Summers may have been on to something, recent research suggests. Math and science test data, he noted, show gender differences at each end of the performance spectrum. In other words, men are overrepresented at the very top and bottom.
This small but significant variance, he hypothesized, suggested differences in innate aptitude -- "whatever the set of attributes are that . . . correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley" -- that help explain the dramatic underrepresentation of women in tenured jobs on elite science and engineering faculties.
Summers is saying that male math aptitude is more spread out than female aptitude. I grabbed the image below from Wikipedia. What Summers was arguing, and data suggests is that the distribution of female math ability resembles the green line, and male math ability is like the blue. They both have the same mean, but there are more boys at the +5 and the -5. So, studies that prove that girls and boys do as well in math on average don't disprove his hypothesis.
I am willing to guess that to be an MIT professor in any quantitative subject (engineering, math, natural sciences, economics, etc) you would have to be to the right of +2 on the scale at the very least. Probably farther than +3. In some sense, the jobs we are discussing go to the intellectual freaks. People who are so above average in intelligence that the placement of the mean aptitude of boys relative to girls is almost irrelevant. These professors have nothing to do whatsoever with the mean.
I've always said that I was skeptical of the argument. I still am. But the apoplectic, knee-jerk reaction by some female academics and many feminists to what is a reasonable hypothesis bothered me.
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I tend to be persuaded by this type of argument. The "default condition" of the human body is female. One gets a man by adding a Y chromosome to the human genome. Without a Y chromosome, you're female. Without an X chromosome, you're dead.
So it makes intuitive sense that men, who are inherently variations on the basic human design, would be more liable to display "extraordinary" qualities or deviations from the mean.
And I think this is what we observe generally, not just math and science data. More men than women have most types of physical and psychological abnormalities, both good and bad. There are more male giants, and more male midgets. There are more men with very high IQs and more men with very low IQs (even though male and female mean IQs are almost identical). Etc.
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