Harvard chief defends his speech on women

Several women who participated in the conference said they had been surprised or outraged by Summers’s comments, and Denice D. Denton, the chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, questioned Summers sharply during the conference, saying she needed to ‘‘speak truth to power’’.

Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at MIT who once led an investigation of sex discrimination there that led to changes in hiring and promotion, walked out midway through Summers’s remarks.

‘‘When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,’’ Hopkins said.

The Boston Globe first reported on Monday about Summers’s remarks and the stir they created. Not all reactions were negative. Some female academics and the organiser of the two-day conference that Summers addressed on Friday at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit economic research organisation in Cambridge, defended the remarks as a well-intentioned effort to speak candidly about the persistent under-representation of women in university departments of mathematics, engineering and physical sciences. —NYT