When Lawrence Summers resigned I was highly disappointed about the entire incident, as it seems no one can question, with good intentions, generally accepted fa

When Lawrence Summers resigned I was highly disappointed about the entire incident, as it seems no one can question, with good intentions, generally accepted facts about gender equality in the interest of the truth, rather than what might be the socially acceptable answer. I was glad to find an article that posits some alternative hypotheses and simply acknowledges that the answers are not so simple as they might seem, and that discusses the issue from a neutral, non-activist viewpoint. I read Pinker's article in The New Republic, but this one talks about the issue more than about the discussion itself. One thing I kept expecting the talk to mention as I was reading was the importance of outliers. While I agree that comparisons of fundamental ability between the sexes, as opposed to factors such as motivation, is probably flawed, I think it might make the argument more immune to activist criticism to point out that there are always outliers in either group. Just because men may be, on average, more inclined to build large businesses, for example, does not mean that each man is more inclined to build large businesses than every woman — the curves overlap. Of course, the different shape of the distributions are important, as Baumeister pointed out (the male curves tend to be bimodal in certain cases whereas the female ones might be more normal). But there are always outliers, and so there will probably always be certain woman who are better at any given thing than most men; even though there may be more men than woman who are 'really good'. The entire talk discusses generalities and statistical tendencies, I know, but might easily be confused by less sophisticated readers as talking about individuals, which seems to be the common criticism of such talk.