B and B

Another article on the Wal-Mart in Helotes story

Not much new, but last week (January 26) the San Antonio Express-News published another article on the Wal-Mart in Helotes story:

HELOTES — A week after City Council voted to stonewall plans for a Wal-Mart Supercenter on a pastoral slice of property straddling the city boundary and its extraterritorial jurisdiction, store officials say they'd still like to negotiate with the city and residents.

...

On Jan. 12, City Council voted 3-2 to have city attorneys draft a moratorium on new commercial development at that intersection, hinging on a traffic study done by the city. It also authorized the city to file suit to prevent development that would be in violation of the public health, safety and welfare of the residents.

It was a move that was met with approval by Helotes and Grey Forest residents who have been pushing the council to fight the retailer.

"To the surprise of the group that was so adamantly opposed to Wal-Mart, the majority of the council supports not having Wal-Mart," said Helotes Mayor Steve Hodges. "They're looking at it more as a quality-of-life issue than a money issue."

Any such action could stop development on the site because a sliver of property along Scenic Loop Road rests within the city limits, said city attorney David Earl.

"Their development has presumed an access directly on Scenic Loop Road, and the city has a clear concern for truck traffic and additional traffic on Scenic Loop Road," Earl said. "Despite raising those concerns, Wal-Mart has never changed the proposal.

"I think the move is prudent and correct given the fact that (the council) has the desire and obligation to protect the integrity of the traffic system within its city limits. In addition, it has the power to enforce traffic regulations in its (extraterritorial jurisdiction.)"

The city also could take legal action based on the Texas Local Government Code that says that the city has a right to prevent any development that would create a nuisance within 5,000 feet, he explained.  

But councilman Jim Caruso, who voted against taking action to thwart Wal-Mart, said the attempt is not a slam-dunk, and the cost of fighting it will rest on taxpayer shoulders.

"My opinion is that by doing that, we weren't being as forthcoming to the citizens of Helotes as the council should have been," he said.  "There was no discussion to let the citizens know that it's a pretty weak effort on our part that could potentially work, but the lawyers weren't really warm and fuzzy about the idea."  

Caruso said the city turned its back on a good offer that could be an economic boon to the city. If store officials requested annexation to Helotes, city officials have estimated it could mean a gain of more than $1 million in revenues each year.

Now, they will be lucky if Wal-Mart continues to extend an olive branch, Caruso said.

"If you're there to offer the community a supercenter that would boost tax revenues up and are willing to redesign a standard, ugly store into something that looks like old town Helotes and you're willing to meet requirements that the city has instilled on all its businesses ... and somebody bites off your hand, what do you think your reaction would be?  I think they are going to stick their middle finger at us and tell us to go to hell," he said.

Given Wal-Mart's new found love for public relations, I think Caruso is mistaken.  But we'll see.

Senator Boxer thanks the Daily Kos community

Senator Barbara Boxer posted a diary on Daily Kos to thank the community there for taking the initiative in opposing Bush's nomination of Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State:

Thank you so much

by Barbara Boxer
Thu Jan 27th, 2005 at 14:11:07 PST
 
I can't thank all of you enough -- the Daily Kos community, and the blogosphere as a whole -- for all of your effective work during the recent debate over Condoleezza Rice's nomination. Your support and participation in this critical debate meant so much to me.

More than 94,000 Americans from across the country signed my petition and stood together to demand the truth from Condoleezza Rice. It was truly an overwhelming response -- much more than I could have anticipated. You helped to get our message out to millions of Americans -- I couldn't have done it without you.

And you made a difference. You gave me the voice I needed to ask the tough questions during Dr. Rice's confirmation hearings. And you gave the entire United States Senate the voice it needed to take its "advice and consent" responsibility seriously. In fact, Condoleezza Rice received 13 votes against her confirmation -- the most votes against any Secretary of State's nomination since 1825.

Two weeks ago, who would have thought that Condoleezza Rice's nomination would allow us to have a full debate about our policy in Iraq? Who would have thought that we'd have the chance to truly expose all of the misstatements and misjudgments that led us into that conflict and continue to plague this Administration to this very day?

