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

From: Jo Schaper (joschapern4ospam_at_2socketdot.no5net)
Date: 01/20/05 

Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 03:02:11 -0600

Jayne Kulikauskas wrote:

>
>>"George" <george@wtfiswrongwithyou.com> wrote in message

<Bunch of stuff snipped>

> > But don't take my word for it. Here are the word of someone who knows
> what the
>
>>hell she is talking about, because she both is a scientist and a teacher,
>
> and a
>
>>very well respected member of the scientific community. She has been
>
> monitoring
>
>>these posts in another newsgroup, and decided to put in her two cents
>
> worth:
>
>>"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.
>
>
> I thought this account seemed like an even-handed one:
> http://www.marinij.com/Stories/0,1413,234~24410~2659688,00.html

Your story also came from a NY Times reporter. This thread came into
s.g.g. already in progress so I had to go find what people were talking
about, since it had already escalated almost into chaos. The one I cited
was also the most even-handed one I could find.

>
> <begin quote>He discussed several factors that could help explain the
> underrepresentation of women. The first factor, he said, according to
> several participants, was that top positions on university math and
> engineering faculties require extraordinary commitments of time and energy,
> with many professors working 80-hour weeks in the same punishing schedules
> pursued by top lawyers, bankers and executives. Few married women with
> children are willing to accept such sacrifices, he said.
>
> Hopkins said yesterday, "I didn't disagree, but didn't like the way he
> presented that point, because I like to work 80 hours a week, and I know a
> lot of women who work that hard."
>
> In citing a second factor, Summers cited research showing that more high
> school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on
> standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the
> possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences
> between the sexes.<eq>

I was deliberately ignoring the remarks of the female attendees, because
  they expressed their disapproval, but didn't add anything
particularily to what Mr. Summers is alleged to have said.

>
>>He is quoted for three ways which women may be unfit for these
>
> professions:
>
> He described 3 possible factors that could account for women's
> underrepresentation in these professions. He never said anything about
> women being unfit.
>
>
>>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.
>
>
> Could you give some references to support this claim please? (Preferably
> web-based since I don't want to drive to the university library in all this
> snow.)
>

Which claim? That my best friend excelled in math, and I in science?
About the textbooks, the teaching methods and the teachers? I made no
claims in my essay that this was scientific, statistically normed
research. This has been my experience, in my first 16 year trip through
the US education system, and then another 4 year stint to complete a
second degree 25 years later. I have always held non-traditional jobs,
and have been notoriously immune to socialization pressure since about
the age of 10. I do what I want to do, and gender stereotypes can go
hang for all I care. I've had one professor who told the class the first
day that the women could leave because he didn't believe women should be
college-educated. I stayed. I've had female professors who have made it
doubly hard on the women, because they know it's a rough world out
there. I worked side by side with blue-collar printers for 20 years, and
have hung out with geologists of all stripes for about the same time.

My statement is my opinion, based on my experience. I endured the math
textbooks for two go rounds. And was very disappointed in the late '90s
to see that the celebrated 'gender-neutral' texts were still the same
old story, with fingernail polish applied over a few of the word
problems.

>>George's comment - (I later pointed out to her that the textbooks,
>
> pedagogy, and
>
>>the teachers are all part of the soclialization pressure, to which she
>
> agreed).
>
>>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.
>
>
> And why aren't girls familiar with these contexts? Because they are usually
> not interested in these things. Doesn't this suggest some innate
> differences to you.

No. As a matter of fact, I shot off baking-soda rockets, worked in my
dad's basement shop running the power tools and building boxes and
boats, played sandlot ball, and put together impossible contraptions
with an Erector Set. I even built plastic models of the U-505 and the
Starship Enterprise. I did not care one whit about baseball statistics,
(nor movie stars) but saw my brother read the Sporting News and memorize
stats at the same time I was memorizing things like the color, luster,
hardness and fracture of minerals, or worked with my chemistry set, and
grew copper sulfate crystals on my windowsill. I also cooked in my
Easy-Bake Oven, played with Barbies and the girls on the street, largely
because pre-adolescent boys were cruel, and would hurt you if they
could. My earliest experience with 'socialization' was being taken by
the teacher from the blocks and trucks to the play kitchen (repeatedly)
in kindergarten.There was a boy there who liked the kitchen because he
liked food, and he got shuffled to the trucks and blocks. (He's probably
a famous chef now.) I retaliated by 'opting out'--getting crayons and
paper and drawing so I didn't have to go to the kitchen. Had enough
kitchen chores (like table-setting and dishes) to do when I was home,
anyway--but my brothers too, did dishes. This was before feminism. And a
good thing, as none of them have ever married, so they have to do housework.

