6.

Are smart men smarter than

smart women? The epistemology
of ignorance, women, and the
production of knowledge1
Carla Fehr

One of the most interesting aspects of theories concerning intrinsic

differences between the intellectual abilities of men and women is that
in principle they are falsifiable, but in practice they don’t seem to be. In
other words, even in the face of contrary empirical evidence some theories
just don’t seem to go away. For example, when Paul Broca (1824–80) set
about studying sex differences in intelligence, he measured differences in
the weight of brains of men and women collected in autopsies from four
Parisian hospitals. His perhaps unsurprising conclusion was that men’s
brains weighed more than women’s and that therefore men were more
intelligent than women (Gould 1993). What was surprising was that despite
having rescued Frenchmen from a claim of German superiority by adjust-
ing for such factors as size and age, Broca made no such adjustments in
measuring women’s brains (Gould 1993).
When Edward H. Clarke argued against co-education for women in the
nineteenth century, he invoked the principle known as the ‘conservation
of energy.’ According to this principle, intensive study would physically
harm women by diverting energy from their uterus to their brain. Although
prevailing empirical evidence had long refuted this principle (Walsh 1977)
and despite flimsy anecdotal evidence supporting it, Clarke’s notions held
and in his wake organizations were formed and dissertations written—all
refuting Clarke’s claims (Walsh 1977; Shields 1982).
These examples, and countless others, demonstrate the importance of
understanding epistemology not only in terms of the production of knowl-
edge, but also in terms of the production of ignorance (Mills 1997). In this
chapter I use the epistemology of ignorance as a theoretical lens to examine
some critical aspects of theories of intelligence differences between men
and women and reveal how these theories have been used to rationalize
women’s absence from higher education. Using this framework, we can

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 Are smart men smarter than smart women? 103

begin to understand how a critical account of not knowing is essential in

examining persistent notions about inferiority and persistent inequalities—
inequalities that are especially important in academe not only in terms of
justice, but also in terms of the production of scientific knowledge.

GENDER AND NOT KNOWING

In Charles Mills’s 1997 book, The Racial Contract, Mills introduces the
‘epistemology of ignorance.’ This is a startling term. Epistemology is the
branch of philosophy that studies knowledge, or how we know what we
know. The epistemology of ignorance is the study of the creation and
persistence of ignorance, or in other words, the study of how we don’t
know things and how ignorance can be systematically generated and main-
tained.
According to Mills, the racial contract, which is based on social contract
theory, is an implicit agreement among Whites to maintain White privilege
in the polity. The epistemology of ignorance supports the racial contract
because it allows Whites not to know about racism. If they do not know
about racism, or do not allow themselves to know about racism, then they
cannot feel obligated to redress the injustices of racism or admit that they
reap the benefits of White privilege. Mills observes that Whites are very
good at not knowing, at being ignorant about race and very good at mis-
representing or ignoring claims of racism. He points out that Whites often
hold false views about race that seem true because those views cohere with
the way Whites expect the world to be.
A particularly glaring example of the epistemology of ignorance with
respect to race is provided through the events surrounding Hurricane
Katrina. In the days that followed the arrival of Katrina, Mike Brown,
Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in reference
to the poor and mostly Black survivors in New Orleans needing evacuation
from bridges and overpasses, ‘we are seeing people we didn’t know existed’
(Lehrer 2006). That is a lot of people of whom to be ignorant. In the last
census, information was collected regarding the economic status of US resi-
dents and on the number of vehicles to which members of every household
had access. Someone knew that those people existed, but that ‘knowledge’
didn’t make it into the decisions of the largely White upper middle-class
policy-makers entrusted with ensuring the safety of US residents.
In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams (1991) relates a
situation that reveals some of the ways in which the epistemology of igno-
rance reproduces itself. Here Williams tells the story of a student who came
to her office crying. The student recounted a story of a racist incident in

