The Intelligence Bell-Curve...

This is not a new story. In fact when it broke a few years ago, there was little to indicate the consternation it would eventually cause. In 2005, the (then) President of Harvard , Lawrence Summers, gave a talk on campus in which he allegedly stated that effectively, men are better at math & high-end sciences than women are. At least this was how the story leaked out...which predictably raised eyebrows for some and infuriated others.

As Summers clarified later, he believed that the average woman was just as capable in these academic fields as the avarage man is. The difference was that men have a higher variance. I.e., the deviation from the mean is larger for men. Hence, the smartest scientists in the world are men since this represents the highest positive deviation from the average. This is illustrated somewhat in the figure shown.



Of course, Summers failed to mention that by this logic, the dumbest people on earth are also men since a Bell-shaped curve is symmetric in nature. Deviations are equal in both directions. It was perhaps this acknowledgment (or lack thereof) that really incensed everyone. Why focus on only the smartest of the lot? Shouldn't any such proclamation be balanced with all relevant facts?

Perhaps, Mr. Summers just didn't care. Or perhaps the place he was in was a factor. Harvard typically has within its boundaries the smartest of the lot anyway and Mr. Summers would only have seen these samples. He was eventually forced to leave his position, largely as a result of the controversy this created.

The reason I talk about this now is that apart from the objective analysis, the issue also rakes up layers of emotional fervour and pyschological complexities, particularly amongst the females of our lot. Fervour that for most, transcends the logical explanation. One mention of this to my sister for example, resulted in the proverbial "if looks could kill, you'd be burning in hell" stare. I fear I'll fare no better with my girlfriend either.

And this, perhaps more than anything else was Mr. Summers' undoing. If his intention behind saying this was to present a genuine piece of academia, surely he needed to be sensitive to the soft issues surrounding such an asertion. The world isn't black & white....and a person's thought process isn't necassarily governed by raw facts either. Our internal value system and sense of right-and-wrong often obliterates raw logic.

Just as the hardest of negotiators build a bridge for communication first and seek to explore viable options for their counterparts before moving to the subtance of the negotiation, a leader's ability to break down long held beliefs before thrusting his own are crucial to its acceptance. Think Abbie Hoffman (of Chicago 7 fame)!