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INSIGHT

Harvard Controversy Over Gender

Aired February 23, 2005 - 23:00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, CNN HOST: Summers storm. Does the head of Harvard really think that women are dumber than men when it comes to science? A nuanced discussion turns into a national tempest on a very sensitive subject.
Hello and welcome.

Lawrence Summers was at the age of 28 the youngest tenured professor in the nearly 400-year history of Harvard University. Then he became one of the most influential figures in the Clinton administration, the kind of man who makes billion dollars decisions before dinner.

When Clinton left office, Summers gave up his job as Treasury secretary and headed back to Harvard again. Now the president's problem- solver has a particular problem of his own, remarks he made that seem to denigrate women's ability in math and science.

On our program today, maybe not so smart.

We begin with CNN's Brian Todd.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): One Harvard insider says Lawrence Summers will challenge you on anything. Now the tables are turned on the university's contentious president.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He is generating a significant controversy within the university and a lot of tension, and I don't know if that's necessarily good for the university as a whole.

TODD: First came his remarks at an economic conference last month. The topic: Why women aren't represented in science and engineering positions at top universities. According to the transcript, Summers said, quote, "There are issues of intrinsic aptitude." That by itself didn't amuse many women on campus.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's hard enough to figure out how to live you life and work as a woman and have a family and those kinds of things without him putting another barrier in the way.

TODD: But during the same speech, Summers also said, quote, "The data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture."

The remarks were kept under wraps for about a month, but word got around. Students and faculty became irate and Summers released the text after a contentious faculty meeting this week.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It got ugly. People used this as an occasion to vent a large number of grievances.

TODD: Grievances that have circulated around Summers since his arrival in the fall of 2001. His spokesperson did not return our calls. But a Harvard official and a student, who both asked not to be named, tell CNN Summers has been a polarizing figure.

The former Treasury secretary is assertive and abrupt, they say, alienating faculty members, pushing hard for change in an ivy league climate not always receptive to it. Others say that's just what Harvard needs.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Even if he does occasionally hurt people's feelings -- he occasionally hurts my feelings, but I'm a big boy, I can get over it. I can argue back. We really need someone to question the way a university is run.

TODD: Brian Todd, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: Summers didn't set out to insult women. He was trying to address different possibilities to explain why women are underrepresented in math and science, trying to get more of them into the upper tiers of the field.

CNN's Bill Schneider invited some other people at Harvard to address the possibilities.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL SCHNEIDER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): What did Harvard President Larry Summers say to provoke so much controversy? Let's reconstruct the scene with Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldman (ph), a Summers's defender who was there.

CLAUDIA GOLDMAN (ph), HARVARD PROFESSOR: He brought with him a pad of paper. It was a yellow pad and it had -- and I saw. It had exactly six words written on it. I have no idea what the words were, but that is what guided his talk. That is, there was no script, there was no formal speech.

SCHNEIDER: But there was a subject: Why are women underrepresented in science?

Summers proposed three theories; one, less willingness to commit to a high-power job.

GOLDMAN (ph): Individuals, men versus women, might make different choices.

SCHNEIDER: To Harvard physics professor Lisa Randal (ph), that raises a red flag.

LISA RANDAL (ph), HARVARD PROFESSOR: To say that it is just the woman's choice not to be serious about their work, that's a bit of an overstatement. And also, that obviously has a lot of cultural issues behind it.

SCHNEIDER: Two, less aptitude for math and science. Randal (ph) argues that can't be proved.

RANDAL (ph): There is no way to establish the kind of intrinsic differences at this point, so having a debate about it is just a debate about prejudices.

SCHNEIDER: Three, discrimination. Young girls are discouraged and women face barriers.

Summers concluded about the three theories their importance probably ranked in exactly the order that I just described. Summers said his aim was to be provocative.

GOLDMAN (ph): He said not once but I think three times in the discussion, I could be wrong. Prove me wrong.

SCHNEIDER: OK, Professor Randal (ph) responses.

RANDAL (ph): The real issue is that his statements just a factually incorrect, and that's pretty important.

SCHNEIDER: To Summers's supporters, like these Harvard students, the issue is political correctness versus academic freedom.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're coming together to say that we support academic freedom on this campus.

SCHNEIDER: And the faculty is continuing to do what Harvard professors do best, debate.

(on camera): It could end with a show of support for President Summers or a vote of no confidence or the most common academic conclusion, further research is needed.

