March 1st, 2005
Remarks by Harvard president supported by some experts
Highlight — Lawrence Summers could be right.
Quoting this AP/LiveScience story:
Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has suffered acrimonious condemnation, and may have jeopardized his job, for suggesting that the underrepresentation of women in engineering and some scientific fields may be due in part to inherent differences in the intellectual abilities of the sexes. But Summers could be right.
Comments on Remarks by Harvard president supported by some experts
Wow, I'm wondering whether your "But Summers could be right" comment is simply meant to be provocative, or whether you're advocating for that idea. If you are indeed advocating that position, I couldn't disagree with you more.
he could be right, just as well as he could be wrong. The fact that he's willing to go publicly advocate such a view without sound evidence (lets be clear here: there is evidence to support such a view; it is neither sound nor uncontested) leads me to believe this was indeed an egregious mistake; not just as a scientist, but as a member of the human species.
I still do not really understand why any individual would suspect such a position to be true, anyway. Why, do we have any reason to believe, that women are "less able" at a valued endeavour than men? Is it because we have some biological propensity to derogate and demean women?
It is a simple quote from the AP/Live Science story, that is of course meant to be provocative.
Hormones account towards behaviors, so it would be nuts to contest the role of sexual hormones in behaviors as a rule.
However, I'd tend to downgrade their impact, and argue that same-sex imitation and opposite-sex differentiation account to as much if not more behaviors. Thus, I'd tend to dismiss sex-specific behaviors as self-fulfilling prophecies to a very large extent.
In many ways, Summers' words remind me of those of Gustave Lebon, who labelled females as frivolous and compared the brighter ones to monstrous nature oddities.
Sorry, I missed the article you were pointing out, though I had read it previously.
I tend to agree with your analysis entirely. The research is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. For years many psychologists have believed that men were more intelligent. They've been looking for the evidence ever since. By now, one would suspect a more egaltarian approach.
Nono, it's my bad: My web site's stylesheet didn't make it obvious enough that I was citing the article. Hopefully, this is now corrected.