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class and the responses of both her professor and an administrator to her
objection to the racism. The student was upset by an exam question that
referred to Othello and that, among other things, asked students to con-
sider why a ‘rough untutored Moor might understandably be deceived by
the wiles of a more sophisticated European’ (ibid., 80). The professor told
the student that the exam wasn’t racist, it was just recounting Othello. The
racist event was denied. The student then went to an administrator who
called the student an activist and dismissed the student’s complaint. The
student was silenced. She clearly understood that being labeled an activist
would undermine her professional credibility. The very act of testifying
about racism provided those in power with reason to ignore her claim and
carried a further threat to the development of her career. When Williams
did some research and found vast numbers of racist and sexist exams,
Williams’s concerns were dismissed by her colleagues as being against the
spirit of academic freedom (ibid., 84) and met with platitudes such as ‘law
school makes everyone miserable’ (ibid., 93). These responses deflected
attention away from Williams’s complaint.
In this case, Whites refused to admit the existence of racism in the face
of a large body of evidence, Whites undermined the authority of those who
experienced racism and had evidence of racism, and Whites had excuses at
hand for not attending to racism. It is a case of Whites not only maintain-
ing ignorance of racism, but also having mechanisms in place to ensure
that this ignorance is maintained. This results in Whites being unable to
understand racism in their culture—racism that they may not only create
but participate in everyday when they most often unknowingly enjoy the
privileges of being White.
Recent contributions to feminist philosophy of science and feminist
epistemology have begun to examine the epistemology of ignorance as
well (Harding 2006; Tuana 2006). According to Nancy Tuana, ‘if we are to
enrich our understanding of the production of knowledge in a particular
field, then we must also examine the ways in which not knowing is sustained
and sometimes even constructed’ (Tuana 2006, 3). For example, why did it
take so long to notice that heart disease presents itself differently in men
than in women, especially when we have long known that heart disease
is the leading killer of women in the United States? It wasn’t that heart
disease was a new thing in women or that there were new technological or
scientific advances that allowed us to perceive heart disease in women. It
was because we didn’t bother to look for it or pay attention to it. Rather,
we choose to attend to men. We had the false ‘knowledge’ that heart
disease presented itself in the same way in women as in men and this false
‘knowledge’ diverted our attention away from investigations required to
gain actual knowledge about women’s health. Gaps in our knowledge of

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female biology and women’s health are common and deserve systematic
investigation.
It is useful to consider not only what constitutes ignorance, but also
how ignorance is generated, and how it is sustained. For example, one can
be ignorant about facts. This can include both gaps in one’s knowledge as
well as false ‘knowledge’ that seems true because it coheres with the way
one thinks, consciously or unconsciously, the world is. It is also important
to consider how one decides who counts as an authoritative knower—who
one decides to respect and trust. Much of what we know is based on tes-
timony. Consciously or unconsciously undermining the authority of the
testifier can block the creation of knowledge.
Finally, it is productive to attend to the procedures and systems that stop
one from acquiring some kinds of knowledge about the world and stop one
from recognizing the ways that we determine who is and who isn’t a worthy
knower. If, as many feminist philosophers have argued, all knowledge is
situated knowledge, it is surely also true that ‘ignorance, like knowledge, is
situated’ (ibid.).

INTELLIGENCE, GENDER, AND THE

EPISTEMOLOGY OF IGNORANCE

The epistemology of ignorance is a useful lens with which to examine the

resilience of theories of differences between women’s and men’s intellectual
ability. This is particularly important because these theories, and the
debates that arise around them, have implications for women and under-
represented minorities in higher education. In January 2005, the past
President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, provoked heated
debate when he opined that the under-representation of women in top
science jobs was probably not due to discrimination or socialization.
Instead, he argued, women’s under-representation was the result of women’s
unwillingness to work long hours coupled with women lacking the neces-
sary aptitude to succeed at these top jobs. According to Summers’s delicately
named ‘different availability of aptitude at the high end’ hypothesis, more
often referred to as the variability hypothesis, there is more variation in
aptitude among men than among women. As a result, there will be more
men than women with extremely high aptitude (it also follows that there will
be more men with extremely low aptitude, but this fact received less press)
and hence more men than women in top science jobs.
The analysis of differences in variation between genders in terms of
intellectual ability and the use of those differences to explain, and in some
cases justify, the absence of women from some professions is not new. For

