Abstract

Summers of Our Discontent

The article offers the author's reaction to comments made by Harvard president Larry Summers on women's role in math and science higher education. A distinguished economist who was Treasury Secretary under Clinton, Summers caused a firestorm on January 14 when, speaking from notes at a conference on academic diversity, he argued that tenured women are rare in math and science for three reasons, which he listed in descending order of importance. One, women choose family commitments over the eighty-hour weeks achievement in those fields requires; two, fewer women than men have the necessary genetic gifts; and three, women are discriminated against. On campus, Summers has lost big--he has had to apologize, appoint a committee and endure many a hairy eyeball from the faculty, and complaints from furious alumnae. Do men have an innate edge in math and science? Perhaps someday we will live in a world free of the gender bias and stereotyping we know exists today both in and out of the classroom, and we will be able to answer that question, if anyone is still asking it. Every gain women have made in the past 200 years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn't do it and didn't really want to. If Summers wants to know why women are underrepresented in math and science, he should do his homework, beginning with Nancy Hopkins's pathbreaking 1999 study of bias against female faculty at MIT. And then he should ask them.