Maybe a more dispassionate response would have displayed the courtesy of acknowledging him for two good points out of three before jumping all over him for the miss, but the miss was issue.
I would say that the miss is the entire point of the criticism, because it's so far off the mark, at least the way Summers expressed it.
A similar debate was triggered recently by what appears to have been an editorial or op-ed in the LA Times over the death of Susan Sontag. The most famous of the protagonists are Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley. I have read the piece in question and agree with Estrich's narrow point that the arguments in that particular article are not just specious but fatuous.
latimes.com
But, on that same date, on that same editorial page, the LA Times printed a couple of articles on related topics which were pretty good, and one I thought was bone-headed (hint: the bone-headed one tries to drive home its point by talking about mares and geldings.) All four articles written by women, so when Susan Estrich argues that the LA Times op-ed page is a male bastion, she is talking out of her hat, as usual.
>>GENDER STUDIES; Love, Lust and Homo Sapiens
BYLINE: Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett, Rosalind C. Barnett is a senior scientist at Brandeis University and Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Their book, "Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs," was published in August by Basic Books.
BODY:
Are women less desirable to men if they are high achievers at work? Do men prefer the "step and fetch it" subservient woman to the one with career aspirations? Two studies receiving major media attention say that the answer is yes. Not surprisingly, this "bad news for smart women" scenario fueled headlines.
"They're Too Smart for These Guys," the Chicago Tribune declared. "Glass Ceilings at Altar as Well as Boardroom," the New York Times announced.
Columnist Maureen Dowd, picking up on the studies, asked whether the feminist movement was "some sort of cruel hoax," writing that "the more women achieve, the less desirable they are."
In truth, the evidence for this notion is flimsy -- ambiguous questions put to tiny sample groups including, in one study, 18- and 19-year-old men with little workplace experience. And yet this latest theory about male-female relationships already seems to have become part of a new conventional wisdom. Gone is love's rapturous "old black magic." The replacement theory posited by evolutionary psychology holds that the human mating ritual is driven by a collection of hard-wired instincts and impulses that nature has parceled out to males and females in proportions largely relating to species survival.
Among evolutionary psychology's truisms:
* Women are by nature coy, modest and monogamous.
* Women with many partners are unnatural, while men are inherently promiscuous. Natural selection instructs men to "spread their seed" widely.
* Women want successful men to provide for them, and older men generally have more resources than younger men. Women would run right past Brad Pitt if he was a struggling actor instead of a rich and famous one, and fall into the arms of a gray-haired but wealthy swain.
* Men lust after very young, baby-faced, presumably fertile women. University of Texas psychologist Davis Buss makes this claim in "The Evolution of Desire," and pop culture revels in this notion.
There's a simple appeal to this worldview, as demonstrated by the mainstream media's salivation at such "evidence" as CEO Jack Welch cheating on his second wife with a younger editor at the Harvard Business Review. Unfortunately for this theory, new research suggests that evolution casts males and females far less stereotypically than the evolutionary psychologists imagine.
Take the notion of the monogamous female and the promiscuous male. This pattern is supposed to be typical for both human and nonhuman primates. But field studies of nonhuman primates suggest that natural selection drives female primates to seek many male partners, argues primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of "Mother Nature." In one group of female chimpanzees in West Africa, half of the offspring turned out not to have been sired by the males in residence.
Rather than wait for her evolutionary Prince Charming, what if the supposedly coy female best protects her genetic future by seeking out a whole pride of Charmings? A mother could indeed gain an advantage by copulating with many males, who would then be invested in her offspring. This behavior might prevent males from attacking her babies, or might elicit other forms of protection from a group of males rather than from just one, as males generally are disinclined to kill infants of their species to which they have any kind of connection.
Following a similar line of skepticism, Brown University biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling wonders why some of her scientific colleagues assume that promiscuous human males who spread their seed are the important evolutionary players. Isn't it just as likely, she asks, that the females "were the ones who hedged their bets and slept with more than one male?"
And does a male have to move from female to female, siring as many children as possible, to ensure that his genes will survive? Do men have love-em-and-leave-em genes? Scientists now suggest that sticking around is a better strategy for human males. After all, because the human female does not go into estrus (heat), the roving male may miss the two or three days a month she's fertile. Even if she's ovulating, there's only about a 20% chance that he will impregnate her. If he does, and he's soon off to greener pastures, he won't be around to protect his offspring.
The prehistoric world was a tough one for infants. If a male invested no energy in feeding and guarding his young, there was a good chance that none would survive. Perhaps, as Nicholas Blurton Jones, a UCLA anthropology and psychiatry professor, argues, marriage was invented by human males as a form of "mate-guarding." Having regular sex with one woman was a lot easier than roaming from female to female, and possibly more effective in terms of reproductive success. So maybe marriage works better than Don Juanism in making men winners in the genetic lottery.
What about the notion that men seek out very young, presumably fertile women? Many economists have noted that in these days when men's wages are flat or stagnant, their mating strategies are changing. More often they seek a woman who has completed her education. In fact, today, the more education a woman has, the more marriageable she is. Forty percent of married women earn more than their husbands, and studies show their marriages are as happy -- and at least as stable -- as those in which the male is the major breadwinner.
