There was actually mention of his sexist remarks ... "On a recent spring afternoon, he was the surprise guest speaker for the final meeting of a lecture course called Morality and Taboo, taught by Alan Dershowitz, the law professor, and Steven Pinker, the psychologist. They were prominent supporters of his presidency, and the occasion seemed ripe for self-justification. Summers has always kept the support of Harvard’s undergraduates, and when he was introduced, the students in the classroom gave him a 20-second ovation. Some stood. In his introduction, Dershowitz defended Summers’s remarks about gender and science as honest intellectual inquiry. But Summers wouldn’t have it. “I think it was, in retrospect, an act of spectacular imprudence,� he told the class. He still maintains that some critics mischaracterized his remarks, but the bottom line is that girls around the world came to think that the president of Harvard believed they couldn’t be scientists. “There are enormous benefits to being a leader of a major institution, but there are also costs and limitations,� he continued. “I thought I could have it both ways, and I was wrong.� Even when someone is defending him, Summers can’t hold back from a debate."

Granted it only got one paragraph, but it was an article on economics and globalization.

As a scientist, I can say that Summers' "science" is not just that. In order to determine whether or not a variable (here, gender) makes a difference, and, if it does, what effect it has, one must control for everything else.

In short, if you want to determine whether or not gender makes a difference, you have to control for discrimination. If such a thing is possible, that is! (The upshot is that, to determine whether or not gender actually matters, you have to eliminate sexism. Talking about women as if they are inferiour makes that impossible.)

What really gets me is that Summers is looking at something that is changing - i.e. women are still increasing their representation in the sciences - and attributes it to a constant (gender). What's the theory? That women are getting smarter over the past fifty years? Or women aren't advancing "fast enough," as if there were some OBJECTIVE way of determining what is "fast enough?"

Such crap. It's all about Summers - who doesn't even hold a science degree - being a sexist jerk. I'm telling you, I was THRILLED when a room full of Federalist Society members (80% white men) deadpanned him two months after this happened when he tried to joke about it. There was maybe one half-hearted snicker and about 300 people who just shut him down.

Having just attended an event where Larry Summers spoke, I must comment:

Larry Summers is one of the most brilliant economists of the modern era. He is extremely progressive on many matters. Much of his economic policy advice is designed to help women. I regularly attend events where he speaks and I can tell you that he has suggested more affordable child care, more research grants for women in science, better family leave benefits, etc.

He should not be maligned for the rest of his life for one speech, which was largely misconstrued by his critics. For an exact script of his remarks please refer here: http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html. As the last comment in the original post on feministing said, I don't think most news commentators or anyone else read the full script of his remarks.

He was engaging in an intellectual inquiry about why there are not more women in science and he hypothesized that part of it could be that there are less women with very high levels of scientific ability as demonstrated by tests.

Now that lack of ability can come from socialization or gentics. Summers says he thinks more of it is genetic but agrees that some is social. There is NO consensus among biologists or anyone else about how much of differences between women and men are genetic versus socialized so I find it incredibly irresponsible for people to act as if Summers suggested something that is patently not true.

I am a feminist through and through and I think Larry Summers is great.

I also think that a practice of perpetually criticizing anyone who offends feminism for the rest of his/her life is probably not one that feminists should take up. We should encourage a full dialog around women's equality.

larae -- I think that his status as both a brilliant man and the head of one of the most prestigious universities in the world make his comments even worse. When this first happened, I remember being so disappointed. If he is trying to engage in an intellectually honest discussion about the shameful dearth of women in technical fields, perhaps he should start by actually speaking to some women in those programs on his campus. I can tell you that he would not have come up with “girls are just bad at math�. There’s socialization as children – girls want to be mommies and boy want to take apart the telephone – but even if a girl has the advantage of parents who strongly encourage math- and science-related activities, once she gets to college she’s got a whole other bag of raspberries to deal with there. The misogyny is stifling -- from both professors and fellow students, a woman in these fields will often be blatantly disregarded or paid far too much attention in ways that have nothing to do with her academics. I could go on for days on this topic, but I’ll just say that, regardless of how smart this guy is, he made a really stupid, hurtful, WRONG statement, and then tried to pass it off as “intellectual inquiry�.

The error that Larry Summers made in that speech was using back of the napkin 'calculations' to support his position. Before he did that he essentially dismissed 20+ years of research on gender bias in education and the impact it has on how many women engage in math heavy career paths by saying "we just don't know" what causes a dearth of women to have professorships in the sciences. That is what he was most called on the carpet for. It was a huge blunder for an intellectual like Larry Summers to pitch ideas and say "we just don't know" when in fact, we know quite a bit.

I'm heartened that he said his speech was an act of spectacular imprudence. That's a good thing. If he can take progressive ideas and influence the direction of globalizing the economy then so much the better even if he is, at his core, a bit of a sexist.

"I'm heartened that he said his speech was an act of spectacular imprudence. That's a good thing."

Yeah, he's learning from his mistakes. :)

"If he can take progressive ideas and influence the direction of globalizing the economy then so much the better even if he is, at his core, a bit of a sexist."

Good point.

Larry Summers' comments are about as much of a contribution to "scientific inquiry" as the bulk of the pop-psych tripe on the subject, exemplified by "Dr." John Gray and "Dr." Michael Gurian.

His reliance on standardised tests is particularly questionable, since it is well known by now that standardised tests don't consistently correlate with much of anything but other standardised tests. His tendency to frame things in terms of women's inclinations is particularly absurd in the light of his own institution's hiring record (at the time he was making these comments, fully half of the applicants for faculty positions in the maths and science departments at Harvard were women).

Even more questionable are his claims about behavioural genetics. We are currently struggling to understand the rudiments of the brain-behaviour relationship. At this stage, we still can't be entirely certain about basic matters such as what bit of the brain does what (we still can't account for the phenomenon of diaschisis). What we do know - and that's not much - is subject to substantial revision, and is more of a Rohrschach test than an authoritative source of knowledge.

Science has a poor track record when it comes to ideologically charged subjects. If an area is poorly understood and relevant to significant ideological forces in a society, science will tend to produce the kinds of results that will reinforce those forces. Thus, the last word in science a hundred years ago was that white people were genetically superior to non-white people in every relevant respect, and every respected source confirmed as much. Similarly, the same scientific institutions found sufficient evidence to convince themselves that education would cause women's ovaries to atrophy. There was, of course, no evidence to support these notions, but they did dovetail quite well with the interests of a society built quite explicitly and unabashedly on white male chauvinism. As society was forced to begin making concessions to women and other disenfranchised groups, an explicit commitment to these ideologies became less tenable, and the science - on the same evidence - began to reach different conclusions.

As feminists, I think we need to approach these discussions with a healthy agnosticism. The science on the subject is at best inconclusive. The closest thing we can come to an accurate statement is to say that society and biology both are factors in some way (though we haven't even reached the point of asking the question of "in what way). When the science in as undeveloped an area as this seems to bolster patriarchal ideologies, that, in itself, is grounds to doubt it.

Ultimately, remarks like those of Larry Summers (and so many others) can't be taken seriously, at least in terms of their substance. Their only seriousness lies in their potential effects.