Warning: This Transcript May Cause Nausea and Loss of Consciousness

Harvard President Lawrence Summers' critics seem to think the transcript of his remarks on women in science and engineering, released yesterday, vindicates their complaints that what he said was beyond the pale of acceptable discussion. Shirley Malcom, director of education for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told The New York Times: "I'm glad his words are finally out there…because so many of us have been accused of implying that he said things he did not, and now people can actually judge for themselves."

Not to spoil it for you, but Summers says his "best guess," based on his reading of the research and his conversations with experts and employers, is that the most important factor explaining the paucity of women on science and engineering faculties at top universities (and in various other high-powered jobs) is that mothers are less inclined than fathers to put in the hours demanded by such positions. He stresses this is not necessarily the way it should be, that the difference could be largely due to unfair expectations vis-a-vis child rearing.

Summers suggests the second most important explanation is a greater variability in aptitude among men, which makes them overrepresented among the sort of people who tend to become physics professors. (Men are also overrepresented at the other end of the bell curve.) There is strong evidence of this pattern, although people continue to argue about the relative role of genes and environment in producing it.

Summers by no means dismisses the roles of socialization and discrimination, but he does say people tend to exaggerate their importance. He cites evidence of sex differences that cannot plausibly be explained by how kids are raised and argues that if discrimination against women were pervasive, more universities would take advantage of it by snatching up all the brilliant women shunned by their competitors.

Summers repeatedly emphasizes that his conclusions are tentative and open to challenge and that more research is needed to definitively resolve these issues. His conclusion:

I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can. That's why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable.

There is no smoking gun, no moment where Summers says, "Let's face it: Women just can't hack it in science and engineering. They should stick to nursing and raising children."

Despite the easy availability of the transcript, Summers' critics continue to brazenly misrepresent what he said. "It's crazy to think that it's an innate difference," Harvard physicist Howard Georgi told the Times. "It's socialization. We've trained young women to be average. We've trained young men to be adventurous."

Summers never suggested that "innate difference" was the only, or even the most important, explanation for the gap between men and women in science and engineering. He did argue that it's implausible to attribute the entire difference to socialization, as Georgi blithely does.

"Where he seems to be off the mark particularly," another Harvard professor told the Times, "is in his sweeping claims that women don't have the ability to do well in high-powered jobs." Summers never said this.

Although Summers has apologized (over and over again) for an insufficiently nuanced presentation, his off-the-cuff remarks were a model of rigor, judiciousness, and intellectual honesty compared to the attacks they have generated.