Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

Listen to what the president of Harvard said the other day:

In his talk Friday at a conference on women and minorities in science and engineering, held at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Summers listed three possible explanations for the small number of women who excel at elite levels of science and engineering. He said he was deliberately being provocative, as he was asked to do by the organizers, and relying on the scholarship that was assembled for the conference rather than offering his own conclusions.

His first point was that women with children are often unwilling or unable to work 80-hour weeks. His second point was that in math and science tests, more males earn the very top scores, as well as the very bottom scores. He said that while no one knew why, "research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people attributed to socialization" might actually have a biological basis -- and that the issue needed to be studied further.

Several participants said that in making his second point, Summers suggested that women might not have the same "innate ability" or "natural ability" as men[emphasis mine].

Summers' third point was about discrimination, and he said it was not clear that discrimination played a significant role in the shortage of women teaching science and engineering at top universities. However, he concluded by emphasizing that Harvard was taking many steps to boost diversity.

[Source: Boston Globe]

And here's what
Eileen McNamara had to say:

Summers, however, thinks we should not lean too heavily on cultural explanations for the absence of women at the top of the sciences. We should not overestimate the role of discrimination in the obvious gender disparity, said the man who presides over an institution that last year made only four of its 32 tenure offers to women[emphasis mine].

Summers suggested that women do not rise higher in the academic or professional firmament because they choose to become mothers and thus devote less time to their careers. "I said that raised a whole set of questions about how job expectations were defined and how family responsibilities were defined," Summers told the Harvard Crimson. [He did not return my call.] "But I said it didn't explain the differences [in the representation of females] between the sciences and mathematics and other fields."

Why doesn't it? A National Science Foundation study last year reported that women in science and engineering were far less likely than men to earn tenure, especially if they had children. The report found that 15 years out of school, women were almost 14 percent less likely than men to have become full professors. Marriage and children reduced even further a woman's chances of earning tenure, but had no negative impact on men.

That sounds like a cultural, not a biological, problem to me. Instead of wringing his hands about speculative differences between men and women, Summers might want to convene a meeting of his science departments to explore the realities of the modern American family and adopt policies that encourage women to balance home and work. Mentor women. Provide child care. Encourage flex-time. Stop the tenure clock during pregnancy or maternity leave.

The academy is tailor-made for just such experimentation. Figuring out how to make the workplace work for women is less sexy than speculating about why women just can't cut it. Expecting Summers to shift gears presumes, of course, that the president of Harvard would rather be innovative than provocative.

We need to get Summers outta there. Harvard is so lame.