The viewpoint expressed in this piece is doomed to be misunderstood by some, and gleefully exploited by those who "do" understand it. Some readers will use the information here to decorate their existing attitudes and biases. However, this is a short, inadequate, piece not about "inferiority" and "superiority," but about scientifically unremarkable statements concerning historical observations and modern comparisons of the differences in groups labeled "women" and "men." We will also look at free speech at Harvard, since the indirectly forced resignation of Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, has been recurrently aggravating me, because of its effect on what John Stuart Mills called the "liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological."

Harvard's Red University commissariat of professors, who continue to be galled by the utter failure of communism, have labeled Dr. Lawrence Summers "biased" and "sexist," because of his remarks at a "brain storming,"--a private, gathering of Harvard professors and others. Here are the concluding remarks (from the public domain transcript, "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce"by Dr. Lawrence (Larry) Summers at that informal meeting:

"So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' 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. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are and working very hard to address."

All Summers (former Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, and no right wing warrior) was saying was that to come up with a manageable policy in the workplace, and for Harvard's faculty, one should discuss the truth about the hereditary abilities and inclinations between men and women, and between other groups. For example as Ruth Wisse, a non-Red Harvard college professor, has pointed out, Summers was not the first one to note that many groups are "under represented" in certain fields: "Catholics in investment banking, white men in the National Basketball Association, Jews in farming and agriculture, etc."

Regarding the number of female faculty members on college campuses, the record teaches us that 20 or so years ago, women were about one-third of those in graduate schools, but only a handful of them are in college teaching positions today, and very few of them are in the top positions, except for the unmarried or childless professionals.

Here is the heart of the Summers controversy: he was asking a reasonable question for a social scientist to ask, "As groups, do men and women differ innately in characteristics that produce achievement at the highest levels of accomplishment?" History can aid us here, without going deeply into the vast research, with the sex differences and their biological basis.

Throughout history women have played a tiny part in the history of the arts and sciences. ("Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences," by Charles Murray) In the 20th Century, women got only 2 percent of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences, and 10 percent of the prizes in literature. The Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, has been given to 44 people since it originated in 1936. All have been men. The historical reality of male leadership of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is not open to argument. One then asks the question, why?

Does the 20th century's earlier social and legal exclusion of women from higher learning sufficiently account for the male "dominance" in the arts and sciences of today?

Consider this, through high school, girls earn better grades in math than most boys, but the boys usually do better on standardized tests. And in a large sample of mathematically gifted students, for example, seven times as many males as females scored in the top percentile of the SAT mathematics test, and where first-rate mathematicians are to be found the male advantage continues to increase.

Yet, women are far superior to men in areas involving verbal fluency and interpersonal skills. If I had the space, and you had the patience, I could detail the importance of those advantages over males, they are huge. If you are interested, you can read Diane Halpern's "Sex Differences in Cognitive Ability." It is a good one-volume discussion of cognitive differences between the sexes. And for those of you with real interests in learning more about the science of this "argument," you can start by reading Larry Cahill's article in the May 2005 edition of Scientific American, "His Brain Her Brain," with his excellent footnotes.

One should mention this about women, men, and babies and career: the experience of having a baby is more profoundly life-altering for women than for men. And there is nothing new in nature about the vastly inferior role the male plays in early "parenthood." Even lower level mammals appear to give the father an inferior role in the raising of young children. And, back to humans, studies have shown that women are more attracted to children than are men, and they respond to them more intensely on an emotional level, and get more and different kinds of satisfactions from "mothering" (nurturing) them. (Yet, it's usually mothers who murder their children. When a man murders his child, he also murders the mother at the same time, but that's another column.)

Women, who have the brains and education for the highest achievement, have also a powerfully competing embedded biochemistry from being female that makes them "want much more in life." The natural woman wants to have a baby. But, the peak age of "professional" achievement is also the time most women must bear children. A father can go to work and forget about his children for the whole day, a mother can't, but extreme accomplishments demand a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand. No real women would ignore her baby for such a total focus on "success." Over-achieving (to the point of an obsession) fathers can and do ignore their children.

Extremely talented and highly intelligent young natural women rather have babies, than to become presidents of "Fortune Five-Hundred"companies. Maybe that's why there are so few top female executives, and so many spoiled, ungrateful, and often undeserving husbands, with wives who are a lot smarter about real life than their husbands.

The "bias" at Harvard is against "normal" women. And the villain is not Dr. Summers, but the "abnormal" women and men at Harvard who think they can "out-engineer" God.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.