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Jewish World Review May 18, 2005 / 9 Iyar, 5765 Summers of diversity By Marianne M. Jennings
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
There are moments when women reach peaceful coexistence with male colleagues; times that bring welcome sexual harassment sans federal involvement. Then feisty feminists stir the pot and set us back 20 years. They are once again flying twice backwards around their cages, squawking like wenches at drunken sailors.
Larry Summers, pirate of the Caribbean, offended the women at a Mary Kay engineering conference in Cambridge, MA several moons ago. The flummoxing theme of this female whine-fest was "Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce," i.e., why aren't more broads scientists?
Gathering in Cambridge, MA, was their first scientific mistake. The great blue state of Massachusetts ranks 41st in job creation. Leave it to women to choose a meeting place that hasn't had a new job since the Kennedy Senate throne to discuss the need to gin up female jobs. Swingin' Summers hurled a rambling discourse to this shrewd and shrewish group. He suggested that 80-hour work weeks in science deter women who want to raise families. He postulated that there may be genetic differences in women's tastes vis-à-vis careers. He spoke of socialization's role and wondered whether indeed discrimination against women in science exists. Finally, he suggested lower IQ as a driver of the feminine deficits.
Dr. Summers also wondered aloud why more Catholics aren't investment bankers and so few whites are in the NBA. Catholics were not offended because they've read investment bankers' e-mails and know they'd be at confession daily, so they sell real goods and services, not highfalutin smoke and mirror barges, SPEs, SWAPS, and SLOBs. White guys have seen the NBA arrest record and are content in their non-felonious, injury-free careers.
But women could not brush off Summers' suggestion of vive la difference. His salvo rattled the broomstick skirts and ruffled the significant leg hair of every feminist from there to Ann Arbor to Berkeley and back to Boulder. Dr. Summers has since issued as many apologies as times I've heard "nuclear option" uttered by U.S. Senate blowhards.
So as to avoid the title of "ex-Harvard president," Dr. Summers will toss $50 million of Harvard's dough to the nattering nags to figure out why more women aren't scientists. Some of the funds will find recruiters rustling the strip mall tanning salons and combing the cheering squads of the local high schools for female candidates they can pay enough to study rocket science. Safety tip for the recruiters charged with bringing in the female scientist raw material: Explain that astrology and astronomy are different. Orion to them is the Zodiac sign they forget.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but Larry Summers and his dunderhead solutions ride again. A son of two liberal economists, a group that should not be permitted to reproduce, Summers has long been a loose cannon. When he was the chief economist at the World Bank, he joined hands with Bono, and forgave foreign nations their billions in debt. During Summers' tenure as Clinton's Secretary of Treasury (1999-2001), he tanked the economy, opposed tax cuts, and embraced the estate tax. He is infamous among the global warming crowd for his memo that called for shipping pollution to the less developed countries, thereby solving our CO2 and their economic development problems in one fell swoop. Choke the poor slobs!
For my sisters of the shrill sex: you would have survived the Summers' comments and your winter of discontent. A loose cannon's suggestion that we might be different from men will neither deter women from entering science nor squelch the careers of those in the field. But, ignoring root cause means you never fix the problem. Just ask any engineer or NASA scientist.
Women now have funding for many Cambridge boondoggles. Much Summers bashing at said gatherings will ease their pain. But, mark my words, when Harvard has spent the $50 million we will not have more women in science from these diversity bucks.
When a woman asks, "Do I look fat?" every non-metrosexual male knows the answer that preserves his life: "No." Women don't want the truth; they want reassurance.
No Watson and Crick potential rests in a mind in denial. Summers is punished because he had the nerve to say, "Yes, actually, you look like you may have put on a few pounds." Summers even offered that perhaps bringing out a scale could give us a definitive answer. The women responded by eating ice cream and extracting $50 million to be used to avoid scales of all types. Ah, the value such diversity shall bring to science.
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JWR contributor Marianne M. Jennings is a professor of legal and ethical studies at Arizona State
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© 2005, Marianne M. Jennings |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
