WOMAN, SUMMERS, PINKER, POLLITT...

Cambridge, Mass.

According to Katha Pollitt ["Subject to Debate," Feb. 21], the press has responded to Harvard president Lawrence Summers's remarks on gender disparities in science by writing, "Women are dumber! Steven Pinker says so!" I've been following the press coverage of this event pretty closely and have seen nothing that attributes to me that mad belief. What I did write, in my book The Blank Slate and elsewhere, is that (1) on average, women and men are equal in general intelligence; (2) on average, women are better than men in certain cognitive skills such as verbal fluency, but since these are only averages, it does not mean that all women are better than all men; (3) on average, men are better than women in certain cognitive skills such as mental rotation of 3-D objects, but since these are only averages, it does not mean that all men are better than all women. These conclusions are well established in the literature on gender and cognition, such as the excellent book Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, by Diane Halpern, the president of the American Psychological Association.

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