This is what he said

Bowing to pressure from his faculty, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, on Thursday released a month-old transcript o...

Bowing to pressure from his faculty, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, on Thursday released a month-old transcript of his contentious closed-door remarks about the shortage of women in the sciences and engineering8230;

Among his comments to a conference of economists last month, according to the transcript, Dr Summers, a former secretary of the United States Treasury, compared the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the numbers of Catholics in investment banking, whites in the National Basketball Association and Jews in farming. He theorized that a 8220;much higher fraction of married men8221; than married women were willing to work 80-hour weeks to attain 8220;high powered8221; jobs. He said racial and sex discrimination needed to be 8220;absolutely, vigorously8221; combated, yet he argued that bias could not entirely explain the lack of diversity in the sciences. At that point, the Harvard leader suggested he believed that the innate aptitude of women was a factor behind their low numbers in the sciences and engineering.

8220;My best guess, to provoke you, of what8217;s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people8217;s legitimate family desires and employers8217; current desire for high power and high intensity; that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude; and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination,8221; Dr. Summers said, according to the transcript8230;

Over and over in the transcript, he made clear that he might be wrong in his theories, and he challenged researchers to study his propositions8230;

Several Harvard professors said they were more furious after reading the precise remarks, saying they felt he believed women were intellectually inferior to men. Everett I. Mendelsohn, a professor of the history of science, said that once he read the transcript, he understood why Dr. Summers 8220;might have wanted to keep it a secret.8221;8230;

Excerpted from 8216;The New York Times8217;, February 18