Larry Summers was fired from his job as president of Harvard University partly for saying the following:
“There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document [percentage of women among tenured professors of science] and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I’ll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.”
This fired up an international debate about whether or not there were enough women with the towering intellects required to make it as top scientists and mathematicians, the sorts who would be likely to receive tenure at elite universities.
Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren’t more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.
