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Comment by dandrews | Hacker News Reader

"That Summers suggested women lacked a natural ability for sciences did not help matters one bit."

That isn't quite accurate. Summers had prefaced his remarks saying "I'm going to provoke you", then pointed out that math and science test scores were higher for high school boys than for high school girls. No one understands why, he continued, but is it possible that genetics plays a part, and it is not strictly a socialization issue?

He was castigated by some faculty members for those politically incorrect remarks. How DARE he even ask the question?

See: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/01/17/summers...

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I think he actually argued that men might have a different distribution for mathematical ability than women. Specifically, he suggested men might have a higher variance in their distribution, meaning more men in the tails at both sides. But the distributions would still have the same mean. So men are not 'better than math' than women -- there would be more dumb ones and more smart ones, and less in the middle, effectively.

This phenomenon, by the way, is commonly observed in other species for various genetic traits. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for the males to "roll the dice" and have a higher variance for many traits. For example, one superstar male frog can have many more offspring than one average male frog. But one superstar female can really only have as many offspring as the average female. That's a crude over-simplified explanation, but the idea is sound.

he suggested men might have a higher variance in their distribution, meaning more men in the tails at both sides

That's my understanding as well.

A professor I respect a lot presented his analysis of Summers' argument in a lecture I went to. This professor said that Summers' argument was statistically invalid, since the number of outliers in the tails of the IQ distribution was insufficient to tell if the distribution was in fact different at the tails between men and women.

It's fair to say that this rebuttal was not the one Summers got when he presented his idea to the faculty. :)

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