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Originally posted by ArmoBarbi
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You really have bought into the Margaret Mead way of thinking about human behavior, haven't you? -
Do you care to provide a frame of reference for this statement? Superior at what? I can think of many tasks in which men will generally outperform women and many other tasks in which women will outperform men. How we place value on these different tasks in order to create a heirarchy of human worth becomes arbitrary very quickly.Originally posted by spiralComment
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Feminists Get Hysterical
by Heather MacDonald
First it was Harvard vs. Summers—and now Estrich vs. Kinsley.
Gee thanks, Susan. Political pundit Susan Estrich has launched a venomous campaign (links here and here and here) against the Los Angeles Times’s op-ed editor, Michael Kinsley, for alleged discrimination against female writers. As it happens, I have published in the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages over the years, without worrying too much about whether I was merely filling a gender quota. Now, however, if I appear in the Times again, I will assume that my sex characteristics, rather than my ideas, got me accepted.
Estrich’s insane ravings against the Times cap a month that left one wondering whether the entry of women into the intellectual and political arena has been an unqualified boon. In January, nearly the entire female professoriate at Harvard (and many of their feminized male colleagues) rose up in outrage at the mere suggestion of an open discussion about a scientific hypothesis. That hypothesis, of course, concerned the possibly unequal distribution of cognitive skills across the male and female populations. Harvard President Larry Summers had had the temerity to suggest that the continuing preponderance of men in scientific fields, despite decades of vigorous gender equity initiatives in schools and universities, may reflect something other than sexism. It might reflect the fact, Summers hypothesized, that the male population has a higher percentage of mathematical geniuses (and mathematical dolts) than the female population, in which mathematical reasoning skills may be more evenly distributed.
A feminist gadfly in the audience, MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, infamously reported that she avoided fainting or vomiting at Summers’s remarks only by running from the room. And with that remarkable expression of science-phobia, a great feminist vendetta was launched. It has reduced Summers to a toadying appeaser who has promised to atone for his sins with ever more unforgiving diversity initiatives (read: gender quotas) in the sciences. But the damage will not be limited to Harvard. Summers’s scourging means that, from now on, no one in power will stray from official propaganda to explain why women are not proportionally represented in every profession.
The Harvard rationality rout was a mere warm-up, however, to the spectacle unfolding in Los Angeles, brought to light by the upstart newspaper, the D.C. Examiner. USC law professor, Fox News commentator, and former Dukakis presidential campaign chairman Susan Estrich has come out as a snarling xxxxx in response to L.A. Times’s editor Michael Kinsley’s unwillingness to be blackmailed. Estrich had demanded that Kinsley run a manifesto signed by several dozen women preposterously accusing him of refusing to publish females. When Kinsley declined, while offering Estrich the opportunity to write a critique of the Times in a few weeks, Estrich sunk to the lowest rung imaginable: playing Kinsley’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease against him. Said Estrich: Your refusal to bend to my demands “underscores the question I've been asked repeatedly in recent days, and that does worry me, and should worry you: people are beginning to think that your illness may have affected your brain, your judgment, and your ability to do this job.”
It is curious how feminists, when crossed, turn into shrill, hysterical harpies—or, in the case of MIT’s Nancy Hopkins, delicate flowers who collapse at the slightest provocation—precisely the images of women that they claim patriarchal sexists have fabricated to keep them down. Actually, Estrich’s hissy fit is more histrionic than anything the most bitter misogynist could come up with on his own. Witness her faux remorse at engaging in blackmail: “I really do hate to be doing this. I counted e-mail after e-mail that I sent and was totally ignored. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to help quietly. If this is what it takes, so be it.” Witness too her self-pitying amour propre: “You owe me an apology. NO one tried harder to educate you about Los Angeles, introduce you to key players in the city, bring to your attention, quietly, the issues of gender inequality than I did—and you have the arrogance and audacity to say that you couldn’t be bothered reading my emails.” Add to that her petty insults: “if you prefer me to conduct this discussion outside your pages . . . that makes you look even more afraid and more foolish.” And finally, mix in shameless self-promotion: “I hope [this current crusade is] a lesson in how you can make change happen if you’re willing to stand up to people who call you names, and reach out to other women, and not get scared and back down. If you recall, I wrote a book about that, called Sex and Power. It’s what I have spent my whole life doing.”
