Opinion
President Summers' remarks offer global 'teachable
moment'
By Denice Denton
Forty leading scholars attended the National Bureau of Economic
Research conference entitled Diversifying the Science
and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities
and Their S&E Careers and I was privileged to be among
them. Dr. Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard, presented
a talk at this meeting entitled Women and Minority Faculty.
President Summers indicated that he was not speaking as the
president of Harvard and that he hoped to be provocative. It
appears that he failed in reaching the first objective, but
has achieved great success in the second. As has been widely
reported, President Summers stated that there is an absence
of women from high-powered jobs in the sciences. There is evidence
to the contrary.
In fact, myriad women are at the top in their fields. Examples:
the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine this year went to
Dr. Linda Buck of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
and the University of Washington; as of next month, four of
the ten campuses of the University of California system will
be led by women scientists.
Many of the related articles and commentaries that have appeared
in the past two weeks have focused on the wrong issues: the
question of whether there are innate differences
between men and women and the defense of academic freedom. Yes,
there are biological differences between women and men, and,
yes, freedom of speech and academic freedom are core values
for all of us. However, what really matters here is that we
must actively tap all the talent among our population
to successfully address the major global challenges that we
face.
The key point is that the United States is facing a crisis
of global economic competitiveness. It is essential that we
draw on all the human capital in this country. We simply cannot
afford to shut out more than half the population from the kind
of work that will power California's -- and our country's --
economy and enhance our competitive edge. To this end, presidents
of our most highly respected universities have a responsibility
to provide leadership nationally at this critical time. And
Harvard has a special responsibility to lead, because of its
unique place in higher education. All of us dedicated to equal
opportunity would expect no less.
Finally, in the spirit of free intellectual exchange, I hope
to shed light on the nature of the reaction by academics to
President Summers at the meeting. In short, he did not present
rigorous and supportable hypotheses. First, he proposed that
women's unwillingness or inability to work 80-hour weeks precludes
us from reaching the most prestigious positions in our society.
Second, he hypothesized that the reasons for differences in
ability and interest among men and women cannot be ascribed
to sex-role socialization. And third, he posited that discrimination
in the science and engineering workplace may not exist.
Some of us at the meeting challenged President Summers' hypotheses
on the following grounds. The notion that plum positions require
an 80-hour workweek, and that many women are unwilling or unable
to commit to this for a variety of reasons, is an outdated mythology
that is unsubstantiated. The hypothesis that nature trumps nurture
every time is supported neither by the research reported at
the conference nor by many of the results that have been reported
in the popular press in the last two weeks. President Summers'
hypothesis, based on economic models, that discrimination in
the science and engineering workplace may no longer exist is
unequivocally refuted by research and by my own actual experiences
and those of numerous others.
The good news is that the international reaction to President
Summers' statements represents a global teachable moment.
Individuals and organizations around the world are revisiting
the issue of equal representation of women and minorities in
science and engineering. Many are learning more about and doing
more in this important arena. For example, President Summers
and the Harvard faculty are developing plans to address the
recruitment and retention of women faculty. I applaud the promise
by President Summers to reverse the precipitous drop in offers
of tenure to women in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and
wish him and my colleagues at Harvard every success in this
endeavor. The whole world is watching to see how this story
unfolds.
Denice Denton is currently dean of the College of Engineering
at the University of Washington. On February 14, she will become
the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Santa
Cruz.
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