At TCS, Arnold Kling, wrote an interesting piece on the Summers brouhaha and in part he mentioned the Summer's discussion of the Becker test. This is what Summers said:
The second problem is the one that Gary Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many years ago. If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a 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 examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.
It is my strong feeling that in continental Europe the Becker test would show a different result. I have only anecdotal evidence here but in my experience I would say that mathematically and scientifically excellent women are disproportionately based in small companies rather than universtities and large established organizations. If you are a European female biochemist (say) you will most likely get the best opportunity to do challenging research as a post doc in a biotech startup rather than in a university or a large company because in the larger organization the institutionalized sexism means that you will be washing the bottles
The problem here is that once a woman has gone the way of the small company she will never return to academia because she will lack appropriate teaching experience and possibly a reasonable number of published works. It is my experience that smaller companies tend to spend less time trying to get their scientist's work published because they'd rather make money from it, thus five years work in a startup may result in just one or two patent applications and no other published work whereas in any other organization the same work would have resulted in two or three journal articles as well as the patents. Because of the lack of such published work the putative female's CV is bound to be less impressive-looking than that of a hypothetically less brilliant male who stuck to university research and thus published many low grade articles. Throw is the male dominance games that Kling mentions and you have a strong disincentive, IMO, for female scientists in academia.
As for the rest? I can't help noticing that unlike Eason Jordon who quit rather than admit what he said, Summers has quite simply put the transcript up and allowed us all to read it and draw our own conclusions. Not only does this look good it also makes the outbursts of his critics look like people who are dogmatic nonscientists. What I really wonder is whether these critics understand the basic mathematics behind the normal distribution and the resulting implications for picking the best. On that note and IMO illustrating the lack of statistical and logical knowledge of Summers' critics, Gnxp has a link to an interesting NY Times article about the relative successes of male and female physicists in the USA with comparisons to other scientific disciplines and countries:
Instead, the sex disparity arises earlier in the pipeline, between high school and college. Nearly half of students taking high school physics are girls, but fewer than a quarter of the bachelor's degrees in physics go to women.
"That's where the drop-off point in physics is," Dr. Ivie said. "That's where they need to look."
Dr. Ivie said the situation appeared to be different in at least some other sciences, like chemistry, where women earn a larger percentage of doctoral degrees but leave academia at a higher rate than men.
Mind you the article is clearly intended to attack what Summers is supposed to have been claiming but I think it manages to screw up this conclusion by making a truly bizarre leap of logic near the end
Dr. Ivie also said that in suggesting that men and women might have different intrinsic aptitude in science, Dr. Summers did not take into account the continuing progress of women in fields like physics. While women earned only 18 percent of the Ph.D.'s in the United States in 2003, that is far higher than 1970, when the percentage was 2.4.
"If it's differences in innate ability, I don't know what innate abilities would have changed so quickly," Dr. Ivie said.
Let me just point out two idiocies here: 1) 18% of what vs 2.4% of what? Not enough information here. With the data supplied it is easy to create a scenario where the the Summers hypothesis is correct. Assume that, as Summers (and others) claim, the varience for males is greater than for women. If in 1970 only the top 10%, say, of people got physics PhDs but in 2003 the top, say, 20% got PhDs then because of the sizes of the tail 18% of the top 20% could be female but only 2.4% of the top 10% could be female. 2) 1970 would seem to be right at the start of the era when feminism and the like would be able to influence whether women felt able to study physics. It should be no surprise that just 2.4% got a PhD then and more did so in 2003. The question is why the number in 2003 is 18% not 48%? That could be residual sexism or it could be the fact that fewer women have the aptitude. We need some intermediate data points before we can draw any conclustions.