Women In-Depth News and Analysis Recent Posts
/ Anne Enke
Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers on the cover of a 1999 TIMEAnother survey of 1,286,350 people young people and adults confirms identically of an earlier analysis of about 500,000 sets of test scores. Girls are as good in math as boys. Period.
The examination of 242 existing articles that assessed the math skills of 1,286,350 people, led by chief author Janet Hyde, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is published in the current online edition of journal Psychological Bulletin.
Another addendum to our update of this original article on girls in math and science, versus current study on math scores only, is that the notoriously-gender biased Lawrence Summers has resigned as President Obama’s chief economic adviser.
Originally written January 2010: Excuse us Larry Summers. 500,000 test results say girls are equal to boys in math and science — when guys like you agree to let women achieve.
Lawrence H. Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, is best known for his infamous comments about women’s abilities in science and math.
A staunch, highly-credentialed member of the old-fashioned, “I know what I’m talking about when it comes to women” wing of the boys club, Summers made his proclamation about women’s abilities in math and science while president of Harvard University.
Summers argued that the under-representation of women in the top levels of math and science in academia is due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” This proclamation ended his tenure as Harvard’s president and many people believe he got a bum rap in a politically-incorrect spark that ignited female-centric gender-fury.
Maybe Summers was just plain wrong about women’s brain capacity in math and science. President Obama’s Chief Economic Adviser insisted that he was only quoting scientific research that grounded his assertions in fact. If the truth hurts women’s pride, they should get over it, argued the old-fashioned boys club.
The new guys sided with women, and there were plenty of them.
I put these ‘Smoking Cat Wedges’ by London-based luxury accessories designer Charlotte Olympia on the table in response to the NYTimes article Sexism Charges Divide Surgeons’ Group. Our comment — which is now rated in the top 5 — tries to bridge the fault line that women professionals walk when dealing with stereotypes, humor and outright discrimination from their male peers.
There is an element of stupidity on the part of Dr Lazar J Greenfield, an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine and president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, praising the mood-enhancing effects of semen on women.
In his Valentine’s Day editorial for the American College of Surgeons, with 10 percent women members, Dr Greenfield referenced research we’ve called out regularly and include in our list of 32 reasons why sex is good for you.
It begins with a reference to the mating behaviors of fruit flies, then goes on to discuss studies on the menstrual cycles of heterosexual and lesbian women who live together. Citing the research of evolutionary psychologists at the State University of New York, it describes how female college students who had been exposed to semen were less depressed than their peers who had not, concluding: “So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.”
The women members of the American College of Surgeons are resigning, Dr Greenfield is out as editor of the organization’s journal and his future as the next president of the organization is in limbo. All copies of the journal were withdrawn, including the digital copy of the article, which exists anyway in cyberspace. Checking the journal website, I read that there are plans to put the journal back in circulation.
Dr. Greenfield has not issued a formal statement and could not be reached for comment, but in an e-mail to his colleagues in response to the criticism, he wrote that his editorial “was considered by the Women in Surgery Committee and the Association of Women Surgeons as demeaning to women. Despite my apologies, they brought the issue to the Board of Regents.”
As all the comments and women interviewed for the Pauline W. Chen’s article remind us, there is major discrimination in the field of surgery, a notoriously macho wing of medicine. In no way should the women’s life experiences dealing with the medical establishment be dismissed, nor their demands that Dr Greenfield’s words be censured go unheard.
Many American Women Have ‘Had It’
Many women have reached the point of having ‘had it’, dealing with men and sexism. The Republican War on Women has us all in knots, as we watch mostly American men trying to turn back the clock on women’s progress in America. Make no mistake: this IS the Republican agenda.
RedTracker
Anne is reading …
The dean of the Harvard Business School Nitin Nohria appeared before 600 alumni and guests in San Francisco on Monday, delivering a public apology for the school’s treatment of female students and professors. Dean Nohria vowed to make changes at the institution.
Many of the women present, including more than 100 Harvard alumnae, were being honored by HBS Association of Northern California for their impact on business and their communities. Nohria promised to more than double the percentage of women who are protagonists in Harvard case studies from about 9% to 20%.
Women make up a record 41% of this year’s MBA class.
Nohria’s comments come after an in-depth front-page article in The New York Times that described the school’s two-year experiment in dealing proactively with gender inequality. The story fueled dialogue and debate around gender inequality in male-dominated business schools. At Harvard, a third of the female junior faculty left from 2006 to 2007.
“The dean also told the group that last year’s class of female MBA graduates at Harvard received a higher percentage of academic honors than their actual representation in the class of 2013. A record 38% of last year’s Baker Scholars were women. Baker Scholars are graduates who make up the top 5% of Harvard’s graduating class.” via Fortune
Women 16% At Davos
As world leaders met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this past week, few women were visible. Writing for Huffington Post, Christine Horansky reminds readers that the Davos forum doesn’t picks its own attendees. Rather, it was the decision of its membership organizations to send only 15-16 percent women to one of the world’s most important gatherings of the global, decision-making elite.
The Financial Post reports that the number of women at Davos declined from 2013.
In contrast, when the Forum selected 50 invitees to represent the millennial generation of leaders under 30 at Davos — a group called Global Shapers - half were women.
Analisa Balares, Founder and CEO of Womensphere, has created a global campaign to help close this gap in representation, by inviting women (and men) to raise their voices online in support of #DavosWomen. As is indicative of the times we live in, it is driven by social media, that great democratizer of public discourse. Balares is herself one of the Forum’s Young Global Leaders, a community of leaders under the age of 40.
Symbolically, a session titled “Gender-Driven Growth” with Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, happened at the end of the event, starting after many had departed the Swiss resort town.