(voice-over): A purely academic argument? As president of one of the most prestigious universities in the world, what Summers says has consequences, as this physics student noted.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: His words are going to be heard not only by the students on campus, but also by people all around the country, all around the world, including young girls.

SCHNEIDER: Which makes this academic debate far more than academic.

Bill Schneider, CNN, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: It is more than academic. You don't have to be at Harvard to have an opinion about the differences between men and women.

Kelly Wallace now.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KELLY WALLACE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): What a debate it has become, moving from the campus of Harvard, to the headlines to the airwaves.

Outrage from liberal women's groups.

KATHERINE SPILLAR, FEMINIST MAJORITY FOUNDATION: Well, the heart of the matter is the bias that president Summers exhibited himself in his comment.

WALLACE: Support from conservatives.

NANCY PFOTENHAUER, INDEPENDENT'S WOMEN'S FORUM: This poor guy basically told the truth in an off-the-record meeting, and now he's being painted as someone who is anti-woman.

WALLACE: Two women, two very different view. So we asked them, first, are there innate differences between the sexes?

PFOTENHAUER: In the field of neurobiology, it's pretty established that men have a superior spatial ability on average. Women have superior verbal reasoning skills on average.

SPILLAR: The research is in, and it's conclusive -- women are every bit an equal to a man in any of these fields.

WALLACE: Why then do fewer women than men become scientists and engineers? Bias, says one.

SPILLAR: What is clear, is that when women face discrimination in the workplace and in education, of course their opportunities are stunted.

WALLACE: Career choice, says the other.

PFOTENHAUER: The women are going to law school because they're likely to be better than the male lawyers they're up against. And the men are going to science and math, because they're likely to be better than their competition.

WALLACE: One says women too often complain about discrimination...

PFOTENHAUER: I think that you are basically setting someone up to have a victim mentality.

WALLACE: The other says women too often are discriminated against.

SPILLAR: This is stealing from girls their chances of achieving their full potential, and that's wrong.

WALLACE: Both, however, agree on this: society benefits from the debate sparked by one speech, by one Ivy League president.

(on camera): Because if a goal is eventually seeing more women in science and engineering, both women say we must first identify the problem and only then figure out what to do about it.

Kelly Wallace, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: We take a break now. hen we come back, aptitude or attitude? Why do more men than women become science and engineering professors?

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: In the United States, women get fewer than 1 in 5 of the Ph.D.'s awarded for physics. In France, women do a little better, about 1 in 4. In Germany and Switzerland, they do even worse, 1 in 10.

Welcome back.

There was a time not so long ago when the numbers would have surprised us for a very different reason. The idea of any women studying or teaching advanced physics would have seemed bizarre. At Princeton, for example, the place where Einstein did some of his work, women who wanted to work on a cutting edge device called the cyclotron weren't even allowed into the building.

Our feelings today about that kind of prejudice color any discussion about people's inherent ability.

CNN'S Jeff Greenfield walks us gingerly through it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): If you don't notice that the great majority of NBA players are black, you almost surely have a vision problem. More than 75 percent of the players are African American.

You might also notice that in general -- in general -- black ballplayers play a different style of game than their white counterparts. The dribbles, the drives, the slam dunks just don't seem the same.

But does this tell us anything about genetic hard-wired distinctions? That's at best an Olympic-sized leap. And, speaking of the Olympics, ever since 1968, the marathon run at the Olympics and just about everywhere else has been dominated by the Kenyans, specifically Kenyans who come from the Calingen (ph) tribe.

Altitude, diet, tradition, socioeconomic factors explain much, but an article in a scientific journal last fall says that such success also points to a possible genetic component. Now, does that make you a bit uncomfortable?

Or, what about the fact that as biologist David Page (ph) has written, the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome and that one of the most obvious differences is that the average man is substantially stronger than the average woman.

(on camera): We're uneasy about such assertions because we know our past, when so-called experts blithely asserted complete falsehoods about racial, gender and ethnic differences designed to perpetuate, even encourage blatant discrimination.

Jews were not as smart as gentiles. Blacks were genetically linked to primates. Women were incapable of rational thought. They were also said, by the way, to be incapable of sexual enjoyment.

(voice-over): So, no wonder Harvard President Larry Summers got into hot water for suggesting that innate differences might explain the porosity of women among professional scientists or engineers. The problem lies in the fear that acknowledging these differences could lead to certain social policies.

For instance, if most women are weaker than most men, it tells you absolutely nothing about allowing women to be firefighters, but it may mean there will be a lot fewer women in the ranks. In New York City where women have been taking the same test as men for more than a decade, there are 28 females in a force of more than 11,000.