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example, prior to Charles Darwin, when variability was viewed negatively,

women were considered the more variable sex. While Darwin only tenta-
tively proposed that there was greater variability among men than women
in the first edition of The Descent of Man (1871), by the second edition pub-
lished only three years later, he treated it as a matter of fact. After Darwin,
with the recognition of the importance of variation for natural selection,
women came to be viewed as the less variable sex (Shields 1975; 1982).2
In her historical analysis, psychologist Stephanie Shields, argues that
the variability hypothesis is ‘a classic case of a concept introduced without
supporting evidence or rigor in its definition and accepted as if consensus
were an adequate test of validity’ (Shields 1982, 27). For example, in 1903,
sexologist, Havelock Ellis, supported the variability hypothesis by noting
that there were both more men than women institutionalized for mental
defect and on the lists of the most eminent. The notion is that genius is a
male trait and high ability ought not to be expected from women. Already
in 1914, psychologist Leta Hollingworth, developed testable, social expla-
nations for these sorts of observations. Hollingworth showed that just
because one readily observes feeble-minded men and men of eminence, it
does not follow that the actual distribution of men’s intellectual abilities
differs from women’s. She pointed out that feeble-minded men were more
likely to be institutionalized than feeble-minded women and women were
blocked from paths to eminence by social factors (Hollingworth 1914).
At the time, some researchers made explicit policy recommendations based
on the variability hypothesis. In 1906, educational psychologist Edward
Thorndike, who was later to become President of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, argued that educational systems should
prepare women for careers in professions where the ‘average level’ of intelli-
gence is needed and restrict women to ‘the mediocre grades of ability and
achievement’ (Shields 1982, 782). Four years later, Thorndike wrote, ‘In par-
ticular, if men differ in intelligence and energy by wider extremes than
do women, eminence in and leadership of the world’s affairs of whatever sort
will inevitably belong oftener to men. They will oftener deserve it’ (ibid.,
787).
Around the time of World War I, a number of studies using more rigor-
ous experimental methods and large-scale testing found no sex differences
in variability of intellectual ability (ibid., 792). However, Shields points out
that some researchers tenaciously maintained their support of the variabil-
ity hypothesis. For example, in 1926, Thorndike went looking for variation
in intelligence by sex among adolescents. In spite of his own admission
that the differences he found were very small and the results inconsistent,
he continued to assert the existence of greater male variability. Similarly,
psychologist Lewis Terman concluded that there is a greater frequency of

