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February 20, 2005

BREAKING NEWS ..!!!

Startling revelation: Men and Women are different.

Of course, this will come as a complete surprise to the "Gender? What gender? We don't recognize no stinkin' gender!" crowd. Usually found disproportionately amongst the hoi paloi of universities, this crowd gathered the torches and pitchforks when Lawrence Summers raised some questions about their orthodoxy. All manner of charges against Summers being a sexist bigot pig who wants to Keep.Womyn.Oppressed were tossed about.

But the transcript of Summers' remarks don't buttress the vitriol leveled against him. An excellent analysis is to be had at Scylla & Charybdis

Short subjective version: Summers does not say that men generally have a greater innate science ability that women. Rather, he makes a narrow observation about the statistical data, corrected for differences in a family's economic means and ethnicity, at the VERY HIGH END - e.g., 4 standard deviations above the norm, at the edge of the bell curve where high-end specialists reside. Summers states that at such extremes, in certain sciences, the sex of the persons receiving those aptitude scores skews 4-1 male, and maybe 5-1 male. That is, 4 or 5 men for every woman. Summers notes that small, perhaps insignificant differences between the sexes in the middle of the bell curve (remember taking 8th grade algebra class?), nonetheless become highly pronounced when you run data in the far extremes of the bell curve.

Thanks to Bill at INDC Journal

As Dennis Prager wrote earlier

In the year 2005, nearly four centuries after Galileo was forced to recant observable scientific facts about our solar system, the president of Harvard University was forced to do a similar thing. He was compelled to apologize for advancing an idea about men and women supported by scientific research and likely to be true.

But for most professors, neither finding truth nor seeking wisdom nor teaching is the primary goal of the university; promoting leftist ideas is. ...

What is most amazing about the Harvard story is that by and large neither the Harvard community nor any other university seems to be embarrassed by it.


Posted by Darleen at February 20, 2005 11:50 AM

Comments

I have been watching this story carefully. I have two opinions 1) the university setting is a place for discourse and open discussion, I am sorry so many women and other PC advicates felt he was wrong to broach the subject. 2) He is wrong and that should have been discussed without all the hysteria more than 50 of medical students are now female, over 65% of vet. students are female. I was reading somewhere that women make up a huge % of post-grad students in many of the sciences, but that something happens after that...what they don't know, but not as many female scientist and doctors as graduate are working in high level positions. Old boys club? Could be...I think it's worth looking into. Maybe it's easily remedied.

Posted by: Mieke at February 20, 2005 09:22 PM

Mieke

Observation Summers had of one aspect which IS true ... a larger percentage of men than women are willing to devote 80 or more hours per week to their career (and thus give up other parts of their lives). This is NOT a judgement on men or women but mere an observation.

Of all my DDA's at my office, there are a few of them that have lobbied for and gotten parttime hours so they can spend more time at home with pre-school aged kids.

Everyone of these parttime DDA's are female.

We can't have everything. And for many people, family comes before career.

Posted by: Darleen at February 20, 2005 10:25 PM

And that makes total sense to me (the moms taking less hours). I am working at about 1/2 or 3/4 speed depending on whom you ask, when they are older I will jam, but for now I want to be around a lot.

Posted by: Mieke at February 21, 2005 11:24 AM