Newsalert has a story that will set in a bunch the panties of all those Harvard idiots who squealed when Summers suggested that perhaps someone should study whether or not innate psychological differences might explain why women are relatively underrepresented in the sciences. And Newsalert's link is to the San Francisco Chronicle, hardly a conservative paper.
Update: Oops! I can't believe I had the wrong name in the title! Harry Summers was a soldier, author, and commentator.
Thanks, Robert, for the correction.
I think you mean LARRY Summers. Sorry for the nitpick.
ReplyDeleteI don't buy the inborn gender difference wrt math thing. I should say that if it exists, then it can be overcome. Look at Japan and Korea, for example. You would expect to see these differences in test scores, but you don't.
ReplyDeleteBack when I was teaching ESL as a starving grad student, I found out that my Asian students not only had never heard of math anxiety, but thought I was joking with them. They didn't get the concept at all.
I think it's more cultural than anything else. And we live in a culture where it is acceptable, even expected, that you can't add two and two.
And no, I have NO research to back that up. It's an opinion.
I believe there are differences in which the brains of the sexes operate. Whether that makes one or the other prone to be better or worse at math and science--it's worth study and investigation, that's what Summers was saying. It seems a reasonable position to take, at least to me.
ReplyDeleteI'm not taking issue with Summers (I also was not one bit surprised by the reaction). And inborn differences in the brain do not necessarily mean differences wrt math (or any other specific topic). At any rate, any study will have to account for the LACK of gender differences in math scores in non-math phobic cultures, and not just the differences in scores here.
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