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very high intelligence among boys than girls because there were more boys
than girls in his sample of gifted children—this, even though girls had the
highest IQs in his sample. Although the children were selected on the basis
of teacher recommendations, Terman rejected the notion that selection
bias might skew the sample (ibid., 792). Some of the strongest support for
the variability hypothesis came from studies of Scottish school children
conducted in 1932 and 1947. The extremely large sample sizes in these
studies allowed researchers to detect slightly higher variability in intelli-
gence among boys than among girls. Shields notes that from these results
it was concluded that there were more boys than girls at both ends of the
distribution. However, in 1972, Anne Anastasi demonstrated that a ‘slight
excess’ of males with very low scores could explain the differences in vari-
ance in the Scottish studies (ibid., 793).
In her book Myths of Gender, Anne Fausto-Sterling (1992, 18–24) docu-
ments biologist Robert Lehrke’s (1972) work on the variability hypothesis.
In 1972, Lehrke hypothesized that intelligence is caused by an X-linked
gene with as many as six alleles resulting in phenotypes ranging from very
dim to very bright. According to Lehrke, since women have two X chro-
mosomes and men only have one, in women the effects of the two different
alleles will tend to average out and women’s intelligence will cluster around
the mean of the population. Since men have only one X chromosome, they
only have one allele, and hence there is a greater chance that they will either
be very dim or very bright. In other words, Lehrke argued that there is a
genetic mechanism for greater variability among men than among women.
This mechanism was completely hypothetical.
Like proponents of the variability hypothesis earlier in the nineteenth
century, Lehrke did not shy away from the social consequences of his theory.
He wrote, ‘It is highly probable that basic genetic factors rather than male
chauvinism account for at least some of the difference in the numbers of
males and females occupying positions requiring the highest levels of intel-
lectual ability’ (Lehrke 1978, 193 in Fausto-Sterling 1992, 18).
However, Lerhke’s research was not without problems. Lerhke’s evidence
came from studies of the heritability of retardation and of the greater inci-
dence of retardation among males than females. He then assumed that his
hypothetical genetic mechanism was responsible for both very low and very
high intelligence. This assumption allowed him to assert that there were
more men than women at the high end of the distribution (Anastasi 1972;
Nance and Engel 1972; Shields 1982; Fausto-Sterling 1992, 20–22).
Like the administrator silencing the student in Williams’s case of the
racist exam, Lehrke undermines the authority of his critics, writing that ‘all
those accepting the hypothesis of greater male variability have been males,
all those rejecting it, females’ (Lehrke 1978, 172 in Fausto-Sterling 1992,

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22). Lehrke’s response to his critics has the function of disqualifying them
as knowers by implying that their gender tainted their interpretation of his
work (while his, of course, did not). In not so many words, he implies that
they disagree with him because they are women not because they are scien-
tists. In this way he undermines their credibility and provides justification
for ignoring their criticism. His claim here, by the way, was false—there
were men who disagreed with his theory—Walter Nance and Eric Nagel—
and their response was published in the same issue of the journal in which
Lehrke’s 1972 paper appeared (Nance and Engel 1972).
Lehrke’s arguments show that there is more in the history of the vari-
ability hypothesis than false ‘knowledge’ seeming true. Researchers such
as Thorndike made explicit recommendations that women be trained
for mediocrity, which would result in the social construction or at least
entrenchment, of the category of people (women of average intelligence)
that researchers were claiming to describe. This would make it nearly impos-
sible to gain knowledge of women with the ability or potential to attain
eminence because they would not be provided with the education to realize
that potential. Finally, several supporters of the variability hypothesis use
it to explain the absence of women from prestigious professions. Thorndike
argued that women were unlikely to attain eminence because they did not
deserve it and Lehrke argued that genetic rather than social factors, such
as ‘male chauvinism,’ were responsible for women’s absence from high-
powered professions. If women are not to be educated for particular profes-
sions and there is a general acceptance of biological justifications for their
absence it is no surprise that their potential often went unrealized. Women’s
absence from lists of the most eminent provided spurious support for the
variability hypothesis while calcifying the status quo.
In 1982, Shields concluded that ‘the variability hypothesis, though it
has undergone some modifications and lost much of its social importance
since its origins at the turn of the century, has survived to the present day
with relatively little factual support’ (p. 794). The resiliency of the variabil-
ity hypothesis is a case of the epistemology of ignorance in action. False
‘knowledge’ of the variability of men’s and women’s intellectual abilities
seems true because it coheres with the way that people expected the world
to be. Already in 1914, Hollingworth provided straightforward and testable
social explanations for the observed greater number of men than women
who were classified as feeble-minded or geniuses. The advent of more rigor-
ous methods provided evidence against the theory and yet some eminent
researchers such as Thorndike and Terman continued to support the theory
with a tenacity not justified by the weak nature of their results. The Scottish
studies provided some of the most powerful support for the variability
hypothesis and yet in 1972 Anastasi pointed out that these studies, too,

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were problematic. According to Shields, 50 years later, these studies, along

with the work of Terman and Thorndike, were frequently cited in support
of the theory. She concludes that ‘people and social issues dictated accept-
ance or rejection [of the variability hypothesis]; facts had little to do with
either’ (p. 771).

