From Time Magazine: Harvard's Crimson Face
The university's blunt president sparks a furor about women. Is he hurting the Ivy's brand?
When Summers suggested at a Jan. 14 conference that innate differences between the genders might help explain why fewer women succeed in math and science, he intended to provoke an intellectual debate among a small group of academics....Summers wound up drawing international attention to Harvard's own shortage of female professors, bolstering a perception that the school isn't welcoming to women and minority academics, and enraging many faculty members, students and alumni of both genders. "It's not appropriate for the man who holds in his hands the future of the brightest minds in America to say that 50% of them don't have the right aptitude" for science, says Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She walked out on the talk.
There isn't a transcript of the conference so I'm not sure what he said exactly. From what I can tell, he asked if innated differences in males and females could be the cause of scarcity of women in hard sciences.
Boys and girls are different (and aren't we glad for the differences?). That doesn't mean that all boys belong in set A and all girls in set B. It's like height. In general, men are taller than women. We don't need it explained to us that there are taller women and shorter men. Innate skills and aptitude are the same way. There's a wide spectrum and people of either sex will fall at various points along it. It just happens that men tend to group more on the science skills end and women more on the verbal skills end. There are always exceptions - Marie Curie for science skills and William Shakespeare for verbal skills, for example.
Recent reports on gray vs. white matter support this.
The study confirms sex differences in human brains, with women having more gray matter than white matter. However, the study also showed that in areas related to intelligence men had much more gray matter, which is typically needed for isolated tasks, such as doing a math problem. Women, on the other hand, had much more white matter, which is necessary for integrating information.
The question isn't whether or not women belong in science, it's how can their skills be best used. Judging from this report, I would that women would be more likely to have the skills needed (integrating information) to oversee groups of researchers.
I'm not letting Summers off the hook completely. "Since Summers, 50, arrived, in 2001, the percentage of tenure offers at Harvard in the arts and sciences that go to women has fallen from 37% to 11%." [Time Magazine]
I would also think that the ability to integrate information combined with verbal skills would, in general, make women better at teaching...including at the college level. It goes without saying that the professor needs to be knowledgeable about the subject, his/her ability to share that knowledge plays a big part in how well the students learn it - and that takes verbal skills.
It's also important to remember that students need more than just an innate ability to do well in a subject. They also need to have an interest in it and a desire to learn and succeed. In the end, that may count for more than natural skills.
According to the Time article, this wasn't the first time Summers has offended people. Maybe it's not so much what he said but how he said it or to whom. You decide:
* Many at Harvard were upset last spring when Summers rejected a tenure recommendation for Marcyliena Morgan, a scholar of hip-hop in the African and African-American studies department, prompting her to leave for Stanford. (Hip-hop scholar?)
* Summers questioned African-American studies professor Cornel West's scholarship and teaching, causing West to leave for Princeton and upsetting many in Harvard's African-American community. (Summers' request that West check in with him on his scholarly progress "was the main thing that upset me." If the university president can't question what a professor is doing, who can?)
* In a controversy in 2002, Muslims on campus said they were offended when Summers labeled as "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent" the efforts of a group of students and faculty to persuade Harvard to divest its holdings in companies that do business in Israel as a protest against its treatment of Palestinians. (RTWT)
* He rattled some Asian Americans at Harvard when he used an inaccurate statistic on child prostitution to illustrate a point about South Korea's economic growth. (“In Seoul, South Korea in the 1970s, there were one million child prostitutes. Today almost none,” he said. “This reflects the progress made in a single generation.” Time didn't supply this quotation nor did it say what is inaccurate about it.)