Harvard University president Lawrence Summers began his now-infamous talk at the National Bureau of Economic Research blandly enough. \u201cI am speaking unofficially and not using this as an occasion to lay out the many things we\u2019re doing at Harvard to promote the crucial objective of diversity.\u201d But Summers then proceeded to discuss some of the possible differences between the sexes \u2014 both natural and social \u2014 and so began the latest academic tempest in a crimson teapot.<\/p>\n
Summers\u2019s remarks are worth quoting at some length. As a possible explanation for why more men than women reach the top of certain professions, he said the following: \u201cIt is a fact about our society that [there] is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than … married women. That\u2019s not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the specific question of why there are not as many women at the very top of certain fields of science and engineering, Summers said this: \u201cSo my best guess, to provoke you, of what\u2019s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people\u2019s legitimate family desires and employers\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout his talk, Summers took care to offer various disclaimers: \u201cI 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.\u201d He also reminded his audience that his intention was to stimulate discussion by making some broad and controversial claims about differences between men and women, which was, after all, the subject of the conference.<\/p>\n
Although the study of sex differences is a controversial area of research, nothing Summers said was outrageously off the mark given the findings of many economists, sociologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists about the innate differences between men and women. In economics, Claudia Goldin and many others have studied women\u2019s choices about hours of work and willingness to travel and work overtime, and this research has shown how important these choices are in determining their future salaries and promotions. Other researchers in recent years have identified so-called \u201cleaking pipelines\u201d for women in many professions \u2014 high-achieving women who scale back on their work to care for aging parents or young children.<\/p>\n
As for sex differences in mathematics, researchers agree that there is a stubborn but persistent trend: Men tend to cluster at the very highest and the very lowest points on the bell curve of mathematical ability, while women skew more towards the center. So while the people who perform most brilliantly in math are more likely to be men, so, too, are the most deficient. Even within science, women continue to choose different specialties than men do: \u201c46 percent of biologists and 30 percent of environmental scientists are women,\u201d Robert Samuelson noted in the Washington Post<\/em>. \u201cOver time, tastes may change, but the idea that men and women should be equally represented in all occupations is unrealistic and undesirable. Choices differ because men and women differ.\u201d<\/p>\n