Watch what you say

Gonz

Gonz

molṑn labé
Staff member
What appears to be a fact is still the unspeakable. Speaking truth is akin to cross burning & slave holding should those spoken of find themselves unable to control their emotions, which, possibly, could show the root of the problem.

POSTED: 4:06 pm EST January 17, 2005
UPDATED: 4:19 pm EST January 17, 2005

CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- The president of Harvard University prompted criticism for suggesting that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.

Lawrence H. Summers, speaking Friday at an economic conference, also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities.

The remarks prompted Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Nancy Hopkins - a Harvard graduate - to walk out on Summers' talk, The Boston Globe reported.

"It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women (at Harvard) are being led by a man who views them this way," Hopkins said later.

Five other participants in the National Bureau of Economic Research conference, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were offended by the comments. Four other attendees contacted afterward by the Globe said they were not.

Summers told the Globe he was discussing hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own views. He also said more research needs to be done on the issues.

Conference organizers said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.

The two-day, invitation-only conference of the Cambridge-based National Bureau of Economic Research drew about 50 economists from around the country to discuss women and minorities in science and engineering.

Summers declined to provide a tape or transcript of his remarks, but he did describe comments to the Globe similar to what participants recalled.

"It's possible I made some reference to innate differences," he said. He said people "would prefer to believe" that the differences in performance between the sexes are due to social factors, "but these are things that need to be studied."

He also cited as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Yet he said she named them "daddy truck" and "baby truck," as if they were dolls.

It was during such comments that Hopkins got up and left.

"Here was this economist lecturing pompously (to) this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day," said Denton, the outgoing dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington.

Summers already faced criticism because the number of senior job offers to women has dropped each year of his three-year presidency.

He has promised to work on the problem.
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Let's see how far out of context we can go with this.
 
I agree with him, is not about discrimination, is just observation, at least my limited experience tells me the same. Through all my years of study, i've always observed that women were not as good as men in exact sciences, especially math and physics. It is a tendency, not a rule, as I've also met women good at math. It is just that the number of women good at math is far inferior to the number of men good at math I've met.

On the other hand, drawing, literature, architecture, biology and chemistry is more suitable for women than men. You think I get offended by that?, NO, things just happen to be that way.

PS. Luis has taken a lot of shit from women for saying that, he's more than used to it.
 
In my limited experience, I've also found that women are much better at scrubbing dishes, baking pies and planning children's birthday parties.

Stupid comment for a man in his position. :rolleyes:
 
abooja said:
In my limited experience, I've also found that women are much better at scrubbing dishes, baking pies and planning children's birthday parties.
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I disagree about the dishes and the pies ;)
It is a rare gift to remember birthdays, let alone planning a party.
 
Its also a matter of sheer longevity. The elite tiers are staffed with those that have been in the field for 40+ years. The melding of the sexes into the 'man club' field has only been in strong force since the late 70s. Bright women do exist and are in the field ... their numbers may even be par with men.... buuuut... from what I have seen in life and know as a matter of biological cutting edge theory and observation; women are better at more things than men, but men are the tops in the fields that they focus in. Its a matter of sheer alignment and brain chemistry and how the task/spatial/processing/bla bla works. The top .001% in any field is almost always a man.. but those men as so hyper specialized as to almost be savants and incapable of tying their shoes.
 
abooja said:
In my limited experience, I've also found that women are much better at scrubbing dishes, baking pies and planning children's birthday parties.
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So tell me, why do the exact sciences have a harder time recruiting females? Are they too busy with wimmins chores or are they, as he points out, less interested? This is not, in any way, a discriminatory view. He didin't say they shouldn't be interested.
 
The problem is that women have only broken the glass ceiling in the last 20 years or so. Equality in the work-place is still debatable. My feeling is that as we progress further into the future, women will increasingly join fields that were seen as predominantly 'male'. I think this hypothesis needs to be re-visited then. It's too soon to say that men and women have certain innate skills in certain disciplines.
 
BeardofPants said:
The problem is that women have only broken the glass ceiling in the last 20 years or so.
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1985? Glass celiing?

There is no glass ceiling for women that decide to follow the unforgiving dog eat dog corporate track. What seperates teh women from the girls is simple...time actively on the job. Not too many men take 2, 3, 5, 10, 12, 16 or more weeks off to have/raise kids or elder care or any of a thousand other time honored family matters. It's genetic to the female of the species. Before you start, not every female is a girl.

Side by side comparissons, where all was truly equal, showed a surprising result...women make more money than men. However, since very few women avoid the mommy track, very few women are in the position to take the top spot.
 
The problem is that women have only broken the glass ceiling in the last 20 years or so
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even then it is still kind of there. Males are more likely to be hired and also promoted than females
 
Isn't it supposed to be proven that women are generally geared towards art, history, etc. while men are geared towards math, science, logic, etc.?
 
Symptomatic of PC bullshit. Some people just can't believe that the body (including the brain) has power over or limits the capacity of the mind. It's not PC to believe that at the core of things, we're still animals. Animals with two genders each best equiped through evolution towards certain tasks.

You may as well be asking why are there so few women hunters as why are there so few women physicists. They both come down to skills and mindset. Nothing stopping a woman from putting on the cams, climbing a tree and shooting at Bambi 'cept ... it's not their thing.
 
Gonz said:
So tell me, why do the exact sciences have a harder time recruiting females? Are they too busy with wimmins chores or are they, as he points out, less interested? This is not, in any way, a discriminatory view. He didin't say they shouldn't be interested.
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Do you disagree that it was a politically stupid comment for the president of a university to have made? In retrospect, do you think he was happy he made those comments?

It's a matter of nurture, not nature. I was a far better math and science student than were either of my older brothers, and they studied engineering and accounting. No one's going to tell me that my widdle brain can't process such information as well as some dude simply because he was born with a penis. I also happened to excel in the arts. Does that make me an anomaly? Perhaps, but you'd have to prove it first.
 
My experience, and the results of numerous accredited studies by every discipline known to academia, is that the female brain and the male brain are wired differently. This leads to differences between the genders.


Oh, God, the horror of it all....





Anyway, these studies, and my own experience, lead to the conclusion that BY AND LARGE men excel at mathemetics and sciences, while women excel at languages, writing, and similar studies. Most any high school guidance counselor will verify this conclusion.

It simply menas we approach things differently. Men are more interested in the final outcome, women with the process of getting there. Neither is superiour to the other, and both are vital to making any system work.

Obviously, there are exceptions, so before anybody starts pointing to famous female scientists or to Stephen King or other male literary masters, spare us all the bullshit. It is not definitive. I know my wife understands our computer much better than I do, and that I am probably a better writer than she is. We're talking generalities here folks...
 
abooja said:
Do you disagree that it was a politically stupid comment for the president of a university to have made? In retrospect, do you think he was happy he made those comments?

It's a matter of nurture, not nature. I was a far better math and science student than were either of my older brothers, and they studied engineering and accounting. No one's going to tell me that my widdle brain can't process such information as well as some dude simply because he was born with a penis. I also happened to excel in the arts. Does that make me an anomaly? Perhaps, but you'd have to prove it first.
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Now, now...nobody said you have to have a penis to become a great mathmetician or scientist. He just said that those subjects have a harder time recruiting females. Personally, I suck at math beyond the basics. I took the classes, but afterward, since they haven't been used on a day-to-day basis, they slipped into deep storage. :D As for the president of the university, he was told to be controversial, and I guess that speech certainly fits the bill. ;)
 
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