I recently read your article about the "confusion" over males having a larger median of sex partners than females.  The solution is very simple.

A median is quite different from an average.  A median is the middle data point in a set of data.  For example, if your data consists of the set {1, 3, 9, 9, 10}, then the median would be 9, whereas the average is 6.4.

So the solution to this problem is simply a matter of who has slept with whom.  Let's say we have three females and three males, with an average of 2 partners per person (remember, the _average_ of sexual partners must be the same between men and women).  So let's say the females had the following data: {1, 2, 3} -- meaning the first female had one partner, the second two partners, and the third three partners.  Similarly, let's say the men's numbers were the following: {0, 3, 3}.

So we have the following data:
  Women: {2, 2, 2}
  Men:   {0, 3, 3}

We see that this is entirely possible.  The women each had sex with the second two men, and the second two men each had sex with all three of the women (poor first guy!).  In this scenario, the average was 2 partners for both the men and the women, yet the medians--the middle number--were strikingly different: 2 for the women and 3 for the men!

I'm surprised that neither Dr. Gale, a mathematician, nor Dr. Fryar, a Health Statistician, missed such an egregious error of simple terminology.  Perhaps some clarification of the data is in order?

thanks,
  Marshall Crumiller