bashoGWSS1

Lawrence H. Summers’ “Remarks at NBER conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce� was a reading the struck me as astonishing that a person of such high ranking could be even “allowed� to say any of the statements and comments that he did. His response is flawed in many aspects and is very poorly stated in the first place because he speaks in such an informal way. Although he explains at the beginning of his “speech� (if it can even be counted as a speech) that he will be speaking unofficially that gives him no right to disregard his status and position as a Harvard President nor does it give him the right to take a standpoint and argue it without having any substantial facts, research or examples. I find it very hard to believe that he took the time to think about this issue “in a very serious way� (LHS). Even at the beginning of his speech he already puts down women and the issue as a whole by stating that he will be discussing “the issue of women’s representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions, not because that’s necessarily the most important problem or the most interesting problem, but because it’s the only one of these problems that I’ve made an effort to think in a very serious way about� (LWS). This to me gives no point to his speech at all because he basically states that it’s not important but he is too lazy to talk about anything else. This is the biggest flaw to his whole speech because why would anyone want to even continue listening or reading about what he has to say if it’s all going to be worthless.

Summers assumption that women inevitably lack aptitude in science is one of the many problems in his speech. I don’t really even understand how he can be arguing this in the first place when there is no evidence or support of this statement and probably never will be. There is no real way to test men and women and see who is really smarter out of the two or even measure somehow if women do really lack abilities in the sciences. Even Bublick would agree with this flawed argument. She had commented at the beginning of her response that there have been studies that show “that women may not simply be little men� and that we are different. She also has other evidence later on in her response responding to the point Summers makes about how women lack talent in science and math. In her opinion having a gift or ability to do something such as math and science in this case, comes from practice and being educated in that area. She provides an example for her response by stating that “the founder of the most successful method of music education for young children, Shinichi Suzuki, based his educational philosophy on the principle that ‘talent is not inborn but nurtured’� (Bublick).

I feel that because of the way Summers decided to go about his speech and the evidence and points he was trying to get across were so poorly stated, it negatively backfired on him. As Bublick had stated in her response, problems stem from Summers speech in the fact that he reinforces the “women-can’t-do discourse� which will have a negative effect in “deepening the already strong rivers of bias against women in science� (Bublick).