Thanks for digging that up for us. That is an outstanding essay — I urge all of you to read it — and I am very glad it was written by a woman.

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/why-can2019t-a-woman-be-more-like-a-man

And it’s written by a woman – girl’s got guts!

During the conversation — which, by the way, was no filibuster, but a perfectly civilized interlocution, mostly between the distaff member of the couple, whom I shall call X (though her real name is Y) and me — my guests objected on two counts. The first was the very point you make about the benefits being questionable and the bad vibes copious. The second was based on X’s opinion that such research is nonsense to begin with; we had a lengthy digression in which she seemed to be defending a view that the very concepts of “intelligence”, “aptitude”, etc., are meaningless, and pick out nothing in the real world.

What appeared to me to be emerging was that it was an important tenet of her worldview that the very idea of innateness as regards any aspect of human cognition or personality was simply out-of-bounds, and axiomatically wrong. This is the very view that Steven Pinker attacks head-on (and in my opinion destroys) in The Blank Slate.

The reason that Summers felt compelled to bring this up, and why this sort of research is important, is that without some understanding of these facts there is no way to tell whether the underrepresentation of women in the upper levels of the sciences is in fact due to prejudice and remediable social factors or not. The fact that there are fewer women in these positions is uncontroversial, but for sociologists it is presumed — without allowing any debate, due to the axiomatic assumption that all such imbalances cannot be due to innate factors — that this asymmetry is evidence of bias. Due to this unscientific presumption, Dr. Summers was under great pressure to do something, perhaps at considerable cost, about a social problem that might not in fact be a social problem at all.

Sure, that’s better. Text emended.

Moreover, I don’t see any virtue in having as many women in science or mathematics as men. We should cultivate the best scientists and mathematicians, regardless of gender. It’s like saying that there should be as many short people as tall people teaching physics.

While you report that “a lively debate ensued,” it sounds more like a filibuster. Presumably your guests are no dummies: why did they object to Summers’s speech?

“the unspeakable idea that there may indeed be innate statistical differences between men and women.”

Perhaps:

“the unspeakable idea that there may indeed be innate, statistically measurable differences between men and women.”

Jeffery Hodges

* * *

Personally I’ve noted that several persons who might be considered “outright rejectionable” should nonetheless be considered for positions of importance due to their demonstrated expertise in evading (though not quite successfully) detection for some periods of time.

Primarily due to the extended periods that these individuals managed to fly “beneath the radar” of and to avoid the repercussions that would normally accrue, I have suggested for President Obama’s high level appointments-

Head of DEA – Rush Limbaugh.