Greg Mankiw reports

about how a group of UC Davis women faculty circulated a petition and pressured UC regents into rescinding an invitation to Larry Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, to speak at a recent board dinner in Sacramento.

Mankiw links

to this article

, which unfortunately grossly misquotes what Summers actually said. Here is what appears in the newspaper article:

In January 2005, Summers made controversial comments at the National Bureau of Economics Research Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce. There, he attributed the under-representation of women in science, math and engineering to, among other things, the “relatively clear evidence” that men and women differ in “overall IQ, mathematical ability (and) scientific ability.”

Here is a link to the transcript of what

Summers actually said

:

It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.

As the graph above illustrates, the average (mean) intelligence of males and females could be exactly equal, but the variability (standard deviation or variance) of male intelligence could be greater than the variability of female intelligence. Result: There are more males 3-4 standard deviations above the mean, and more males 3-4 standard deviations below the mean, which would mean that there are more male super- geniuses than females, and more male super-idiots than females. MIT math and science professors are typically 3-4 standard deviations above the mean, and males could be overrepresented in those groups because they are overrepresented in the top tail of the intelligence distribution (and the bottom tail).