The Republican Senate leadership intended to easily approve Dr. Rice's nomination in a routine voice vote last Thursday afternoon, after President Bush's Inauguration and before the Inaugural balls got into full swing.

But you didn't let them ram this nomination through the Senate. You forced the Republican leadership to give us the debate we wanted on the floor of the United States Senate, and you gave us the opportunity we desperately needed to hold Dr. Rice and the Bush Administration accountable for their failures in Iraq and in the war on terrorism.

The American people deserved no less.

As you and I both know, this is just one more of the many battles we'll be having as we fight for our nation's future. It started with contesting the Ohio vote, it continued with the debate over Dr. Rice's confirmation, and it will certainly continue over the Gonzalez nomination and on many other looming issues. We're going to need to keep working together to make our voices heard and build a better America.

I enjoyed the dialogue we started over the past few weeks, including the chat I had with Armando and DavidNYC on the eve of the committee hearings, and I look forward to future interactions with the Daily Kos community. I hope to have the time to drop by here and participate in the discussion from time to time -- I value your input, and I thank you for caring so much about the future of our country.

Thanks again for all of your hard work. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your continued support. And I look forward to standing with you in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

In Friendship,

Barbara Boxer

It's comforting to see that all this talk on the internet can have an impact on our elected officials.

Democracy, Texas style

So a couple weeks back, Texas Governor Perry appoints a Republican legislator from San Antonio to the state railroad commission.  The special election to fill the seat will be held on February 5.  Early voting has already begun.

Ridiculous, you may say.  Until two weeks ago, no one even knew there would be a new election for this seat.  How could anyone decide to run for office, mount a campaign, and get elected in such a short time span?

No doubt, that's the idea, as Ken Rodriguez points out in the San Antonio Express-News today:

Four candidates are running to succeed Jones, and it is perhaps like no race you've ever seen.

One day the candidates are filing. The next they're practically waiting for returns.

If you're a new resident of District 121 and want to get to know the candidates — Paul Silber, Rose Spector, Glen S. Starnes and Joe Straus III — forget it.

By the time you read their bios, the polls will be closed.

If you're new to District 121, all you know for sure is that the winner will be somebody whose last name begins with the letter "S."

...

In a race that begins and ends so quickly, you have almost no chance to win unless you're anointed to win. Which means you need the blessing of the prominent and the powerful.

The anointed one appears to be Straus. In a heavily Republican district, Straus has the support of influential GOP leaders, including U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith.    

Rose Spector is the Democrat in the race.  And a prominent one as well, as she was apparently one of the last statewide elected Democrats in Texas, as a Texas Supreme Court Justice in the 1990s.

She's quick, and already has a campaign website up and running (via Off the Kuff).  We should help her out in this short, uphill race.  The district includes Alamo Heights and a good chunk of northeast San Antonio, and, as such, is obviously strongly Republican-leaning.

Comic relief

From Michael Berube:

You’ve got questions, Mister Answer Man has answers.  That’s one of the reasons his name is Mister Answer Man!  Let’s go to the mailbag.

Dear Mister Answer Man:  In his defense of Harvard president Larry Summers, Steven Pinker responded to the question, “Were President Summers’ remarks within the pale of legitimate academic discourse?” with some exasperation:  “Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.” President Summers had mentioned, in support of the hypothesis that genetic differences between men and women might play some part in explaining the dearth of women in the sciences, his attempt to practice “gender-neutral” parenting by giving his daughter two trucks, only to find that she named them “daddy truck” and “baby truck,” almost as if they were dolls.  Did Summers’ citation of his daugher and her trucks meet scientific criteria for “some degree of rigor”?  --V. Solanas, New York

Mister Answer Man replies: Yes.  The “Two Trucks Test” has long been recognized as a legitimate-- and singularly revealing-- research experiment by those who are wise in the ways of science.  In some circles it is as widely used, as a pedagogical tool, as the famous lightbulb-and-two-apertures demonstration of the quantum nature of electromagnetic radiation.  Additionally, one can discover a young girl’s aptitude for the sciences by weighing her in relation to the two trucks:  the law of the conservation of matter proves that if a girl weighs the same as a truck, she is made of wood, and therefore unlikely to become a scientist or engineer.

