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[Colloquy Moderator]

Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers, landed in hot water last week for suggesting at a scholarly meeting that innate differences between the sexes explain why fewer women succeed in math and science. Some criticized his comments as dangerous and untrue. Others said the science behind his views was inconclusive at best. Who is right? Did he make a mistake in talking about such a hot-button issue? Should scholars, or only Harvard presidents, avoid such topics? Read more...

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[Reality Check]

Summers is an idiot, but he is in no way the story here.


The story is Nancy Hopkins and other "women" playing abjectly to every stupid stereotype of women imaginable, then demanding the world spin into hyperdrive over their stereotypical hysteria. For God's sake, have we made no progress whatsoever in the past millennium? As a female academic, ladies, do us all a favor: Counter the man with facts and logic, please, or let someone who can do so for you. Your emotional fits help no one, most pointedly women in the academy.


 You humiliate us all by getting the vapors just because someone said something with which you do not agree.  The rest of us are smarter and stronger than that, and we do not appreciate you making such a public spectacle of your lack of emotional self-control. Women are simply not what you claim they are, and we do not appreciate your efforts to turn back the clock to the 19th century. If you have an argument to make, make it. If not, move aside and let the real women take over from the swooning little girls.

[Wendy C. Turgeon, Asst. Prof,]

Two things concern me about Summers' comments taken as quoted in the media:
1. --The assumption that one must work long hours in research jobs and that eliminates women who are the caregivers
This perspective assumes that the only way to perform certain jobs is a way which precludes the serious involvement of women.  It also assumes that women's work is to take care of children and family while men's work is not.
2.  His bringing up a tired old hypothesis which has been examined again and again and simply found to be faulty: that boys are innately better at math and science than girls.

However, was he presenting this theory as a viable option or was he simply describing theories that have been proposed and are held by people somewhere?  I am not clear to what extent he intended these remarks to be genuinely explanatory vs. descriptive.

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[Constance Soja, Prof/Colgate U]

Let's not fault Pres. Summers for adding a provocative topic to a closed-media conference.  But let's express our dismay that he wasn't more articulate or thoughtful about - obviously - a sensitive issue, especially at one of our leading institutions where tenure rates for women have been abysmally low and the subject of much recent discussion.  How could Summers forget that as a Harvard grad himself and now as President of that university his opinions and perspectives will receive considerable attention?  Why not offer his points-to-ponder in a more intelligent manner that reflects his academic pedigree?  Instead of posing an hypothetical about the underrepresentation of women in science and math, he might have done a little research to proffer an informed perspective on the topic, noting that most gender-focused studies indicate NO innate differences in math-science abilities of men and women.  Let's hope that reactions to Summers ignorance about an important issue -- why women continue to confront barriers to equal representation in many academic fields -- will help educate Harvard's President about how to be a more sensitive and informed contributor to subjects of academic interest.

[Jeffrey D. Senese, VPAA]

The statements made at a professional meeting by a president, no less the president at Harvard, are curious.  Presidents certainly are people and as such they make mistakes.  Moreover, they should be strong leaders and be willing to express their opinions to lead their institution and even higher education.  However, they should also do their homework and carefully weigh spending their institution's image capital?  Presidential comments should when possible, not be about personal opinion (if his were).  While there appears to be an appropriate negative reaction to President Summer's comments due to the context more than anything, Harvard is attempting to focus more directly on female faculty recruitment and retention.  That is a good thing at Harvard and perhaps this effort will be a focus at other insitutions.  I wonder whether there might have better ways to accomplish the results that the president sought.

[Leslie Johnson, Admin/Antioch]

Recent research could very well support what LHS said but speaking of it the way he did can directly or indirectly discourage girls and women from studying science and math.  The study of science and math has not been available to girls and women for as many centuries as it has been to boys and men, and so this kind of research needs to be on-going. Over time, the findings will change.  There are differences between the sexes, differences both sexes should be happy about and proud of; however, for the sake of future students, it's important that findings be put in a true light, not in terms of men vs. women -- which seems truly "old-fashioned" by today's standards.  Had he said "women are succeeding in math and science at a greater rate than they were 25 years ago" or "men are still succeeding at math and science at a greater rate than women but the gap is closing," he might not have come across as putting women down.

[Dorothy Swift, Biotech., URI]

Harvard's president makes the mistake of assuming that a possible gender difference in aptitudes, that may occur in the general population, applies also to those who have earned doctorates, undertaken postdoctoral research, and have sound publishing records--the very specific pool from which a research university would do its hiring.
 
In this highly skilled pool, women cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be assumed to to have qualifications inferior to those of men.  Women may simply occur as a minority in this pool in some fields, but women have certainly advanced well, at least at other institutions, in fields where they represent a significant portion of this pool, fields such as biology and psychology, for example.

In the past there has been consscious discrimination against women in some scientific fields.  There are more recent  studies of the unconscious discrimination against women that may occur--see particularly the work of Virginia Valian and the National Science Foundation program called ADVANCE.

[Voice of Reason]

Here is a simple proposition even academics can understand:

There is no better reason to expect that male/female math aptitudes are *exactly* equal than there is to expect that an empirical study will disclose that men and women on average have *exactly* the same height.

