Lawrence H. Summers is a smart man. An economist by training, he earned a bachelor’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a doctoral degree from Harvard, and taught at both — becoming one of Harvard’s youngest tenured professors in recent memory. He edited the Quarterly Journal of Economics, won the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Waterman Award and served as the World Bank’s chief economist, as the secretary of the Treasury and most recently as the president of Harvard.
If Summers’ analytic prowess is formidable enough that world leaders have tapped him to manage some of the most complex fiscal machinery man hath wrought, then why has he spent much of recent weeks apologizing for remarks in a speech at the conference, “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce”?
Well, during his speech, which was organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Summers reviewed several factors that might explain the large gap between the numbers of men and women among the scientific elite. The most influential, he suggested, was that fewer mothers than fathers were willing to sacrifice family hours to work the 60- to 80-hour weeks that scientific research can demand. Summers also fingered discrimination within academia as a likely culprit (incidentally, the conference’s morning proceedings suggested that, however extensive discrimination is, its grip is weaker than it used to be).
He then referred to research suggesting that, while boys and girls post similar medians on standardized math tests, variance in boys’ scores were much higher than those of their counterparts — in other words, boys are more likely to score unusually high or low than girls. The result, Summers postulates, is that because most of the top scorers are men, more men end up in top science jobs.
Some critics were disgusted by his suggestion: “I felt I was going to be sick,” MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins told The Washington Post. “I was extremely upset.”
Unfortunately, because Summers’ comments came from notes but were extemporaneous, and because no public transcript was drafted, we can’t argue too much about the nuances of what was said. But there’s general agreement that the differences between men and women that lead to differences in test score variances are “innate” — and that’s what prompted outcry about Summers’ half-formed sensibilities, shortsightedness, “fatalism” about Harvard’s ability to attract top female scientists and whatever other non sequiturs critics concluded from his remarks.
There are good reasons why suggestions that one gender is more genetically predisposed to academic success than the other prompt reactions as visceral as Hopkins’. Purportedly “innate” differences between genders (and among races, for that matter) have been used as excuses to deny rights and privileges to otherwise deserving individuals; academia, for its supposed intellectual modernity, hasn’t proved to be a consistent exception.
But that doesn’t mean “innate” differences don’t exist. Olympic sports are usually split by sex, and no one would argue that the differences that prompt such segregation are exclusively a product of social conditioning. And socialization — which is itself biologically influenced — is likely the most significant factor in the gender demographics of various disciplines. Regardless of how much the statistical differences between genders that Summers mentioned are biological and how much are social, given that an estimated one-half of the human genome is involved in brain development, we should expect some innate cognitive differences between the genders. In terms of achievement, however, these differences are aggregate: They are characterizations of diverse populations as a whole; they are not (nor could they be) predictors of, or limitations to, individual achievement.
Construing them as justifications for limiting rights would be nonsensical and outrageous.
In any case, the well-placed loathing for undue discrimination has fathered obdurate toads of political correctness that inhibit discussion of innate gender differences for reasons that include the above. Work on the human genome began recently, and will almost certainly reveal new genetic differences between genders (and therefore, ones that are “innate” in a very real way). An academic and political culture willing to admit these differences would be one better prepared to navigate the ethical challenges they might incite.

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