Mistaking trees for a forest?
Mr. Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard faculty was
finally stripped of his
elected position for the simple
reason that he was more outspoken than could be tolerated
by his constituency. He used to express publicly pungent
comments on various issues that antagonized many members,
some of whom struck back to pull him down. His detractors
were eventually successful.
Summers had the unpopular habit of raising controversial
issues such as intellectual and temperamental capacities of
women in comparison to those of their male counterparts. He
got into big trouble by doing that. Yet his question
remained unanswered. The question was why didn’t women
prefer to don the lab apron in place of the kitchen
overall? Why didn’t they enjoy researching yet unexplored
vistas of
science and technology? Why they weren’t as
ambitious as man? Why did they prefer to remain stereotyped
and mediocre?
Why were there so few female Noble winners in sciences? Is
the difference cultural or genetic? In a paper in the New
York Times it was said that
scientists are made not born.
Mr. W Michael Cox and Mr. Richard Alm of the Federal
Reserve Bank of Dallas wrote in that paper that statistical
evidence went on to prove that feminization of science
professions had been taking place one degree at a time.
They mistook trees for a forest; otherwise there would not
have been so few starry-eyed women scientists pursuing
research on the most unlikely of topics. If one looked at
the Bell curve, fewer women would be on the extreme right,
the genius portion of the curve. Summers argued in this
manner and it was no wonder that he was punished.
It seems that the world is full of mediocrity these days.