​

Harvard University, 2005

Here's a pretty good summary of the feminist over-reaction to Larry Summers' words to the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce in 2005. In these situations, it's always best to find out EXACTLY what the person said. And Summers said three things, one of which the feminists would have heartily agreed with, had they listened. The other two were, however artlessly expressed, actually proven to be true and were not spoken pejoratively.

The most controversial of these was, with respect to women in the upper echelons of science and math, that "there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude.(emphasis added)." In visual-spatial thinking, which is so critical to things like higher level mathematics, men and women statistically share the same mean, but women are more tightly spaced about that mean, while men's levels have more variation about that mean. This means that there are more men to be found in the upper AND lower levels of mathematical thinking.

Reply