100 monkeys typing.

I respect Larry Summers' attempt to encourage people to expand the realm of their inquiry into why women and minorities are underrepresented in the highest positions in certain fields, and in principle, I think that scholars should be free to pursue whatever avenues of study they see fit, whether or not the results lead to discomforting conclusions. If there are innate characteristics that lead to differences in men's and women's aptitude in particular fields, then researchers should be able to study them and report on their findings without fear of condemnation by those with a political agenda at odds with the results.

That being said, I have serious issues with what he said.

First, Summers simply doesn't have the credentials to offer informed comments on the issue of whether women's performance in math and science is due to innate factors or not. His background is in economics, not biology, sociology, or genetics. He may be brilliant in his field (or not, I'm honestly not familiar with his academic work) but when speculating here, he is simply out of his element, little better than the average educated lay person. This is unfortunate, because he's speaking not as an average educated lay person, but as the president of one of the leading universities in the world. Just as Dubya has allegedly learned recently, "words mean something," and part of what they mean is dependent upon who is saying them.

Secondly, while pretending to be forward-thinking and provocative, his approach to questioning conventional wisdom is in fact quite conservative, even regressive. He posited that one reason for underrepresentation is that women aren't willing to put in 80-hour work weeks, choosing instead to devote a greater share of their energies to children, family, etc. than men do. That may very well be the case. But simply throwing the comment out there has the effect of blaming women for not doing what it takes to get ahead. Why not instead use the forum as an opportunity to consider that 80-hour weeks are unhealthy, and challenging business leaders to adopt more family-friendly policies that offer advancement opportunities without forcing people to choose between work and personal lives?

Thirdly, he's suggesting that people ignore or look beyond existing theories into an area where the body of knowledge simply isn't advanced enough to provide answers. Summers speculated that women succeed in lower proportion to men due to innate biological differences. But what use is such a statement? Our notions of intelligence and aptitude are so vague that we have no idea of how to look for their origins in the human genome, and our knowledge of genetics is so rudimentary that even if we find anything, we can't use the information for any practical purpose. Meanwhile, study after study has shown that there are unconscious, unintended, but real biases in girls' educational experiences compared to boys'--showing that parents and teachers tend to treat girls as if they expect them to have a harder time with math and science, and expect them to underperform, even if they start on an equal level. These studies provide ample avenues for social improvement.

And finally, appealing to innate, immutable charactaristics invokes a kind of fatalism-- if the differences are innate, then women will never be as successful as men, so why exert so much effort trying to bring them up to parity?

Summers is not of the same ilk as Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, who claimed that blacks are less successful than whites due to an inherent, immutable intellectual deficit, who claimed to have simply wished to spark a debate and did not have any racist intent, but who later admitted in the NYT Magazine that he had burned a cross with a group of friends as a teenager (supposedly without realizing the significance of the act). I don't doubt that Summers meant well and did not expect that his words would spark the backlash that they did. But I long for the days when Harvard's president had far more diplomatic sensibility and awareness of the significance of his office.

Bush's "meteoric rise" in politics? Meteors don't rise, per se; current theories suggest that they aggregate and cling together (like the uber-wealthy and powerful). However, meteors do crash and burn.

Also: Mr. Dubuque -- Well said! You obviously put more thought into your statements than Summers did in his.