Perhaps it's gender block
Personally, I blame PMS. Between the bloating and the foul mood, it was just easier to curl up with a heating pad and read romance novels than to measure the hypotenuse of a triangle.
I offer this possible explanation for the "F" I got in geometry in 10th grade, not in my official capacity as a columnist at The Boston Globe, but as a freelance provocateur. If unsubstantiated speculation about behavioral genetics is good enough for the president of Harvard, it's good enough for me.
I make no claim to the intellectual rigor that President Lawrence H. Summers brought to his unscripted remarks at a luncheon of the National Bureau of Economic Research the other day. I pulled my theory of female ineptitude out of thin air. Summers, on the other hand, characterizes as a "purely academic exploration of hypotheses" his idea that female scientists might be underrepresented in the academy and the professions because of innate differences between men and women.
To the untrained ear, that might sound like making it up out of whole cloth, but Larry Summers is the president of Harvard University, so let's just say his theory needs further study. Not that "anatomy is destiny" is exactly an original idea. Women have been hearing for eons that their lack of achievement, in the arts as well as the sciences, is the result of, variously, their weaker constitutions, their smaller brains, their delicate uteruses, and/or their unruly hormones.
It is biology, not sociology, that intrigues Summers as a cause for women's paltry representation in the higher ranks of the sciences. Maybe there is a "math gene" that girls lack, although that sounds suspiciously like "math block," the less-than-scientific label that was slapped on girls of a certain age who struggled through algebra and, defeated, abandoned math well before calculus.
We know now that "math block" was a myth, that math failure for so many females in my generation was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Summers, however, thinks we should not lean too heavily on cultural explanations for the absence of women at the top of the sciences. We should not overestimate the role of discrimination in the obvious gender disparity, said the man who presides over an institution that last year made only four of its 32 tenure offers to women.
Summers suggested that women do not rise higher in the academic or professional firmament because they choose to become mothers and thus devote less time to their careers. "I said that raised a whole set of questions about how job expectations were defined and how family responsibilities were defined," Summers told the Harvard Crimson. [He did not return my call.] "But I said it didn't explain the differences [in the representation of females] between the sciences and mathematics and other fields."
Why doesn't it? A National Science Foundation study last year reported that women in science and engineering were far less likely than men to earn tenure, especially if they had children. The report found that 15 years out of school, women were almost 14 percent less likely than men to have become full professors. Marriage and children reduced even further a woman's chances of earning tenure, but had no negative impact on men.
That sounds like a cultural, not a biological, problem to me. Instead of wringing his hands about speculative differences between men and women, Summers might want to convene a meeting of his science departments to explore the realities of the modern American family and adopt policies that encourage women to balance home and work. Mentor women. Provide child care. Encourage flex-time. Stop the tenure clock during pregnancy or maternity leave.
The academy is tailor-made for just such experimentation. Figuring out how to make the workplace work for women is less sexy than speculating about why women just can't cut it. Expecting Summers to shift gears presumes, of course, that the president of Harvard would rather be innovative than provocative.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
