor to analyzing males as much as women, I would bet my whole life's savings and 60% of all my future salaries that we'd find men are subject to more violence, physical and emotional, and more unfairness than women. If any day you start opening this can of worm, you'll notice that people don't accept your results, saying "because you have a grudge against women".
If everyone could react to the title of such BBC articles by protesting for misrepresentating the study, then the science itself would get more credit.