bashoGWSS1

Two problems, out of the many, I saw with Lawrence Summers' position on women in the sciences and also the tenure issue were lack of research and effort and constant contradiction. Even though Summers was "speaking unofficially," he still has to be accountable for the things he says and keep in mind his position in academia and society in general. To many people he is, or at least was, highly respected and thought of as very intelligent, so therefore his opinions and remarks are usually taken into great consideration and treated as important. To me he ruined this respect, at least on the subject, by failing to use all the knowledge at hand, instead using examples that can't be backed up by previous research, and by constantly contradicting his own remarks and refusing to actually take a side or completely support anything he said. It is one thing to try to make your negative comments less harsh, but its another when you go back and forth so much that you aren't actually saying anything or even making a point. It would be like someone asking if you liked the food and instead of giving a yes or a no you responded with, "Well I wasn't the best, but I thought it was good and I'm sure that the cook did his/her best, but better luck next time." People weren’t asking him to speak about this subject so that they could listen to their own thoughts out loud. They wanted a researched analysis, a solution, or at least an educated, researched hypothesis at best.
Aside from Summers' contradictory style, I mentioned his lack of research, which I think Bublick does a great job criticizing. Bublick criticizes Summers' use of the example of his daughters and his truck observation. “Can a woman fail to receive her Ph.D. in physics - because Summers' two-year-old daughters once played with trucks in a way that made them seem like dolls - ?� She even comes back with a great counter-example about her sons making trains into dolls and escorting stuffed dogs around in strollers. How can one even begin to use logic like little girls appearing to use trucks instead as dolls as having any effect or relationship for that matter with having the ability or right to become tenured in fields of math and science, especially when it could only be the case of two little girls out of the many in the world given trucks to play with? To me this just gives Harvard a bad name, thinking about the kinds of things Lawrence Summers was capable or saying and using and then the things he chose to say.
These were just two problems that Summers could have easily avoided, making his arguments and opinions that much more valid, no matter what they actually were. This doesn’t even mention the other claims he makes about women’s intrinsic aptitude, desire to achieve, or their priorities involving the decision between their motherly duties and their work outside the home, not even considering the fact that for a lot of women this decision doesn’t even apply and for others there is a balance that can be made.