At long last, a reporter finally decides to talk to a significant number of female scientists to find out what they think about the Harvard President's comments from a couple weeks ago. From the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday:
To many female scientists, whose ancestors were denied admittance not only to Ivy League colleges but also to laboratories, a recent speech by Harvard President Lawrence Summers was a blast from the past -- a reminder of dimwitted prejudices many women hoped they had outlived.
Exactly what Summers said in his mid-January remarks on the underrepresentation of women in science is uncertain, as he has reportedly declined to release a tape of the remarks and no transcript has been made public. What is known is that he claimed that girls are less likely than boys to get the highest scores in standardized math and science tests, and that he suggested several explanations.
Among those possible explanations, he said, was that the differences are innate -- that is to say, genetic. Angered, a noted MIT female biologist walked out on the speech. Summers later issued an apology, stating: "I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully."
Still, his original remarks rankle many female -- and not a few male scientists, a few of whom suggest Summers should be fired.
A leading female astrophysicist at Yale, Meg Urry, says she and her female colleagues in science "have talked of little else for days." In the Bay Area, members of the East Bay chapter of the Association for Women in Science "discussed this around the table" at their latest meeting, says their chapter secretary, Paula Shadle.
"The reaction was frustration, disappointment, and no surprise," said Shadle, a quality assurance consultant to the pharmaceutical industry who has a doctorate in biochemistry from UC San Diego. "One person said, 'Maybe this attitude explains why Harvard hasn't been able to attract women.' "
Critics say Summers ignored overwhelming evidence that such difficulties are caused by social factors that include sex discrimination, not by genetics. They note that boys' and girls' average test scores are the same, and that gender differences in scores have converged over the past few decades -- a convergence that no one suggests is due to a sudden transmutation of women's DNA.
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Some women say Summers' speech also shows he's insensitive to the history of sex discrimination against female scientists.
Helen Quinn, now a top physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, said that in the 1960s she met a young man who asked what she did for a living. On being told, he said, "That's not my idea of what a woman ought to be," and walked away.
Margaret Burbidge -- one of the most distinguished astrophysicists of the past half-century, now a professor emeritus at UC San Diego -- recalled how, as a young woman, she applied for a fellowship to observe the stars using the telescopes atop Mount Wilson in Southern California. She was informed "that women were not allowed at Mount Wilson Observatory."
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The next question, some women say, is: What is the most constructive way to react to Summers' speech? Here, an informal sampling of female scientists uncovered significant disagreement.
Suford Lewis, a 1965 graduate of Harvard who is now president of the Association for Women in Computing, is disturbed that during Summers' speech, "at least one (woman present) felt ill, got up and left. Instead of getting angry and leaving, we should get angry and fight. I find a humorous remark to be the best weapon."
Barrie Greene, a Harvard physics graduate who earned her doctorate in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 and now works as a patent agent, thinks some women have overreacted to the whole brouhaha. She was "surprised and distressed to hear women scientists claim they were offended and even physically sickened by an opinion they disagreed with. This does not help to debunk stereotypes of women as emotional and incapable of cool logic," said Greene, a member of the Palo Alto chapter of the Association for Women in Science.
"It is important to note that Summers was not saying that women scientists are inferior to men," Greene continued. "Rather, he was trying to discover why fewer women choose to be scientists in the first place. Nor did he insist on gender differences in ability and interest as the sole explanation, but considered discrimination against women as another possible factor."
Nonetheless, Summers "should be fired," Shadle said, "just as the coach who when asked why most coaches were white while most players were black, said, 'Maybe it's genetic.' His published apology is totally inadequate."
But Burbidge opposes firing him: "Ridicule is the best response!"
Meanwhile, sex discrimination in science persists, some women charge.
A prominent female scientist on the East Coast who asked not to be identified said she has watched in dismay as "inferior male colleagues" were given "better lab and office space ... (and) introductions to prominent scientists, while women were ignored."
"My concepts and actual work have been stolen and published without credit to me, or with only the faintest acknowledgement," she added.
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Shadle complains that women receive mixed messages: "I personally have been told, simultaneously, both that I was too aggressive -- and that I was 'too nice' to be successful as a scientist and lacking in 'that killer instinct.' "
Some research suggests the media is partly to blame, as it perpetuates stereotypical views. Prime-time TV shows tend to depict few scientists who aren't white males, according to a 1999 study by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Evolutionary neurobiologist Richard C. Francis, whose book "Why Men Won't Ask for Directions" was published in 2003 by Princeton University Press, believes sex differences on tests are too diverse globally, and change too much over time, to be simplistically attributed to genes.
For example, Francis says, by the 1960s, "the conventional wisdom was that males were superior in spatial-mathematical skills and females were superior in verbal skills," although these beliefs were based on "remarkably thin" evidence. Today, the putative female advantage in verbal skills "has been debunked," while tests that purportedly showed a male advantage in spatial skills "no longer do, with the exception of 3-D mental rotations" -- the ability to mentally rotate an image in one's mind.
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A leading astrophysicist, Wendy Freedman, director of Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, says one of the most important things parents can do is ensure that their daughters receive the same science education as their sons: "When my daughter was in the third grade, she came home and said to me, 'I can't do math.'
"So I told her, 'Sorry, but no daughter of mine is allowed to say that.' We looked at her ... problems, (and) she became thrilled to see that she could do them." Eventually she became a top-ranked math student.
"Now imagine what might have happened," Freedman adds, "if I had agreed with her, and said, 'Yes, girls intrinsically aren't very good at math.' "
Why has it taken so long to get these opinions of female scientists, with their unique perspective on how biased attitudes have conspired against them, themselves into the news coverage of this story? Instead of stories being focused on whether discrimination exists and what effect it has, most stories have instead focused on the red herring of male-female differences. (For one example, see this New York Times article, via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.)
Thanks to Keay Davidson for writing this new angle, and the San Francisco Chronicle for publishing it.
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