The Wake

Last month, speaking candidly at a conference aimed at solving the problem of low numbers of women and minorities in science and engineering, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers revealed the lingering boys’-club culture in the upper echelons of academia.

Summers suggested factors on which to blame the lack of female scientists, and offered the suggestion that divergent test scores between high school girls and boys stem from biological differences. Most disturbingly, he used his daughter’s play behavior to illustrate his point about genetic predisposition. The girl was given two toy trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Summers says she named them “daddy truck” and “baby truck,” as if they were dolls. Any Disney movie shows us that children like to imbue inanimate objects with personalities, and the fact that Summers used this anecdote to justify a lack of opportunity for women is insulting. Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at M.I.T., walked out during Summers’ “daddy truck” number.

She told the Boston Globe, “this kind of bias makes me physically ill.” Dr. Hopkins, who led an investigation into sex discrimination at M.I.T. that led to changes in hiring practices, added, ”Let’s not forget that people used to say that women couldn’t drive an automobile.”

I don’t blame Hopkins for walking out. I’m not a scientist, but when I put myself in the shoes of the accomplished women at the conference, I am infuriated by the implication that they just don’t have what it takes to make it to the top. This kind of bias is so upsetting because it strikes at the heart of personal identity. Imagine devoting your life to whatever it is that inspires you, only to be told by those in power that your field is a big inside joke and you’ll never get the punch line. You just had to be there when they were passing out the Ys. Oh and, by the way, when I look at you I see a little girl who doesn’t know how to play with boy’s toys.

Summers also said that married women with children tend to shy away from the 80-hour workweeks required of top science faculty. Is the problem that they shy away, or have been overlooked? Summers faced criticism in the past because, in each of his three years as president, senior job offers to women have dropped.

Tonya Laufenberg, “U” biology major and community adviser to the Women in Science and Engineering living and learning community, agrees that underlying bias, and not biological predisposition, accounts for the gender disparity in top science positions. “Engineering and science fields have been dominated by men in the past,” Laufenberg says. “At a young age, children learn what fields are male oriented and what fields are female oriented. This ideology causes a lack of encouragement to study in fields that are not oriented to one’s gender.”

But Laufenberg is hopeful, and believes that the talented and hardworking women she’s met studying science and engineering at the “U” can “shatter the ideology” of those fields being male oriented.

Summers apologized several times for the harm that his comments caused, and said in a letter to the Harvard community that he should have “weighed them more carefully.” But when suits speaks off the cuff, they show us their true perspective, not the polished, public-relations-department-approved, speech-writer version of it. Some conference-goers defended Summers’ comments, saying that only when scientist are allowed to speak openly about the possible roots of a problem can they further the discussion. Certainly Summers’ comments shed light on the obstacle women in science face: old-fashioned sexism.

Morgon Mae Schultz is the editor in chief of The Wake and welcomes comments at office@wakenews.org.