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Anything less anecdotal to support your assertion?

Val is stereotyping much of the country. Where are these "quietly submissive" women she speaks of?

Larry Summers' speech

Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce
Lawrence H. Summers
Cambridge, Mass.
January 14, 2005

is at http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php . Here is an excerpt. What he said is debatable, but I don't see anything outrageous.

"It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity 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 a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right-it's something people can argue about-that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem."

Try this:

But there is still a huge segment of the population in the United States that tells women to be quietly submissive to their husbands and to stay home and raise kids. This group includes millions of people. I had made a list of specific groups, but will leave it out to avoid appearing like I'm trying to bait people.

Any evidence that is provided to you gets dismissed.

You need to provide some evidence yourself.

I do not know if the statistics exist, but it would be interesting to see the demographics in China, where both girls and boys are pushed and they do not have the historical bias that women were not pushed into STEM.

Since women decided to pursue medicine more aggressively here, more than half the medical schools are populated by women. That is telling and not anecdotal.

That's some hardcore trolling right there.

DAD22,
I apologize that I came across too strong in my response to your comments. “Tearing down” was an overstatement and was inappropriate. What I understood from your several posts on this topic so far was that because this program appears discriminatory that you thought it shouldn’t happen at all and I went too far in describing my perspective. In retrospect I also apologize for coming across as too personal with the questions about your mentoring. I overreacted by questioning your actions when I perceived your criticisms as not constructive.

I really do not want you to keep your opinions to yourself, as I did honestly ask you in at least two posts for constructive suggestions. Rather than bickering amongst ourselves, it would be so much more useful to figure out either how to make a program like this achieve its goals while making suggestions to address discrimination, or otherwise propose an alternative plan to reach these goals that is not perceived as discriminatory. I can’t see that most who support this program would object to making it better, even if some of us like it the way it is. We may disagree on what ‘better’ actually is, but that shouldn’t stop the discussion.

Having said that I still respectfully disagree that the program is discriminatory because it has been set up to cater (not exclusively) to girls. The application page clearly states that it is open to “students”. They can market it to girls by calling it NASA Girls or they can call it NASA Mentors and paint it with pastel colors and add lots of hearts and flowers to the web site and the application page or they can find some other way to appeal primarily to girls (I’m exaggerating for effect based on the LEGOS for girls mentioned upthread). None of those things actually discriminates against boys, they simply seek to grab the attention of a particular audience.

I also want to clarify our side discussion about illogical conclusions – judging a book by its cover. I actually agree with you in principle that it is illogical, but as I said before just because it is illogical doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen – it does – all the time, in nearly every aspect of our lives. And children are generally far more susceptible to that illogic than adults. They often can't get to the logical conclusion that appearances can be misleading, they draw their conclusions based on what they see and experience.

In an attempt to provide an admittedly poor analogy and maybe add a little levity, I'm curious how well logic works with your little ones in the midst of a tantrum. I will freely admit that it frequently didn't work well with mine as preschoolers (although it did sometimes) and it still has something of a tendency to go in one ear and out the other with my elementary school-agers even in a very calm discussion.

Thanks Prissy. There's a lot of good insight in what you just wrote.

I'm going to ignore Dude's antagonizing remarks. I love a good argument, but I have other outlets for that. I once wrote this in reply to someone who reached out to me in a positive and friendly way when I was very new to this forum:

"I've done my share of spreading and defending libertarian ideals on another forum, but here I intend to be much more passive, and more focused on the issues that brings us all together: gifted issues."

It looks like I forgot why I was here.

I think NASA Mentors would be a better program, especially if it was available in a version that wasn't pastel colored with hearts and flowers (assuming a pastel version existed, which would be fine by me) and didn't specifically say that it was "a project that offers a one-of-a-kind experience to middle school GIRLS across the country."