Re: Harvard Pres: Women Lack Ability In Math, Sciences

From: Jo Schaper (joschapern4ospam_at_2socketdot.no5net)
Date: 01/19/05 

Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:53:18 -0600

As a woman apparently lacking the genetic abilities under discussion, I
would advise the men in this discussion to take the time to find out
what Mr. Harvard President Sir actually said, (at least as reported in
the news media):

Please read:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/education/19harvard.html
No transcript of his exact words are available.

He is quoted for three ways which women may be unfit for these professions:

1) Reluctance of married women with children to work long (some articles
say 80-hour) workweeks in pursuit of their vocation;

2) That innate sex-related/genetic differences make women less capable
of math or science; or

3)That they are still discriminated against because of their gender.

To refute these remarks:

1) Is undoubtably true of both women and men with families, who value
their spouses, children and own productive lives both at and away from
their vocation. Both math and science can be harsh masters and
mistresses. While hard work is necessary for success in any endeavor,
this stereotype of the brilliant mathematician/scientist with no time
for anything but work is false--One need go no further than Einstein and
his violin, or Richard Feynmann and his theater and drums to note that
a) home life suffers greviously in the case of many so called
'brilliant' people; b) recreation is necessary to all humans to keep
from going crazy. No one can be a genius 24/7 for 70 years on end and c)
if there are children, someone must mind them, whether parent or nanny,
or the kids turn out badly.

2) This is an easy remark to make, but a hard one to substantiate. Also,
   math and science, though both use numbers, are not equal. My best
friend in grade school excelled in math, but had no use for science. I
excelled in science, but math has always been a harder row to hoe. It's
not 'socialization pressure', nor genetics which cause women to back off
from math or science--it's the textbooks, the pedagogy, and the teachers
along the way.

Children of either gender will be drawn to study what interests them.
You can make a million gender-neutral textbooks about girls building
rocketships and calculating trajectories, or figuring baseball
statistics, and you're just not gonna 'win the audience' except of a
very few. Face it, most math texts don't explain "why" something is, or
how it go to be that way--they just throw a lot of squiggles at you and
say, if you do thus and so to the squiggles, you win. Math and science
texts (especially physics) are full of discrete examples whose contexts
boys are already familiar with--throwing balls, building things from
wood, making electrical circuits and so forth. Math books are written by
men (for the most part) for boys, using examples out of their own
boyhood. These fellows' idea of humanizing a text is throwing in clipart
of old famous white dead mathematicians in wigs. I can recall several
word problems in probability I couldn't do-- I could do the math all
right, but didn't understand how one played some game (I think it was
figuring canasta hands) and without known the distribution of the hands,
I was clueless. But hey, I'm a woman. I *asked* somebody to help me! *|;-)

I'd love to see a generation of boys raised on math books with examples
of calculating how to make a creme rinse from its basic components, how,
given X amount of prepared food, to redivide it evenly when unexpected
dinner guests arrive,or how to even out 'playtime' with an even set of
dolls, and an odd set of girls. How about the spatial calculus involved
when figuring out how much material in 30 inch wide yards has to be
purchased to most efficiently yield the irregular pieces needed to sew a
Halloween costume. Hey, it's math, right? There are plenty of 'spatially
literate' men who haven't a clue how to take a Dutch cut out of a ***
of rectangular paper, much less to cut and sew a shirt while wasting
only minimal cloth.

Part of the answer to 'girls don't understand math and science' is yes
they do, but the questions they find interesting are different, and
often defined by men as uninteresting. Girls and women are not
stupid--they're less likely than men to get fixated, and beat their
heads to a bloody pulp on a lost cause. They just go around the problem,
which often means abandoning both math and science.

3) The glass ceiling still exists, for one reason: Ambitious men are
defined as go-getters and successes. Ambitious women who do not become
pseudo-men are defined by society as bitches (or worse). If one wants to
be a whirlwind of successful genius, people's feelings are deemed
irrelevant--it's a pursuit of a dream or an idea to the kill. That is
seen as acceptable in men, but not in women. One need go no further than
a person whom even Mr. Summers would call a female genius--Marie
Sklodowska Curie--who was nearly denied her second Nobel in 1911 because
of a morals charge. (Marie Curie--A Life, by Susan Quinn) Imagine a
widowed male genius being in the same predicament because of an affair.
Preposterous!

Yes, there are women who love math, and love science and excel at both
(or if they don't excel, they can quite capably do what has to be done
to get to the point they need to be.) Or maybe they just redefine the
problem, and discover new things instead.

In any event, Mr Harvard President Sir has apparently decided to eat his
words, buttered and with honey on them, via his retraction:

http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/womeninscience.html

Now--whose made the more logical argument here...the several handfuls of
male posters gesticulating at each other, or me, who is of the gender
incapable of math, science, or analysis?

I rest my case.
Jo

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