I'm all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions: 1) Would it be safe during the "interactive discussions" for someone to mention the new evidence supporting Dr. Summers's controversial hypothesis about differences in the sexes' aptitude for math and science?
These differences existed when controlling for differences in cognitive aptitude, gender, and the presence of conduct disorder.
But given all the progress made in math by girls, who now take more math and science classes than boys and get better grades, Dr. Ceci and Dr. Williams say that differences in aptitude are not the primary cause of the gender gap in academic science.
This gender gap is the subject of hot debate, as illustrated in 2005, when then-Harvard president Larry Summers argued that differences in science aptitude between men and women explained most of the problem.
Ms. Rosser was one of the speakers at a conference in January 2005, where Mr. Summers said that differences in "intrinsic aptitude" between men and women were more important than cultural factors and discrimination in explaining why fewer women succeeded in the sciences.
They find consistent evidence for biological differences in math aptitude, particularly in males' advantage in spatial ability and in their disproportionate presence at the extreme ends of the distribution curve on math tests (the topic of last week's column).
Inspired by these findings, language researchers Dan Dediu and Robert Ladd at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom set out to see whether there might be a genetic basis for these differences in tonal aptitude.
Apparently, the currently available tests are too costly, impractical, unknown, or inaccessible for researchers to use, or it may be widely believed that biographical reports and self-rated proficiency scores are sufficient to capture differences in language aptitude.
The important point is that these differences in the souls' qualities and potentialities ("aptitudes") are determined by God's will.
Perhaps it gels, but it also seems to be consistent with a story about innate differences in ability and aptitude that the market gradually uncovers and values.
