Last month, after another round of stories appeared suggesting that Summers was going to be Obama’s choice, Rivlin, Romer, and Tyson signed an open letter calling for Yellen to be appointed. So did about two hundred economists, many of them men, like Joseph Stiglitz and Alan Blinder.

The authors and organizers of the letter—Heidi Hartmann, the president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and Joyce Jacobsen, the dean of social sciences at Wesleyan—didn’t mention Summers explicitly . But in talking up Yellen’s character and record, they made it patently clear that she didn’t share very many traits with her combative alpha-male rival for the Fed post…