Have people never heard of Darwin and/or never reflected on the reality that different evolutionary pressures operate on the sexes?

Do lib elites think there is some Goddess sitting in the sky declaring, by eternal decree, that there are no group differences with respect to any characteristics that are politically volatile?

What a joke PC academia is.

[Patricia SChwarz]

When I first started in physics grad school, all I wanted to do was learn more physics. I was completely entranced by the subject. My first day in grad school, however, I was besieged by sad lonely nerds bemoaning the fact that there were only two women in our class. They spent the whole first three years of graduate school whining to me about the lack of women in their dating pool and making me feel somehow responsible.

They needed a rational explanation for this so I was besieged with theories about the genetic inability of women to do math. Their urge to feed their obsession with gender into science led to some of them informing me that the evolutionary explanation for rape trauma is because rapists make bad fathers.

My love of physics was eventually eroded by this maddeningly abnormal social environment and I became more interested in why male physicists are so obsessed with women that they drive all the women who like physics away.

I've been reading about Asperger's Disorder and prevasive developmental disabilities. It's very interesting.

Now I understand why Goethe had Mephistopheles complain to God that his new creation Man suffered from an excess of reason:

Er nennt's Vernunft und braucht's allein,
nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein.

or in English,

He calls it Reason and uses it, resolute,
to become more beastly than the meanest brute.

I no longer care about what percentage physicists are women, that concern I realize was an artifact of being around men who were obsessed with that idea for reasons that had nothing to do with my intellectual or emotional well being.

What we really need to be concerned about is whether the women who are good at math are being treated like human beings or whether they are being hounded and harassed like freaks.

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[Patricia SChwarz]

There are two issues here: the percentage of women in math and science, and how the women in math and science are being treated by men.

Suppose we forget the first issue and concentrate on the second one.

Do you think it's such a joke to treat people badly? Many women in science and math get treated badly despite their abilities.

Even if only 5% of physicists are women, those 5% deserve to be treated like human beings. They deserve to be treated as well as any man in the field.

But that is not what happens, and that is why Larry Summers is becoming acquainted with the Rage of the Female Nerd.

You can make fun of the whole thing, but he's not going to be laughing again for a long time, because he ripped the scabs from wounds that have been nursed in silence for a long time by a great many women.

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[Patricia Schwarz]

Those were some very strong opinions you expressed. But if you're such a strong woman, then why not prove your strength by repeating these comments under your real name?

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[astronomer]

To "voice of reason":

The problem isn't that Summers said there might be differences in
innate ability - the problem is that he said that such differences are
a plausible explanation for the demographic differences between
male and female representation in sciences.  The first point may well
be true (although I've seen no compelling proof), but the second
is flat-out false.  It's easy to prove this in the following way: female
representation in sciences varies enormously by national origin,
and also varies quickly in time.  The fraction of female biology
majors has gone from very small to 60% in less than a generation -
my own field is now moving in a similar direction on a similar timescale.
Given these geographical and temporal shifts, it is clear that the
dominant effect must be social/cultural, since those effects can change,
and innate characteristics cannot.  This is not to say that there can't be
innate differences - but the possible existence of innate differences isn't
what Summers was talking about, and isn't why people are mad at him.

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[anonymous thankew very much!]

The very title of this discussion says it all for me-- what's the problem, that more research needs to be done? No, that Larry Summers needs to "watch his mouth". Behold--academic freedom! Even in a closed meeting, one can't speak off the top of one's head.

I think all three points he made were reasonable to throw into the churn midway through the kind of meeting he was attending.

I think Nancy Hopkins ought to see someone about those vapors.

I think, as a not yet tenured woman working in a number-heavy field, I have plenty to lose if I sign this post and nothing to gain.

But there's academe for you: can't live with it and you just can't shoot it.

[David A. Young, Ph.D./Cerritos]

I have read several accounts of Dr. Summers' comments, the reactions of his critics, and talked with several friends and colleagues about this issue.

One of the things that occurred to several of us is that the academe just isn't that attractive a work environment for highly competitive women candidates.

I suspect, as several women I know asserted, that there are a great more highly placed and highly compensated women in the research facilities of major corporations than there are in the academe.

I submit that the corporate world is a lot more user friendly in many mays than is higher ed.  There is also evidence that it pays considerably better than entry level professoriates do.

Perceived value is a very important part of most people's decision making when it comes to making career choices.  Maybe we just don't look all that "valuable" in the eyes of talented women.

[Patricia Schwarz]

Voice of Reason, you made me think, now suppose we apply naked Darwinian reasoning to Summers' situation.

Let's look at Harvard as an evolving organism, in competition with other universities for energy resources (cash) and opportunities to spread DNA (students).

For whatever reason one might come up with as an explanation, university development programs tend to be staffed mainly by women. .

And since women tend to outlive men, a high proportion of wealthy donors turn out to be female.

Roughly half of the students expected to carry Harvard's educational DNA into the future are women.

Harvard can't survive in Darwinian terms if the president of Harvard insists on saying things that make women feel their survival is threatened.

The organism will face a shortage of energy and its reproduction potential will decrease. It will lose its place on the fitness landscape to some other organism eager to replace it. For example, Princeton.

You see, anyone can use Darwin to rationalize something that someone else feels is wrong and unfair.

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