I've written about the Larry Summers debacle before but I learned something new from Ian Ayres' book Super Crunchers.
When
Larry was speculating that women might be under represented in the top
echelons of math he mentioned that the sigma (standard deviation) for
male IQs
was higher than for women. He further speculated that at the top level
of math academics, which he presumed is populated by people with 4
sigma IQs that the higher sigma variation between men and women would result in 20 men for every woman.
That would be a statement of scientific fact except for two assumptions. One is that math academics have really high IQs. Two, that the highest math intelligence leads to an academic career, which I really doubt.
The most important point to me is the fact that journalists (except for the Wall Street Journal) don't know math, have no idea what sigma is, which means we never got the actual statement reported.