Summers Draws Fire For Remarks on Women

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers triggered a national media frenzy when he suggested at an economics conference last Friday that the scarcity of female scientists at elite universities may stem from “innate” differences between the sexes, although two Harvard professors who heard the speech said his remarks have been taken out of context.

MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins ’64 said she felt physically ill while listening to Summers’ speech at a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) luncheon on Friday, and left the conference room half-way through the president’s remarks.

“For him to say that ‘aptitude’ is the second most important reason that women don’t get to the top when he leads an institution that is 50 percent women students—that’s profoundly disturbing to me,” Hopkins said in an interview Monday. “He shouldn’t admit women to Harvard if he’s going to announce when they come that, hey, we don’t feel that you can make it to the top.”

But Lee Professor of Economics Claudia Goldin, whose own research has examined the progress of women in academia and professional life, said she “was pretty flummoxed” by the negative response to Summers’ speech, which—in her view—displayed “utter brilliance.”

scarcity of female scientists at elite universities may stem from “innate” differences

Note the use of the word MAY. I guess you're not even permitted to postulate ideas that are not PC, much less claim they are fact. It goes to thought control as much as speech control.
Summers is actually not a bad guy. He managed to get rid of that idiot Cornell West professor of African-American studies.

This is so much political correctness crap. One can't even discuss such matters without some bleeding heart feining and/or fainting. This Hopkins beeyotch needs to apologize to Summers for raising the contention in the first place and then she should banish herself from the real world and go to Feminania, the land alongside Amazonia, where women can do their thing sans any opposing viewpoints. Wotta maroon!! Just goes to show that mostly only college-educated people can think that honest discussion is an evil thing. She should mind her own business (dare I say tend to her knittin'?) Enuf awready!! SSZ

I wonder if Nancy Hopkins realizes that her overreaction to Summers' comments just reinforces the stereotype of women as emotionally fragile and prone to hysteria.

Oh dear, now you've done it again. Poor little Nancy will have another bout of the vapors over comments like that. Someone fetch her smelling salts.

Seriously when are libs going to let this stupid non-story die?

Consider some hard evidence of genetic differences:

What's the evidence on Summers' side? Start with the symptom: the gender gap in test scores. Next, consider biology. Sex is easily the biggest physical difference within a species. Men and women, unlike blacks and whites, have different organs and body designs. The inferable difference in genomes between two people of visibly different races is one-hundredth of 1 percent. The gap between the sexes vastly exceeds that. A year and a half ago, after completing a study of the Y chromosome, MIT biologist David Page calculated that male and female human genomes differed by 1 percent to 2 percent—"the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee," according to a paraphrase in the New York Times. "We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it," Page said. "But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome." Another geneticist pointed out that in some species 15 percent of genes were more active in one sex than in the other.

You'd expect some of these differences to show up in the brain, and they do. A study of mice published a year ago in Molecular Brain Research found that just 10 days after conception, at least 50 genes were more active in the developing brain of one sex than in the other. Comparing the findings to research on humans, the Los Angeles Times observed that "the corpus callosum, which carries communications between the two brain hemispheres, is generally larger in women's brains [than in men's]. Female brains also tend to be more symmetrical. … Men and women, on average, also possess documented differences in certain thinking tasks and in behaviors such as aggression."
http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2112570&

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