THE SUMMERS AFFAIR AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY

OF IGNORANCE

Although the variability hypothesis may have lost much of its social impor-
tance in the early 1980s, the imprudent comments of Lawrence Summers
gave it top coverage in newspapers across the country in 2005. At a National
Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science and
Engineering Workforce, Summers offered his views on the lack of women
in science and engineering in top universities (Summers 2005).
According to Summers, socialization and discrimination were relatively
unimportant explanations for the dearth of women in science and engineer-
ing. Summers’s conclusion, although he ‘would prefer to believe otherwise,’
comes not from large sample data on socialization but from his experience
with his two-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters. His daughters ‘who were
not given dolls and who were given trucks,’ found themselves saying to each
other, ‘look, daddy truck is carrying baby truck.’ According to Summers,
we often attribute what is a matter of ‘taste’ to ‘socialization’ noting that
‘the human mind has a tendency to grab the socialization hypothesis when
you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true.’
On the possibility that women may experience discrimination in male-
dominated fields, Summers sees this as unlikely. According to his view:

if there was a really pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an

extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects
that in the highly competitive academic marketplace there would be more exam-
ples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And
I think one sees relatively little evidence of that. (Summers 2005)

Oddly enough, although Summers compared the under-representation of

women in top science and engineering jobs to the under-representation of
White men in the NBA (National Basketball Association), Catholics in
investment banking, and Jews in farming, his most controversial remarks
involved his support of the variability hypothesis, which he referred to gen-
erally as ‘issues of intrinsic aptitude’ and more specifically as the ‘different
availability of aptitude at the high end.’ In Summers’s words, ‘It does appear
that on many, many different human attributes—height, weight, propensity

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for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability—there is

relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can
be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability
of a male and female population.’
Summers frequently referred to the existence of ‘relatively clear’ evi-
dence supporting his claims, but he did not produce any of that evidence.
Further, he made no reference to the abundant evidence contrary to his
claims, much of which was revisited at the very conference where he was
speaking. He also frequently stated that his comments were not normative
but descriptive, referring to the importance of the variability hypothesis as
an ‘unfortunate truth.’ This gives one the impression of a lone man sum-
moning the courage to speak up and to ‘call it the way he sees it.’ However,
one need be only moderately well informed by actual evidence to see things
very differently.
The variability hypothesis is seductive. It has two parts. First, it is posited
that there is more variability in intellectual ability among men than among
women (Feingold 1992). As a result, the pool of men with very high ability
will be larger than the pool of women with very high ability. Second there
is an assumption of meritocracy. It is posited that, in this case, scientists
and engineers at top schools are drawn from the pools of individuals with
very high ability (National Academy of Science 2007).
There are studies that support the first part of the hypothesis. For
example, in a 1988 study using the SAT-M, the mean scores for boys and
girls are similar, but there were twice as many boys as girls with scores of
at least 500 and 13 times as many boys as girls with scores of at least 700
(Benbow 1988). Although the average male and average female scores
were similar, there were more boys than girls who achieved extremely high
scores.
However, there are reasons to be cautious about the first part of the
hypothesis. It is not clear that the test scores used to support the first part
of the variability hypothesis are good measures of scientific or intellectual
aptitude. For example, the SAT-M is designed to predict student perform-
ance in college math courses. While generally predictive, this test tends
to under-predict female and over-predict male performance (Wainer and
Steinberg 1992). Also, it has been shown that expectations, which vary
with gender, have a significant influence on test performance (Spencer,
Steele, and Quinn 1999; Bransford, Brown and Cocking 2000). Finally, the
differences in variability are not fixed. The ratio of males to females in the
extreme high end of the distribution was 13:1 in the 1970s but has recently
shrunk to 3:1 (Brody and Mills 2005).
The second part of the variability hypothesis also lacks clear empiri-
cal support. As pointed out in a letter to Science signed by 80 eminent

