- The president of Harvard, who provoked a furore by
suggesting
that women were less able than men at maths and science, has added to his
embarrassment by revealing that he made similar comments about Jews and
Catholics.
-
- Lawrence Summers, who has a reputation for plain
speaking,
finally bowed to demands to publish a full transcript of what he said at
a private conference of economists last month.
-
- His remarks prompted one woman to walk out in disgust
and led to calls for Mr Summers, a former US treasury secretary, to be
removed from his post at the university.
-
- The 7,000-word transcript revealed that he had compared
the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the small number
of Catholics in investment banking, whites in professional basketball and
Jews in farming.
-
- He also suggested that a "much higher fraction of
married men" than married women were willing to work 80-hour weeks
to attain "high-powered" jobs.
-
- Racial and sexual discrimination could not completely
explain the lack of gender diversity in the sciences, he said.
-
- In his speech, he argued that intrinsic differences
between
the sexes, along with family pressure and employer demands, probably played
a bigger role than cultural factors and discrimination in explaining why
relatively few women had senior science jobs. In the cases of science and
engineering, there were issues of "intrinsic aptitude".
-
- Mr Summers's claims that he had been asked to be
provocative
by the conference organisers and that he had repeatedly emphasised that
he was "guessing" did not placate critics, who accused him of
suggesting that women were intellectually inferior to men.
-
- Several Harvard professors have called for a vote of
"no confidence" in Mr Summers - unprecedented at the university
in modern times.
-
- His supporters, however, claim he has been a victim of
the politically correct orthodoxy of US academia.
-
- He has apologised repeatedly, adding in a letter
accompanying
the transcript that "if I could turn back the clock, I would have
spoken differently on matters so complex".
-
- Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor whose complaints about
the talk helped to set off the controversy, said that she was pleased that
Mr Summers had released the transcript and praised the accompanying letter.
"He understood he'd been wrong about the research," she
said.
-
- However, several Harvard professors said they were more
angry after reading his exact remarks. Everett Mendelsohn, a professor
of the history of science, told the New York Times: "Where he seems
to be off the mark particularly is in his sweeping claims that women don't
have the ability to do well in high-powered jobs."
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://telegraph.co.uk
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