Selective quotation cannot do justice to Estrich’s rants. But their underlying substance is as irrational as their tone. Estrich lodges the standard charge in all fake discrimination charges: the absence of proportional representation in any field is conclusive proof of bias. Determining the supply of qualified candidates is wholly unnecessary.
For the last three years, Estrich’s female law students at USC have been counting the number of female writers on the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages (and she complains that there aren’t more female policy writers? Suggestion to Estrich: how about having your students master a subject rather than count beans.). She provides only selective tallies of the results: “TWENTY FOUR MEN AND ONE WOMAN IN A THREE DAY PERIOD [caps in original]” (she does not explain how she chose that three-day period or whether it was representative); “THIRTEEN MEN AND NO WOMEN” as authors of pieces on Iraq.
Several questions present themselves: how many pieces by women that met the Times’s standards were offered during these periods? What is the ratio of men to women among experts on Iraq? Estrich never bothers to ask these questions, because for the radical feminist, being a woman is qualification enough for any topic. Any female is qualified to write on Iraq, for example, because in so doing, she is providing THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE. (This belief in the essential difference between male and female “voices,” of course, utterly contradicts the premise of the anti-Larry Summers crusade.) Thus, to buttress her claim that Kinsley “refuses” to publish women, Estrich merely provides a few examples of women whose offerings have been rejected: “Carla Sanger . . . tells me she can't get a piece in; I have women writing to me who have submitted four piece [sic] and not gotten the courtesy of a call—and they teach gender studies at UCLA. . . .” It goes without saying, without further examination, that each of those writers deserved to be published—especially, for heaven’s sakes, the gender studies professors!
Self-centered? Thin-skinned? Takes things personally? Misogynist tropes that sum up Estrich to a T. It is the fate of probably 98 percent of all op-ed hopefuls to have their work silently rejected, without the “courtesy of a call.” But when a woman experiences the silent treatment, it’s because of sexism. Similarly, it is the fate of most e-mail correspondence to editors to be ignored. But when Estrich’s e-mails are ignored (“I sent e-mails to my old friends at the Times. Neither time did they even bother to respond.”), it’s because the editor is a chauvinist pig.
The assumption that being female obviates the need for any further examination into one’s qualifications allows Estrich to sidestep the most fundamental question raised by her crusade: Why should anyone care what the proportion of female writers is on an op-ed page? If an analysis is strong, it should make no difference what its author’s sex is. But for Estrich, it is an article of faith that female representation matters: “What could be more important—or easier for that matter—than ensuring that women's voices are heard in public discourse in our community?” Her embedded question—“or easier for that matter?”— is quickly answered. She is right: Nothing is easier than ensuring that “women’s voices” are heard; simply set up a quota and publish whatever comes across your desk. But as for why it is of paramount importance to get the “women’s” perspective on farm subsidies or OPEC price manipulations, Estrich does not say.
She provides a clue to her thinking, however. For Estrich, apparently, having a “woman’s voice” means being left-wing. She blasts the Times for publishing an article by Charlotte Allen on the decline of female public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag. Allen had argued that too many women writers today specialize in being female, rather than addressing the broader range of issues covered by their male counterparts. For Estrich, this argument performs a magical sex change on Allen, turning her into a male. After sneering at Allen’s article and her affiliation with the “Independent Women's Forum which is a group of right-wing women who exist to get on TV,” Estrich concludes: “the voices of women . . . are [not] found within a thousand miles” of the Los Angeles Times.
In other words, Allen’s is not a “voice of a woman” because she criticizes radical feminism. Estrich does not disclose if she conducted this sex change operation on all conservative women when compiling her phony statistics on the proportion of female writers on the op-ed page.
“Women’s liberation,” for the radical feminists, means liberation to think like a robot, mindlessly following the dictates of the victimologists. But if all bona fide women think alike, then publishing one female writer every year or so should suffice, since we know in advance what she will say.
Depressingly, Estrich’s crusade, no matter how bogus, will undoubtedly bear fruit. Anyone in a position of power today, facing accusations of bias and the knowledge that people are using crude numerical measures to prove his bias, will inevitably start counting beans himself, whether consciously or not. Michael Kinsley could reassure every female writer out there that Estrich has not cowed him by publishing only men for the next six months. It would be an impressive rebuff to Estrich’s blackmail. I’ll happily forgo the opportunity to appear in the Times for a while in order to get my pride back.