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scholars, even if the differences in the tail of the distribution reflect actual
differences in intellectual ability, it remains to be shown that high test scores
are correlated with career success in science (Muller et al. 2005). Yu Xie and
Kimberlee Shauman (2003) demonstrate that many male scientists are not
drawn from the extreme tail of mathematical aptitude test distributions and
that such tests are not very predictive of who ends up in a mathematical
occupation. If we confine our attention to individuals who end up in the
extreme tail of the distribution we find that top-scoring girls are only about
60 percent as likely as top-scoring boys to pursue science or engineering
careers and female scientists are more likely to have very high test scores
than male scientists (Weinberger 2005). Female engineers have higher
average mathematics test scores than male engineers (Jagacinski 1987;
McIlwee and Robinson 1992) and women are seriously under-represented
both as engineering faculty and as practicing engineers.
There is evidence that social factors explain at least part of the differences
in men’s and women’s test scores in math (Deaux and Emswiller 1974; Bar-
Tal and Frieze 1977; Eccles and Jacobs 1986; Jacobs and Eccles 1992;
Jussim and Eccles 1992; Tenenbaum and Leaper 2002; Thompson 2003).
For example, research shows that as the ratio of men to women in the room
increases, women tend to score lower on mathematics tests (Inzlicht and
Ben-Zeev 2000). Also, when gender is made salient to women before they
take a math test, they score lower than when gender is not made salient
(Spencer et al. 1999).
Finally, there is a large body of literature revealing that discrimination
does play a role in the professional assessment of women, including women
in the academy. Virginia Valian (1998 and this volume), has forcefully
argued that women’s professional achievements are under-valued and not
rewarded in comparison with men’s achievements (Sonnert and Holton
1996). Research shows that both men and women, who sincerely and explic-
itly believe that they are not sexist, significantly undervalue the professional
and leadership abilities of women as compared with men (Porter and Geis
1981; Butler and Geis 1990). The authors of the 1999 MIT study describe
gender discrimination as ‘a pattern of powerful but unrecognized attitudes
and assumptions that work systematically against women despite good will’
(MIT 1999, 11, emphasis added). The tendency to be unaware of one’s own
discriminatory behavior and to undervalue women’s achievements provides
reason to doubt Summers’s free market argument against the significance
of discrimination. His argument assumes that administrators make deci-
sions based on accurate knowledge of the quality of women scientists—
knowledge that research shows they likely think they have, but don’t.
Where did this huge body of knowledge go? In response to a challenge
from Denice Denton, then Chancellor of the University of California-Santa

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Cruz, Summers said, ‘I was giving you my best guess but I hope we could
argue on the basis of as much evidence as we can marshal.’ Denton, refer-
ring to the conference at which Summers was speaking, replied, ‘It’s here’
(Summers 2005). There is evidence of problems with measures of intellectual
ability, evidence undermining the correlation between test scores and success
in science careers, evidence of social influences impacting the development
and measurement of intellectual ability and evidence that unconscious dis-
crimination impacts professional women’s careers. How could the president
of one of the world’s leading universities not know this—especially since
Harvard is publicly committed to addressing problems with recruitment and
retention of women scientists? There are gaps in our cultural knowledge
about women’s intellectual abilities that empirical evidence seems unable to
fill. Our culture’s false ‘knowledge’ and ignorance about women’s intellectual
abilities persists in the minds of even the most educated people and in the
face of vast bodies of evidence. One possible reason for this is that the false
‘knowledge’ seems true and retains currency because it coheres with the ways
that both men and women expect the world to be.
The Summers affair also provides an example of how some people are
disqualified as knowers. Needless to say there was an angry response to
Summers’s comments. According to the Boston Globe, ‘The organizer
of the conference, Harvard economist Richard B. Freeman, described
Summers’s critics as activists whose sensibilities might be at odds with intel-
lectual debate’ (Bombardieri 2005). Like the administrator in Williams’s
example calling the student an activist, and like Lehrke falsely pointing
out that his critics were women, here it appears that being an activist or a
feminist disqualifies one from being a good intellectual debater or a good
knower. The very fact that critics were familiar with knowledge undermin-
ing the existence or importance of intrinsic intellectual differences and had
an appropriate response to Summers’s ignorance put them ‘at odds with
intellectual debate.’ It disqualified their criticisms of Summers, who ought
to have had this knowledge and didn’t think clearly about the ethical impli-
cations of perpetuating this ignorance. To paraphrase Lisa Heldke (2006),
it appears that having some knowledge makes you stupid. Here we have
a case of ignorance fighting back. Some knowledge disqualifies one from
being a good knower, and it happens to be the very knowledge needed to
disprove the hypothesis under consideration.
The dialogue around the Summers affair also has implications for
systems that create ignorance. As in Williams’s example, academic freedom
is used to justify ignorance. The media reported that Summers’s critics
thought that he shouldn’t have hypothesized about intrinsic sex differences
in ability ‘at the high end’ of the distribution because what he said was
sexist. Reflecting mistaken inferences about why the critics thought the case