And from last week, more Berube:

Women barred from Harvard presidency by "genetic predisposition," study finds

CAMBRIDGE, MA (AP)-- Researchers unveiled today a startling new study that suggests women are “extremely unlikely” to become president of Harvard University, and that women’s “distinctive genetic makeup” plays “a decisive role” in preventing them from becoming top-level administrators at the nation’s oldest college.

“Traditionally, presidents of Harvard have been men,” said Harvard geneticist Charles Kinbote, the study’s designer and principal investigator.  “Now, after almost 400 years, we know why.  To coin a phrase, it’s in the genes.”

According to Kinbote, the presidency of Harvard University requires a unique array of talents and dispositions which, statistically, only a small handful of women possess.  “For one thing,” noted Kinbote, “it has long been one of the president’s tasks to deny tenure to promising female scholars-- personally, without stated cause, and after a department, a college, and a battery of external referees has approved her.  My study shows that the X chromosome contains material that, in combination with another X chromosome, inhibits a person’s ability to do this.”

Men are also more adept than women at mentally rotating three-dimensional shapes on aptitude tests, Kinbote added.  “You’d be surprised how often a university president needs to do this, and at Harvard the pressure is especially intense.” Kinbote estimated that the president of Harvard spends roughly one-quarter of the working day mentally rotating complex, hypothetical three-dimensional shapes, “and that’s not even counting all the time he needs to try to figure out why women aren’t as skilled at abstract mathematical thought.”

The X chromosome also seems to play a role in suppressing the ability to make fatuous remarks in public forums.  “If you want to be president of Harvard,” Kinbote said, “you have to be willing to get up there and just let it fly, no matter what the facts are and no matter what the consequences may be.  Not just in off-the-cuff remarks-- anybody can do that-- but in carefully considered, prepared statements.  It appears that once again, the X chromosome works, when paired with another X, as an inhibiting factor in all but a tiny fraction of the female population.” That tiny fraction, Kinbote suggested, would be the subject of a subsequent study into the biochemical basis of Coulter Syndrome.

The hopelessness of quantifying scientific ability

From Sean Carroll, a physicist at my alma mater, the University of Chicago, who writes a blog called Preposterous Universe:

So, except for the fact that "scientific ability" is something hopelessly hard to quantify, I'm happy to contemplate the possibility that men have some tiny innate superiority to women when it comes to science. I am equally happy to contemplate the possibility that women have some tiny innate superiority to men when it comes to science. The point is that we have no strong evidence one way or another. It's impossible, given the current state of the art, to reliably measure "innate ability" in a way that isn't hopelessly noisy and compromised by cultural factors. It's perfectly clear that the differences between individual people are typically much larger than the difference between some hypothetical average man and average woman, just as it is perfectly obvious that the expression of innate ability is tremendously affected by social and cultural factors.

Howard Georgi of Harvard University has an essary published in the Harvard Crimson today that makes a similar argument:

1 - Talent is not a unitary thing. It is multidimensional and difficult to measure or quantify precisely.

2 - Many different kinds of talents are critical to the advancement of physics or any other science interesting enough to be worth doing.

3 - The spread of talents within any group, sex, race, etc, is very large compared to any small average differences that may exist between such groups.

4 - Talent can to be developed and enhanced by education, encouragement, self-confidence and hard work.

For these reasons, I think that it is not particularly useful to talk about innate differences to explain the differences in representation of various groups in physics. Instead, I conclude that we need to try harder to teach science in a way that nourishes as many different skills as possible.

These arguments totally demolish the concept that "innate scientific ability" is anything we can hope to measure with any degree of confidence.  Those defending Harvard President Summers' comments on the basis that he was allegedly merely asking for more research in this area are misguided.

Anyone defending Summers' dismissal of discrimination is even more mistaken.  Sean Carroll continues:

Don't these people read any history at all? Whenever some group is discriminated against by some other group, people inevitably suggest that the differences in situation can be traced to innate features distinguishing between the groups, and they are never right!  If you would like to suggest that innate differences are responsible for some current discrepancies in people's fortunes, the minimal burden you face is to acknowledge that such explanations have been spectacular failures in similar circumstances throughout history, and explain why we have compelling reasons to think the situation is different this time. Maybe it is, but the presumption is strongly against you.

