Summers famously said that women and men have different inherent attributes, despite a vast literature that shows this is untrue when comparing performance of men and women across countries. His fixation with biological explanations of the distribution of abilities within and between sexes, in addition to being factually incorrect for cognitive traits, was deeply concerning given his position at Harvard and visibility in the sector.

For transparency, Summers said the following:
“It does appear that on many, many different human attributes—height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability—there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it’s not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it’s talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out.”