Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kech who wrote (101794)	2/23/2005 12:07:37 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793809

At least the students get it. To be a little more precise: At least 488 students out of a total university enrollment of 20,400 get it - that is a little less than 2.5%.

To: kech who wrote (101794)	2/23/2005 2:15:53 PM
From: Neeka	Respond to of 793809

You should give it up. I think Mary hates the guy just for saying it. It was un-pc and un-pc statements are not allowed....especially by white guys who happen to be the president of Harvard. It is just not allowed in our modern society. Summers got the message, but has kept his job for now. One more screw up and he's gone. M By Maggie Gallagher Quick, has anyone seen poor Larry Summers' frontal lobes? Somebody at Harvard seems to be holding them hostage, along with some more intimate parts of his anatomy. Maggie Gallagher Larry Summers is the former Clinton treasury secretary and president of Harvard University who recently made the mistake of thinking out loud, in front of a group of female Harvard professors. Why are there fewer women math and science professors at Harvard than men? At a conference of scientists on Jan. 14, Summers speculated on many possible reasons, ranging from discrimination against women, to differing socialization of men and women, to innate gender differences in mathematical ability, job preferences and family life. The reaction was, well, spectacular. I apologize in advance to the many women professors at Harvard who, whether they agree or disagree with Summers' hypotheses, are perfectly capable of engaging in rational debate. As for the rest: Can someone please pass the smelling salts? Summers has spent the last month begging for his job, apologizing repeatedly (five times, by the New York Post's count) for his part in lowering the self-esteem of the fragile flowers on the Harvard faculty. I can think of few things more discouraging to any woman who lives by her intellect than the sight of some of the nation's most highly credentialed female scholars attempting to use their emotions to cut off argument, rather than focusing on winning the debate. Political correctness is the opposite of thought. It proceeds by moral condemnation and emotional outrage: Anyone who can imagine such a thought must be a bad person, or a crazy one. Harvard physics professor Howard Georgi opined: "It's crazy to think that it's an innate difference. It's socialization. We've trained young women to be average. We've trained young men to be adventurous." Hmm. Perhaps only a Harvard professor could imagine that young men today consider a career in math or science to be real macho-man stuff. As the scientific study of sex difference progresses, it gets harder to maintain that gender is wholly a product of socialization, as Professor Georgi maintains. As Leonard Sax writes in his new book, "Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences" (Doubleday): "Gender is one of the two great organizing principles in child development -- the other principle being age. Trying to understand a child without understanding the role of gender in child development is like trying to understand a child's behavior without knowing the child's age." Gender is not just a matter of sexual organs: According to Sax, men's and women's brains are organized differently, our ears process sound differently, our eyes are anatomically arranged to perceive color and motion somewhat differently. Men and women are known to process risk differently, in ways that are not always to men's advantage. Here's another gender difference for Harvard to ponder at its next scientific conference: Why are almost all drowning victims male? Men, a group of Boston University psychologists concluded, consistently overestimate their ability to swim. There are many reasons why, even if the genders do not differ in innate math ability, highly able women may not want to become mathematicians. Maybe, as Summers suggested, they want to spend more time with their kids than with the Harvard faculty. One woman told The New York Times that she chose medicine over math because she wanted to spend time helping people, not numbers. Is that such a bad thing? I don't know whether these or other innate differences between men and women are at all responsible for the relative dearth of female physics professors at America's great universities. I do know that any great university that cannot tolerate these questions being asked is in the process of losing its claim to that title. story.news.yahoo.com