The following short summary is an excerpt from the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education
A Summary of a Speech entitled "Computers, Brains and Gender Equity" by Dr. Leonard Sax, founder and directors of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education
Dr. Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, caused an "intellectual tsunami" in January 2005 when he made some remarks on the subject of women in science and engineering.Dr. Summers said that the reason that there are so few women holding senior academic positions in math, physics, engineering and technology was that there might be "innate differences" between female and male brains. These differences make women incapable of mastering high-level math and science. Immediately afterward, more than fifty Harvard professors denounced their president. Less than a year later, Dr. Summers resigned.
Dr. Leonard Sax is a professor and medical doctor who has spent most of his academic career studying sex differences in the brain and ability to learn. He has written widely on this subject. In his view, Dr. Summers got it wrong.
Dr. Sax notes that the various regions of the brain develop in different sequences, depending on a person's sex. A 12-year-old girl has a similar capacity to learn math as an eight-year-old boy. However, Dr. Sax believes that if girls were allowed to learn math and science at their own pace, more might become senior academics in these subjects. The problem is that girls learn in co-ed settings, where they learn math in the same sequence as boys. By the time girls hit middle school, many have fallen behind or been trying too hard for too many years so that they believe that they can never master math or science.
Girls who attend all-girls schools do not have this problem. For example, a classic 1986 study by Professor Elizabeth Tidball found that women who graduate from all-women colleges are five times more likely to earn doctorates in math, physics and chemistry than their co-ed counterparts.
Dr. Sax believes that the under-representation of women in science and math has nothing to do with their inability to master these subjects, and everything to do with how they are taught in co-ed schools.