Three years ago, Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University, claimed that genetic differences between the sexes led to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end". His widely derided led to his dismissal, but is views are by no means uncommon. In the same year, Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn conducted a review of existing studies on sex differences in intelligence and concluded:
"Different proportions of men and women with high IQs... may go some way to explaining the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds for which a high IQ is required, such as chess grandmasters, Fields medallists for mathematics, Nobel prize winners and the like."
