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A 2001 report by Richard J. Coley of ETS (Educational Testing Service) found that females often outperformed males on various measures of verbal ability, while males tended to outperform females on measures of mathematical and spatial ability (Sex and Intelligence Article).It has been proposed that many women have been discouraged from pursuing careers in scientific and mathematical fields due to the fact that men are better at understanding those concepts than are women. In this view, societal biases and expectations encourage men to pursue scientific and mathematical fields and for women to pursue verbal and spatial fields.

In January of 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, commented in a public speech that innate differences between the sexes might help explain why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers. This statement caused much controversy and many were enraged that he made assertions that they felt are not supported by current research and that could actually contribute to sex differences in performance (Stereotype Threat). MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins said she felt physically ill as a result of listening to Summers’ speech, and she left the conference room half-way through the president’s remarks. . Summer referred to other sociologists who have found that women make up 35 percent of faculty at universities across the country, but only 20 percent of professors in science and engineering. The controversy that followed Summers' statements brought more awareness to the under-representation of women in science and generated a flurry of responses.

A number of studies have looked for sex differences in the brain that might relate to sex differences in intelligence or performance on different tasks. These studies have included measures of total brain size, relative amounts of grey and white matter, and a wide variety of measures of brain activity patterns (Sex and Intelligence). However, findings of sex differences in the brain do not answer the Nature vs Nurture controversy raised again by Summers' comments, because studies of neuroplasticity show that the brain can be altered by experience.