A story in the tabloid Daily Mail led me to the web page of Professor Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh, which reports:We have also worked on sex differences in ability (appearing in [the journal] Intelligence), finding an absence of mean differences, but quite a large excess of males in both the very low and the very high extremes of the normal distribution of ability.
Which reminds us of these words from the speech by former Harvard President Larry Summers that prompted a feminist putsch against him:
Because if my reading of the data is right –it's something people can argue about –that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well.
In Scotland Professor Bates is far enough away from Cambridge, Massachusetts to be safe from the Harvard faculty’s version of the Spanish Inquisition.
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