FemaleScienceProfessor is commenting on a really depressing article by yet another sexist academic on the apparently unfair behaviour of Title IX and other diversity mandates in the States. It is a trend that is starting to really piss me off. First Larry Summers, then John Tierney, and now Peter Wood are flying the it’s-not-discrimination,-women-are-weaker-and-that’s-why-they-aren’t-in-our-fields banner. Here’s Peter Wood’s precious argument:
The science “problems” we now ask students to think about aren’t really science problems at all. Instead we have the National Science Foundation vexed about the need for more women and minorities in the sciences. President Lawrence H. Summers was pushed out of Harvard University for speculating (in league with a great deal of neurological evidence) that innate difference might have something to do with the disparity in numbers of men and women at the highest levels of those fields. [Emphasis mine.]
I’m sorry, I must be one of those neurologically inferior women who is incapable of keeping up with current psychological research. Where’s this neurological evidence you’re talking about? Is it this? This? This? Oh, my mistake, it must be this article, the one that states in its title that “sex matters” to neuroanatomy, but not to eventual outcomes of neurological activity. Mr. Wood must be too busy to read abstracts.
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