Systematic biases against women in science are real. I've talked about this before, so didn't think it was worth rehearsing, but apparently there are a lot of folks who don't quite see it. They must not be looking.

Like I did earlier, but more eloquently, Carroll finds fault with Summers' argument that discrimination is not a significant cause of gender disparities:

Summers, of course, casually dismisses the idea that differences between the representation of men and women in science can be traced to systematic biases. His argument is based on rational markets: if there were a lot of talented women out there who were being discriminated against, a clever university could dominate the competition by hiring them all up, but this doesn't happen. This is the kind of idea so dumb that it could only be entertained by a professional economist. By similar logic, shouldn't smart baseball executives in the first half of the twentieth century been able to win multiple World Series by simply scooping up all of the African-American players that their racist colleagues were reluctant to hire?

Clearly, it's time to add Preposterous Universe and PZ Myers' Pharyngula (who comes through with another excellent post today on this subject) to my blogroll (that's the list of blogs on the left side of this page to those of you unfamiliar with the term).  And time to remove Mark Kleiman.

Misrepresentation, reparation, and resignation

Harvard president Larry Summers misrepresented, or at best ignored, the results of a sociological study in his talk earlier this week in which he claimed the possibility of innate differences in mathematical and scientific ability between men and women.  Garance Franke-Ruta at The American Prospect's blog TAPPED highlights an article in the Harvard Crimson from Wednesday that says this:

Two sociologists whose research University President Lawrence H. Summers cited at an economics conference Friday said yesterday their findings do not support Summers’ suggestion that “innate differences” may account for the under-representation of women in the sciences.

University of California-Davis sociologist Kimberlee A. Shauman said that Summers’ remarks were “uninformed.” The other researcher, University of Michigan sociologist Yu Xie, said he accepted Summers’ comments as “scholarly propositions,” although he said his own analysis “goes against Larry’s suggestion that math ability is something innate.”

Xie and Shauman presented their findings at the National Bureau of Economic Research Friday afternoon, shortly after Summers’ remarks.

In an interview with The Crimson last night, Summers stressed that he only cited Xie and Shauman’s research as evidence that females are underrepresnted among the top 5 percent of test-takers on standardized assessments. Summers said the evidence for his speculative hypothesis that biological differences may partially account for this gender gap comes instead from scholars cited in Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker’s bestselling 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

So Summers' defense is that he didn't misrepresent Xie and Shauman's work, he just ignored it in favor of Steven Pinker's book.  As for that book, Franke-Ruta writes:

I haven't read this book, but if you look at the amazon.com readers' comments, it appears that some female readers found its discussions of rape and the maternal instinct highly offensive and sexist. One newspaper reviewer described Pinker's book, in 2002, as "breathtaking, rabid stuff.... likely to reduce most university common-rooms to states of gibbering apoplexy." (Mission accomplished, clearly.) If Summers based his remarks in part on a reading of Pinker's book, the response he generated was something that was not only predictable but predicted.

Meanwhile, Summers is trying to smooth things over, at least with his colleagues at Harvard:

Continuing efforts to soothe professors angry about his remarks on women, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, met last night with faculty members who wrote to him this week that his comments would hurt Harvard's ability to recruit top female scholars.

Summers repeated the apology he has made at least twice in writing, according to spokeswoman Lucie McNeil.

"It was a good meeting," she said. "He apologized, and they moved on to a discussion of a variety of steps the university can take to address the issues, and they agreed to continue to address them in the coming days."

...

Between a half-dozen and a dozen professors, members of Harvard's official Standing Committee on Women, attended yesterday evening's hourlong meeting at the Barker Center for the Humanities.

The participants were reluctant to discuss details of the meeting for fear of jeopardizing their ongoing discussions with Summers.

"It was a constructive discussion on very difficult issues of importance to the university," said Caroline Hoxby, a professor of economics. "The discussion is ongoing, and we believe there will be some resolution on important issues next week."

