Week Ten
To begin with the most basic and wide reaching of the problems with Lawrence Summer's speech, one can point out, as does Fausto-Sterling in her book Myths of Gender, that we do not possess a reliable way of quantifying intelligence. Indeed, many have argued that quantifying intelligence at all is not practical, and even that it is not possible. Summers is not actually specific in saying that he is questioning women's intelligence, but his theory of "different availability of aptitude" is specific enough, especially when he cites different methods of testing that show women to lack the ability to perform in high-end careers. We have known for many decades that tests of intelligence overwhelmingly measure socioeconomic status rather than intelligence. In addition to that bit of knowledge, we know that the math gap between boys and girls has been steadily closing for decades as well. Summers completely ignores the fact that scientific knowledge and studies are also political. "Objective" knowledge is an illusion that he gladly falls victim to; his lack of will to examine the way in which knowledge is also a product of culture, history, geographic location, and capitalism (and thus patriarchy) is a particularly repulsive trait to see in an "educated" man.
Going back to Summer's first "hypothesis" (I put the word in quotes because a hypothesis is supposed to be an educated guess, not the ramblings of a man oblivious to his own priviledges) that women do not want "80 hour a week jobs," is highly problematic. On the most basic of levels, why are we asking anyone to work 80 hours a week? In France, it is illegal to work over 30 hours a week. This should say something about the backwardness of our own country's expectations of its workers. If academia were really a place that had a goal of making itself accessable and respectful of everyone's potential to produce knowledge, we wouldn't be making it so inaccessable for most people. Why does Summers have so much trouble realizing that white men have more time, more money, and less responsability typically than other demographics? That stated, it should be fairly obvious why positions of higher worth and status are dripping with an excess of rich white men. He fails to question why the meanings of marriage, children, and work are so dramatically different for men and women. Why have men consistently failed to take responsability for their own children? Or their own house? Going along the lines of women not wanting "80 hour a week jobs," he fails to address the fact that the average woman already works an extra month of 24 hour days a year than an average man does.
Finally, Summer's dismissal of the real discrimination women face every day in every realm of life truly reveals the blind and carefree state of the man at the top of the social food chain. His insistence on finding answers in biological predispositions harkens back to the time of phrenology, 19th century studies of the size people's skulls, and so forth. Personally, I don't care how "nice" a person he seems to be. Lawrence Summers is a dangerous man. The white male president of Harvard is someone people look up to, reference in their own arguments, and take advice from - may even form policies based on his "expert" opinion.