Most girls I knew (in the late 60s-early 70s) 'were' interested that I
did such different things, but they had mothers who were more interested
in them becoming 'ladies' than real people. The mothers were also afraid
of power saws and chemistry sets, and their girls were forbidden to
partake. Heaven knows what the twenty-something and early
thirty-something females now are into. Those I had as students weren't
domestically trained. I think they must be into media hype, because all
I ever heard about were shopping, Hollywood celebrities, clothes and
money. But those (plus sports) were all I heard from the male students.
Precious few of them (either gender), seemed really into a hobby, or
their studies.
>
>>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! *|;-)
>
>
> This has not been my personal experience of math texts. Do you have some
> references that indicate your experience is the norm?

I don't claim my experience is the norm, and I never stated that I was
either omniscient or infallible. However, before I made that statement,
I dug up all my recent math texts (community college intermediate
algebra through stats and Calc II). I also made a cursory examination of
the other math texts I have in my library. Not a single one has a female
author. The trig and calc books even have some of same problems (with
the same numbers)(!) as my husband's college trig and calc books from
the early 1980s. They aren't even by the same authors. The only material
difference is that his books have trig and log tables and problems in
degrees, and mine don't, but have calculator and electronic graphing
exercises, and trig problems in radians. I suspect some of the calc
problems may have been written by Newton himself. *|;-)

Oh, and his books do not have the dead mathematicians. But they do have
explanations of procedures in plain English paragraphs, explaining not
only what to do, and how to do it, but also the historical significance
of the usage of the procedure in a practical application. I often went
back to his text for that reason alone. Mine just have diagrams and
bullet points and equation problems, except for the word problems,
which, as I stated are at least 80% drawn from experiences most common
to boys or men.

Here's an example: the row the boat across the river problem, in which
you are to row your boat at W speed perpendicular to the shore when the
current is moving at X speed and you are attempting to intersect a
landing on the other shore at point Y, Z feet downstream. What speed do
you need to row your boat?
  Now, this sounds like a straightforward rate problem. However, if you
have ever canoed in a current, it is the stupidest problem on the
planet, because a) the current in a river is not uniform, but has a
channel and eddies, b) only an idiot would try to row *directly* across
a current, c) you cannot accurately measure the speed of your rowing
across such a small distance, and d) your speed will be variable,
anyway. So what is the point? Now, that may be the difference between a
thinking or a non-thinking brain, or some may say a male and female one.

Why not make a realistic problem, not one where your answer will be
false because it is based on untrue assumptions? But,aha, you aren't
supposed to get a realistic answer, you are supposed to get the right
one, calculated by ignoring the way the river, the boat, and the person
actually work. If I had never canoed, I'd say, gee, it's a vector
problem, and put the right numbers in the right squiggles and the
teacher would be happy. But the boat would still end up somewhere else.

>
>
>>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.
>
>
> Apparently you think that they would do badly. Why would you love to see
> boys doing badly? I would love to see education that allows both sexes to
> do their best.

No, they would not do badly if they look at the problems the same way
the male authors are expecting females to look at current problems in
jet-plane impact energy releases, flying cannonballs, air-traffic
control patterns, load-bearing capacities, antenna-erecting and
miscellaneous other construction projects. That is--ignore the subject
and concentrate on the numbers. Perhaps that is the problem. Since it is
obvious most math problem solutions have little relation to real world
solutions you are liable to encounter yourself, it is more difficult to
concentrate on their solution. Of course, the only thing more gender
neutral and mind numbing that this are pages and pages of
differentiations and integrations with no context whatsoever.
>
>
>>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.
>
>
> Neither do I have a clue about this. I do not think that I ever encountered
> a math problem as much outside my experience as your sewing examples.

