Blog Ten
Lawrence Summers’ response and justification of diversity (of women) in the science and engineering workforce was, to say the least, flawed. In his speech, Summers argues that women hate hard work and women should be more focused on being the primary caregiver for children rather than their occupation. It is upsetting to me to know that this mindset is still being encouraged, especially by a representative of one of the most respected universities of the United States, in late 2005. He does not specifically come out and say that women belong in the house, but it is somewhat written between the lines of what he says. He also suggests that women lack the attributes, some of which were drive and brain power, to hold such a high powered job in the science field.
A major issue that was very apparent was his use of statistics. As laid out by Fausto-Sterling in “A Question of Genius: Are Men Really Smarter than Women?� the use of statistics to prove the point that men’s brains are much better at understanding math and science than women’s brains is unreliable. As I have learned in statistics classes, the use of statistics can be twisted to support almost anything that one may want to prove. She also talks a lot about the flaws in the experimental set up of many of the famous studies done on this very topic. Sometimes, the subjects being tested do not take the test seriously, giving very flawed results. Fausto-Sterling also brings up the point that many children are taught and treated differently in the classroom depending on their gender. If there is a difference in brain power between genders, one could attribute it to the difference in teaching, not the difference between the brains of different genders. We came to the conclusion in discussion on Friday that test results are very subjective and are a product of one’s socioeconomic class (or the +5 system) more than anything. I am not sure if this is true, but my question is why this issue is really that important. Yes, learning different learning styles could be very beneficial for teachers and students. I believe that the preferred learning style depends more on the specific person rather than the gender identity that they follow. I think it would be more beneficial to test the individual rather than generalize between two different genders.