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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DavesM who wrote (103384)	3/6/2005 8:26:06 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793800

maybe the reason women are under represented in the Academic end of science and engineering research, is because they are just smarter then men. In my opinion, that may not be impossible. If it is though, I think it would be by an insignifcant amount - either way. The point however, is that there are so many vairiables that account for differences, it is virtually impossible to control the known variables (not to mention all the variables that we can't identify) and be able to come out with any data samples that have a lot of meaning. Having said that however, that does not mean we can't make educated guesses. There are no laws in this country, that I know of, that prohibits you from thinking anything you want and there are laws that try to protect us from saying anything we want. Anybody should be able to get up on a soap box and say anything they want. At least that is what I believe. I think I know what the intent of the framers of the Constitution wanted, but the application of freedom speech is much more complicated than I can even imagine. People that hold positions of public trust (eg, POTUS, heads of ogranizations that educate people, etc), those people have an added responsibility to be careful in their speech. They can't spout nonsense. In the case of Dr. Lawrence Summers, he can't so casually infer that because there are relatively fewer women in the sciences, that we should start to look at inherent intellectual disabilities as one of three possible causes (no matter how it is weighted). That is pure nonsense. That is irresponsible conjecture. That causes a lot of pain and a lot of harm - for no reason.