RE: Summers’ Theory of Inequality

To the editors:

The patently misinformed op-ed published on January 25 (“Summers’ Theory of Inequality” by Farley and Stone) is based on the false premise that Larry Summers made a confident assertion about gender differences; in fact, he laid out three different hypotheses in his 2005 talk. Farley and Stone refer repeatedly to a theory that simply does not exist. Speculating about three possibilities is quite different from stating (testable) results that follow logically from a collection of axioms—that’s what a theory is.

Their op-ed brims with innuendo and pretends to be revealing the former Harvard president’s views about women and features a “quote” that Summers—they think—would have used to respond to criticism. This would be perfectly fine on a page of a fiction magazine, since the total number of quotes by Summers not dreamed up by Farley and Stone in this op-ed is zero. Among the things Summers did say in his talk was that discrimination against women surely takes place in the U.S., but this reality is conveniently ignored by these creators of a curious new literary genre dressed up as commentary.

Admittedly, the op-ed succeeded at one thing: application of stereotypes. The penultimate paragraph invites readers to, “[w]atch how quickly [women] can figure out that marked-down price of any clothing item during a sale.” Comments on this jewel are hardly necessary.

Jan Zilinsky

Cambridge, MA

Jan. 26, 2010

Jan Zilinsky ’09, a former Crimson editorial writer, is a research affiliate at MIT.