Such fatuous feminist fulminations have been good fun, as have the eviscerations of Hopkins as a latter-day "Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, [who] suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines," in the words of George Will. (More on Hopkins below.) But most of the commentary has glossed over one important point:

For all its foolishness and irrationality, the feminist hysteria about Summers furthers the career agendas of feminists who seek thinly veiled job preferences or quotas for themselves and their friends. Such preferences are most easily justified as a remedy for male bias. And bias can more easily be blamed for gender imbalances if the possibility that more men than women are gifted with math-science brilliance is banished from public discourse.

This feminist-careerist agenda is conveniently ignored by the less hysterical critics of Summers, who make no claim that he said anything inaccurate but nonetheless reproach him for what a Los Angeles Times editorial portrayed as a gratuitous and insensitive ego trip. To the contrary, until his disgraceful capitulation to the power of political correctness, Summers was making a much-needed effort to break the self-serving feminist-careerist stranglehold on honest discussion of gender imbalances.

Summers had already been under pressure from the "huge majority of female professors at Harvard [who] recently formed a Caucus for Gender Equality to protest the drop in senior job offers to women" on his watch, as Ruth Wisse, a professor of literature at Harvard, wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. "Offering no evidence of discrimination in hiring and not a single example of a superior female applicant overlooked in favor of a less qualified male, the caucus charged the president with having reduced 'diversity' by failing to hire enough female professors."

Harvard has already caved in to such pressure by requiring numerical records of how many women are considered at each stage of the faculty screening and selection process. Now that Summers has succumbed to feminist re-education, can numerical "goals" for hiring, promotions, and departmental chairmanships be far behind?

Inconveniently for preference-seeking feminists, scientific evidence shows that while women do better than men at certain verbal skills, men do better than women at some other intellectual tasks. These include visualizing three-dimensional subjects in space—essential to much engineering and science work—and mathematical reasoning. More than twice as many boys as girls scored in the top range (750-800) on last year's SAT math test, for example. Among serious scholars, the only debate is about whether the pattern reflects acculturation or genetics. A substantial body of work suggests genetics.