Men are smartest and dumbest, say scientists - Times Online
Larry Summers, former President of Harvard University, got in big trouble over suggesting among other things this -- that the distribution of male intelligence is broader than that of women in the extremes -- might contribute to gender imbalances among faculty. I wrote a blog entry about this at the time exploring some of the issues beyond whether or not Larry Summers was a dick or merely unwise.
There's still too much heat and political correctness around such issues. Science is about making hypothesis, based on observation and experiment, to explain phenomena. We should collect data on this and every other relevant question that occurs to us, and advance our knowledge of ourselves and the universe we inhabit. To do otherwise is to deny the same methods that have worked well, usually, for centuries. There should be some experiments that are forbidden for being unethical, but studying intelligence across different parameters of the population isn't one of them.
I don't just pull that out of the air and put it up like a strawman. A few months back I was having dinner with a group of people that included a female graduate student at Harvard in the physical sciences. She told me flat out we should not study such questions. I was aghast. I had the impression she was very sharp, but on this issue she thought not at all like a scientist, and I wonder if she'll have a decent career. There are reasons other than a lack of superior intelligence that people fail to reach the highest levels of achievement in academia. Intelligence is only one of several qualities a person needs to have.