(no subject)

[confuseacat]

There was an interview in the times (try bugmenot if you don't want to create an account) the other day with a history professor from Harvard. Here's a quote:

"Q. Were you sorry to see Harvard's outgoing president, Lawrence Summers, attacked for saying that men and women may have different mental capacities?

A. He was taking seriously the notion that women, innately, have less capacity than men at the highest level of science. I think it's probably true. It's common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are."

The whole interview reads this way and makes you wonder how exactly he made it into Harvard. He's a bigger idiot than Summers.

Comments

[workingproject.livejournal.com]

I don't know of the studies the information came from, but I can find the link to the Associated Press article if you'd like.

Frankly, I don't see any problem. If a woman is exceptionally skilled at math and isn't accepted into a position at one institution because she's a woman, that institution is worse off for not having accepted her--another institution undoubtedly will accept her and be better off for it. If you think that society is guilty of breaking the woman's spirit, that's her fault. If she wants to be successful, she has to fight for it like the rest of us. The world is not a nice place and has no reason to be. We didn't get to be the top species by being warm and cuddly. We got to it by killing the things that were competing against us.

Summers and this history professor are probably not idiots. I suspect, rather, that they're extremely intelligent. They're just not skilled in the field. They are, respectively, an economist and history professor. Summers has the obligation to deal with topics outside his field of expertise because he's the president of a major university, and the history professor was defending his boss's good name.

[the-olive.livejournal.com]

Unadulterated faith in The Market is so delicious.