In his speech, while president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers opened up the debate of why women are underrepresented in positions in the science and engineering fields. He justified his thoughts with three hypotheses: 1. The high-powered job hypothesis, 2. Different availability of aptitude at the high end, 3. Different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. To explain these three hypothesis further he is basically saying woman are more inclined than men to find jobs that have a balance of work and family life. The second hypothesis, which heated the debate, was that in tests of math and science aptitude the distribution curves are different between men and women. In addition, Summer’s is saying that women are socialized to be less competitive than men. In the article “Harvard Prez’s Admission: Men and Women Are Different,” Linda Chavez makes the argument that as heated as Lawrence Summer’s speech may have been, should his idea that differences exist between men and women when it comes to math and science be correct? In her article Chavez states, “Boys outnumber girls in remedial reading classes—by large ratios, in most studies—but they are even more likely to outnumber girls among the most gifted in math and science.” It was even shown in a study by Johns Hopkins University, “boys outperformed girls among the top scoring students on math by 13-to-1.” Chavez believes that although many people may not agree with Summer’s speech, he deserves high marks on this intriguing debate.
Chavez does an adequate job of presenting the counter argument with many concrete examples. She talks on how feminists have been trying to explain the reasoning behind the differences of men and women in science, one of their reasons being, “girls are not encouraged properly to pursue math and science.” She also goes on to give the example of Hopkins revealing gender discrimination in MIT in their actions of, “allotting them less lab space and giving them fewer plum assignments.” Would fault be brought in to the argument, regarding men and women in science, when bias is brought in to the picture? Are gender roles still a main issue in our world even though we are in the 21rst century?
I do not agree that men have any affect on a womans performance or intelligence. I single male sitting in a room at the same time as a female when she is taking a test is not going to change her scores. The comments made by Summers are very stereotypical and I do not believe they are accurate. Though women and men are different, they dont necessarilly perform differently on test based on gender.
ReplyDeleteSince Chavez is trying to say that men and women are different, then counterargument to this would be that men and women are not different. The statistics from this article are not very convincing. For example, the study done by John Hopkins University states that boys outperform girls among top scoring students on math 13-to-1.(pg 507) This evidence is not convincing and seems actually questionable. There is definitely not that big of a difference between men and women's smartness. This study makes it sound like girls can not even compete with men, Which is not true. This article might be more convincing if it used statics from across the country.
ReplyDeleteThis is a controversial topic but it is pretty well known that men are women both can excel or fail in any field. While this article says men are statistically smarter than women, there is knowledge that some of the smartest scientist and mathmetacians are women. It is also questionable whether a person's biology affects intelligence over socialization (507). It is difficult for an answer to be determined since it seems authors will always be biased on their opinion."
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Gender roles are still an issue in our world but not as big as it used to be. I believe that women can be as competitive as men in anything. I feel like this article is saying that anything women cannot do anything that men do. This is not true as in today's world they have men who are "stay at home moms," while the wife is the one making the living for the family. Even though women and men are genetically different I do feel like they do not perform differently when it comes to test and work.
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