But where's the mommy truck?

YOU ARE VISITING THE OLD MALKIN(S)WATCH. THAT'S FANTASTIC. PLEASE VISIT THE NEW MALKIN(S)WATCH WHEN YOU GET A CHANCE.

Stone Court has a good response to Malkin's snarky support of a talk by Harvard President Lawrence Summers on the reason there are more successful male academics than female. (Summary: It's the uterus - oh, and the genetics that go with having a uterus. But mainly the uterus.) Stone Court's Fred Vincy writes:

Malkin condemns MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins for walking out on Summers rather than engaging in "rigorous academic debate", but neglects to mention that, according to the Globe, "Hopkins was the main force behind an influential study documenting inequalities for women at MIT, which led that school's former president, Charles M. Vest, to acknowledge the pattern of bias in 1999." That is, and not to put too fine a point on it, she actually knew something about the subject that Summers was just making stuff up about and, I'm pretty sure, Hopkins was willing to engage in quite a bit of "rigorous debate" to get MIT to admit to bias.

Now, Vincy is clearly much more knowledgable about economic theory than I am, which is why I'm deferring to him on this one, but this thought comes to mind: Summers claims that he was simply "synthesizing data" from the work presented at the confrence, but the Boston Globe reports:

In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them "daddy truck," and one "baby truck."

Ah yes, nothing like Freud's reductive method: If my daughter does it, it must be universal. Using this logic (and not having heard the talk - neither did Malkin, by the way - I don't know how much Summers relied on this kind of thing) I can prove that Summers' theories are bogus: I know a female academic, and she's smarter than any male academic I've ever personally met.

Done and done.