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Joanne Brokaw

freelance writer s columnist

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Playing the Gender Card: President Summers Was Right!

by Joanne Brokaw

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers got womens libbers all in a tizzy recently when he suggested that inherent differences between the genders may be one reason women are under-represented in the fields of math and science. He also suggested that many women with young children may be unwilling or unable to put in the 80-hour work week necessary to succeed in a demanding field.

At the risk of stating the obvious, propagating the species is a pretty demanding job. Who needs the added responsibility of heading the Harvard University biology department?

Women clamoring up the corporate ladder forget that by virtue of their gender they already have the most important job on the planet. They could aim for a corner office and spend their days training and motivating a staff to meet their quarterly sales goals - or they could train and motivate their own children to become courteous, productive members of society who know how to behave in the supermarket and play nice at the playground. Good preparation for a future President.

All of that responsibility eats up much more than 80 hours a week, so it’s no wonder women with small children don’t have time to pursue advanced degrees in math and science. And why would they want to? The ability to literally grow another human being inside of your own body is the pinnacle of scientific achievement. Once you’ve done that, finding the square root of pi is a cakewalk.

Summers also said that by late high school girls are testing lower in math and science than boys, suggesting that maybe boys are just smarter in those areas than girls. The problem isn’t whether boys are smarter; the problem is that the tests are asking the wrong questions.

Teenage girls who can’t calculate the length of a hypotenuse can tell you how many grams of fat are in one bite of a cheeseburger. They grow up to be women who know how many calories are burned running Johnny’s book report to school before the homeroom bell rings; women who can divide a cookie into three so that each child not only gets an equal-sized piece but the same number of chocolate chips; women whose knowledge of electricity allows them to detect forks being inserted into outlets before the lights even dim.

I’m not saying that women shouldn’t be striving to excel in the fields of math and science. On the contrary - women clearly have the upper hand in both of those fields, and those who spend their time trying to compete with the men are underachievers.

But when one of us needs a break from our daily responsibilities to go off and pilot a space shuttle or discover a cure for the common cold, the rest of us thank her for representing us in the workplace, and then get back to the task at hand: running the world from our kitchens.