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by Kyo on 01:04 AM February 24th, 2005 EST (#1)
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I'm not registered; could someone post an excerpt?
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by mcc99 on 05:25 PM February 24th, 2005 EST (#2)
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In fact, leaving aside the infinitesimally small world of math geniuses, there isn't any evidence that men are more intelligent than women, and no one seriously says so. Outside of a handful of institutions, the evidence of unthinking discrimination is slim too. It is true, of course, that men continue to earn more than women -- approximately $1 for every 75 cents that women make. But economists such as June O'Neill or Harvard's Claudia Goldin, who have accounted for different job choices, hours worked and time taken off for raising children, have concluded that it is these factors, not discrimination, that account for most of the difference.
And that is the point: Too often the missing component of the debate about the dearth of tenured female scientists, or female chief executive officers, or women in Congress, is the word "family." But Summers did call the work-vs.-family choice the most important problem for women who want tenure: In academia, as in other professions, high-powered employers "expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, they expect . . . a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women." It isn't ability or discrimination that hold women up most, in other words, but the impossibility of making a full-time commitment to work in a culture that demands 80-hour weeks, as well as to family in a society unusually obsessed with its children.
My own take is that she is still to some degree pandering to feminist falsehoods and looking at the issue from an entirely what-do-women-get POV. But at least she isn't a shrill fembot. Thta's progress, esp. for the Post.
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From Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post,