When Barack Obama last week announced that Lawrence Summers would head the White House-based National Economic Council and Timothy Geithner would become Treasury secretary, people assumed the division of labour was practical. Mr Summers would avoid a potentially awkward hearing in the Senate - the NEC does not require Senate approval - while Mr Geithner's diplomatic skills would serve the Obama administration well on Capitol Hill.

But the truth is closer to the reverse. Some feminist organisations did try to reignite the controversy around Mr Summers' comments about women and science, made while he was president of Harvard University. But that three-year-old issue was unlikely to attract as much attention as it once might have, given the severity of the financial crisis.