Finally, the National Organization for Women, along with a certain female member of my household, yesterday called for Summers' resignation:

The National Organization for Women calls for the resignation of Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who has failed to lead the prominent (and previously all-male) university toward true inclusion of women. His recent comments generated a firestorm of response from Harvard/Radcliffe women who were outraged that he would embarrass Harvard with such a public demonstration of sexism and ignorance.

"Summers' suggestion that women are inferior to men in their ability to excel at math and science is more than an example of personal sexism, it is a clue to why women have not been more fully accepted and integrated into the tenured faculty at Harvard since he has been president," said NOW President Kim Gandy. According to reports, the number of female faculty receiving tenure has declined over the past four years — down to just four of the last 32 tenure offers in the school's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

"Harvard University holds itself out as the pinnacle of higher education in this country," said Gandy. "Such an esteemed institution should set a standard for other colleges and universities — a standard that Lawrence Summers appears unable to maintain."

Certainly, as UCLA professor Mark Kleiman's recent comments illustrate, Summers' attitude of male superiority is far from unique in the academic world—and not even the worst example.  So Summers' resignation as Harvard president alone will not solve anything.  But his resignation is a necessary step for the fair treatment of women in acadmics, precisely because of the prevalence of this attitude.

Excusing male domination and anti-female discrimination

A modestly prominent, moderately liberal academic blogger has weighed in on the controversy regarding the comments of Harvard president Larry Summers on the sparsity of women in academic science and engineering positions (see this article from Monday's Boston Globe and these earlier posts for the details).  Unfortunately, this blogger, Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of policy studies at UCLA, who I've been reading for over a year and whose writings I generally respect, has weighed in firmly on the wrong side.  Even more repulsive, an argument he proffers could be used to justify male domination of every skilled field of endeavor.

First, here is an excerpt of what Kleiman says about Summers' comments:

My reader says:

1. Summers does or should realize that he is never speaking just as an intellectual or as an economist, and that it is possible (and I mean possible) that his comments were incompatible with his role as President.

2.  The content of his remarks seems entirely unobjectionable and probably true.

3. The behavior of those who walked out or condemned him is truly regrettable and I am disappointed that it has not sparked more comment.

I agree with #2 and #3 entirely, and #1 in part. The President of Harvard needs to mind his manners and to make sure that he speaks in ways that are less likely, rather than more likely, to lead to pernicious misinterpretation. But this should be a matter of form, not substance. It should not be inconsistent with the function of a university president to make true statements on important issues.

True statements?  Entirely unobjectionable?  Let's review what Summers said, based on the Boston Globe article that initially publicized his words:

Summers spoke during a working lunch. He declined to provide a tape or transcript of his remarks, but the description he gave in an interview was generally in keeping with what 10 participants recalled. He said he was synthesizing the scholarship that the organizers had asked him to discuss, and that in his talk he repeated several times: ''I'm going to provoke you."

He offered three possible explanations, in declining order of importance, for the small number of women in high-level positions in science and engineering. The first was the reluctance or inability of women who have children to work 80-hour weeks.

The second point was that fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years. ''I said no one really understands why this is, and it's an area of ferment in social science," Summers said in an interview Saturday. ''Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren't" due to socialization after all.

This was the point that most angered some of the listeners, several of whom said Summers said that women do not have the same ''innate ability" or ''natural ability" as men in some fields.

Asked about this, Summers said, ''It's possible I made some reference to innate differences. . . I did say that you have to be careful in attributing things to socialization. . . That's what we would prefer to believe, but these are things that need to be studied."

Summers said cutting-edge research has shown that genetics are more important than previously thought, compared with environment or upbringing. As an example, he mentioned autism, once believed to be a result of parenting but now widely seen to have a genetic basis.

In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ''daddy truck," and one ''baby truck."

...

Summers' third point was about discrimination. Referencing a well-known concept in economics, he said that if discrimination was the main factor limiting the advancement of women in science and engineering, then a school that does not discriminate would gain an advantage by hiring away the top women who were discriminated against elsewhere.

