NOW Calls for Resignation of Harvard University's President

NOW Calls for Resignation of Harvard University President

January 20, 2005

The National Organization for Women calls for the resignation of Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who has failed to lead the prominent (and previously all-male) university toward true inclusion of women. His recent comments generated a firestorm of response from Harvard/Radcliffe women who were outraged that he would embarrass Harvard with such a public demonstration of sexism and ignorance.

"Summers' suggestion that women are inferior to men in their ability to excel at math and science is more than an example of personal sexism, it is a clue to why women have not been more fully accepted and integrated into the tenured faculty at Harvard since he has been president," said NOW President Kim Gandy. According to reports, the number of female faculty receiving tenure has declined over the past four years — down to just four of the last 32 tenure offers in the school's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

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"The women of Harvard — professors, students and alums — merit more than a belated and defensive 'I'm sorry,'" said Gandy. "How can they trust that Summers is committed to equality for women when he doesn't seem to believe that discrimination exists?"

In Summers' Jan. 14 remarks, he proposed that innate genetic differences between the sexes may be one explanation for why fewer women succeed in math and science careers. NOW applauds the women who challenged his comments at the conference and afterward. We thank the hundreds (if not thousands) of women who have written to newspapers and to Summers directly to set him straight about the challenges that face women in still-non-traditional fields.

"The notion that women are innately inferior to men is simply archaic," said Gandy. "For decades, women have been making dramatic advances in science and technology fields while negotiating a minefield of gender stereotypes and obstacles created by ignorance. It has been a rocky road, but women have risen to the challenge. It's time to remove the barriers, and one of them is Lawrence Summers."

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Literally every other female in the audience had no problem with the context, but the one that did went ballistic.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.

''Here was this economist lecturing pompously this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day," said Denton, the outgoing dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington. Next month, Denton will become the new head of UC Santa Cruz.

Besides Hopkins and Denton, the participants who criticized Summers to a Globe reporter were Anne C. Petersen, former deputy director of the National Science Foundation; Catherine Didion, former executive director of the Association for Women in Science; Donna J. Nelson, chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma; and Sheila Tobias, a feminist author and proponent of women in science.

The second point was that fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years. ''I said no one really understands why this is, and it's an area of ferment in social science," Summers said in an interview Saturday. ''Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren't" due to socialization after all.

This was the point that most angered some of the listeners, several of whom said Summers said that women do not have the same ''innate ability" or ''natural ability" as men in some fields.

Asked about this, Summers said, ''It's possible I made some reference to innate differences. . . I did say that you have to be careful in attributing things to socialization. . . That's what we would prefer to believe, but these are things that need to be studied."

We want our University president to lead the discussions on ways to overcome gender inequalities—not to offer ways to rationalize them. As the letter from the Standing Committee on Women told Summers, “your efforts to ‘provoke’ your audience did not serve our institution well.”

We are glad that Summers has offered an official apology and recognized his mistake, but, unfortunately, much of the damage to his reputation—and to the University’s—has already been done.

It would be foolish to deny that different people have different talents. You have only to look around at your fellow students to see that this is true in physics as in other human endeavors. Given the biological differences between men and women, it would be surprising if the distribution of talents were identical for women and for men, though we have no convincing evidence for important differences in the intellectual realm.

However, having taught physics for many years and having interacted with literally thousands of Harvard physics students, I can say some other things about the issue with equal confidence.

1 - Talent is not a unitary thing. It is multidimensional and difficult to measure or quantify precisely.

2 - Many different kinds of talents are critical to the advancement of physics or any other science interesting enough to be worth doing.

3 - The spread of talents within any group, sex, race, etc, is very large compared to any small average differences that may exist between such groups.

4 - Talent can to be developed and enhanced by education, encouragement, self-confidence and hard work.

For these reasons, I think that it is not particularly useful to talk about innate differences to explain the differences in representation of various groups in physics. Instead, I conclude that we need to try harder to teach science in a way that nourishes as many different skills as possible.

Don't these people read any history at all? Whenever some group is discriminated against by some other group, people inevitably suggest that the differences in situation can be traced to innate features distinguishing between the groups, and they are never right! If you would like to suggest that innate differences are responsible for some current discrepancies in people's fortunes, the minimal burden you face is to acknowledge that such explanations have been spectacular failures in similar circumstances throughout history, and explain why we have compelling reasons to think the situation is different this time. Maybe it is, but the presumption is strongly against you.

Systematic biases against women in science are real. I've talked about this before, so didn't think it was worth rehearsing, but apparently there are a lot of folks who don't quite see it. They must not be looking. It might be better to refer to "systematic biases" rather than "discrimination," because many of the pressures that work against women are brought to bear by men who have no idea that they are discriminating, and could even be said to have the best of intentions. The truth is that girls are dissuaded from pursuing science from almost the moment they are born, and the pressures are equally real at the university level. If the current differences in representation between men and women were due to innate differences, the U.S. wouldn't have such low numbers compared to other countries, and the numbers wouldn't actually be gradually but steadily increasing (as they are). There are very few role models for talented women students. There is a culture within science that stretches from offputting to downright misogynist. There are teachers in elementary and secondary schools that steer girls away from math and science. There are societal stereotypes that discourage women from pursuing scientific careers. There are many male professors who deep down just don't think that women are cut out for the job. The list of biases goes on and on, and only someone willfully blind or extraordinarily simplistic could miss them.