Ellington

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus --- except when it comes to math. Where math is concerned, they come from exactly the same place, and you had better not ask any questions about it.

This was the message sent Friday to Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers by the presidents of Stanford, MIT and Princeton in a jointly written essay. Although they mention his name only once, they wrote the essay in response to comments made by Summers during an informal talk he gave on Jan. 14 at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce."

Summers dared to broach a taboo topic. Offering possible explanations for the gender gap in science, Summers mentioned that, although median scores on standardized math tests are comparable for boys and girls, boys tend to score on the extremes of either very high or very low more often than girls. According to some reports, he used the phrase "innate ability," or at least suggested it may play a role.

Since then, the backlash against him has been constant and lethal. Scholars and pundits across the nation have called for Summers' punishment and removal, and top academic minds -- such as the three previously-mentioned presidents -- have asserted non-stop that questions of brain differences between the sexes aren't worth considering.

This isn't an issue of sexism. In his own words, Summers spoke at the conference "with the intention of reinforcing my strong commitment to the advancement of women in science." His avowed goals are the same as the three other university presidents'.

What is really at stake here is academic freedom. The job of a scientist is to discover and present facts, not to dictate which facts should and should not be presented. When the president of a prestigious university suggests a venue of research and is silenced and forced into retreat by ideologues, there is cause for concern. His detractors would have us believe that his comments have no scientific backing, but that is simply not the case.

On Jan. 20, UC-Irvine reported that researchers there had found that, despite equal levels of general intelligence, men and women have significantly different brain compositions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they showed that men have 6.5 times as much gray matter as women, while women have 10 times as much white matter as men. Gray matter is related to information processing centers, whereas white matter represents connections between major centers.

Similarly, researchers at Yale in 1995 and Indiana University in 2000, again using fMRI, found different patterns of brain activity between men and women performing a simple intellectual task. In both independent studies, men used only one side of their brains while women used both. Though their performance on the tasks was comparable, the two sexes reached their goal using different neural pathways.

These results are fascinating and deserve further attention. If the three presidents who wrote the essay really believe, as I do along with Summers, that women are vitally needed in the sciences, then they should be encouraging this kind of research, not shouting it down just because it is controversial.

We should be using every tool available, including research into the differences in function between men's and women's brains, to pinpoint the causes of the gender gap so that we can abolish it. Understanding these differences would be huge a leap forward, and would enable us to better reach the capable young women we are currently failing. Denying their existence accomplishes nothing.

Slate's William Saletan, in a Jan. 21 editorial, summed up the issue best: "The only people who don't belong in science, male or female, are those who would rather close their eyes -- and yours -- than see what's there."