Because that doesn't seem to be a widespread phenomenon, Summers said, ''the real issue is the overall size of the pool, and it's less clear how much the size of the pool was held down by discrimination."

Summers ended his talk by describing some of the efforts Harvard is making to improve its hiring record and help women balance work and family.

''I believe that it's an important part of what I do to encourage frank scientific discussion," he said. ''I would hope and trust that no one could [doubt] that we are absolutely committed to promoting the diversity of the faculty."

So Summers, using only theoretical economic hand-waving, essentially dismisses discrimination completely.  His argument, as related here, neglects all the factors that contribute to advancement that are outside the control of the individual and the institution that hired her.  Advancement in science requires not just an employer, but collaboration opportunities, published papers, and funded grant proposals.  Summers' hypothetical non-discriminatory school could not obtain any advantage by hiring talented women shunned at leading institutions if the women continued to be shunned by the leaders in their field. 

Summers then fills the vacuum that his dismissal of discrimination creates by elevating some alleged innate female inferiority.  That such sexist arguments can still be put forward by supposedly serious people like Summers, and accepted as "entirely unobjectionable" by other supposedly serious people like Kleiman, shows how far the fight against gender discrimination has yet to go.  Someone making similar suggestions that racial disparities might be due to inferiority of certain races would, and should, lose professional respect and likely their job (unless they work for a conservative think tank, of course).

Alas, Kleiman takes his argument further into the depths:

That invidious gender bias and skewed social arrangements exist it would be hard to doubt without deliberately closing one's eyes and ears. But that those problems explain most of the underrepresentation of women among tenured scientists and mathematicians is open to doubt.

Matt [Yglesias, blogger and journalist] misstates the evidence about the relative skills of the two sexes in a subtle but important way. What matters isn't the difference in central tendencies between the two distributions, but rather their dispersion around that central tendency.

For excellent evolutionary reasons, human males display higher variance than human females on many important traits, including measures of mental capacity. That means that they are likely to predominate among the top one hundredth of one percent of almost any cognitive talent, unless women are on average much better endowed in that particular department.

So it wouldn't be surprising to find that women, on average, write better than men do, but that there are more men than women among the handful of the very best writers in the world.

I'll skip over the supreme, albeit typical in academics, arrogance that is evident in Kleiman's implicit assumption that academic positions are reserved for the "top hundredth of one percent."  But with this argument, Kleiman appears to excuse male domination of every skilled field into eternity.

Exhibit A in the academic glass ceiling:  Larry Summers.

Exhibit B:  Mark Kleiman.

Exhibit C:  Far too many other men.

It would be nice to see some evidence that these men have ever listened to a significant number—or even any—academic or other professional women about their experiences in building their careers.  I know a few who might be able to educate them.

Other blogs commenting on the Harvard president/gender discrimination firestorm

Below, I'm compiling links, with excerpts, to posts on other blogs about the remarks on gender differences in the sciences made by the president of Harvard a few days ago.  The comments are also well worth reading in many cases.

Pharyngula, who appears to be a male scientist at a university in Minnesota:

I’ll tell you how much of a role discrimination plays in limiting female professors in so-called “elite” universities: 100%. There is no shortage of brilliant women scientists (or brilliant male scientists), but there is a dearth of jobs and we still have bigoted ignoramuses like Summers standing guard over the gateways.

Bitch, Ph.D.:

Having said that his hypothesis is "based on . . . scholarly work," Summers goes on to offer this incredibly scholarly piece of evidence:

"In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ''daddy truck,' and one ''baby truck.'"

Well, I've got news for you, Larry.  My son, whose father took him to see the first X-Prize launch, calls SpaceShipOne the "Mama Plane" and the "Baby Plane." Click on the link, you'll see why. So I think maybe a little more research needs to be done on this topic before your darling daughter--who I'm sure was raised in a completely non-sexist environment (not)--can really serve as definitive proof that girls can't do math and science.

Dumbass.

Feministing:

Women at the conference—which was about women and minorities in science and engineering—were less than pleased. Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT, walked out on his talk, saying that if she hadn't she “would've either blacked out or thrown up.”

