Harvard’s embattled president, Lawrence Summers, yesterday released the transcript of a speech about gender differences he delivered last month that offended faculty members, made international headlines, and has led some at the school to question his future at the helm of the university.

In a statement accompanying the transcript on Harvard’s Web site, Mr. Summers, 50, said he was releasing his January 14 remarks before the National Bureau of Economic Research in an effort to be “responsive” to concerns of faculty members and to “move on” past a controversy that refuses to die down.

On Tuesday, some professors at a faculty meeting lambasted Mr. Summers for his remarks and for what they described as his authoritative style of leadership. They pointed to his famous confrontation in 2002 with African-American studies scholar Cornel West, whose academic productivity Mr. Summers questioned. In anger, Mr. West later left Harvard for Princeton.

In his statement, Mr. Summers expressed regret for the ramifications of his talk, in which he speculated that innate differences between men and women might help explain male dominance in the math and science career fields.

Soon after the Harvard president spoke, audience members’ versions of the speech spilled out onto the front pages of newspapers and triggered a widespread debate on whether his ideas were inappropriate.

“I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields,” Mr. Summers said. “I especially regret the backlash directed against individuals who have taken issue with aspects of what I said.”

The transcript of his speech, which was intended to be off-the-record, largely corresponds with many of the descriptions of his talk that audience members gave to news outlets.

The speech is filled with long, knotty sentences that often express doubt about his conjectures. Mr. Summers said gender differences expressed in the standard deviations of populations “probably” explain why men dominate certain fields.

In his speech, which was roughly 4,000 words long, Mr. Summers offered three reasons why more men than women excel in “high-end scientific professions,” citing scholarly studies. One explanation is that more married men than married women are likely willing to make the high-level commitment to jobs in scientific fields.

“And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women,” he said, according to the transcript.

His second and most controversial explanation is “what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end,” he said.

“It does appear that on many, many different human attributes – height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability – there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means – which can be debated – there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population,” Mr. Summers said.

He pointed to a study conducted by sociologists Yu Xie and Kimberlee Shauman showing that high-performing 12th-graders were likely to be male. After questioning the relevance of the data in the study, Mr. Summers suggested that the specific attributes that lead one to careers in math and science are probably spread across differences among populations.

“[I]f my reading of the data is right – it’s something people can argue about – that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well,” he said.

A number of people who attended the speech said they found it sexist, including a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nancy Hopkins, who told the Boston Globe she left in the middle of his speech because she “would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

In the transcript of the question-and-answer session following Mr. Summers’s talk, the tone of the questions was far from hostile, though there was some suggestion that what Mr. Summers said was controversial.

The first person addressing Mr. Summers said: “Well, I don’t want to take up much time because I know other people have questions, so, first of all, I’d like to say thank you for your input. It’s very interesting – I noticed it’s being recorded, so I hope that we’ll be able to have a copy of it. That would be nice.”

“We’ll see,” Mr. Summers gamely replied.