"Among the 19 students who got a perfect score on the ACT science test in the past two decades, 18 were boys."
~John Tierney in today's NY Times
Q: Does that mean that Larry Summers can get his job back as president of Harvard University? After all, according to Tierney, Dr. Summers merely suggested that a tenured physicist or mathematicians at a top university "might well need skills and traits found in only one person in 10,000: the top 0.01% of the population, a tiny group that would presumably include more men because it’s at the extreme right tail of the distribution curve."
In other words, if male professors greatly outnumber female professors in the math or physics department at Harvard or Yale, it might be because boys outnumber girls by 18:1 for perfect scores on the ACT science exam. Stated differently, why should we expect perfect gender equity in the math or physics departments at Harvard or Yale, when boys get almost 95% of the perfect scores on the ACT science exam?
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