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was sexist and about the basis of critics’ complaints, media reports often
presumed that feminist critics (1) deny that there are biological differences
between the sexes (Goldenberg 2005), (2) argue that it is not politically
correct and that it is never OK to discuss differences between the sexes and
that they are hence hurting the spirit of intellectual debate (Dershowitz
2006), and (3) use a liberal agenda to limit academic freedom or freedom of
speech (Thernstrom 2005). These assumptions are false, but they function
to discredit feminist critics.
The point to realize is that there is already a large body of research that
provides evidence contrary to Summers’s conjectures. A scientist support-
ing creationism or geocentrism would be ignored or silenced. We would not
fund research in either of these programs and there would be no concerns
raised about academic freedom. One important difference is that if a pow-
erful person espouses geocentrism, no one gets hurt. What is sexist about
Summers’s remarks are that they ignore evidence about women’s actual
abilities, they ignore the need to encourage talented women to remain in
the sciences, and they reinforce sexist stereotypes about women in the face
of abundant contrary evidence.
Most importantly perhaps, if we hold out the possibility that research
could somehow ‘prove’ that employment patterns were primarily the result
of intrinsic differences that could not be mitigated by social factors, it takes
the pressure off of universities and individuals when it comes to employing
and respecting women scientists. Keeping these hypotheses in play not only
coheres with powerful cultural stereotypes about the intellectual nature of
women, it can also function to maintain gender inequities inside universi-
ties and out. And, it further reduces the intellectual authority that women
can claim when they try to fight against these stereotypes. Here we see a
distressing relationship between ignorance of science assessing women’s
abilities and the employment inequities suffered by women scientists.

IGNORANCE AND DIVERSITY IN SCIENTIFIC

COMMUNITIES

This ignorance has serious ethical and political implications for the equi-
table treatment of women in science, but it is crucial to realize that this
ignorance also hurts the practice of science itself. This ignorance has an
impact on the benefits of diversity for scientific communities. We need to
distinguish between two senses of diversity. The first is situational diversity.
In this sense a diverse scientific community is one that includes members
situated differently in terms of categories such as gender, race, and class.
Arguments for this type of diversity are often couched in ethical or political

