<p>I did see the article, and the way it was written (given the UC budget crisis) made it sound a bit unseemly (the job being created for her). </p>
<p>I am quite certain that a survey of women engineers and women scientists would NOT bear out the argument you mention (and which some men probably do secretly believe)--as I am sure you agree.</p>
<p>"I really wonder if Summers will ever be trusted to speak in public again. This is one of those things that will stick with him, I think, and really hurt him and Harvard. On the other hand, he has unwittingly recharged a debate that should be at the forefront of everyone's minds as we deal with an increasingly challenging and competitive global and technologically-oriented economy and for that perhaps his misstep can have productive effects."</p>
<p>To my way of thinking, he made the best possible case for all-women's colleges. If his thinking represents that of the administration, and the hiring practices apparently, of the "leading" university in America, then change is going to have to come from elsewhere.</p>
<p>The thinking (and practice) may pervade elsewhere as well. If you think your double x-ed offspring will be considering graduate school after undergrad, it is worth checking out the the grad school attendance rates for female students, rather than that of the total student body. At some schools, notably Swarthmore, they are excellent; at some other places, well, check them out for yourself.</p>
<p>(P.S. I worked for Larry Summers, who sat on the board of a human relations agency in Philadephia at which I worked in the 80s.. He is just as ignorant as he appears.)</p>
<p>You know, mini, you're almost as good at putting the last nail in the coffin as Xiggi...</p>
<p>Mini...if you have a source for this data (grad schools by gender), please provide it --I am sure lots of people will be interested.</p>
<p>Just in case Prez Summers apology hasn't yet been posted here:</p>
<p>"Last Friday I spoke at a conference on women and science, hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research. I attended the conference with the intention of reinforcing my strong commitment to the advancement of women in science, and offering some informal observations on possibly fruitful avenues for further research. Ensuing media reports on my remarks appear to have had quite the opposite effect. I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully...."</p>
<p>Here's a link to an NPR commentary. Unfortunately I couldn't find the UCSC Chancellor's interview on the site--it may have been a local program. </p>
<p>I wasn't able to get that link to work: maybe they've moved it? Let's see if this one works: <a href="http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/womensci.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/womensci.html</a></p>
<p>"Mini...if you have a source for this data (grad schools by gender), please provide it --I am sure lots of people will be interested."</p>
<p>-- You've got to check school by school. As I understand it, admissions of women to medical schools surpassed those for men several years ago. So unless Summers wants to argue that physicians are simply "helping professionals" without the intellectul capacities to do "serious science" , his comments simply stem from the same sexism that have kept women out of the professions to begin with.</p>
<p>When this story appeared on the national news last night, I thought the female professor they interviewed (MIT? Harvard? anyway, a biologist) put it best. She said that Summer's comments were extremely unhelpful because they made every woman who is a scientist in academia come into the lab each morning feeling she has to prove she really is qualified enough to be there. And that, she added, "is exhausting."</p>
<p>This reminds me of how, years ago, when I got hired for a faculty position, the dean congratulated me and then, in the very next breath, said that he really didn't think they had hired me just because I was a woman. I told him I didn't think so either but even if they had, it was all right, since I had certainly NOT been hired for several jobs just because I was a woman. He was an older man who meant his comment as reassurance that he thought I was qualified. But, of course, it came out like Summers' comments, with the infuriating implication: congratulations, now every day you have to prove you are good enough to be here.</p>
<p>The good that will come out of this, I believe, is that Harvard's hiring will improve. Sooner rather than later, I do believe.</p>
<p>Just for the record, Nancy Hopkins, who walked out of Summers' speech, is the MIT scientist who spearheaded the study that disclosed MIT's policy of paying female profs less than male counterparts at the same stage of their career.
