The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Speaking of XX

Christina Hoff Sommers has an interesting op-ed in the WSJ today
about the academic struggles ignited over former Harvard President Larry Summers remarks about why women are not better represented in the hard sciences. On one hand an invitation for Summers to speak at U.C.-Davis was rescinded because, a faculty petition said, he "has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice." (Can we agree it's outrageous that Ahmadinejad is allowed to speak at Columbia but Summers can't speak at Davis?) On the other, researchers in brain science are actively exploring how male and female brain differ.

The other day I was talking to my sixth-grade daughter about school and I asked her who the smartest kids in her class were. She listed a bunch of boys. "What about the girls?" I asked. "There are lots of smart girls, but they're not the smartest. But most of the kids who at the bottom are also boys."  This is exactly one of the observations -- males are over-represented at the lowest and highest ends  -- that got Summers in trouble. (Of course I told her she could forget becoming president of Harvard.) Discouragingly, she also told me that while the majority of candidates for class office were girls, the boys got more votes for class president. This is because, she explained, "Girls will vote for a boy. But boys would never vote for a girl." (I will not extrapolate from her class to the nation.)