Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, jumped back into the national spotlight this weekend after making some controversial remarks at a conference last friday. His speech discussed the gender gap in the sciences in academia and new research which offers some possible explanations. One of these explanations is that men may have an innate genetic advantage over women in the sciences.
Coverage of this issue differs widely between the national/international media like BBC News and the The Harvard Crimson. Something that the national media is leaving out is that Summers apparently followed his comment about innate differences with the statement: “I’d like to be proven wrong on this one.”
The impetus for Summers comment is recent research which shows that the variance in science test scores is greater for men than for women. Consequently, there are more men that are really good at science, but also more men that are really bad at science.
This controversy seems awfully reminiscent of what Steven Pinker shows in The Blank Slate: modern society displays great resisitance to any explanation which is based on genetics rather than on social factors. That is not to say that in the particular case of women in science social factors are unimportant. But, clearly there are differences between men and women, and if there are factors which make men more inclined toward science, we should try to discover what those factors are, rather than ignoring them.
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