Ah. Barbie was right: Math is hard.
And has it ever occurred to you that people think in particular ways because they are trained to do so?
Since I read your opinionist (and, like her, I couldn't believe she wrote that column either), I'd like you to read mine, someone who interviewed both the chairwoman of Harvard's task force on women in science and engineering and a woman on the Harvard faculty with a PhD in genetics. An excerpt:
Barbara Grosz, chair of the Harvard task force on women in science and engineering, recaps the argument with some exasperation: "The criticism of Summers's talk was not that the ideas he expressed were politically incorrect, but that they were just plain incorrect." How come, she wonders, when Summers talks he's being open-minded and provocative, but when his challengers offer a spirited rebuttal they're accused of trampling on academic freedom?
This is especially ironic since the campus-wide rap, expressed at yet another testy faculty encounter Tuesday, is that Summers never listens and brooks no criticism.
Hopkins, a Harvard PhD and one of 15 senior women scientists who got neighboring MIT to fess up to gender bias, describes the weirdness of being attacked as antiresearch or even antigenetics. "I'm a geneticist," she says, "but the genetics of career choices is just lunacy. We are nowhere near the research on innate differences. But we do know the attitudes that hold people back. When you eliminate the discrimination that says only boys can do math, then we'll talk."
Meanwhile, she shares the deep frustration of women scientists who find themselves back to square one, having to prove that women can so do science. Let's see now, women had only 2.4 percent of the physics PhDs in 1970 but 18 percent in 2003. Is that evolution on steroids?
It takes a while to reverse attitudes, especially ones that have been around for millennia. How do the grey-matter gurus explain the women with physics PhDs? Oh, yes. Not all women are map handicapped. Just most. I wonder if they've done a study on men asking for directions.