Week Ten Blog
I believe that Lawrence Summers has an extremely skewed point of view, according to Summers, more males enter math and science fields because they are genetically better in those fields than girls. Summers never takes into account that there are many different kinds of intelligence and that there is no concrete facts that support his theory. Fausto – Sterling also used statistics in her article from many well known scientist, psychologist and doctors. Many of their findings did show that males excel in math and science compared to girls. One of the only things that I took away from my math classes was that correlation does not equal causation. There are so many factors that can contribute to their outcomes; also stats can be influenced in one direction over the other. With these false facts people are starting to believe that males are inherently better than females. According to Fausto- Sterling, girls at young ages are encouraged to go towards the social science areas. Instead of math books and science set they are given crayons by parents. Boys are more supported in the math and science fields compared to girls; girls do not have the chance to excel because of the factors holding them back. Summers bases his argument on absurd stats and leaves out so many factors. I am not great at math, but looking at his comments about standard deviation and norms its mind boggling how wrong they are, and how he came to his conclusions is upsetting. He also had the audacity to say that women require more than men, that women would want flexibility to care for their children or they lack the judgment in comparison to their male colleagues. There is no proof what so ever to support his theories. Summers and Fausto-Sterling also bring up the issue of test scores, males tend to have higher scores than females, according to Fausto-Sterling those who come up with these stats take raw data and shape it into the desired out come. Most people do not realize that correlation does not equal causation and that stats do not tell the whole story.