Your second sentence seems rather terrible to me. Of course, it's not scientific if Fox News takes Hill's article and uses it to justify "bad things" (e.g. less advocacy for women in the work place and academia). However, Fox News is not a scientific organization so the "not scientific" label is tautological. What you are saying seems to be, "Don't do science on gender differences because if you do the other side will take it and use it to justify atrocities." Is it our (day) job to fight the political battles of the world? No, it's our job to do science.

To start with, frankly, as a society it's high time we told our journalists to stop mucking around in our research journals. Today I will wake up and see how scientists discovered that coffee is terrible for my health, and then tomorrow I will hear that scientists are concerned I'm not drinking enough coffee. The problem isn't the scientists. The problem is journalists who don't know when to publish a scientific article (i.e. when there's a major breakthrough, and then only tentatively; or after a new theory or discovery is thoroughly understood). Routine papers, no matter how thrilling, should not be commented on in the media. That has nothing to do with what we do as scientists: we should continue to try to publish our incremental achievements. It has to do with our responsibilities as citizens. It's high time we all (not just scientists) made it clear this behavior from journalists is embarrassing as well as meddlesome.

Secondly, when we act as though certain ideas are "dangerous," we embolden our political opponents and we also teach our students/children that those ideas are very likely to be true. Nuance says that women can have on average lower IQs than men and we can still treat them like our metaphysical and political equals. When we act as though that's impossible, we show our opponents how weak our leadership really is. We also suggest to our students that perhaps the truth is other than what we, the scientists and academicians, are saying. Dangerous to whom?, they might rightly ask. Those for whom the status quo is most beneficial? Is that more likely to be the professor or the student?

In short, I don't think it's naive to discuss academically the variability hypothesis or other politically contentious topics without regard for the negative societal impacts. Those impacts are not our bailiwick. The real question is: does our side ("the left," say, or your favorite political party) have the strong institutions and grassroots network to resist when others want to pervert our discussions or research? One thing will not end: the other side will continue to try to push its agenda, and sometimes, as I already alluded to, this will constitute atrocities, big or small. Therefore, we need a strong community and real leadership to counteract this. That is not the purview of our scientific life.

It is part of our civic life, one which I find lately is being neglected more and more (and not just by scientists). In the US, the Republican Party is apparently quite good at rallying its people and getting them out to vote. It also has few scruples where spreading misinformation or hateful rhetoric is concerned. What compounds this and makes it worse is the Democratic Party acts as though various fashionable ideas in or around social science ("white privilege," "unconscious bias," "microaggressions") and certain social questions (acceptability of homosexuality, deference owed to questions of race) were God given and don't require campaigning or explanation. On the contrary, as someone in math, I have never been schooled in what can be done to cure unconscious bias, for instance, or whether or not psychologists have any evidence to suggest talking about unconscious bias will do anything other than p*ss off a lot of otherwise sympathetic people. If Democrats or social scientists or whomever care so much about some of these issues, the politically practical and, indeed, moral thing to do is to really spend the time bringing people over to their side. As far as I'm concerned, this is not being done, but instead the work has been replaced by a combination of social media outrage and "public shaming" and belittling idealogical opponents by making references to obscure studies the vast majority of us have not been educated well enough to understand. (With regard to referencing an obscure paper or five, see my discussion of journalists getting out of our research journals. I am beginning to feel the same should apply to good faith conversations between non-experts.)

Please, understand me. There is doing science and then there is doing politics. No question, if you are doing difficult science on biology or sociology, that only adds to the weight of your political duties. However, that is not an excuse to abandon the science (or relegate some of it to the dangerous pile) altogether.