Professors criticize Harvard president's comments on gender

Harvard University President Lawrence Summers apologized for the third time Thursday after his suggestion of "innate" differences between men and women in math and science touched off a firestorm of criticism at Princeton and around the country.

"I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully," Summers wrote in a letter to the Harvard community. "I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women."

As the media frenzy continued, some female professors and administrators at Princeton joined their colleagues at Harvard in condemning the comments. Summers had already come under criticism for the steady decline in the proportion of tenure offers to women — to 11 percent last year from 37 percent in 2000-01 — that has occurred under his administration.

Maria Klawe, dean of Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science, called the remarks "irresponsible and damaging."

"They have added credibility to beliefs frequently held in our society that women are less able to succeed in science and engineering," she said in an e-mail response to a query from The Daily Princetonian. "I'm grateful to be at a university like Princeton where the President (and other senior administrators) are working hard to create an environment in science and engineering where everyone (independent of race, gender or socioeconomic background) is encouraged and expected to succeed."

Pointing out that people no longer question whether women can be successful doctors and lawyers, Klawe said, "No one talks about innate differences in ability to succeed in these areas. I look forward to the day when this is the case for science and engineering."

Summers' remarks came at a Jan. 14 conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, Mass. He later told reporters that he had been trying to "add some provocation" by proposing that biological differences may partly explain why fewer women succeed in math and science.

The incident comes less than four years after a landmark meeting at MIT in which the heads of nine research universities, including Harvard and Princeton, pledged to work toward the equitable treatment of women in science and engineering.

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Following the meeting, President Tilghman founded a task force to examine the place of women in the Princeton science faculty. The committee issued a report in September 2003 saying that despite improvements over the last decade, the University must step up efforts to hire women in the sciences.

The committee noted that the percentage of women faculty in the sciences had increased to 13.9 percent in 2002 from 8.4 percent in 1999.

'Wrong direction'

In response to the report, Tilghman, who could not be reached for comment this week, appointed psychology professor Joan Girgus as assistant dean of the faculty to oversee gender equity.

More than a year later, Girgus said some improvements have been made, but much remains to be done. She spends much of her time consulting with departments, mentoring assistant professors and giving practical advice to recently hired faculty.

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"We help new faculty figure out how to organize their lives in Princeton," she said. "That simply wasn't done before."

Amid such efforts to provide more support to women in science faculties, Girgus said Summers' comments were a step in the wrong direction. By focusing on hypothetical biological differences to explain women's underperformance, Summers ignored the known social influences that often discourage women from pursuing careers in math and science, Girgus said.

"To dismiss the socialization issues in the performance gap flies in the face of the data," she said. "When you talk about it in an unsophisticated way — and this is not his field — it gives a misimpression about what we know and what we don't know."

Girgus added that while it is always good to provoke discussion, people must be careful about how they do so.

"When you're the president of Harvard, everybody listens," she said.

Social factors

Psychology professor Emily Pronin, whose research focuses on bias and stereotyping, said that there is much more evidence suggesting that social and cultural influences, as opposed to innate biological factors, play a role in determining women's performance in the sciences.

"One important reason for underperformance on the part of women in quantitative pursuits results from anxiety and concern about being judged according to negative stereotypes (about female mathematical ability) and about having one's performance viewed as confirmation of those negative stereotypes," Pronin said in an e-mail.

At the NBER conference, Summers also suggested that women may be underrepresented in math and science because many choose not to accept the sacrifices that accompany 80-hour work weeks.

Girgus called this statement "worrying," saying, "We have to think about whether the 80-hour notion is the only way to be successful in a research university. We're losing a lot of talent to people who do feel that they have to make that choice."

With a responsible spouse, money for child care and flexible hours, Klawe said it is feasible to combine a successful career with children.

"When I talk to high school students about careers in science and engineering, I tell them that when I was their age the myth was that women couldn't be good at math and science," she said. "The new myth is that women can't combine a successful career in science or engineering with having children. And just like the old myth, this one is false too."

Tilghman, herself a female scientist and longtime proponent of equalizing the gender imbalance, argued at a recent conference that to compensate for the fact that women faculty with small children will be less productive, institutions must recognize "quality, not quantity."

"In the end, what pushes science forward?" she wrote. "It is not the 22 papers in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC). What pushes science forward are the seminal papers, the extraordinarily creative, imaginative, groundbreaking piece of work. If we as a field reward quality and not quantity, women at all stages of their careers will compete extremely effectively."