If you want to get a rise out of Louise Root-Robbins, just ask what she thinks of Harvard University President Larry Summers’ theory of why few women are among the nation’s top academic scientists, mathematicians and engineers.
In now-infamous remarks at a diversity conference in January, Summers speculated that men may have more “intrinsic aptitude” for those fields – in other words, that women, due to biologically based brain differences, can’t handle the analytical thinking demanded by the hard sciences.