This article is excerpted from the Chicago Tribune, January 26, 2005 issue.  

by Clarence Page

Washington - Judging by the uproar over Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' ungraceful speculations about the shortage of elite Female scientists and mathematicians, you might think Women weren't doing so well in school.  Not so.  In many ways, they're beating the pants off the guys!

Women nationwide have been closing the gap or surging ahead in just about every arena over the last three decades.  Even in areas like the sciences, where they remain underrepresented, they are catching up.  

The bad news is the guys.  While Female students have achieved academic milestonesin high school and college, their male counterparts have been slipping backward in ways that spell trouble for everyone's future.  

The National Organization for Women, among other enraged parties, called for Summers to resign after he suggested at a Jan 14 conference that "innate" diffferences between the sexes might account for the shortage of Women in the upper ranks of math and science academia and professions.  According to those present at the conference in Cambridge, Mass., on diversity in the scientific workforce,, he offered several explanations for the shortage of Women, including upbringing, genetics, and time spent on child rearing.  

Summers has since apologized, pointing out that he never meant to suggest that Women were incapable by nature of matching or surpassing men in math and science.  He merely wanted to stimulate discussion.  To say he has stimulated discussion would be like describing a forest fire as a small cookout.  

But the Female-male gap does need to be discussed, even if certain avenues of inquiry are painful.  We should have learned that a decade ago when Charles Murray and Richard Herrenstein's book "The Bell Curve," touched off a similiar firestorm when it suggested that innate differences might account for test score gaps among whites, blacks and Asian-American students.

"The Bell Curve" ignitted a stormy backlash, especially from sesnitive black observers for even bringing up that possibility.  But in breaking the ice around the taboo topic, the book also led to a wealth of scholarly studies which discounted genes and found numerous environmental factors that explained the gap.  

In the pursuit of truth you follow all lines of inquiry, no matter how painful some of them might be.   That is why I defend Summers' call for more research and discussion of the gender gap, as long as it pursues the growing problem of male underachievement too.  Women are closing the gap, but what is wrong with the guys?

"In every state, every income bracket, every racial and ethnic group and in most insdustrialized Wester nations, Women reign, earning an average 57% of all bachelor of arts degrees and 58% of all masters' degrees in the US alone," said Business Week in a special May 26, 2003 cover story on "The New Gender Gap."  That year 133 girls were getting BA's for every 100 guy's, according to the US Department of Education, a number projected to grow by 142 Women per 100 males by 2010 and 156 Women to 100 males by 2020, if current trends continue.  

Summers did not suggest that guys, rather than girls, might be sufffering from innate differences with the opposite sex, but he might as well as have done so.  The males shape up as "more genius, more idiots," quips Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist. 

Women are moving up at a much faster rate in student achievement than in income and in power in the workplace.  Even at Harvard, the Boston Globe reported that faculty complain that the number of tenured professorships offerred to Women has dropped sharply in the last fours years of Summers' presidency .  Sounds like Summers' studies of female achievement should begin at home. 

Clarence Page is a member ot the Chicago Tribune editorial board.