01.03.06
day 1, retrospect 2: ruminating on the president of harvard
this happened some time in early february i believe of 2005.
today the new york times featured an interesting little article on its front pages about some upheaval in the great ivy clad wings of harvard– namely, the alleged sexist remarks coming forth from none other than the president of harvard itself (gasp!) in a conference addressing sexist discrimination in science and engineering positions within academia.
i read through the article expecting to hear some sort of obnoxious good old boys mentality– which would be both offensive and merit the ostentacious front page coverage that it has now received), and instead found some key points that were truly relevant– but unfortunately, quickly dismissed within the context of his entire presentation, and a few points which were nothing short of unintelligent in their abstraction of some very particular raw data (some of which were his) regarding stats compiled for performance between men and women in the most intellectually demanding positions out there (think top physicists).
the relevant points that i think lacked the coverage they demand (but perhaps are not truly helpful for the particular conference needs) briefly covered the fact that he believes (and claims to observe) that there exists a key difference between men and women in the sciences by virtue of the demands of the position. specifically, that women are more likely to make sacrifices in the job arena before a man– and the highly focused and competative world of scientific and engineering research, a larger percentage of women fall through the cracks.
“They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That’s not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe.”
this is a key point which receives no argument in the post-questioning session as there is little argue about. what he doesn’t expound on is how this has come to be a historical fact. the truth beneath this quick behavioral observation is that the psychological demands on women today are still disproportionately larger than men. in the most basic terms, women are expected and taught and ultimately, internalize values that place a higher value on the feelings of those around them. they are expected to tune in, to care how they impact people, and in some cases, learn from their mothers how best to read others in order to more effectively manipulate them– perhaps the oldest and most interesting behavioural by-product in patriarchal societies.
the bottom line, perhaps nearly all women in patriarchal societies (yes– these include the western world) grow from little girls who learn that they simply cannot ignore the people around them– including their husbands, lovers, children, mothers, fathers, and so on. thus, there isn’t the proclivity or even capacity to be as unequivocally focused (obsessed) with equations and research when she shuts the lab door and her child is whining or mother calls up with pain in her hip.
is this a question of a fundamental differences between men and women: that women are less likely to sacrifice the well-being of those they care about for the demands of a highly competative job? i don’t think so. not really. it’s more a question of responses to a power-driven system (male-oriented) which unrealistically posits that your work is your primary worth– and men, with their relative mental independence formed from early years (as well as socialization to hide emotions and bury themselves in work), can focus, and compete much more effectively in this dehumanizing stress-factory that is modern scientific research. the downside to this? they will probably wake up in the middle of their 50’s wondering who their children are and harldy recognize their face in the mirror anymore.
i’ll come back to these thoughts later… i have to go cook food for sick people.
“Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I’ll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to.”
sadly, he never does. i don’t hold it against him though– it is a massive and horrible can or worms: taking on the entire structure of scientific research as it stands today– esp. within the american university system where it has started to resemble some version of business on crack: with minds that are twice as tenacious in their intelligence and half as secure in their capacity to succeed as those competing in the financial world.
i’ve been playing with ideas about why i quit graduate school in neuroscience– why i felt like i was never a scientist, even when i was accepted into a program and competing with all those bright minds. i happened on an article a few months ago regarding women in the sciences and how the system as it stands now is not necessarily the form of science that most women with enquiring minds might use to answer their research questions. i talk to friends who are in graduate school in science, about the sort of basic academic abuse they undergo as they enter deeper and deeper into the annals of the sacred grounds of “scientific research.” ideas become meaningless unless they carry fixed dollar sign (read: grant proposals to the NIH that are nothing short of revolutionary in their detailed plan to revolutionize modern medicine/engineering/biowhatnot… and so on). politics are ugly and surprisingly childish at times in the labs… (when aren’t they then again?).
when i thought of grad school as an undergrad, i dreamt of a scientific forum, an athens with women and liberty to think and to experiment. the reality is quite different. i came to graduate school severly disadvantaged as i had an incredible but what can only be considered elusive undergrad experience. i was keyed up and turned on when i graduated from knox college. my honors research was my obsession… but i’ll stay on track here.
i don’t think that science as it is today is discriminating in it’s hiring practices, quite the contrary– i think universities throughout the world are keen to have women in the labs. i think the system today at a much more fundamental level alienates women from these fascinating fields of inquiry prior to and after they’ve entered into a lab. i also think that public schools in america give science and it’s female students a rawer deal than they ought; i think parents are just starting to STOP assuming their daughters won’t be scientists. but these daughters have to start learning that science is accessible at an early age– in school at the age of five. finally, i think that science as it is today is limiting itself in it’s scope and effectiveness by closing it’s doors to humanisitic or creative thinkers… something, which is slowly beginning to change, but oh so slowly…
yes, yes, i think alot about all of this… i think about it b/c it had a profound effect on my life and my personality. i found science in college. before that point everything in me was taught to just get by– i was entirely intimidated by chemistry and biology prior to that point. i’ll admit i’m a bit unusual b/c i was taught science was a bit of an inaccessible evil as i was raised in a highly religious conservative home– where evolution conspiracies ran rampant along with homosphobia shut many things out of my mind before i could open my eyes to see them for myself. thank god for college eh?
but this sort of thinking is going on in evey red state in the country… and this sort of thinking is going to continue maiming little girl’s educational proclivities for generations to come. dramatic? maybe… but only b/c it’s tragic and true at the same time.
i won’t address the pointless remarks that the president of harvard made regarding intrinsic aptitude b/c these remarks are virtually moot in their uselessness relative to our piecemeal understanding of the human brain and it’s different functioning intelligences, and how we even dare to try and define such a thing as intelligence with so little real data on our plates.
quite simply, there is no relevant point to make about the intrinsic aptitudes of men versus women in the sciences or math b/c we haven’t sorted out the societal problems to see what’s going on, much less designated any sort of real definition of what makes one person more effective in a particular field over another b/c we just don’t know enough. still, i’ll admit it suprises me this comes from the president of harvard– i always imagined these folks were a bit more intelligent than most. but i daresay, the ivy’s climbed into their ears and started screwing up their analytical skills afterall.