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114 Part II

terms. It is a basic matter of justice that women have access to the same edu-
cational and employment opportunities as men, especially when it comes
to science that is paid for by tax dollars that women help generate. We can
roughly think of calls for situational diversity as being calls to help women
and especially women scientists. For a middle-class White man to embrace
this sort of diversity is a matter of virtue or of acting in terms of some sort
of ethic that values the just treatment of other people.3
But, there is a different sense of diversity, epistemic diversity, that many
feminist philosophers of science argue is in the best interests of all sci-
entists to embrace (Harding 1986; 1991; Longino 1990; 2001; Solomon
2001; Rolin 2002). An epistemically diverse scientific community includes
members who differ from one another in terms of their points of view,
research interests, or theoretical perspectives. Epistemic diversity is good
for science in general. It fosters the development of new areas of investiga-
tion and of alternative theories and hypotheses for current areas of inves-
tigation. Also, when communities include members who differ from one
another with respect to their points of view it is possible to test hypotheses
more stringently and from a wider variety of perspectives. All of these pos-
sibilities help us do better science. One can embrace epistemic diversity for
very selfish reasons.
We cannot assume that situational diversity will result in epistemic
diversity because there is not a single women’s point of view or way that
women approach their research. This would also be disrespectful of women
scientists who work within the frameworks of existing scientific communi-
ties. Although we cannot assume that situational diversity will result in
epistemic diversity, if scientific communities don’t give members from some
situational perspectives (in this case, don’t give women) intellectual respect
and treat them as good knowers, as good members of a community, the
community will be less likely to benefit from the epistemic diversity that
those women may be able to offer. If there are differences in the ways that
some particular women approach their work it would be a shame not to
glean the epistemic benefits of those differences.
So, does ignorance regarding gender and intrinsic intellectual aptitude
hinder the ability of scientific communities to make the most of the epistemic
diversity that women scientists may provide? Obviously, there is the issue of
simply respecting one’s colleagues. But more importantly, if this ignorance
impacts the intellectual aspirations of girls and women, or if it is used, con-
sciously or unconsciously, to justify unfair hiring and promotion practices,
then scientific communities will lack situational diversity and the epistemic
diversity (that may or may not relate to gender) that could arise out of it.
In addition, there are serious differences in the assessments of the profes-
sional competence of male and female scientists. Studies have shown that

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 Are smart men smarter than smart women? 115

CVs that differ only in the gender of the applicant’s name are assessed very
differently (Fidell 1975; Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke 1999; Orenstein
2002). Grant applications written by women are required to be several
times better in terms of the quantity and quality of publications than those
written by men in order to merit the same level of funding (Wennerås and
Wold 1997). Many women researchers are justifiably concerned about
being taken seriously. Thus, given that the label ‘feminist’ or ‘activist’ or
even the possibility that one may be perceived as disagreeing with a theory
because one is a woman have been used to disqualify people as being good
knowers, it is only prudent that a woman researcher, especially a junior
woman, would studiously avoid such labels. The progress of her career
depends on being taken seriously by her colleagues. As a result, it would
be prudent to censor oneself, in one’s thinking or one’s speaking. But, this
means that scientific communities are denied the epistemic benefits of inter-
acting with colleagues who may have unique points of view because they
grew up experiencing the world in a woman’s body.
Considerations of the epistemology of ignorance should lead us to be very
careful about our responses to Summers’s comments. Although the topic of
women in science received significant media attention from the Summers
affair, the old adage that any publicity is good publicity may not hold in this
case. This case places ideas about the social significance of intrinsic differences
and stereotypes about women’s intellectual inferiority back in the public
mind. This public mind is one that is still deeply influenced by stereotypes
about women and science, even though many individuals that constitute that
public mind think that they are not sexist. There are systems in place ‘ready to
go’ that lead many to take claims such as those Summers made seriously and
to discredit Summers’s critics. Even in the academy the debate about this case
gets deflected by spurious charges regarding academic freedom, which makes
it easy to dismiss critics unfairly. It is easy, for some, not to hear or know the
other side of the story, even as it falls on their ears. Even aside from issues of
justice, this may have a chilling effect on diversity within scientific communi-
ties, which is as bad for science as it is for women scientists.

NOTES

1. Thanks to the participants in the 2003 National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar
on Feminist Epistemologies for fruitful discussion on this topic. I would also like to
thank Lorraine Code, Patricia Gowaty, Heidi Grasswick, Kristen Hessler, Dave Saldana,
Tony Smith, Alice Sowal, and Jessica Slind for helpful comments on earlier drafts of
this paper. Special thanks to Ann Mari May for her insightful suggestions. This material
is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.
SBE-0600399. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed

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