Nancy Hopkins: Do NOT Read This!

Hopkins, of course, is the MIT biologist who allegedly got sick and had to leave the room when Harvard President Lawrence Summers mentioned that there might be innate differences in male and female brains that could explain men's greater proficiency in math-related fields. (Read my column on the whole mess here).

She'll have to run for her smelling salts before she reads this WebMD piece, which forthrightly accepts the fact of brain differences between men and women -- and alludes to "a lasting functional advantage that females seem to have over males: dominant language skills."

The article is a little more cutesy when it comes to conceding that men, too, have areas of greater expertise -- but it does concede that, "When it comes to performing activities that require spatial skills, like navigating directions, men generally do better."

Hello, Nancy Hopkins? Those "spatial skills" are what's key to success in complex math and engineering fields. Deal with it.