by Mike North
posted February 21, 2005
 Mike North |
Why then, is it a big deal that Harvard president Lawrence Summers mentioned those differences while discussing the number of women professors in university science departments? At no point did Summers say that men were superior to women or smarter than women. He simply said that natural cognitive differences cause men to be attracted to the fields of math and science, and women to gravitate toward the humanities. It’s all about interest, not ability or discrimination.
This should not even be news. Dr. Summers may just as well have said, “Water is wet.” But today’s politically correct intellectual totalitarianism forbids the recognition of facts if those facts run counter to the accepted orthodoxy of the intellectual elite.
Said orthodoxy promotes notions such as these: we want men and women to be identical except for a couple of biologically necessary functions, therefore they are identical; we want all people to be intellectually equal, so if we ignore the differences they will be equal; differences in natural ability and effort should not bring about unequal outcomes, so when they do we will equalize the outcomes (usually by taking from the achiever and giving to the underachiever).
Everything in our natures contradicts this value system, but that is irrelevant. The overwhelming push for egalitarian outcomes means that no fact or law of nature can stand in the way of progress.
The best way for a woman who disagreed with Dr. Summers to make her point would have been to challenge him on his assertions in the arena of discussion and debate. But instead, several women professors chose to walk out. "I felt I was going to be sick," said Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "[My] breath was shallow. I just couldn't breathe." Oh my -- someone get the smelling salts.
One irony is that Dr. Summers is an establishment liberal himself. A former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, Dr. Summers bought into the notion that gender differences were due to socialization – girls were “raised to be girls, and boys to be boys,” one might say. During his address, Summers talked about his efforts to rear his daughters in a more gender-neutral environment.
“I guess,” said Dr. Summers, “my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something.” Unfortunately for Dr. Summers, the current campus atmosphere doesn’t allow for such observations. He should have known going in that his remarks would result in a furor.
Perhaps he forgot that he was a university president and that his audience was made up of professors from top-flight institutions. He must have thought for a moment that in an intellectual discussion, one could consider different possibilities and ideas without being accused of chauvinism (or bigotry, homophobia, racism…). He should have known better.
A segment of the faculty at Harvard University is clamoring for Dr. Summers' resignation. Some critics have challenged Summers to produce research validating his remarks. They need look little farther than Harvard’s own web site. A research group called “Project Implicit” has developed a series of exams designed to uncover unconscious bias. The introduction to their project says, “This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.”
And guess what? There is an exam to test the natural bias toward or against science. And the introduction to that particular test says, “This IAT often reveals a relative link between liberal arts and females and between science and males.”
Marie Curie was good at science. Vincent van Gogh was good at art. No one, including Larry Summers, is trying to say that individuals can’t excel in any field they choose. What he is saying is that gender may play a role in helping decide the field that one wishes to pursue.
Yes, and water is wet.
You can take the “Gender-science” IAT (or many other IAT’s) on the internet at: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
(Mike North writes a regular op-ed column for six newspapers in the southeast Tennessee, northwest Georgia and northeast Alabama region. He is a professional land surveyor with True Line Company, Land Surveyors. He is a former Walker County School Board member and a student of history and political science. He can be reached at
Mike@myhumbleopinion.net
His columns are at
Mike North Columns )
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