A well-written and interesting article. I’m no expert at all on this subject — I’ve read a few books that have touched on the issue, but I’m basically just a mildly informed layman on this. Still, it seems to me extremely plausible that men and women, like males and females of other species, would as a group have different innate temperaments, behavior patterns, and skill sets. As Saletan points out,
[This is not] a statement that girls are inferior at math and science: It doesn’t dictate the limits of any individual, and it doesn’t entail that men are on average better than women at math or science. It’s a claim that the distribution of male scores is more spread out than the distribution of female scores — a greater percentage at both the bottom and the top. Nobody bats an eye at the overrepresentation of men in prison. But suggest that the excess might go both ways, and you’re a pig.
Of course, in the past many people have vastly overestimated innate sex differences. But this isn’t reason to assume today that the differences simply don’t exist. And it’s certainly not a reason to try to prevent honest and informed discussion of this subject, or to condemn people simply for raising this question.
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