This sounds like yet another hysterical attack on anyone that even mentions that there might be worth studying whether or not there are innate differences in the sexes beyond the obvious physical ones like muscle mass and the effect of hormones on things like impulsiveness, libido, etc. A lot of people at Harvard don’t like Summers for a lot of reasons (he’s an economist, foremost), and they’ve gone after him by mangling his statements before and putting scare-quote headlines on his speeches.
What’s really ironic is that as long as you are a woman, and woman studies-type, you can go on and on about how women speak in “different voices” and so on, or have special insights, or have some sort of fancy menstural moon power. And what do you get? Fawned over. But if you are a man, or, god-forbid, a scientist that actually practices the scientific method instead of a “woman-centered method of psycho-social text-based interpretation,” who raises the issue: well then here come the fireworks!
Let’s face the facts: there may well be some variation difference between (straight) men and (straight) women (gay or transgendered people may also thus be different as well, though in what ways would be murkier). The reality is, if you look at the animal kingdom, you’ll find a curious fact: social animals in which the sexes are similar tend to be those in which monogamy is the norm. Social animals where the sexes are different tend to involve lots of harems. Where do humans fall? Well, especially if you count only first-time life-long partnership as monogamy (which is what it’s like in many animal species: no “wild oats” period), humans overwhelmingly look to be a harem species. The vast majority of human civilizations before the modern age with first both sexual repression and then liberation and equality have been harem cultures. And even now, our attempts at “monogamy” are fairly pathetic.
Now, what does that tell us? Not a whole lot, really, and indeed even the handful of human generations that have passed since harems were the norm may be enough to make changes in our gene pools that make men and women more alike than they once may have been. But it does open the door to speculation.
And frankly, it’s offensive to want to shut that door. We’ve fought long and hard to get to a point where our civil rights and values and dislike of stereotyping aren’t based on literal equality. If women really are more inclined towards literature and men towards math (and then, only on the average in a distribution where some women are way better at math than some men!) then finding this out should not threaten our society or laws. Ethically and legally, we deal with people as individuals, looking directly at their own qualities independant of grosser group traits.
And think about this: if men and womens brains don’t work quite the same way, then by refusing to acknowledge it, we might be passing up the ability to better deal with depression by doing it differently among men and women. Just as it would insane to treat everyone with the same blood type, so too it might be stupid (though not quite as deadly wrong) to give Welbutrin to both men and women.
I have the same issue with race. Yes, race is a pretty gross and superficial construct, I agree. Except, well, people that can trace their ancestry to certain lines really DO tend to have different medical problems on than other ancestries. And yes, you can’t really tell if someone really has that ancestry simply by looking at the color of their skin or their features (though, troublingly enough, you’d often have a pretty good chance of being right, which is the virtual definition of it being useful information). But that’s not the same thing as saying ancestry makes no difference, and that ancestry doesn’t at ALL match up with “racial” features.