Women just as smart as men
Friends of ours had two boys and then boy-girl twins. Before long, the girl was saying whole sentences (“Mommy, I want my green shoes to go outside”) while her twin brother could only manage “donut.”
The mother told her pediatrician that her daughter was probably a genius and would require special training. The doctor’s pithy response: “What you have is a girl.”
We were reminded of this story when Harvard president Lawrence Summers touched off an academic firestorm by suggesting that “innate differences” between men and women might explain why males have stronger success rates in science and engineering.
All parents with offspring of both genders — including us — know two things: sex-based differences show up at an early age, and many of those differences favor females. Like our friends’ daughter, girls often say more, do more and understand more than their brothers. As Summers noted, they even play differently.
Steve was on the beach with our granddaughter when she started building a mound of sand around a rock. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Making the rock cozy,” she replied. Chances are that few little boys would give that answer. Perhaps that’s why the two best bosses we’ve ever had were both women, working mothers, and caring and considerate managers.
There are clearly obvious differences between the genders, then, but give us a break. They cannot justify the outrageous remarks by the president of the country’s most prestigious university. The notion that “innate differences” are keeping women out of the sciences is a major cop-out. Summers made a veiled but unmistakable suggestion: The poor dears just don’t have the brainpower for really heavy academic lifting.
However, this mess might have a beneficial effect. The fallout on campus was so ferocious that the president announced he would look for ways to improve the status of women at Harvard.
This is not a matter of political correctness or quotas or affirmative action. It is a matter of accuracy and equity. Women don’t need any special help, they just need an equal chance.
That’s what happened a generation ago when colleges went to sex-blind admissions. Undergraduate classes went from 42 percent female in 1970 to 57 percent today. The change has been even more striking in professional schools. Thirty-five years ago women accounted for 5 percent of all law students and 8 percent of medical students. Now gender ratios are about equal.
The real problem areas remain math and science, and here, the blame clearly rests with lower expectations and the “institutional culture.” Professor C. Megan Urry, who teaches physics and astronomy at Yale, cites a study in which men were asked to grade mathematics papers on a 5-point scale. They rated the papers a full point higher when they thought the author was male instead of female.
The New York Times reported on a recent Princeton study in which students were asked to choose between two candidates for an engineering job. One had a better education while the other had better work experience, and when both were men, the students preferred the educated applicant three out of four times. But when the more educated contender was given a female name, she was picked less than half the time.
So Summers, despite himself, has made a useful contribution. More attention has been focused on the achievements of women and the obstacles that remain in their path. But it’s both sad and stunning that suggestions of female inferiority can still be taken seriously in a great American university.
As our daughter, a journalist who covers science and technology, told us, “I can’t believe we’re dealing with this kind of craziness in 2005.” But we are, even among “the best and the brightest.”
Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by e-mail at svroberts@aol.com.