<p>Patrick, thanks for the personal revelations, funny stuff. Glad you turned out OK.</p>
<p>I get your point...but believe that society gives lots of prompts that Boys are naturally good at Science and Math, while giving the opposite prompts to women. I also think that mothers and fathers often push their sons harder to achieve than they do their daughters. Hence, my goofy demographic, where I know the girls have had high expectations AND high resources heaped upon them. </p>
<p>Here an article I found about the Summers uproar that has some quotes from women scientist who came up through the ranks, and their observations. I edited to make it a faster read.</p>
<p>Are women not wired for science?</p>
<p>By Lauren Gold
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer</p>
<p>Monday, January 24, 2005</p>
<p>"My e-mail activity that morning was staggering," said Telle Whitney, a computer scientist and president of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, a Palo Alto, Calif., nonprofit dedicated to attracting women to the sciences.</p>
<p>Whitney spent much of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday fielding messages and reading press coverage. By Tuesday, she was helping circulate a letter of protest.</p>
<p>The letter, drafted by Stanford consulting associate professor of mechanical engineering Carol Muller, argued that different expectations not different genetics are the biggest reason for the achievement gap.</p>
<p>"If society, institutions, teachers and leaders like President Summers expect (overtly or subconsciously) that girls and women will not perform as well as boys and men, there is a good chance many will not perform as well," Muller wrote.</p>
<p>More than 100 scientists and academicians signed it, including former astronaut Sally Ride. </p>
<p>Whitney was one of the first. "I don't think that particular conversation was an effective way of bringing up the differences between men and women," she said. "It's easy to take on the status quo and believe that represents some kind of right. But there have been too many times in history when there have been massive changes in the population."</p>
<p>Women have made dramatic advances over the last 30 years in medicine and law. By applying the same things that worked in those fields including mentoring programs and changes in the workplace she expects women to make similar strides in science and engineering.</p>
<p>Momentum builds</p>
<p>Whitney passed the letter along to Stanford University physicist Cherrill Spencer, who added her name.</p>
<p>"There's no strong evidence for innate ability being the reason for why there are fewer women in science and engineering," Spencer said. "When somebody harps back to this, or when that's the implication, then we do get a bit annoyed.</p>
<p>"International comparisons show the USA test scores being below the average of 41 countries' test scores," she added. "So are USA-ans genetically less good at math than the citizens of 20 other countries? By President Summers' reasoning they are."</p>
<p>Test scores show there's not much difference in ability between boys and girls, she said. (The American Sociological Association reports that while fourth-grade boys outperform girls in math and science in the U.S., the disparity disappears or is reversed among kids of the same age in other countries.)</p>
<p>The difference comes in what American kids have been conditioned to expect of themselves. "Boys will get Bs in class and barrel along," she said. "Girls will get a B and say 'I'm no good.' "</p>
<p>But even though she disputes Summers' hypotheses, she wasn't offended by them. And certainly not sickened.</p>
<p>Actually, she's hoping the controversy will lead to some changes.</p>
<p>"It gets the topic into the newspapers," she said. "I don't see anything wrong with getting it into the newspapers as long as people read to the end."</p>
<p>The letter made its way from Spencer to Emily Carter, Princeton professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and applied and computational mathematics.</p>
<p>Carter was less forgiving. "My first thought jumped to the book The Bell Curve (which) proposed genetic differences in IQ for black versus white people, which was incredibly offensive," she said. "What Larry Summers said is akin to that."</p>
<p>In her 16 years in academia, Carter said she's heard male colleagues argue that gender discrimination is a thing of the past, and that hiring committees bend over backwards to recruit women.</p>
<p>She disagrees.</p>
<p>"What they don't see was what (Summers') words really embodied an unconscious bias." But she said the research some of which was presented earlier in the day at the same conference doesn't support the idea that women are genetically less suited to science. "I think if you speak in front of a bunch of people, you have a responsibility to do your homework."</p>