sexism and science
I had a conversation with the female grad students in my lab who were
very upset by the Harvard president who made the provocative comment
about women lacking the innate abilities to excel in science and math.
His comment strikes me as very ignorant and aggressive. It doesn't take
a genius to figure out that the reason not many women have
excelled in science and math careers is because women have been
oppressed for many generations by child-rearing and home making and
were not encouraged to pursue these competitive fields. Even now days
the demands of working non-stop, overtime and stressful competition
have deterred many women from getting PhD's, becoming post-docs,
becoming tenured professors in math and science fields. It's not a
question of why women can't go through all this, it's about why they
don't want to go through
everything. And that's about the biological clock. Women want to have
children and can't wait until they're forty, when all the work and
competition are over and the successful career has began, to have
them. Then there's also the balance of being a career woman and the
expectations of house work, and child-rearing that women today get
saddled with. But despite of all this, currently more women are going
to college than men. More and more of the science, math and medical
faculty in major universities are women. There's definitely a
trade-off, but women who are willing to make it can excel in science
and math just as well as men. So, it seems to me that the Harvard
president's provocative comment is not only clearly absurd but also
reflects men's (or his) fear and insecurity of having more women in the
traditionally male-dominated fields of science and math.