bashoGWSS1

My initial reaction to Summers’ speech was that it’s pretty despicable for a university official, especially the president of such a well-respected university, to say that women aren’t cut out for certain fields. It seems right on par with claims like African-Americans are better at athletics because of the history of slavery, or Irish people are drunks, or Jews are greedy. There is no basis for that kind of reasoning, and it’s using false data to justify biological untruths. Like Fausto-Sterling points out, even studies that have been done to find a genetic link to sex-based knowledge have come back inconclusive. The results can be interpreted however the studier wants to read them, and those conclusions aren’t questioned when presented to the public. All data is moot if anyone bothers to challenge it, but when a prominent person in the research/ educational community makes a statement it seems concrete. I’m glad there was a public backlash and people were smart enough to know his perceptions are unfounded. Summers, in his apology speech, claimed that what he said was taken out of context and fueled by the media, but reading his speech in full proves that the implication was present throughout. Whether certain knowledges and abilities are predestined by genetics or not is up for the scientific community to debate, but I think there are more social influences that should be paid attention to. For instance, growing up I got an Easy Bake Oven and my brother got a Creepy Crawler set. Basically, we were both adding powder to water and cooking it with a light bulb, but I, the girl, was “baking’ and my brother, the boy, was doing “scientific experiments.� Girls and boys are raised to believe they have different inherent skills. I think that should be given equal importance and not studied in tandem with genetic ties to intelligence.