Men and Women are Different - Go Figure!

John Leo has an article that discusses "evidence" men and women are different -- amazing, isn't it -- more amazing is that this is news, that men and women of academia refuse to admit this. Even more amazing is there have actually been studies to determine this -- all they had to do is ask my wife, my parents, my grandparents, my grandparents, etc.

Could the recent flap over comments by Harvard President Lawrence Summers about women and science have ended differently? Oh, yes. Summers is bold enough to speak unfashionable truths now and then, but, alas, he is not inclined to stick to his guns very long. When the opposition howled, he buckled quickly and issued regrets and apologies. But suppose Summers had been the owner of a sturdier spine. He might have made a serious contribution. He could have said something like this:

Yesterday I spoke bluntly at a closed academic conference and offered some possible explanations of why women are less represented than men in the upper reaches of math and science. In addition to the cost of the time women spend in bearing and raising children, I said that innate sexual differences may be playing a role.

"This was a politically incorrect thing to say, but I believe it is true. An enormous literature on sexual differences has been piling up for 30 years or more. Everybody knows about this work, but it is one of the large elephants in the academic living room that nobody is supposed to notice. It is officially invisible. Careers can end if you see it.

"The literature points to one conclusion: The sexes are different. Males and females have different aptitudes, and they make choices based on those aptitudes. Males tend to outperform females on mathematical reasoning, mechanical comprehension and spatial ability, while females tend to outperform males in such areas as language use, reading comprehension, verbal fluency, verbal memory, spelling and mathematical calculations. On many verbal tasks, women as a group are decisively better than men and remain so all their lives.

"In addition, there is a persistent finding that men tend to prefer to work with 'things,' while women, more than men, prefer to work with people. This may sound like a stereotype to you. It is certainly true that when the doors to high-paying professions were closed to women, females gravitated, by necessity, to valuable but lower-paying 'people' fields like nursing and teaching. But now that the barriers are finally coming down, women are still opting in great numbers for 'people' fields. We have seen a great surge of women into law and medicine but far less female interest in engineering, math and the hard sciences.

Read the entire article here.