People seem to want to use this one way or another as yet another battle in the culture wars. It just isn’t so.

Anyway, this is likely to descend to jalpa, so it is the time to bow out.

Your definition of science would seem to be narrow enough to exclude paleontology, geology, astronomy and cosmology, not to mention anthropology and many aspects of human biology - but whatever - all I meant by “scientific method” was a critical and open minded examination of the facts.

As to the science cited by Summers, experiments have shown that women and men differ somewhat in the way they process some kinds of information and that men are overrepresented in at the extremes of the mathematical talent curve. I have yet to see either of these refuted, and if unrefuted they can hardly be irrevelevant.

I thought that Kristin summed up the whole issue very well and would not dispute anything she said.

I’m saying this as a woman who did earn a Ph.D. in physics from a first-tier university department but who decided to get out when I realized that I had risen to my level of incompetence and that 80 hours a week as a postdoc was probably not going to make up for a spectacularly mediocre graduate career (I made mistakes, had my own issues, but I think my advisor made some mistakes, too). I know a number of guys who left for similar reasons. In physics, there are simply more scientists than there are openings, and you really have to be a star to make it to the next level.

And I have female friends who are currently working in engineering fields who like what they do just fine but would prefer to do it 3/4 time if they could—they hate the all-or-nothing hours in this career. They’re sticking with the program because they don’t have a choice—that’s the way that professional work is structured in our society right now. But I think Summers wasn’t necessarily wrong that some people are turned off by 80-hour work weeks in these technical fields. More of them might be women, whether they have supportive partners or demand more balance in their lives or just have other interests or whatever. I saw health problems and failed marriages among several people who worked on their science to the exclusion of other aspects of their lives. That helped to seal my decision to leave physics on top of my other reasons.

That said, Larry Summers was still tactless and impolitic, even if his intent was to reexamine orthodox notions. It sounds like his rough manner was spread around pretty universally and he didn’t have the political skills to juggle all the different constituencies at Harvard. But he was probably necessary to shake things up a little. I think the renewed debate about women and science is a good thing, because it forces us to examine the way that talented scientists are recognized and rewarded, as discussed in the Peter Lawrence essay in PLOS Biology. So we should at least be grateful to Summers for opening that can of worms, and we should also be glad that we won’t have to hear any more from him on the topic.