Who Needs Science When We Have Intimidation?

Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, has been backtracking and apologizing at full speed for saying what most sensible people know is probably true, that men's and women's brains are wired a little differently.

"[M]ore males than females tend to score in the very top range of maths aptitude tests. Mr Summers also touched on the proposition that there might be a genetic difference between men and women when it came to performance in hard sciences."

As you would expect, the radical feminist community exercised its "nuclear option" and won the argument not with facts, but with bullying - as the Left usually wins.

But now, even Martha Burke's New York Times is seriously considering the possiblity that Summers might be right.

"Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women - in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain.

Yet despite the desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows.

"We can't get anywhere denying that there are neurological and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly are," said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women." "The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance."