Scandal! A Trump Nominee Is Not Ignorant of Basic Psychometrics

The Washington Post is shocked, shocked to find that E.J. Antoni is aware that males have flatter bell curves than do females.

A shocking scandal reported in the Washington Post’s news columns:

Trump’s BLS nominee discussed controversial theory on gender IQ with interns

E.J. Antoni told interns from the Heritage Foundation that women’s IQs clustered around average scores, while men have more geniuses and unintelligent individuals, people familiar with the remarks say.

September 2, 2025 at 1:12 p.m. EDT

By Jacob Bogage

President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics shared a controversial scientific theory of inherent differences in intellect between men and women during remarks to a conservative think tank’s interns last year, according to two people familiar with the remarks…

Antoni made the remarks about intelligence in a discussion with summer interns at Heritage in 2024. He said that women’s IQs generally clustered around average scores, while men’s IQs varied more between “geniuses” and low-intelligence individuals, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Shortly afterward, Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of domestic policy, spoke with the interns and said Antoni should not have shared that viewpoint, one of the people said. Severino told the interns that Heritage had no official position on the question of gender IQ differences, the person told The Post.

Neither Antoni nor Severino responded to requests for comment.

In a statement, Mary Vought, Heritage’s vice president of strategic communications, said Antoni was presenting to interns on the subject of economic freedom when a participant posed a question on the workforce. She said Antoni cited what is commonly referred to as the “greater male variability hypothesis” among other statistics to answer the question.

“A statistician cited statistics when asked — that’s not a story or controversial. As BLS commissioner, Dr. Antoni will rely on objective data to restore integrity, accountability and America’s trust in the agency,” Vought said. “I’m proud to call him a colleague and a friend.”

Heritage representatives shared statements from three former interns who were present at Antoni’s talk, all of whom either did not respond to requests for comment from The Post or declined to comment when reached.

Liana Gordon, who is now a Heritage research assistant, said in a statement that Antoni “was asked a question about statistics and gave us an objective answer without editorializing. That is exactly what an economist should do.”

Carly Smith, now the communications director for the Georgia Republican Senatorial Committee, said, “Dr. Antoni showed us the data and led a discussion, period.”

Mary Heipel, a student at the University of Dallas, said Antoni led a “straightforward and insightful presentation on economic freedom.”

A Heritage spokesperson added that “there was no apology for Dr. Antoni’s presentation” and called The Post’s reporting “almost as bogus as writing a piece on an economist citing economic data.”

… The conservative British magazine the Spectator first reported Antoni’s remarks, which trace to the 19th-century writings of Charles Darwin, the scientist and explorer.

Then in the 15th paragraph, the Post switches gears from scandal-mongering to honest reporting that the science isn’t actually that controversial (the New York Times does this more often than the Post: the marketing department insists on using the opening paragraphs to uphold paying subscribers’ prejudices, while reporters are allowed to report interesting facts toward the bottom of the article after most readers have moved on):

Darwin discussed variability between the sexes among animal physical traits and their relationship to mate selection. Multiple studies have tested the question over the years, with varying results.

A 2003 study based on the aptitude test scores of Scottish 11-year-olds from 1932 found that “boys were over-represented at the low and high extremes of cognitive ability.”

A 2016 study that measured students’ scores on standardized tests published in Large-scale Assessments in Education, a publication from the International Educational Research Institute, declared, “The ‘greater male variability hypothesis’ is confirmed,” after reviewing datasets of academic scores from international standardized tests. An analysis of that work from 2019 broadly confirmed some gender-based variability in academic achievement but separately found countries that actively incorporated women into the workforce and empowered women politically also had increased variability among women.

I’d add that in the 2000s, women have made up 15 of the 193 Nobel laureates in the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, and medicine), or 7.8%.

Lawrence Summers, a prominent liberal economist and official in the Clinton and Obama administrations, faced scrutiny for remarks reflecting aspects of the variability hypothesis in 2005. The fallout in part led him to resign as president of Harvard University.

That was a real turning point in the history of the 21st Century: you had one of the world’s most connected guys: the current President of Harvard, a former Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, Democrat, Zionist, nephew of two Economics Nobelists (Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow) … seemingly bulletproof. Larry offers a scientifically well-informed explanation of why there are gender differences in groups at the far edges of the bell curve, such as the Harvard math department, a talk that his friend Steven Pinker could barely have improved upon and … the whole world suddenly is screaming at this august figure for giving a scientific talk at a science conference!

It happened again two years later to America’s most eminent man of science, James D. Watson, but by then we were a little more familiar with the drill. We now know that the Larry Summers whoop-tee-doo was the opening salvo of the Great Awokening, but we hadn’t seen it coming.

I wrote four articles about the Summers brouhaha because it was so radically different, the harbinger of a new age. Here’s one from the National Post of Toronto:

We're Different. Get Over It.

by Steve Sailer

National Post of Toronto, February 24, 2005

Canadians, who often view Americans as reactionary bigots, might be surprised to find out how much more pervasive than in the relatively meritocratic Canadian college system is the thumb on the scale known as "affirmative action" in American admissions and faculty hiring. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld, in the name of "diversity," preferences to close partially the deviations from equal representation that arise when only objective standards are employed.

Yet, 35 years into the era of modern feminism and despite a variety of preferential programs for women, Ivy League colleges still offer tenure in math, science, and engineering mostly to male professors.

Now that the transcript has been released of Harvard U. president Lawrence H. Summers' endlessly denounced Jan. 14th remarks on "Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce," we can finally grasp what the brouhaha has been all about.

The former Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary has already apologized at least five times for suggesting two alternatives to the conventional wisdom that the gender gap stems just from discrimination.

Summers proposed that since winning tenure at Harvard requires focusing on the job 80 hours per week, young women who want children often think twice about undertaking such a grueling career.

As a lesser reason, he noted that males tend to vary more than females in many traits, including IQ and mathematical ability, and thus more men than women possess the peculiar mental skills needed to be Harvard scientists.

Finally, Summers explained why, as an economist and a follower of the brain sciences, he doubted the popular view that discrimination in socialization and hiring primarily accounted for the sex disparity.

As is customary in America when a white male authority figure utters a "gaffe" (memorably defined by Michael Kinsley as when a politician tells the truth), Summers immediately pledged to boost Harvard's hiring of women, thus sacrificing other men's opportunities.

Not surprisingly, however, by showing weakness, Summers just encouraged the feeding frenzy. The majority of the Harvard faculty (which has most of the power in tenure decisions) remains up in arms against Summers' sexist allegation that they don't actually discriminate much against women. Granted, it makes no logical sense for the professors to flex their feminist credentials by denouncing Summers' chauvinistic claim that they aren't that biased against women, but academic disputes are seldom academic.

Instead, they are mostly about money and power. It's commonly joked that faculty politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low, but at Harvard, with its $22.6 billion (U.S.) endowment and pre-eminent position in global intellectual discourse, the struggle is hardly trivial.

So, how deplorable was Summers' speech? It notoriously sent MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins fleeing like a Victorian maiden faint from hearing the word "legs" instead of "limbs." She later claimed that she had to escape or, "I would've either blacked out or thrown up."

Yet, when read closely, Summers' off-the-cuff talk turns out to be strikingly lacking in outrageous soundbites. Indeed, the press, in its desperation to find something objectionable, has tried to tut-tut over Summers' (ironically undeniable) prefatory remark that: "It is after all not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity … [For example,] white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association."

In fact, it's precisely because the presentation by Summers, one of the world's leading economists, was lacking in crude misstatements that it was so threatening to feminists. When finally published, it turned out to be humbly argued, open-minded, well-informed, logically rigorous, and, in sum, cumulatively devastating to the feminist orthodoxy from which many of Summers' female critics have professionally and financially profited.

For example, Hopkins's showy disgust was hardly disinterested: she had been given an endowed professorship at MIT and a 20 percent raise after heading the committee that investigated -- conflicts of interest be damned! -- her own complaints of discrimination.

Hopkins and company want to drive Summers out of polite society to prevent his insightful skepticism from undermining their special privileges.

This is not to say that Summers' sophisticated attempt "to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation" would instantly convince those unfamiliar with the issues. But over the years, the example of the President of Harvard getting away with speaking the subversive truth about gender inequality would embolden others to point out that the feminist empresses have no clothes.