By contrast, the U.S. Army holds men and women to distinctly different standards. A 21-year-old man must to at least 40 pushups, for women it's 19, gender-norming critics call this. No women in combat units, the brass reminds them, so maybe the tests don't have to be exactly the same.

But this discussion gets even more intense in matters of race. Why do black students tend to under-perform in academic settings, even when those students come from affluent, stable families?

Peer pressure not to achieve, the legacy of discrimination, low expectations from their teachers that could undermine their own self- confidence? And, if we acknowledge this, does that somehow imply that everything from affirmative action to outreach programs are doomed to failure?

(on camera): We live in a time when we're fully prepared to acknowledge, even laugh about differences in how we walk and talk and mate and pray and raise our kids, but the whole conversation is so loaded with our knowledge of past ugliness it's no wonder we approach the topic as though we were walking through a minefield.

Jeff Greenfield, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: Joining us now to get back to the challenges for women in science is Amber Post, who is getting her Ph.D. in physics in Princeton University.

Thanks so much for being with us.

When you first heard what Lawrence Summers said, what did you think?

AMBER POST, STUDENT: Well, when I first heard it, it was more like media reports. And so initially I thought it was just a very bad political move, but I wasn't sure, you know, what exactly was said.

But, you know, a few days ago they released the transcript, and I remember after reading it, I felt like it was actually worse than what the media had originally made it out to be. Because of the fact that he ranked these three reasons that he came up with. And he seems to say preference innate differences over sociological factors, and I just thought that -- I thought that was very surprising, and that it was offensive.

MANN: Let me go back to what you just said. He said -- he had three different elements that he thought would explain the disparity. One of them was collective prejudice. One of them was individual choice. And the third of them -- the famous one, or infamous one -- was innate ability.

Do all three seem like the wrong menu of possibilities, or do the three issues seem realistic and his ordering of them the offensive element?

POST: Well, I think that the ordering was offensive. I would say -- I wouldn't even include innate differences, particularly since he backed up the theory of innate differences with data taken from 18-year-olds. I mean, you can't say that 18-year-olds haven't been exposed to social factors.

I would include social factors and discrimination at the beginning.

MANN: OK. I'm going to jump in. Let's stop being theoretical and get concrete. Tell us about your experience?

POST: You know, my experience, I guess, is that I always thought, you know, that physicists as a group tend to be very confident, and they also tend to be very competitive, and I was always quite competitive, and I seemed to do decently well, but as I got into graduate school and giving talks and things like this, I also felt like I still didn't have the level of confidence that a lot of my male colleagues did.

I don't necessarily think that's a difference in intelligence. I think that men tend to be much more confident in their intelligence, and if you poll, you know, 17-year-old kids, many kids, you'll find that the guys are going to be much more confident -- they're going to say, you know, I'm very, very smart -- then the females are. And that carries into science.

And you have a lot of females, once they get to college, and they're thinking, well, I'm not that smart, I don't want to do the hard sciences, the black and white, right or wrong sciences.

MANN: That makes it sound like the element of individual choice is very important.

Let me go to the third issue, which is prejudice. Do they let you see the cyclotron at Princeton?

POST: I think that's a little bit before my time. But there are several women at Princeton that are doing quite well, and I think that Princeton is a very good place to be as a woman.

There are some places that probably aren't so great. But I'm quite comfortable at Princeton. I'm a little less comfortable, though, in conferences.

MANN: Are you going to go into academia when you finish your career? I ask you because there was a separate study done, I believe, by the American Institute of Physics, that found that women do just as well as men once they have their BA's in physics, but the women with those BAs in physics who go (UNINTELLIGIBLE), most of them just don't tend to get their BAs in the first place, or the BSCs as the case may be.

POST: Well, you mean, like, after the Ph.D., a lot of women don't tend to stay in academia, and I think Dr. Summers maybe probably was right about that, that a lot of women, you know, do have families and they have husbands that don't help out that much, or whatever.

But I would say, yes, I do want to continue in academia. I do want to do a post-doc. I love physics. And I love studying it. And that's what is going to motivate me to keep on going.

MANN: Lawrence Summers says kids get in the way. A lot of women say that. Any truth to that?

POST: Well, I don't actually have children, but I would say that, you know, it's interesting. You could ask male and female professors, you know, about taking the road of academia, and I think that you will hear a lot from female professors that, you know, kids get in the way and kids were a big concern when they were trying to decide whether they wanted to stay in academia.

