Larry Summers

OK--just a mini-post, but be grateful for the crumbs I throw you, you unworthy--

Oh, wait: for a second I thought I was George Bush, talking to the White House media.

But seriously, folks: I know this is waaay out of date, but do y'all realize just how much of a sexist pig Larry Summers is? I just mention this because I was over at Living on Less and I linked to an article that happened to feature Larry front and center. That's Larry Summers, president of Harvard, and conservative poster child because the Feminist Left nearly hounded him out of office because he dared to muse aloud that reality might not agree with their ideology.

Well, that's one way to look at it. The way I looked at it when the story broke was that while suggesting that there were fewer women than men in the sciences and engineering because women were biologically different from men was stupid, there's no good going to come out of trying to shut down scientific inquiry because you don't like where it seems to be headed. And I was willing to cut the guy a lot of slack, because he was addressing the lack of women in these fields as a problem, and he threw out gender differences as just one of many possible explanations. Just good scientific practice.

After a few weeks of listening to outraged feminists tearing poor Larry a new one for having the temerity to suggest, even just suggest, that biological differences might be one possible explanation for the appalling lack of women at top positions in the sciences and engineering, I thought, "Man, people are totally fucking overboard on this. The guy's a) wrong, and b) ignoring a host of other, clearly important reasons, but geez, all he did was make a suggestion of one possible explanation." So, I thought I'd check out the transcript of his speech. And my first reaction was

No. Fucking. Way.

No Fucking Way did the president of an "elite" university actually say the ignorant shit that man said. And when I say "ignorant," I don't mean "didn't get a lot of schooling," because he certainly did. And I don't mean "doesn't read much," because you can be assured he does. And I don't ever use "ignorant" as a synonym for "stupid," but especially not here because there's no doubt that Larry is a real smart fucking guy.

No, here I use ignorant as in "willfully fucking ignorant," because some of the shit he says is so obviously contradicted by the tons and tons of research that's out there. Out of all of it, though, my fave is when he just dismisses socialization as having virtually any effect on how women and men behave, and then goes on to say:

So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, "look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck," tells me something

Omifuckingod! Is he seriously trying to tell us that the way girls play with trucks has absolutely nothing to do with socialization? And that integrating familial role-play into their truck-play somehow makes them unfit for the sciences and engineering?

Pay attention here--it's not that I'm bashing him because what he's saying is wrong. It's that what he's saying is so incredibly poorly thought out.

I can come up with only two credible explanations for why he would toss off remarks like that at a conference devoted to "Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce." Either he's stupidly ignorant and can't help himself, or he's willfully ignorant, and just doesn't think that the huge lack of women in science and engineering is worth much serious thought.

You guess which it was.