Reply #7: Not true. 6 of 8 women interviewed by Boston Globe were deeply offended. [View All]

DubyaSux wrote:

Literally every other female in the audience had no problem with the context, but the one that did went ballistic.

This is false, as you can find by reading the original Boston Globe article from Monday

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.

Of these "four others" interviewed, two were women (based on their names; I assume Richard Freeman and David Goldston are not women). So 6 of 8 were "deeply offended."

''Here was this economist lecturing pompously this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day," said Denton, the outgoing dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington. Next month, Denton will become the new head of UC Santa Cruz.

Besides Hopkins and Denton, the participants who criticized Summers to a Globe reporter were Anne C. Petersen, former deputy director of the National Science Foundation; Catherine Didion, former executive director of the Association for Women in Science; Donna J. Nelson, chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma; and Sheila Tobias, a feminist author and proponent of women in science.

And you're also wrong about what Summers said. He did indeed suggest the possibility that women are inferior in some fields.

The second point was that fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years. ''I said no one really understands why this is, and it's an area of ferment in social science," Summers said in an interview Saturday. ''Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren't" due to socialization after all.

This was the point that most angered some of the listeners, several of whom said Summers said that women do not have the same ''innate ability" or ''natural ability" as men in some fields.

Asked about this, Summers said, ''It's possible I made some reference to innate differences. . . I did say that you have to be careful in attributing things to socialization. . . That's what we would prefer to believe, but these are things that need to be studied."

Furthermore, it appears Summers misrepresented or ingored findings exactly contrary to what he claimed: http://pmbryant.typepad.com/b_and_b/2005/01/tapped_january_.html

Peter