Re:Lack of rational thinking (Score 1)

Right. There are two points that are being widely avoided in this discussion: (1) There is ample evidence for institutional discrimination against women, especially in the sciences and math -- see for example the MIT study. So that gives us a very clear mechanism and result. (2) Discrimination against women is the same as artificially privileging men, especially a lot of mediocre men who otherwise wouldn't get specific jobs or promotions. There's therefore a certain self-interest when men try to explain away hiring patterns by little anecdotes about how their daughters want to play with dolls. Precisely the same kind of argument was used in the past to justify not hiring Jews or black people into certain kinds of jobs. So you want to be alert to how these arguments get used. A century ago the arguments circulating on this thread were being very successfully used to keep women out of most higher education in the first place. There has been a lot of work and new academic literature on gender questions in recent years of which, judging by the reported remarks, Summers is ignorant. One mark of privilege is that you're allowed to be pompously ignorant, though being an economist is also useful practice.