(Crosspost from 2xc)

link to the complete transcript.

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind [this dearth of women in the sciences] is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.

TL;DR: women and men have, on average, the same aptitude when it comes to scientific work and research. What makes the difference is the standard deviation, which is way higher on the men distribution and hence makes it "fatter" at both ends. Only the top percentiles have what it takes to do serious research and that explains the skewed gender ratio in science and engineering.

There are studies backing up his claims and he cited them during the speech. What they say is more or less this ( note that graphs are not from actual data, they're just for the concept and they resembles the ones found in the papers ):

This (for instance :wage discrepancies between men and women) is a case of gender discrimination: all the wage groups are influenced in the same way and the difference between genders is a difference in mean value (the curves have more or less the same shape)

This is instead about a situation when social pressure doesn't matter as much and supposed inbound factors rule the field. This time the standard deviation is different and so the shapes of the curves are different. Note that while the mean value is still the same the values at the tails of the distributions are very different. In a situation where only the top percentiles have what it takes to do the job (hard science, computer programming) it is statistically bound that there must be a skewed gender ratio.

All of this has been seen and acknowledged, and published, and praised as excellent research. Still, Summers was fired a year after his now famous speech, due to the amount of hate coming from both feminist and politically correctness advocates.

It happens to me very often to be accused of sexism because I'm a computer programmer and it's supposedly our fault that women don't join our field. When I point out that there's no actual entrance barrier to software programming and make the Summers case as an example of what's really going on I get regularly blasted by the holy wrath of the listening women. Now I've basically stopped arguing (I just let the matter drop) but really, it pisses me off.

Does reality matter? Or, when it comes to discussing differences between sexes, is really social conventions all the way down?