January 19, 2005
And the President of Harvard Larry Summers says women and science don't mix! At least from an economist's point of view.
My favorite part: "The organizer of the conference, Harvard economist Richard B. Freeman, described Summers' critics [all women, of course] as activists whose sensibilities might be at odds with intellectual debate."
Wait, women aren't sensible enough for intellectual debate? I thought that notion was blown away at least 5 to 10 years ago!
I also liked how all the women who weren't offended by his comments were all economists, and all the ones who were offended were actually scientists.
WARNING: the following are my thoughts on this discussion and probably wont be interesting to most people.
I don't know what to think about that article. It is really difficult to discuss research on gender or race inequalities without offending and to have this discussion led by an economist is a poor choice. That much I know.
If I read a study that shows a difference in the way that a brain functions between the sexes, it would anger me, but not for the reason that you'd think. I accept that male and female brains get exposed to different levels of chemicals and hormones, and that these biological differences will impact function and preferences in some fashion. What bothers me is that in these studies, and always when they are quoted, people wont mention that with most things in life, there is a distribution. Generalizations are so damaging. And that is where people get offended. This economist guy didn't seem to be sensitive to that fact.
I think it was good that he mentioned the issue of balancing family and work, but I think he missed out on a key issue: success is determined by drive and how much effort one is willing to put into a given field for a given result. Not just in professorships, but in business and other areas as well. There are many female grad students that I know who aren't going to become competitive professors, or even go into academia at all because putting in the amazing amount of effort and sacrifices for the reward returned doesn't sound appealing. In my opinion, a woman's ability to be happy isn't linked inextricably to her level of career success as much as in men. (Yeah, I know, a generalization, but please apply the distribution rule to it.) There are women in science and engineering academia who are very successful. I think that they just wanted to be successful a lot more than others, and this phenomenon doesn't have as much to do with male/ female divide as this goofball economist would seem to indicate.
Well said NanoCindy!
That's economists for you. "I've done one study, in a field that has nothing to do with economics, found a result that marginally beats the null hypothesis, but it's MY study, so dammit, I'm going to use it to push my agenda." And that agenda is always to prove that the gender gap is either pretend or the fault of women, so as to remove the liability of business from any of the legal reprecussions of their stupidity.
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pretty wild, i think, in this day and age to say such things publicly and when one holds such a prominent position. best is that the conference explicitly forbade transcription so that speakers could voice their opinions without fear. fear of...accountability perhaps?
posted by reid at 12:48PM CST on January 19