Like Sac, I believe that Summers' gaffe will have a positive outcome.</p>
<p>...when in reality, they should just have to prove that they can do good research.</p>
<p>Marite - is she part of the group that got out the tape measures to prove that they got less lab space than their male counterparts?</p>
<p>Ariesathena, I think she was the leader of that group.</p>
<p>Its interesting that the rightwing press and blogs have leapt on this incident with See, See, We knew it! articles and the leftside is being low keyed and apologetic He said he was sorry, lets just forget it. </p>
<p>I agree with this sentiment is attributed to Harvard professor Howard Georgi who organized a signatures on a reproachful letter: [He thought it was] a mistake for the Harvard president to speak as an intellectual provocateur during his remarks at the academic conference, forgetting that they would be interpreted as the beliefs of the university's leader.</p>
<p>Mini says Summers is ignorant. I would add that he is arrogant. The trouble with arrogance is that people wait until you mess up then the knives come out.</p>
<p>ariesathena....I have to confess when I saw "tape measures" the first thought that came into my mind was not lab space that they were measuring ;). </p>
<p>This is just too depressingly reminiscent of the kinds of comments that used to be made in the 70s about women in business, law, etc. Are we making no progress, or can I be slightly more optimistic that we HAVE made progress and that math and science are just the next frontier?</p>
<p>"(P.S. I worked for Larry Summers, who sat on the board of a human relations agency in Philadephia at which I worked in the 80s.. He is just as ignorant as he appears.)"</p>
<p>Perhaps a collection can be taken up for corrective lenses for the Trustees or whomever it is that awarded him his job. Surely they must have seen him before he was hired. This comment is reminiscent of the old ones from last year noting the lack of body piercings and weird hair as the basis for judging students and campus atmospheres. I wish I had those powers of insight. </p>
<hr>
<p>The further-back comment that the women at MIT have higher scores could possibly be right, but anyone who looks at the SAT scores by gender can see that men dominate the highest end of the math by about 2:1. We can argue about why that is, but at the "right tail" schools where the scores are extremely high, and where the percentage of male to female is close to even, we can know the the womens scores were lower. I'm happy to read people's comments about why that is, even if they can't believe that it could have a "genetic" component. But in the argument, lets not screw up the facts with non-facts, [even if the admissions offices tell us so].</p>
<p>patient - </p>
<p>Progress is being made. Our science/math D's are taught and mentored by members of our generation who made it through the past 30 years. My D won't be weeded out of her classes as I was years ago. I still harbor a bit of regret that I dropped an engineering major because of the dire predictions of an older generation prof who directed his comments at the small number of female students in his class. In the end, only one stuck it out. Never saw a female professor or TA in my math, physics, or engineering courses at UCLA until my junior year. My D's first two math & science courses at her LAC were taught by female professors. And they could cook too (class dinner parties at their homes)!</p>
<p>"Perhaps a collection can be taken up for corrective lenses for the Trustees or whomever it is that awarded him his job. Surely they must have seen him before he was hired."</p>
<p>Would you consider the possibility that the trustees awarded him the job BECAUSE of his opinions rather than in spite of them?</p>
<p>Glad to hear that your d. or s. would be perfectly comfortable on a campus with 90% body piercings and dreds - it really wouldn't affect anything, would it? (Alternatively, if you think it might, then you'd have to admit that the lack of them would likely have the same impact on others.)</p>
<p>Momrath, I don't skim the blogosphere often but as far as households go, we're about as Blue State as they came and Summers' comments have up over either the dinner or breakfast table several times in the past week. It's a point of more than casual interest to TheMom, who has worked her way up through administrative ranks at UCLA for 25 years and was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper at a time when such a thing for a woman was very much a novelty.</p>
<p>Btw, Calmom's exposition of there being an aggregate of pervasive small barriers instead of a single large barrier bears close attention. The same can be applied to the affirmative action debate, imo.</p>
<p>TheDad, I dont think I made my self clear. The conservative press and blogs have heartily endorsed Summers (alleged) position which is exactly why comments like these are so hurtful. The liberal press who have always been supportive of Summers has for the most part downplayed and rationalized the whole issue (and have even suggested that his criticizers are the guilty parties.) I stand by what I said in post #30. I think these kind of comments from the President of Harvard are destructive and just plain wrong.</p>
<p>dadx: Were the female students' high school grades also lower than the males'? I would bet not. In general, girls do worse on the SAT than boys. In general, grades are a better predictor of college performance than SAT scores. </p>
<p>I agree that progress is being made -- witness the increasing number of women with science and engineering degrees. The point is that they aren't being hired into academia at the same rate that they are graduating with those degrees. I don't think it is so much that science is the last bastion, but that academia is the last bastion, and engineering and science a particularly well fortified section. Harvard under Summers has not been criticized for lack of hiring of women only in the sciences. As I asked earlier, I wonder how many women do stay in scientific careers in private industry.</p>