|
Looking to the Future, Remembering the Past
Alyson Zureick
I was in my senior year of high school, when, as a friend and I worked with a problem set for our AP Physics class, he took advantage of a lull in the conversation to suggest that women just weren’t successful in math and science and this could very well have to do with certain “innate” differences between the sexes.
That friend didn’t get my help with the rest of the problem set. Instead, I remember walking out of study hall, clutching my AP physics and calculus books to my chest and biting back an angry response. To hear my friend argue about these supposedly “innate” differences brought back something I had heard time and time again growing up: “You’re a girl: it’s ok if you can’t do math.”
I couldn’t help but remember that debate, now years gone by, when I first heard about Harvard President Lawrence Summers’s speculations on why men vastly outnumber women in top academic positions in the sciences and engineering. Again, my pulse began to rise. I felt tense. Summers’s comments seemed so strange, so anachronistic, yet at the same time so painfully familiar.
Summers’ comments have produced—-to put it lightly—-strong reactions from women across the country. His statement even elicited a response from President Tilghman and the presidents of Stanford and MIT. Interestingly enough, Tilghman’s response did not attempt to dispute Summers’s suggestion that biological differences could potentially explain some of the disparity between the numbers of men and women at the top of the sciences and engineering. Instead, she brought him to task for not doing more to ease the burden faced by professional women in these fields, many of whom face a daunting academic workload as well as primary responsibilities at home.
The first paragraph of the statement released by Tilghman and the two other presidents reads, “Harvard President Lawrence Summers’s recent comments about possible causes of the under-representation of women in science and engineering have generated extensive debate and discussion—-much of which has had the untoward effect of shifting the focus of the debate to history rather than to the future.”
Tilghman was right to point to the future and to the policies that can be implemented now to ease the burdens placed on working women around the country. These women, whether they be tenure-track professors or working-class service providers, desperately need better sources of child care and some sort of paid leave to help them care for their children. To focus exclusively on biological differences is to draw attention away from all of the concrete things we can do now to help women balance work and family demands.
But is it really such a good idea to completely dismiss the past? In the wake of Summers’s comments, many women are articulating the reasons why we need to look to the future. Yet many of them are scared to say why they also feel the need to look to the past. Why are women—-many of whom do not feel that biological differences between the sexes should be dismissed outright as valid areas of study-—not just offended but patently angered and disturbed by Summers’ comments?
The truth is, Summers hit a nerve with women because the sort of research he suggested is hardly new and rarely has been non-partisan.
People have been trying to study the “innate differences” between the sexes for centuries. Yet this legacy of exploration has often been accompanied by its less appealing twin: scientific sexism. The history of sexism (and racism as well) is littered with studies in the natural and social sciences that endeavored to prove that women were unsuited to certain professions and ways of life. Many of these studies gained currency in their societies and contributed to longstanding practices off discrimination against women. Even today, there are studies that, while eventually discredited, remain legitimate in the public at large and continue to shape the reality in which we live. The notorious and in many ways discredited book The Bell Curve, for example, which explores levels of intelligence between different ethnic groups, was published as recently as 1994, and one of its authors, Charles Murray, popped up again in The New York Times after Summers’s comments hit the national media.
It is one thing to explore biological differences between the sexes, but it is quite another to make that leap from biological differences as an existing phenomenon to biological differences as the cause of certain social differences. Drawing connections between these two phenomena is a tricky task because socialization is such a complex process. Where exactly does biology end and socialization begin? Does any clear line actually exist?
When many women react strongly to Summers, they are reacting against an ideology that has, time and time again, been used to justify inequality between women and men, blacks and whites. While there are biological differences between the sexes, crossing the gap between biology and sociology opens up a chasm of uncertainty, a space in which biased and dubious studies can gain legitimacy in the population at large. But women are not merely subjects of study or numbers on a page. They are human beings, and the results of social-scientific study will have an impact on the world they live in, the opportunities available to them and the expectations others have for them.
There is a fear among many of the women with whom I have spoken that in this case, statistics and scientific data could stop being fluid and debatable entities (because, as any good statistician will tell you, statistics cannot actually prove very much) and instead become authoritative descriptive statements about what women are. Once again, women are thought of in terms of biology instead of sociology.
I am not suggesting we should live in a world where the PC-police descend on every stray remark that seems to have even the slightest possibility of offending someone. The recent backlash against Summers’s comments—-with some Harvard faculty recently suggesting a vote of confidence on him—-has admittedly been extreme. Intellectual and scientific exploration, as well as free speech in general, must be encouraged. And who knows, such studies could very well prove that the biological differences between men and women actually have little impact upon women’s performances in math, science and engineering.
At the same time, any call for such research must be accompanied by a word of caution. Scientific studies have been used for centuries to restrict women in certain ways, and there is no reason to believe that this cannot happen again today. While intellectual exploration is valuable and important, women are not merely academic data to be carelessly tossed around. Scientific studies must always be taken with a grain of salt and should not be used to justify some sort of static definition of what a woman “is” and what she can do.
It is laudable that prominent women like President Tilghman are speaking up about working women’s needs. However, the other side of this debate—-certain women’s ambivalence toward this sort of scientific exploration—-should not be silenced. Theirs is a concern that springs from a history of discrimination and scientific abuse; we must remember that now more than ever, so that whatever studies are undertaken today will not repeat a sadly recent history of discrimination and sexism.
Alyson Zureick is a Politics major from Cincinnati, Ohio. She is an officer
with the Organization of Women Leaders.
| 