The president of Harvard University has provoked a furore by arguing that men outperform women in maths and sciences because of biological difference, and discrimination is no longer a career barrier for female academics.
Lawrence Summers, a career economist who served as treasury secretary under former United States president Bill Clinton, has a reputation for outspokenness. His tenure at Harvard has been marked by clashes with African-American staff and leftwing intellectuals, and complaints about a fall in the hiring of women.
He made his remarks at a private conference on the position of women and minorities in science and engineering, hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
In a lengthy address delivered without notes, Dr Summers offered three explanations for the shortage of women in senior posts in science and engineering, starting with their reluctance to work long hours because of childcare responsibilities.
He went on to argue that boys outperform girls on high school science and maths scores because of genetic difference. ”Research in behavioural genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialisation weren’t due to socialisation after all,” he told the Boston Globe on Monday.
As an example, Summers told the conference about giving his daughter two trucks. She treated them like dolls, and named them mummy and daddy trucks, he said.
Summers also played down the impact of sex bias in appointments to academic institutions.
He said: ”The real issue is the overall size of the pool, and it’s less clear how much the size of the pool was held down by discrimination.”
At least half of his audience comprised women, several said they found the remarks offensive and one walked out.
”It was really shocking to hear the president of Harvard make statements like that,” said Denice Denton, who is about to become president of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Others said Summers’s comments were depressingly familiar. ”I have heard men make comments like this my entire life and quite honestly if I had listened to them I would never have done anything,” said Donna Nelson, a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma.
A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on Monday, or to release the transcript of Summers’s remarks. Richard Freeman, who invited the Harvard president to speak at the conference, said Summers’s comments were intended to provoke debate, and some women over-reacted.
”Some people took offence because they were very sensitive,” said Dr Freeman, an economist at Harvard and the London School of Economics. ”It does not seem to me insane to think that men and women have biological differences.”
During Summers’s presidency, the number of tenured jobs offered to women has fallen from 36% to 13%. Last year, only four of 32 tenured job openings were offered to women. – Guardian Unlimited Â