bashoGWSS1

I feel that the opinions expressed by Summers regarding the lack of women holding top positions in the sciences at Harvard were based on dangerous and oversimplified assumptions that are pervasive in our society. When he asserted that women would hold these positions if they were in fact the best candidates, he was ignoring the limitations that women have in the process of getting to be the best candidate. Women aren’t always encouraged to work towards such careers and because of that the path to get there is substantially more treacherous. Also, women are forced to balance their career development with their responsibility towards family, which is not equally demanded of men. When he said that women do not want careers they are forced to think about eighty hours a week, he was indirectly citing this familial responsibility and reinforcing it. By considering the fact that women are often forced to choose between their careers and families to be inevitable and nonnegotiable, he is merely making it harder for women to be able to be committed to both kinds of work. Bublick put it well when she said, “The very fact that a workforce is still male-dominated, at a time when so many fields have integrated, may send women an accurate signal about the climate they should expect� (532). Women are not encouraged or enabled to fill these top positions in the sciences at Harvard, so why should they try to?