Let me try to outline Summers' unusual approach to "underrepresentation." He tends to view people relativistically, employing that most useful of all conceptual tools for thinking about both the similarity and the diversity of human beings: the probability distribution (more roughly known as the bell-shaped curve).

In contrast, most intellectuals today think in absolute, black and white categories, and thus they get irrationally upset by mention of any facts they can denigrate as a "stereotype." Many seem unable to distinguish between perceptive observations about the average traits of a group and blanket assertions about each and every group member. Thus, even carefully worded summations of the obvious like, "More men than women find mechanical engineering interesting," are indignantly countered with, "So, you're saying no woman likes engineering? Huh? Huh?"

As a bell curve aficionado, Summers noted a widely observed tendency: "It does appear that on many, many different human attributes -- height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability -- there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means … there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and a female population."

In other words, as any woman could testify, there are more stupid men than women; likewise, at least in math and spatial reasoning, there are more brilliant men than women.

Summers stated, "… if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. [In a normal bell curve, only one out of 44 individuals is that much above average.] And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean [or one out of 741]. But it's talking about people who are three and a half [one out of 4,299], four standard deviations above the mean [one in 31,574] …"

Observing that among the top five percent of twelfth-graders in math and science, it's common to see two boys for every girl, Summers estimated that the variance in ability is about 20 percent greater among males. He went on, "If you do that calculation -- and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways -- you get five to one [males per female], at the high end."

Actually, Summers was being a bit politically correct with his math. At three standard deviations above average (the equivalent of a 145 IQ), there would be over seven males for every female. At four standard deviations (a stratospheric 160 IQ), there would be more than 30 men for each woman. This also implies, correctly, that there are a lot more retarded men than women, but they don't come up much for tenure at Harvard.

These proportions are not contradicted by the Nobel Prize statistics. Since 1901, women have made up four percent of the Nobel laureates in Medicine, two percent in Chemistry, and only one percent in Physics. Strikingly, no woman has won a Nobel in Chemistry or Physics since 1964.

Few would consider economics a hard science, but, for whatever it's worth, the entire female sex has never won a Nobel in the math-intensive Economic Sciences, while Summers' immediate family has won two: Kenneth Arrow is his mother's brother, and Paul Samuelson is his father's brother. (Summers' dad changed his name for fear of anti-Semitism.) Both of Summers' parents were economics professors, and Summers was, for a while, the youngest person ever to win tenure at Harvard.

Perhaps hoping that his toddler twin daughters would someday add their own Nobels to the family trove, Summers tried to socialize them away from traditional female roles by giving them trucks instead of dolls, but soon heard them saying, "Look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck." That's just a charming anecdote, but Summers also pointed out the same resilient sex differences were found in "100 different kibbutzes" in Israel despite the fervent multi-generation commitment of the leftist kibbutz movement to raising children in an environment of utter gender equality.

Summers also mentioned the insight of economist Gary Becker, the 1992 Nobel laureate, that competitive markets make meritocracy profitable. Yet, "one sees relatively little evidence," Summers went on, that any colleges were assembling "remarkable departments of high quality [women] at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating," implying that bias was already mostly a thing of the past.

In short, Summers' speech represents an admirable model for how our intellectual leaders should discuss complex issues. And for exactly that reason, feminists are trying to crush it.

Here’s another one of my essays, from The American Conservative:

The Education of Larry Summers

by Steve Sailer

The American Conservative, February 28, 2005

I tried to explain the Larry Summers brouhaha to my wife, but she stumped me with a simple question. I had outlined for her how the president of Harvard, after mentioning that genetic differences could be one possible reason why more men than women are qualified to be Harvard professors of math, engineering, and science, had almost instantly offered three apologies and pledged more affirmative action for women as reparations.

Puzzled, my wife asked, "Why did Summers give in so fast and promise, in effect, to make it harder for our sons to someday get hired there? What's the President of Harvard so scared of?"

Invented by Jesse Jackson, this public ritual -- an authority figure commits a "gaffe" by telling a bit of truth about human diversity, and then immediately hands over other people's money and opportunities to the offended special interest -- has become so familiar that nobody else asks why the fix is always in.

Summers, who was Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, is a famously headstrong and arrogant man. So why did he cave in without a fight?

It's not as if he was lacking in responses.

MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins won much sympathy from the press for fleeing Summers' talk like a blushing Victorian maiden hearing some uncouth personage use the word "legs" instead of "limbs." In leaking Summers' off-the-record talk to the Boston Globe, Hopkins claimed that she had to leave or, "I would've either blacked out or thrown up."

In reality, Hopkins is a veteran at playing the gender card. Wendy McElroy reported in 2001 on Hopkins' lucrative conflicts-of-interest:

"The [MIT] Committee was established to investigate complaints of sex discrimination that were leveled by Hopkins herself. Yet she became the Chair, heading an investigation into her own complaints. As a result of her findings, Hopkins received -- among other benefits -- a 20 percent raise in salary, an endowed chair and increased research funds. Indeed, most of the Committee consisted of women who benefited substantially from the 'guilty' verdict. The only evidence of sex discrimination produced was the fact that there are more men than women in the faculty of the School for Science."

Similarly, Denice D. Denton was celebrated for standing up to Summers to, in her words, "speak truth to power." This heroic tableau of the humble, no-doubt-discriminated-against woman engineering professor daring to defy the mighty male university president lost some luster when it emerged that Denton was UC Santa Cruz's chancellor-designate at $275,000 annually. One college supremo attempting to intimidate another one into not mentioning inconvenient facts is not what most people visualize as speaking truth to power.

A few days later, Tanya Schevitz reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on how Denton plays the game. The headline read, "UC hires partner of chancellor: creates $192,000 post for Santa Cruz chief's lesbian lover."

Less privileged women were unenthused:

"'It makes me sick,' said Mary Higgins, an administrative assistant at UCSF and statewide president of UC's clerical union, which did not get a raise this year. 'It is a violation of the public trust and it is just more of the same.'"

But Denton had a powerful defender in the woman scientist who had formerly headed UC Santa Cruz. M.R.C. Greenwood praised UCSC's two-for-the-price-of-three deal for the lesbian academics as the cost of gender diversity: UCSC "should be commended for attracting and hiring two very qualified female engineers."

Greenwood herself had just moved up to provost of the UC system, at $380,000 per year, almost $100,000 more than the man she replaced. Moreover, she had quietly brought with her a female scientist friend from Santa Cruz to fill the novel post of "Executive Faculty Associate to the Provost."

Are you noticing a pattern here?

[Greenwood later resigned under a cloud following a conflict-of-interest investigation.]

The feminists' complaints never made much intuitive sense (not that they cared -- the goal of academic feminism is money and power, not rationality). Apparently, the Patriarchy had conceded to power-share with women in such trivial outposts as law and business, but it desperately clung to that central bastion of male control of society: the college mathematics department.

All 23 tenured mathematicians at Harvard are indeed men. Yet, can you name one? Do you know even two living mathematicians? Those who feel the necessity of pursuing mathematics are an odd breed. A mathematician has almost zero chance for celebrity, yet his primary reward, if he discovers something important enough to have it named after him, is fame. It's a strange kind of renown, however, one that the vast majority of humanity will never notice. Among the handful who comprehend, however, his fame will be as undying as Achilles's.

The more meritocratic the field, the more feminists accuse it of discriminating against women. In mathematics, new proofs either quickly fail or are accepted forever. In contrast, women flourish most in notoriously faddish, cliquish domains like the humanities. In Harvard's English department, 20 out of 51 professors are women, and at less exclusive colleges, they often comprise a majority.

One of Summers' initial triumphs had been hiring superstar cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of the anti-social constructionist bestseller The Blank Slate, away from Hopkins' MIT. When asked by the Harvard Crimson if Summers' remarks were "within the pale of legitimate academic discourse," Pinker answered, "Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That's the difference between a university and a madrassa."

The first scientific challenge to academia's traditional assumption that men were smarter than women came in 1912 when pioneering IQ test researcher Cyril Burt announced they scored equally -- on average. Yet, as Summers noted, men are more variable, so they are more numerous among the extremely intelligent, such as Harvard professors and Nobel Prize winners (40 of whom have taught at Harvard).

