Maybe, just maybe, there is a relationship between testosterone levels and the ability to do math and science. Perhaps someone should look into that...
Well it would strike me as odd if God, or nature, or evolution -- whatever one believes -- made it so that the biological forces that make us man and woman would limit the inherent differences only to physical anatomy, and not to anything mental or emotional.
And I'm only speaking of generalities here, there are always exceptions to rules, but they don't invalidate the rules themselves.
Someone did something related. A study of high-math, high-mechanical ability (HMHM) women supposedly showed that such women had "much higher rates of miscarriage and stillbirths than the controls. Between the ages of 19 and 27, 47 percent of those who had been pregnant reported miscarriages or stillbirths, versus 8 percent in the control group. This was astonishing for a cohort that had such high intelligence and reported none of the common risk factors for losing a pregnancy."
This suggests the possibility of hormonal differences between HMHM and other women.
"Maybe, just maybe, there is a relationship between testosterone levels and the ability to do math and science"
Do you want me to look that up? I'm female and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics from Harvard. I could look that up for you.
Hmm, nope.
Let's apply the scientific method to President Summers' analysis, shall we?
Fact: His daughter prefers to play with dolls
Inference: His daughter wouldn't be as good in math
Hidden assumption: To be as good in math as boys, girls have to have as much testosterone
Fact: In algebraic geometry, you don't deal with trucks or with dolls.
Maybe testosterone is correlated to better performance in math and physics. Maybe something else about guys. Maybe not at all. No one has any evidence.
I played with dolls when I was young, that's all I know. Ah, except one thing. I know more about math and logic and the scientific method than President Summers (an economist! ha ha ha, that's the most dismal thing to call a science). And his recent comments are just further proof of that cold, hard fact.
Oh, and for the record, there was PLENTY of sexism at the Harvard math department. And further for the record I could have CARED LESS and it did not HOLD ME BACK. Nice thing about math: you should up as an undergrad in a graduate level math course and do the best in the class, then they can't say otherwise. Testing is objective.
But the idea of spending a professional lifetime with such neanderthals. Well, I think not.
Are Republicans more sexist than Democrats? I hope not. I hope they're more logical and meritocratic. I hope they realize the jury's out on why women still aren't as well-represented, and that meanwhile they'll treat specific high-performing women with perfect fairness. Will scads of the Freepers here post things like "President Summers is right?" I won't even read the rest of the thread to find out, because I doubt it would be a good statistical sample of Freepville generally.
I do hope -- and I secretly suspect -- that all in all there's less actual sexism (of any sort, men against women and women against men) here than in a Democratic-infested setting.
I think all people of substance are feminists. Unlike President Summers, I don't purport to have a proof for that. It's just an article of faith.
It's quite possible. It may also be possible that those same hormones make women less interested in math careers, even though they have the ability.
You would have to look at math scores of girls and boys in high school to see of there really is a difference in ability.