You know, during tenure track, kids are a big concern. You want to wait until after you have tenure. And you will find very few male professors who will say the same. You know, it's still this old idea of, like, the woman being home with the kids is persisting, even in the highest, you know, ranks of academia.

MANN: Amber Post, soon-to-be Dr. Amber Post. Thanks very much for this.

POST: You're welcome.

MANN: We take a break. When we come back, Lawrence Summers's track record. How the president has ruffled feathers before.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: Lawrence Summers has annoyed people at Harvard before. He had a very public spat with acclaimed author and Harvard professor Cornell West, allegedly accusing West of spending too much time on outside activities, like recording an album of hip hop music. West ultimately left Harvard to go to Princeton, and found the time to appear in two movies, in "The Matrix" series.

Welcome back.

Summers does have some real fans at Harvard. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, for example, says his problems are only a sign that he's doing something right.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALAN DERSHOWITZ, LAWYER: Universities love group-think, and Larry Summers hates group-think.

He comes to Harvard and he really says there is no political correctness at Harvard University. You say what you believe -- and he says what he believes. He offended a lot of people with statements about Israel, supporting Israel and criticizing those who would divest from Israel. He criticized -- he made a lot of controversial statements about gay rights at Harvard and about the so-called Solomon Amendment, which prevents schools from preventing military recruiters from coming on campus.

Now he's made these statements about gender. He threw them out as a provocative attempt to stimulate discussion, and there are those who just won't forgive him for offending them.

Yes, there was a very sexist event that occurred that day, when he made that speech, but it wasn't Larry Summers's speech. It was a professor from MIT who said, "Oh, I felt nauseous. I couldn't breathe. I would have fainted if I hadn't walked out." It was reminiscent of the 19th century "the vapors."

If a man had tried to get away with that kind of an excuse instead of pointing their finger at Summers and saying, "Look, you're wrong. Here's the science. Let me correct you." At a university, you correct mistakes. You don't walk out or try to fire somebody for making mistakes.

MANN: Do you understand why he made the point he did? He made points of three different kinds, looking at three different issues. One of them was individual choice. One of them was collective prejudice. And the third one was inherent or in some sense natural ability. And he argued his own opinion on each of these subjects, and he suggested inherent ability would be an important factor when all the science was in, when the question was answered.

So he said, modestly, that he didn't know the answer, but he also said that he suspected it was inherent ability. I, frankly, read the transcript. I didn't understand why he had that conclusion.

DERSHOWITZ: Well, it's a -- I disagree with him on that conclusion. I have been teaching here 41 years. I teach a course on law and mathematics. I use a lot of mathematical analysis in my classes, and women do extraordinarily well. I just gave two A-pluses blind grading, and both of them were women. So I don't agree with his analysis based on my experience.

What he was doing was making a kind of mathematical point. When you have even slight variations in potential ability based on test scores and you then talk about what happens in the top 25 research universities, which are a very, very tiny number, even small differences can have exaggerated results. But I think, look, the major reason that we have so few women in math and engineering is old fashion stereotypes and prejudices.

And I think if genetics play any role at all, they would play a very, very small role. So if I were Larry Summers, I wouldn't have made that speech because I don't agree with it.

Now, on the other hand, in an academy, if you don't agree with something somebody said, you write an article contradicting it, and bad science is going to be defeated by good science. But you don't have trials of Galileo, which is what some of the people on the hard left were trying to do, trying to dismiss him or make him apologize because they were offended by his alleged scientific conclusions. That's not the way at a university.

MANN: In retrospect, you know, he's been praised both in academia as brilliant and in government as shrewd. Has he just been dumb on all of this?

DERSHOWITZ: I think he probably underestimated the opposition he would generate by telling what he believed was the truth, and I think unfortunately, he's going to be more careful about what he says in the future, and this will be a somewhat duller place as the result of it.

In my 41 years of teaching, I have never seen Harvard be a more exciting place, more interesting place, more diverse play where more views are expressed. Summers loves to express views and he loves people to argue with him. He is not somebody who intimidates people who have different views as long as you can stand up to him and argue on the merits.

So I am hoping that we won't lose what he brought to Harvard, which has been a very positive contribution to what often has been a fairly dull institution, when people have had the same group think about controversial subjects.

MANN: Alan Dershowitz, author, commentator and professor of law at Harvard, thank you very much for this.

DERSHOWITZ: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: And that's INSIGHT for today. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues.

END

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