Opinion : Women in Science

One of the things that has come to my attention repeatedly in recent weeks are the comments made by Harvard president Larry Summers. In short, he said that there may be physiological differences in women that make them not want to go into academic sciences and possibly not be as good at them. Now this pissed off feminists everywhere and caused a big public commotion, with many people twisting his words in different directions. But instead of looking at the actual quotes (which you can interpret for yourself), lets look at the bigger issue he brings up.

First of all, there is a huge difference between the number of men and women in the sciences; the higher you go, the bigger the difference. Almost 70% of engineering students at some schools(including mine if you take out biomed.) are male (and more than 80% of the faculty). This is made worse by the fact that in most other majors, and in college overall, women outnumber men(and by a wide margin BU). So the obvious question is why?, followed by , what can we do about it? Now this is what was bothering Summers, and I have to assume that he considered and ruled out many factors. So he did what any good academic would do, he suggested more research and studies in the areas that he thought might be the problem. So why do women not go into science and why do the ones who do rarely succeed at the highest levels? Now this is a difficult question because there are no obvious answers. Outright discrimination was ended many years ago, before any current students were even born. All schools and employers in these fields are equal opportunity (if not affirmative action). Maybe pressure from friends or relatives is a factor for children, but certainly not in advanced college levels. Some (mostly feminists) say that its partly because women are having children during prime period for advancing their careers, but I see no reason why you can’t be creative or do math while you are pregnant. That doesn’t seem to be a problem for women in fields such as writing or psychology either. So that leaves us to consider that maybe its because women just don’t do as well on technical tasks or find them as interesting, and this could clearly be tied to a known difference between men and women: physiology

Clearly, men and women are different. There are genetic differences (in one pair of chromosomes) that make us who we are. And since most genes in humans are expressed in the brain, there will necessarily be differences in the way we think, feel, and act. It is rather obvious that men and women act differently. Not all men have exactly the same personality, but there are certain things they share that would distinguish them from any woman. Moreover, while no one will dispute emotional differences, it has always been held sacred that intellectually, men and women are the same. Summers suggested (and I will second) that probably they are not, and that this is the reason for the difference we see in the sciences. This would make sense, and good questions lead to good science. Unfortunately feminists have effectively blocked all research into this area for years, and look what a controversy erupted when research into it was even suggested. I personally think that we would find some correlation between male development and spatial vs. verbal reasoning differences. Knowing the underlying causes would probably give us the necessary insight to correct the problem, but instead we seem destined to continue on in ignorance.

The negative publicity surrounding this issue is pretty much going to stop anyone from studying these problems. This will allow Political-Correctness activists and feminists to continue to impose their baseless ideology on science. Ironically, this will probably hurt their efforts to bring about equality to the field itself.