Well, someone's got to figure out how much material it takes to
economically make a dress pattern. Dutch cuts are common in printing; it
just means getting another piece out of an 'odd' scrap of leftover,
thereby maximizing your use of 17x22 or 24x36 parent *** of paper.
This is actually easy, but you have to visualize what you are doing
before you start cutting the stock. Just the same as Michelangelo had to
cut away everything which wasn't David. I think spatial thinking is a
teachable (and learnable) skill. Neither the young men nor women were
very good at it until I showed them with real world examples. And 3-D
thinking is essential in geology, because you are working with 3-D
concepts. Actually, you gotta throw time in there as well, making it 4-D
at least. Just about any manual skill (especially in arts/crafts)
requires some 3-D thinking ability. But it does not necessarily require
math or science to comprehend it.

>
>
>>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.
>
>
> Western education systems has been greatly influenced by women in general
> and feminists in particular for the past couple decades. I find it
> implausible that men are defining the questions in math and science.

In my experience, this statement is simply flat wrong. Of course, we
really don't have many feminists (whatever they are) around here,
either. Women may be a lot of the elementary grade teachers, but most
administration, school boards, college trustees, principals, educational
consultants, math and science teachers and professors and therefore
textbook writers are still overwhelmingly male in my part of the world.

>
>
>>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!
>
>
> Not in 1911. People took sexual morals, even men's, pretty seriously back
> then.

Perhaps you need to reread some of your history books, if you do not
believe in a double standard for gender behavior, both then and now.
(Hollywood excepted--those folks have no standards, regardless of their
gender.) Men have always gotten away with much more than women, and had
people think not much less of them for it--as the saying goes--wink,
wink, nudge, nudge. People may have publicly been Victorian, but there
was just as much scandal then as there is now, or will be in the future.
People's behavior doesn't change--just society's assessment of it. True,
people in 1911 had to have a better public persona than they do now,
when scandal entertains the masses on TV. But women had to have a much
better pattern of public behavior than men to stay in societal good
graces. Even today.

  Or just look in the morning news. Heck, a big honcho for a securities
firm here just 'voluntarily retired' for nearly the same crime and at
the same level of culpability as Martha Stewart. He's remaining a
partner in the firm, and she's in jail. Now, I'm not even close to being
a Martha fan, but there is no doubt she obtained her fame and fortune
whilst being 'uppity', and that's her major crime. Otherwise sauce for
the goose would be sauce for the gander.

>
>
>>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
>
>
> This is clearly not a retraction. It is a statement that his comments were
> misunderstood. He says in this statement exactly what he was saying all
> along.

   I disagree. Along with other hats, I've done some work in public
relations (I have one of those dire liberal arts degrees, too.)
'Misunderstood' is a waffle-word for retraction, when saying
'retraction' would cause the person to lose face. This is the Harvard
Office of the President trying to 'spin' what he said into something
acceptable.

>
> Your argument is a refutation of Lawrence Summers' alleged claim that women
> are unfit for math and science professions. However, he did not claim that.
> You apparently created a misrepresentation of his view in order to refute
> it. In other words, you have committed the straw man fallacy. Since your
> entire argument is a logical fallacy, it is not logical at all.

Oh, please... I don't believe that for a minute. Part of the difficulty
with the entire issue (from a journalism perspective) is without a
transcript of his remarks, NONE of us know what the man actually said,
just what is reported that he said. All those reports are colored with
biases. Now, you've said, 'well, he didn't say that'. But you have no
proof either, as there is no transcript. I gathered as much gist, as
well as I could, from as many sources as I could muster, going back to
the earliest web reports, and only those from reputable newspapers
(Boston Globe, New York Times included). My response was to the thread
as it appeared (truncated) on s.g.g. and all the people signing their
names with masculine first names, who were ranting uncontrollably about
women being genetically unfit for math or science. That's it. I'm not on
some social crusade, one way or the other.

> I would also like to note that it seems inaccurate to characterize my posts
> on this subject as "gesticulating at each other".

None of your posts before this one were propagated to s.g.g. Therefore
you could not have possibly been included in my original conclusion.

best wishes
Jo