Ground Floor : When he was the US treasury secretary, Mr Lawrence H Summers only had to worry about things such as the value of the dollar, tax vetoes and smaller current accounts deficits than his successors. Most of us would find the workload heavy and the issues thorny, but Mr Summers generally received decent press coverage and was seen to be reasonably good at his job.

Put it this way, the markets listened to him when he spoke, and having market participants on side is always a good result.

However, things haven't gone quite so smoothly for him since he became president of Harvard University. Just a few months into his tenure, he fell out with Mr Cornel West, a leading professor in Afro-American studies. The result was that Prof West returned to Princeton University and Mr Summers had to apologise for his apparent implied affront to everyone in that department.

More recently, his talk at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he made some highly inflammatory remarks about the shortage of women within science and engineering, has caused him to put on his apology hat again.

The key paragraph in his remarks tries to explain the problem as "the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity; that in the special case of science and engineering there are issues of intrinsic aptitude and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialisation and continuing discrimination".

In a nutshell, Mr Summers is saying that women don't have as much an aptitude for these disciplines as men, and they are more likely to put family concerns ahead of their working lives, which is why they're under-represented in science and engineering. He uses the family concerns argument as a reason why they don't make it to the top in other professions too.

Cue mass hysteria from the press and women's groups regarding the president's outdated views. Nobody could read the transcript until last Friday, when it was released, and there has been frantic spinning in all directions from his detractors and his supporters to present their view of the man.

The question is whether or not the former treasury secretary should be pitied for pitching it wrong, or pilloried for suggesting that women are somehow genetically less able to pursue a career in science and engineering. He did preface his remarks by saying that he was speaking unofficially (although that's a ridiculous notion for a public figure) and that he wanted to make "attempts at provocation".

He also continually stressed that his theories might be completely wrong. And then he proceeded to dump women into the dustbin of mediocrity.

I do have some sympathy for him. Rather like Kevin Myers in this newspaper, who wrote a provocative piece using inflammatory language which in itself became the debate neatly eclipsing the actual topic, Mr Summers had some interesting things to say.

Leaving aside the "natural aptitude" theory, he also spoke about the "high-powered job hypothesis" which, he said, meant that employers "expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job even when the job is not taking place" and that, historically, married men were the ones most likely to give that commitment.

The debate here is surely about employers' expectations of their staff. Initially, people work to earn money. Some will only ever work to get paid but others want to progress, not just for greater financial rewards but also for the satisfaction that doing a good job brings.

I don't, for a moment, believe that fewer women than men want job satisfaction at the highest level. I do, however, believe that a system which makes people feel that they must be continually at the company's beck and call while passing over those who actually have a life, is wrong. But according to Mr Summers, more men than women will answer the company call.

He also gave a certain level of thought to socialisation, citing the old reliable of girls being caring and boys being destructive. (Not always. I cared enough for the doll I got for Christmas one year to take her apart to find out how the talk mechanism worked.)

Not content with enraging many of the women at the talk, Mr Summers - in trying to be provocative - also managed to annoy Catholics, Jews and white male Americans by highlighting their under-representation in various fields.

When he was the treasury secretary, and not allowed to provoke, he addressed the Women 2000 Forum. Then, he said that if the Sub-Saharan African continent had seen the East Asian rate of improvement in the gender gap in education since 1970, GDP and living standards would be 15 to 25 per cent higher than they were in 2000. And if the ratio of female-to-male years of schooling were the same, Africa's rate of infant mortality would be 25 per cent lower.

At that conference, Mr Summers said that "education always pays off". He also said that, by educating girls in Africa, you empower the household member with the greatest capacity to alter the life prospects of generations to come. The cost of keeping girls in school for an additional year, according to Mr Summers, would pay for itself in the form of higher income and lower infant mortality.

With comments like that, Mr Summers clearly isn't the oppressor he's portrayed as. But neither has he grasped the fact that women shouldn't change to bring their talents to the workforce, industry itself should be adapting to accommodate those talents.

There are issues about women in business, regardless of whether we're talking about management or sciences. But they are not issues of aptitude. Nevertheless, not everyone ends up in the arena that they're most suited for. As Mr Summers might be finding out for himself.

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