I'm also surprised Summers wasn't laughed out of the auditorium. Anyone taking statistics, such as most economists, should know these Bell Curve type studies are worthless because the data can't be properly analyzed without a mathematical model for how one's genetics affects one's environment.

Consider identical twin girls, both of whom become actresses. One has her breasts surgically "enhanced" while the other does not. Same genetics, but different physical appearance - and guess which one will get more work in Hollywood?

I've got a friend with a Ph.D in molecular biology that encountered constant sexual harassment during her doctoral studies. Had she been male, she would probably not have faced that environment. Yes, human gender is determined by one's genetics, but she also faced a different environment because she was a "girl."

If one discarded all ethics, studies could be designed involving multiple clones of one genome coupled with sex-change operations and plastic surgery - but unless and until such studies can be conducted, any statistical analysis is either indeterminate or just assume that one's appearance doesn't affect one's environment.

Short version: You're walking down a dark alley and see a stranger walking toward you. Would you rather see someone that looked like Rick (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) Morannis, or Mike Tyson? Will you treat them differently because of the way they look, or first conduct genetic analysis?

The sad thing about this whole incidence is that we don't have the abilities to actually study innate gender differences in the way most people seem to assume that they are studied. So we really know very little, yet everybody and their grandfather is ready to go and support Summers arguments in many places on the net. All right-wing places, of course, but also in surprisingly lefty places. There is a general consensus, it seems to me right now, that we have done the equality thing and that now we can just move on and be "scientific" about all this. Evidence abounds, I have been told, of women's innate inability to do science, but no references are provided, with the exception of anecdotal stories about ones own children's preferred toy types. Which really have nothing to do with the question at hand.

I have to look at this-
In a forum of (asumed) academmic scientist where the discrepancy in positions by gender, tenured or not(also assumed) was addressed and a woman that didn't like what she heard walked out, later proclaiming to the eager press, physical distress.

And later, public opinion was invited to weigh in,(via an eager press)for the purpose of what? Search for allies amongst outside venue? Circle the wagons?
There was no refutation or input to the forum other than the issue of recent reduced tenure offerings to WOMEN in science.

Does anyone else see the humor? Is this what independant women are expected to aspire to?

Give credit where due but don't expect Nancy Hopkins to get respect or recognition for a mere tantrum. Sadly, that's what sells papers.

Sally, I wouldn't try to make sense out of it. Clearly, his higher functioning male brain has caused him to write in balderdash only aliens can understand.

I'm not sure which is to blame: his high-functioning male brain or vast quantities of alcohol.

Sorry, I'll type slower next time.

The perfect cap-off to the Crimson's "well, we're not gonna come out and SAY Summers's comments are correct, but y'KNOW..." coverage: "it's too soon...to be getting hysterical." Nice way to underline the sexist point you thought you'd so subtly distributed throughout your article. I hear those anvils falling now.

"If Summers is such a brilliant guy and strong proponent of women, then why won’t he stand by his comments (oh, I’m sorry, “hypotheses”) and explain them rather than hide behind sad excuses?"

Good question. Larry has refused to make public the tape of the conference. This would provide an empirical way to resolve the dispute between his critics and him. He claims that he was misunderstood - that those women with their inferior y-chromosome deprived neurons misunderstood him. They claim that they heard him loud and clear.

Should Mr. Harvard be man enough to provide the empirical data necessary to resolve this disagreement?

Did anyone read the full transcript? Especially the so-called “news” commentators???

Summers seemed to me to be a model of academic integrity, including disclaiming at the outset that he had any professional expertise as well as being willing to comment on a full selection of papers in a field in which he fully acknowledged he was a non-expert.

For starters, he suggested three possible explanations, incl. a possible "innate gender difference" for the under-representation of women in science, and for all of them, he said there was not enough evidence to say definitively--either from the papers at the conference, or more widely in his experience, reading, etc—what the causes were.

The transcript makes very clear, he was trying to provoke his audience into hypothesis testing and doing more research & not simply claiming "discrimination" as the cause for under representation. About discrimination, he offered the economist's observation that if there were systematic discrimination that resulted in a equally qualified pool of candidate as those hired, economic theory suggests that some high level university would break ranks and hire the "discriminees" and get a world-beating department at bargain prices--something that does not seem to have happened.

He also offered the statistician’s observation, that the farther that one got from the mean ability of a “normal” distribution—i.e. at the v. high ends of the “ability” scale we could expect for Ivy league science departments--that very small differences (of whatever origin—social/cultural/POSSIBLY innate differences) this would translate into huge variance in the applicant pool. Translated—it wouldn’t take much “X-factor” at this distance from the mean (as he puts it, 3 or four std deviations out, or the 1/10,000 candidate) for the applicant pool to not reflect the “normal” gender balance.

More interesting (and almost totally lost in the hue and cry), was his first hypothesis--what he called the “high powered job hypothesis”--that he thought should be tested (based in part on anecdotal evidence such as a woman reporting on the subsequent career of her female MBA colleagues where only 2 out of 30 female colleagues were continuing in high level positions & thus skewing the gender balance of executives 30 yrs after her Harvard MBA class had started to seriously include large numbers of women), was that woman were POSSIBLY backing away from the 80 hr. career choices, through a combination of lack of institutional support (i.e. child care, etc., which he pointed out was not provided at Harvard for junior faculty!!!), combined with some ineluctable responsibility for child care especially in fields (science? engineering?) in which interrupted careers are not easily restarted.

Addressing at least the child care issue ought to have been the issue to be acted on, not criticizing him for suggesting that "innate differences" might play a role--which for him as another question to be tested, NOT assumed as he clearly pointed out.