DO you think that Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard's president, stirred up
a hornets' nest by suggesting that women's brains are not genetically
wired for math or science? Wait until you hear Warren Farrell on the
subject of women's pay.

Sure, Dr. Farrell accepts that women, as a group, are paid less than
men. But the way he sees it, using pay statistics to prove sex
discrimination is akin to using the horizon to prove that the world is
flat.

Women, he believes, methodically engineer their own paltry pay. They
choose psychically fulfilling jobs, like librarian or art historian,
that attract enough applicants for the law of supply and demand to kick
in and depress pay. They avoid well-paid but presumably risky work -
hence, the paucity of women flying planes. And they tend to put in
fewer hours than men - no small point, he says, because people who work
44 hours a week make almost twice as much as those who work 34 and are
more likely to be promoted.

In fact, Dr. Farrell points to subgroups - male and female college
professors who have never married, or men and women in part-time jobs -
in which women average higher pay than their male counterparts.
"Control for all these things, and the women make as much, or more,"
said Dr. Farrell, 61, whose new book on the shaky myths of pay
disparity, "Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -
and What Women Can Do About It" (Amacom), arrived in bookstores in
January. "Let's face it: men do a lot of things in the workplace that
women just don't do."

Ready to brand him a sexist? Wait, there's more. Dr. Farrell says he
thinks that the whole debate over gender-linked skills is superfluous.
"Men may well be hard-wired to be better at math, and women to excel at
verbal skills, but so what?" he asked. He said the human ability to
adapt to circumstances and limitations was equally hard-wired, and that
fascination with a field could easily trump innate abilities.

It's pretty subversive stuff. But then, Dr. Farrell - the doctorate is
in political science, "but I walk and talk like a psychologist," he
said - is accustomed to flouting convention. In the early 1970's, when
the idea of equality for women still had novelty status, he served on
the board of the New York chapter of the National Organization for
Women. In 2003, by then living in San Diego, he unsuccessfully sought
the Democratic nomination for governor of California on a platform
promoting legislation to force courts to grant divorced fathers equal
time with their children. He has a lucrative business as an expert
witness in custody cases, and in speaking and consulting on fatherhood
issues. (He has no children, but he has served as a stepdad to
several.)

When a book tour took him to Manhattan recently, he had lunch with a
reporter at Eleven Madison Park, on Madison Avenue at East 24th Street,
to elaborate on why, as he phrases it, women should stop trying to play
off "victim power" and start wielding their true earning power.

"Companies like I.B.M. have offered women scholarships to study
engineering for years, and women engineers routinely get higher
starting salaries than men," he said.

Noting that his current and former wives, businesswomen both, make more
than he does, he added: "Men have not stacked the decks against women."

Even as a child, Warren Farrell had little patience for the gender
roles mandated by society. His family was conventional enough: a New
Jersey suburban home, three children (he was the oldest), an accountant
father who was definitely the primary earner.

But the young Warren refused to be pigeonholed by anyone's view of
proper behavior for a boy. In seventh grade, he entered - and won - a
beauty contest for boys. "I was elected class prince," he recalled with
a still-proud laugh. In eighth grade, he was tagged as a math whiz, but
he found math too boring to pursue. Although he was tall and athletic,
he hated fighting, so, of course, he attracted the taunting of the
local bullies in high school. He finally fought one. He won, and the
bully clique respected him after that.

"It made me sad - winning a wrestling match is such a stupid reason to
respect someone," he said.



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