If you liked the story, Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions, recommended last month, or today's thread, Men want hot women, study confirms, then you might be interested in this article from 2005, in which Steven Pinker reacts to the hubbub over controversial statements by then-President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers.

The analysis should have been unexceptionable. Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.") To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.