Ah, Harvard, how far you’ve fallen.
“Harvard president criticized for remarks”
Teen-Talk Barbie was unavailable for comment.
Open mouth, insert foot
1 TrackBack
…relatively speaking, of course, compared to certain other world leaders. Indisputably, the looniest of them all is North Korean despot Kim Jong-il, who recently launched a campaign to ensure that his country’s citizenry is neatly groomed (... Read More
Man, that’s dumb. I think that’s a subject worth looking into. Obviously there is a difference between men and women no matter how much anyone tries to prove otherwise, and maybe this difference sublimially or conciously affects women in the work place.
I’m a woman… and sometimes women just frustrate me.
This is a tough one, and there is a very good chance that the comments made by President Summers were taken out of context, still though…
I’m not sure that the problem with his talk was that he recognized that there are differences between the genders (which there most definitely are), it is that his comments seemed to make generalizations which reinforced stereotypes that many women in math and science-related fields have been struggling to overcome (for example, men are better at math and science, woman are better-suited to the humanities and the creative fields).
I am really wary about “Nature versus nurture” studies like the type he is proposing, especially when they confuse correlative results with causative ones. I can’t see how you would gather a representative sample for such a study that’s not tainted, and a flawed study does more harm than good if it unnecessarily discourages one member of a particular gender from pursuing a field or feeds prejudice that acts as a barrier to an individual’s advancement in a field dominated by the opposite gender.
BTW, I myself was a humanities major who flunked college calculus (math bored me, so I never went to class), and I am now graphic artist and web developer.
I just came across a comment on Fark about this that I liked—for any given trait, the variation within a gender is much greater than the variation between genders. Hmmmmm. I wonder how much truth there is to that.