Does the Right agree that girls are biologically unfit for science?
Alert your daughter.
From the lower third of the article to which you linked, with emphasis added by me:
Several, including Barbara J. Grosz, chairwoman of a new task force on women in science and engineering, called on Dr. Summers to release a transcript of his remarks about science and women. Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology, said, "President Summers appears to be apologizing profusely, yet he refuses to release for honest discussion his actual remarks." The result was that commentators have cast his critics as "unreasonable opponents of academic inquiry and openness," with Harvard "ridiculed as a center of close-minded political correctness."
Professors demanding to see primary source documents as the basis for discussion? Shocking!
Rather than the notion that the female brain is somehow not wired properly for science (Dr. Summers's quaint suggestion), columnist Ellen Goodman draws another conclusion, which has more to do with time management, how we as a society have organized the workplace, and how the academic career path of tenure has adapted to it. An excerpt from the column, which can be found here:
[Berkeley Dean Mary Ann Mason's] analysis of 160,000 Ph.D.s showed that having children early in their careers was a boon for men and a bust for women. Fathers who had children within five years of their Ph.D. were more likely to get tenure-track jobs than other men, but mothers were less likely than either fathers or other women. As for women who got on the tenure track before the baby track? Only one in three ever became mothers.
Right now, the big flap in the land of academia is over Harvard President Larry Summers' off-the-cuff and off-the-wall remarks about women and science. He wondered aloud whether innate gender differences were one reason women weren't getting ahead in the sciences.
I am not sure Summers' recurring bouts of foot-in-mouth disease are based in nature or nurture. Is there a gaff gene? But what slid by with little fuss was this economist's other explanation for science and gender inequity: the conflict between motherhood and the "80 hour week." He made it sound as if the weighty work week was genetically programmed.
Higher education is a laboratory where all the contemporary problems of work and family get distilled. The average graduate student gets a doctorate at around age 33 and makes tenure by 40. As Mason says, "The 30s are the make-it-or-break-it decade with everything colliding at once." Moreover, in the academy, the rule is up or out, publish or perish, tenure or bye-bye. Do I hear a biological clock ticking?
Goodman, Ellen. "Can Women Have It All?" The Boston Globe, Opinion/Op-Ed, 23 Jan 2005
She goes on to say that Nancy Hopkins, a professor at MIT, also walked out on Summers's original remarks. His recognition, negative though it is, has reached beyond Harvard.
Workers seldom turn on a well-liked and effective boss because of one gaffe. The faculty meeting described in the NYT article was the flashpoint for a litany of complaints.
Do you think that remarks by the president of a university stating that women are not cut out for science are not grounds for complaint by its faculty? Do you think that this president not releasing the full text of his remarks for discussion is conducive to open debate on their content, which is the academy's stock in trade?
Welcome to Barbie University, where Math Is Hard.