blog 10
Although Summer uses logic to justify the absence of women in the sciences, the way in which he goes about doing so is particularly disturbing to me. His tone in the article gives off the general idea that he does not think that anything he is saying will be offensive to women. To say that women do not “want� to put in 80 hours a week is not a fact, but merely his own opinion based off of the number of women in the field. He also adds to his theory about how women want to take care of their family or have children, and they are not fit or willing to do the amount of work a man can. It has been primarily a woman’s responsibility to be the caretaker of the family, especially when it comes to the children. This idea created a stereotype that all women should be stay at home moms. Women who want or have a serious desire to be in the field will strive to be there, it does not matter what kind of stereotypes society bears on them. When he claims he made an effort to think in “a very serious way� it shows how narrow minded he really is. Bublick is disturbed by this claim because he is one of the youngest men to become a professor at Harvard, which would make it more likely for him to have an open minded view of things. Instead he just comes up with examples that are not diverse in ways of thinking with his colleagues who think in the same way he does. I would like to know if Summers has ever just questioned the idea that although men have proved on standardized tests to be better at math and science than women, that there are still a good number of woman who are far more intelligent in that category as a good number of men. It is possible that women have different intellectual strengths. Even if there are not an equal amount of men and women in this field right now, a person in his position would be the perfect candidate to encourage women to become a larger part of it. For him to try to express the reasoning of which women are less fit to be in the Science and Engineering field is crazy because he is not a woman, and therefore cannot express exactly why women are not more prominent in the field. He also never considers where the world would be without the number of women (although it is smaller than the number of males) who contribute to scientific and engineering advances. As Bublick states, “Even in physics, where women’s participation is still relatively small, the world would be less in the absence of their contributions. It is unfortunate that the President of Harvard has not used his position to nurture their potential.