In today’s Wall Street Journal Christina Hoff Sommers has a great recap of a recent conference on women and science put on by the American Enterprise Institute. The conference dealt with a contentious question: are their biological differences between men and women that would account (in whole or in part) for the fact that more men than women enter academic science.
That’s a topic, you’ll recall, that Lawrence Summers got booted out of Harvard for daring to bring up. But as Dr. Sommers points out in the Journal, “the scientific literature on why men and women enter different fields is legitimate, robust, complex and fascinating.” I attended the conference, so I can attest to the fascinating part – the discussion was always lively and interesting. It was, in short, the type of debate that institutions like Harvard should be engaging in, not shying away from.
Read the whole article here. And if the topic interests you, check out video and audio from the conference here. George Leef has additional commentary over at Phi Beta Cons.