In The Nation.

Minding the Campus’s Anthony Paletta writes of the media assault more broadly:

Summers is no stranger to misrepresentation and absurd accusations; flip and inaccurate summaries of his 2005 remarks are legion again, now that his name is in the news. His mild inquiries about the role of biology in the numbers of females in mathematic and scientific fields, prefaced as “some attempts at provocation” have routinely been reported as ex cathedra proclamations on female feebleness and male superiority. Take Reuters’ description, last week, of his remarks as a “suggestion in 2005 that men had more innate ability in science and engineering than men.” No, that’s not true. That’s a potential answer to an element of the very broad question he raised, but one he made clear he did not embrace given available evidence. This is not difficult to report accurately, and yet so few make the minimal effort required to get it right. Instead, we’re graced now with exponentially more risible accusations that Summers’ failure to take the advice of a female colleague is proof of a hatred for women so great as to endanger the economy. This is farcical. And yet Summers’ troubles with women appear as the first citation under the Boston Globe’s description of his “baggage.” Ridiculous.

I agree with Paletta for the most part, but I don’t think it’s even “a potential answer” that “men had more innate ability.” Rather, Summers argued that men and women have the same average ability, but that men’s ability varies more — that is, there are more very smart men than very smart women, but also more very dumb men. To my knowledge, few serious psychometricians dispute this.