The Nobel Prize lists show a striking pattern: the fuzzier the field, the better women do. Twelve women have won the most political and least intellectually rigorous Nobel Prize, Peace (13 percent of all individual winners), and ten have been Literature laureates (ten percent). In Physiology & Medicine, there have been seven female laureates (four percent). In Chemistry, three (two percent), and in Physics, the most abstract of the Nobels, just two (one percent).

What about mathematics, that most unworldly of subjects? The Fields Medal for mathematicians under age 40 is the equivalent of the Nobel. No women number among its 44 recipients.

But, surely, the trendline must be turning upwards as discrimination lessens?

That's true in Physiology & Medicine, where women won only once before 1977, but six times (nine percent) since. Yet, by aggregating Physics and Chemistry, we can see the opposite pattern: five women ranked among their first 160 laureates, but over the last 40 years, not a single woman features among the latest 160 winners.

Overall, in the bad old days from 1901 through 1964, women won 2.5 percent of the hard science Nobels. Since then, they've declined to 2.3 percent.

Why hasn't the feminist era fostered more female scientific geniuses? Perhaps feminism persuaded the top women that they could have it all -- romance, children, and career -- rather than just the lonely celibacy society once demanded from them, and they spread themselves too thin. Moreover, feminism encourages women to indulge in self-pity and resentment, which distract from earning a Nobel.

My wife asked, "So why hasn't the Nobel Foundation bowed to feminist pressure and started the usual crypto-quotas to make women feel better about themselves?"

"Because they don't have to?" I speculated. "After all, they're the Nobel Foundation."

"Exactly," she shot back. "And Larry Summers is the President of Harvard. So why can't he stand up to the feminists, too?"

That got me thinking about the Nobel for Economic Sciences, which Summers may win someday. Economics has become a math-crazed subject, which might explain why none of the 55 recipients has been a woman, but it's also highly politicized, although in the opposite direction from the Literature Prize, where being a Communist has been an asset. In contrast, 23 of the last 44 Economics laureates have been associated with the U. of Chicago's temple of laissez-faire.

While the entire female sex has yet to produce an Economics winner, Summers' uncles account for two: 1970 laureate Paul A. Samuelson is his father's brother and 1972 laureate Kenneth J. Arrow is his mother's brother. Both of Summers' parents were economists at Penn.

Having been blessed with the luckiest imaginable combination of genes and upbringing, nature and nurture, for an economics professor, Summers earned tenure at Harvard at age 28, then a record.

This family history might help explain why Summers crumpled without a fight.

Summers' job is partly to enhance, but mostly to protect, one of the world's most valuable brand names. "Harvard" stands for "intelligence," extreme far right edge of the IQ Bell Curve smarts. America is increasingly stratified by IQ, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless means that having Harvard's endorsement of your brainpower is ever more desirable. Thus, applications and SAT scores have skyrocketed over the last half century.

Yet, Harvard's IQ elitism sharply contradicts its professed egalitarianism. The typical Harvard professor or student considers himself superior to ordinary folks for two conflicting reasons: first, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't; and second, he has a high IQ, but they don't.

Further, he believes his brains weren't the luck of his genes. No, he earned them. Which in turn means he feels that dumb people deserve to be dumb.

Ivy League presidents aren't much worried that the left half of the Bell Curve will get themselves well enough organized to challenge the hegemony of the IQ overclass. No, what they fear is opposition to their use of IQ sorting mechanisms, such as the politically incorrect but crucial SAT, from those identity politics pressure groups who perform below average in a pure meritocracy, such as women, blacks, and Hispanics. But, they each boast enough high IQ activists, like Nancy Hopkins, to make trouble for prestige universities.

So, Harvard, like virtually all famous universities, buys off females and minorities with "a commitment to diversity" -- in other words, quotas. By boosting less competent women, blacks and Hispanics at the expense of the more marginal men, whites, and Asians, Harvard preserves most of its freedom to continue to discriminate ruthlessly on IQ.

What is obviously in the best interest of Harvard, and of the IQ aristocracy in general, is for everybody just to shut up about group differences in intelligence. Stifling arguments allows the IQ upper class to quietly push its interests at the expense of everyone else. So, Summers bought peace fast.

Of course, he won't pay the price. Our sons will.