Score One for Larry
The American Press Institute comes to Summers' defense with a new study of men and women in the newsroom. (Fascinating, I'm sure.)
Here's the opening paragraph: "Despite the recent backlash over remarks by Harvard President Lawrence Summers about women in science, more than 30 years of research on gender differences points to one conclusion: Men and women are different. They think differently and they have different aptitudes."
Couple of things....
First, I question that use of the word "backlash," which I've seen used several times in this exact context—the backlash against Summers. The word implies that somehow the reaction to Summers' women-in-science remarks was illegitimate, perhaps even contrived.
Second, though the statements the author makes about men and women thinking differently are so vague it's hard to say whether they're true or false, it's important to remember that that wasn't really the reason for the Summers controversy. The issue was whether differences in the way that men and women think explained the paucity of women in the sciences and mathematics—or whether discrimination was a far more plausible factor.
