(FORTUNE Magazine) – February 12 was the release date set by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), so the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle dutifully ran the story that day, in every case on the front page to signal its transcendent importance. Possibly to forestall flak from the movement, all these stories carried femme bylines, and all were highly supportive of the AAUW's basic kvetches.

Oddly, or is it predictably, the report just issued by the AAUW -- the basis of the news stories -- caused the present writer to experience naught but wracking dubiety. Entitled How Schools Shortchange Girls, the report is a movement document masquerading as scholarly research. It blames the schools rather than nature for girls' persistent tendency to behave like girls in the classroom (e.g., to be less aggressive than boys about wanting to speak). Ignoring the hundreds of studies demonstrating that teachers give girls better grades than boys, it complains bitterly that teachers favor the boys and in general leaves you wondering how the average young lady finds the courage to confront school day after day. Our own favorite kvetch was the declaration that less than 1% of the space in teacher-education textbooks is given over to problems of sexism. Keeping Up's counter-research efforts were centered on the report's contentions about bias in the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a subject on which we had thought every possible contention had been made. As is well known, girls score lower than boys on the SAT. In the 1991 round, the guys outscored the dolls by eight points in the verbal tests and by 44 points in the math. Movement activists have long complained that this gap obviously reflects bias, since the SATs are supposed to predict college grades -- but the girls go on to get higher grades, at least as freshmen. The standard and well-documented answer to the bias charge is that the girls get higher grades mainly because they tend to take courses with easier grading standards -- e.g, courses in education rather than engineering. We were somewhat startled, however, to see that the AAUW had an apparently solid rebuttal to this argument. It cited a 1988 study, from the prestigious Journal of Educational Measurement, indicating that SAT scores underpredict girls' performance even when you adjust for course difficulty. Could it be? After years of back and forth about SAT bias, had the movement actually found some research shooting down the central argument of those denying sex bias? Luckily for our peace of mind, the answer was: no way. The AAUW report had it all wrong. The study it cited, by Mary M. McLeod and the late Robert L. McCormack, both of San Diego State University, had looked at grades in 88 different courses, all taken by significant numbers of men and women, in a large coeducational university (unnamed). It concluded that SAT scores had generally predicted grades in these courses equally well for both sexes. ''Curiously,'' it added, ''in those few courses in which a gender bias was found, it most often involved overpredicting ((emphasis gleefully added by Keeping Up)) for women . . .'' Professor McLeod expressed puzzlement at her study being used to demonstrate SAT bias. But will her puzzlement make page one?