Men indeed do like good-looking women, but they don't have to be very young. In one experiment, when men were shown pictures of plain women in their 20s and more attractive women in their 30s and 40s, the men chose the good-looking older women. However, for men, beauty is not the prime ingredient in a mate. A worldwide study found that for both men and women, "kind and understanding" were the most sought-after traits in a mate.
And do women set their caps for older, wealthy men? No. In societies with a high degree of gender equality, where women have their own resources, they seek out men who are caring and able to bond with children, report psychologists Alice Eagly of Northwestern and Wendy Wood of Duke. In truth, what men and women look for most in a mate may simply be someone like themselves.
Cornell University biologist Stephen T. Emlen reported in 2003 that "attractive people tend to value attractiveness, wealthy people value mates with money and ambitious types and family-oriented souls tend to gravitate to others like themselves." The desire for similar mates was five or six times more powerful than the desire for beautiful or wealthy ones.
So what should we make of this landslide of evidence against the ultra-Darwinians' belief that mating is driven by rigid patterns of programmed sexual behavior? That we are more than puppets dancing to a preset tune. And perhaps "that old black magic" is as good a way as any to understand how and why we love.
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>>GENDER STUDIES;
When Are You Guys Going to Get It?
BYLINE: Deborah Blum, Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and the author of "Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection."
BODY:
In Victorian times, scientists argued that women's brains were too small to be fully human. On the intelligence scale, researchers recommended classifying human females with gorillas.
The great 19th century neuroanatomist Paul Broca didn't see the situation as quite so dire, but he warned his colleagues that women were not capable of being as smart as men, "a difference that we should not exaggerate, but which is nonetheless real."
The president of Harvard University suggested that a lack of "innate ability" might help explain why women couldn't keep up with men in fields like math and science ... oh, wait, that one happened just last month.
Hold for a minute -- OK -- while I dig out my corset and bustle.
If that sounds snotty, I mean it to be.
I, for one, am ready to leave the 19th century behind. Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers can apologize all he wants, but the fact is that -- from a position of power -- he felt comfortable speculating about women's inadequate intelligence and ignoring years worth of science that proved him wrong.
I don't find that excusable. Period.
And I wonder why we women are so willing to tolerate this kind of behavior.
Summers raised the issue of women's lesser capabilities in an economic conference in Cambridge, Mass., in mid-January. And the most consistent response from women -- the one still resonating across the country -- is defensiveness.
A litany of female scholars quote studies proving that, yes, we girls can do long division, actually understand a chemical formula, comprehend a physical law or two and not only become professional scientists but do good work.
In fact, when allowed, women have done excellent science for decades, even since the corset-and-bustle days. The physicist Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes -- in 1903 and 1911 -- for her work in France with radioactive elements. As one Stanford University professor assured her audience last week, "clearly, girls are as capable" as boys.
No argument there from me except this one: Why does that have to be said at all? How well must women perform before the question of our competence gets taken off the table? How many times do we have to make the point before people actually believe it?
I wonder when it was that male academics last organized a conference to explain that their brains worked as well as those of their female colleagues. Perhaps they should have. At least, if more attention was given to the limits of male brain function, Summers might not have made quite such a fool of himself.
If that sounds like a cheap shot, I mean it to be.
Thanks to brain-imaging studies, we can quantify the average size difference between men's and women's brains. It runs between 6% to 8%. Imaging studies also tell us the brains are packed a little differently.
Preliminary evidence suggests that the average female has more cortical complexity -- a little more sophisticated material in the region that handles cognitive processing -- than your average guy. A whole bunch of studies -- to use one of those technical terms -- indicate that the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerve fibers that connects the right and left hemispheres, is larger in females.
Not unexpectedly, research also shows that women seem to use both sides of their brain in certain tasks, such as verbal processing, when men use only one. The result, though, in terms of quick and accurate response, is about the same.
In other words, minor brain differences with minor effects. But as Dr. Ruth O'Hara of Stanford's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science points out, even such subtle differences can be used against women. In one report, the scientists suggested that men have better control over brain activity and therefore don't need to slop into a second hemisphere.
"You wouldn't think that more activity would be a bad thing," she notes. "But apparently that's a matter of interpretation."
Does it strike you, as it does me, that Summers missed the important question? The one that goes like this: If men and women are basically equal in ability, why is there not a more equal balance of power?
That's complicated terrain, perhaps more than he wanted to take on. Still, I'd like to propose this simple scenario: One gender gained the power position and has been really, really reluctant to share the space.
It's possible that dominance has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with size and strength. That early in human history, males muscled their way into control and have stayed there because they're bigger (an average 17%) and because they play tough.
In our civilized times, muscle mass isn't that necessary. Why use physical force when other techniques are so effective: put-downs, dismissals, suggestions that, geez, we'd love to see women advance in those challenging intellectual fields -- if only they were up to it.