And I have to say, I don’t buy Summers’ attempt to spin his comments as “hypotheses,” especially after learning that the number of tenured job offers made to Harvard women has dropped significantly since he took office. What a coincidence…

Harvard president downplays gender discrimination in the sciences

Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, has apparently ignited quite a firestorm about why women are so severely underrepresented in science and engineering academic positions.  Here is a brief summary of what he said, according to the New York Times:

At Friday's conference, Mr. Summers discussed possible reasons so few women were on the science and engineering faculties at research universities, and he said he would be provocative.

Among his hypotheses were that faculty positions at elite universities required more time and energy than married women with children were willing to accept, that innate sex differences might leave women less capable of succeeding at the most advanced mathematics and that discrimination may also play a role, participants said. There was no transcript of his remarks.

His remarks caused one professor to walk out and another to openly challenge them.

Summers has apparently moved into damage control mode:

At the center of the storm, Mr. Summers posted a statement late Monday night on his Web page, saying that his comments at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit economic research organization in Cambridge had been misconstrued and pledging to continue efforts to "attract and engage outstanding women scientists."

"My aim at the conference was to underscore that the situation is likely the product of a variety of factors and that further research can help us better understand their interplay," he said. "I do not presume to have confident answers, only the conviction that the harder we work to research and understand the situation, the better the prospects for long term success."

Alas, there is no transcript available, so I don't know exactly what he said, but based on this reporting, I wonder whether Summers has ever seriously talked to female university scientists and engineers about their workplace experiences. 

Maud Lavin, who graduated from Harvard in the class of 1976, was one of the first women to take a demanding theoretical math sequence, Math 11 and Math 55, and is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ms Lavin said in an interview yesterday that she would not donate any more money to Harvard as long as Mr. Summers was president, after firing off an angry e-mail message to him.

"I am offended and furious about your remarks on women in science and mathematics," Ms. Lavin wrote. "Arguments of innate gender difference in math are hogwash and indirectly serve to feed the virulent prejudices still alas very alive and now even more so due to your ill-informed remarks."

Sadly, Summers' dismissive attitude toward gender discrimination is still extremely common among men, even those who should know better. Fortunately, his eagerness to explain away discrimination by appealing to notions of female inferiority is much rarer these days.  Well, at least voicing such an opinion is rare.

But perhaps some good will come out of all this:

On and off the campus, Mr. Summers's remarks were the subject of heated debate yesterday.

Denice D. Denton, the dean of engineering at the University of Washington who confronted Mr. Summers over his remarks at the conference, said that her phone had not stopped ringing and that she had received scores of e-mail messages on the subject. She said Mr. Summers's remarks might have put new energy into a longstanding effort to improve the status of women in the sciences.

"I think they've provoked an intellectual tsunami," Dr. Denton said.

Enough of one to wake huge numbers of men up from both their patronizing attitude towards women and from their ignorance of the existence and affects of gender discrimination?  I sure hope so.

Belated update on the Helotes Wal-Mart story

Seems I missed this update on the Helotes Scenic Loop Wal-Mart story in the San Antonio Express-News last week.  The headline is "Wal-Mart plan stalled in Helotes".

HELOTES — The City Council late Wednesday imposed a moratorium on the site along Scenic Loop Road where Wal-Mart intended to build a store, saying a traffic study is needed first.

The decision came after Wal-Mart representatives attended Wednesday's special meeting, determined to hear what residents had to say.

The majority of the 300-plus people at the Helotes 4-H Center gave Wal-Mart plenty to listen to.        

"You have to realize that a lot of animosity out here from citizens of Helotes is we just don't want Wal-Mart out here," Jon Allan, a Helotes Heritage Association founder, said to rousing cheers from the audience and a standing ovation.    

His sentiments were echoed by a stream of residents lined up to voice their opposition. Helotes Mayor Steve Hodges called for the special session Dec. 2 in response to protests and numerous e-mails from residents angry about the proposed Wal-Mart.

On the Helotes Heritage Association web site, there is a quote from the assocation's president saying, "We've won a skirmish but not the war."

Earlier posts related to this story are here, here, and here.