Do I believe this represents the way all men think today? Absolutely not. I know many men who were as unhappy with Summers as I was. "My first thought was, 'With friends like this, who needs enemies?' " one male neurobiologist told me.
Do I believe, though, that Victorian attitudes of superiority still exist? Absolutely yes.
"It's important for these attitudes to come out," Londa Schiebinger says. She directs Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and she organized the recent conference. Schiebinger is determined, she says, to make something positive out of Summers' remarks, to use them to educate people about women's talents and abilities.
Again no argument from me. But I would ask how much lemonade can be made from Harvard's lemons. How many people learned from subsequent reports on women's brains and how many only heard, as my 15-year-old son relayed to me, "the president of Harvard thinks women aren't as smart as men."
I wonder even now if a few more bellows of rage and a lot less tact might yet be in order, that we need to remind the world also that, yes, we are nice -- but not that nice. That we don't have so much patience that yet another generation of female scientists needs to die out before garnering the recognition they deserve.
To return to Marie Curie, you should know that the year she won her second Nobel Prize, the French Academy of Sciences refused to admit her as a member. Why? She was a woman. Curie did finally get her recognition from France in 1995 -- 61 years after her death from leukemia. They dug up her bones and reburied them with other national heroes in the Pantheon. What an honor, huh? I'll bet that meant a lot to her.
And if that sounds angry, I mean it to be.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>GENDER STUDIES;
La Difference Isn't Rocket Science
BYLINE: Catherine Seipp, Catherine Seipp is a columnist for National Review Online and the Independent Women's Forum.
BODY:
You might think that the hard sciences would be resistant to the unscientific notion that equal opportunity necessarily leads to equal outcomes. Alas, no, as Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers discovered when he suggested that perhaps women are "underrepresented" in science because they're innately less interested in the subject. The very notion caused a female MIT science professor to walk out on Summers' speech. His ideas, she said, made her "physically ill."
Anti-suffragists used to claim that because women's minds are ruled by our reproductive organs, we're too irrational to vote responsibly. Tactics like getting the vapors when encountering a disagreeable idea don't offer a powerful argument to the contrary.
The National Science Foundation has funded a three-year grant called Gender Equity in Math and Science; projects include tracking "gender discrimination" against female professors or trying to persuade high school girls to major in computer science instead of, say, law. Never mind that college women now outnumber college men, or that high school girls in general get better grades and test scores than high school boys. Feminists have a knack for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory, so until women reach a utopian 50/50 parity with men in math and science careers (whether they want to or not), the party line says we've got a problem.
This is a real bee in the bonnet of educators now. But girls, like boys, have a way of resisting what adults think is good for them. I glimpsed this up close a few years ago when I visited a special summer camp that a female software CEO had set up to encourage Silicon Valley high school girls who were interested in technology. There I witnessed a perfect little paleo-feminist versus post-feminist moment: One of the earnest, gray-haired female professors was advising the girls what to do if a job interviewer asked inappropriate questions like "How soon do you plan to have children?"
That would be illegal, of course, but the professor advised the girls not to argue about it but to say something like "I think what you're asking me is if my job will always come first, and the answer is yes!"
There was a silence as these words sort of hung in the air. Finally one girl raised her hand. "Can you just decline to state?" she asked tentatively. "Because I kind of have a philosophy that family comes first." Not exactly the sort of sentiment the female role models in the room wanted to hear.
What with all the funding and the proselytizing, girls are anything but discouraged from careers in science now, and I'm skeptical of the notion that doors were always slammed in their faces.
Even in 1950, no one stopped my mother from studying science, although (as she always said later) maybe they should have. She spent her spare time reading Milton in the library but insisted on majoring in science, to be different. A silly reason, obviously. But I'm afraid the only other she ever offered wasn't any better. The University of Manitoba science department had the best sports "yell," she said. Years later she was still able to recite it verbatim: "Hot damn, holy hell, have you heard the science yell? We want, God knows, more beer, less clothes."
A bigger problem than gender equity is the general incompetence of science instruction, beginning in the lower grades. I still remember having to explain to one of my daughter's elementary public school teachers, during a marine biology project, that a jellyfish is not a mollusk. But scientific illiteracy afflicts men as well as women, and it only starts in the schools.
Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist and professional debunker, argues in his book "Voodoo Science" that such ignorance is spread by the media, which feel no embarrassment at their lack of rudimentary scientific knowledge -- basically throwing up their hands and letting any old fool have his say as long as it ups the ratings.
The most pervasive unscientific assumptions crop up at that well-traveled intersection where pop culture meets public policy. Over the years I've heard fellow journalists say all sorts of unscientific, silly things, especially when it comes to the notion that masculine and feminine behaviors have any basis in biology. No, no, my media colleagues say, it's the culture. That's why women are underrepresented in science. So are stallions rarely used as riding horses because the mares get their more docile nature from leafing through those "How to Please a Man" articles in Cosmopolitan? (And do geldings behave the way they do because they subscribe to Eunuch Living?)
Maybe the NSF can fund a grant to find out. |