Achkerov kute.Comment
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Is anybody going to respond to this article, or just post mindless diatribe's in the execution of a personal vendetta? Post something pertinent to this topic. Any more personal attacks out of the blue and I'll start suspending accounts.
By the way, I've had several pieces rejected by the LA Times and never once did I receive any notification - just to illustrate this author's point.Comment
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I can post articles without comment too...
U.S. Drops Abortion Issue at U.N. Conference
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 5, 2005; Page A13
UNITED NATIONS, March 4 -- The Bush administration abandoned an antiabortion initiative on Friday in the face of overwhelming opposition at a U.N. conference on women's rights.
The move came at a critical stage in the two-week meeting of 130 countries and 6,000 representatives of women's rights groups, who gathered to assess women's progress in the decade after a 1995 summit on women in Beijing. It paved the way for the unanimous adoption of a declaration reaffirming support for a 150-page platform of action for achieving women's equality that was adopted in Beijing.
The Bush administration had pressed governments throughout the past week to support an amendment to the declaration stating that no new human rights, including the right to abortion, had been recognized at the Beijing summit.
The United States had offered the amendment in response to concerns by domestic critics of abortion who have said that women's rights groups and a U.N. women's rights body had used the Beijing plan to promote the procedure.
Ellen Sauerbrey, head of the U.S. delegation, had argued that the amendment was critical to counter efforts by private organizations to interpret the Beijing plan as recognizing that individuals had the right to an abortion. But the initiative, which was backed only by the Vatican, faced overwhelming opposition from representatives of African, Asian, European and Latin American nations.
Sauerbrey declared victory as she told reporters Friday that the United States was scrapping the initiative. She said representatives of many nations, including conference chairwoman Kyung-wha Kang of South Korea, had privately assured the United States that the Beijing plan did not create a right to an abortion.
"We have heard from countries that our interpretation is their interpretation," Sauerbrey said. "So the amendment, we recognize, is really redundant, but it has accomplished its goals. We will be withdrawing the amendment and we will be joining consensus today on the declaration."
Sauerbrey was applauded and booed by activists on both sides of the debate at the end of an address to the conference that highlighted U.S. opposition to abortion and promoted abstinence, fidelity and condom use. Earlier in the week, Sauerbrey had boasted that the United States was the world's largest provider of condoms.
"The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action express important political goals," Sauerbrey said. "We understand these documents constitute an important policy framework that does not create international legal rights or legally binding obligations on states under international law."
Many delegates and women's rights groups had charged the Bush administration with trying to "hijack" the conference to appease the president's conservative base.
"Ideology seems to be paramount," said Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition. But rights groups welcomed the withdrawal of the amendment, saying it would allow the conference to focus for the remaining week on practical ways to improve conditions for women.
"We welcome the U.S. decision to join the international consensus and affirm that women's rights are human rights," said Alexandra Arriaga of Amnesty International. "What was clear was that the United States had a very specific agenda it brought to the U.N. and that the world unanimously rejected an effort to hijack the commission."Comment
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Summers was just off base and perpetuating negative stereotypes with no real backing.
Unlike the Theory of Evolution - Summer's comments are not scientific...
Harvard's Summers
There's an excellent response to Harvard President Lawrence Summers' remarks on women in the sciences in Monday's Washington Post, How Summers Offended, written by three scientists. The two women (sisters) both attended Harvard:
If innate differences play a role in SAT scores, how do we explain the mathematics scores in countries such as Iceland, where girls outshine boys on standardized international and national exams?
The real reason Summers's comments offended, however, is because they were made in the context of a history of discrimination that has hurt scientific and mathematical progress immeasurably. And unfortunately, Harvard is a part of this history.
Just 45 years ago, Harvard was a place where sex discrimination was ubiquitous -- and so taken for granted that it was little noticed or protested. One of the main libraries was off-limits to the Radcliffe College "girls," and it was still debated whether a Harvard/Radcliffe education might be "wasted" on women.
Summers' remarks focus attention on the role of culture and genes in the development of human personality, "intelligence" and achievment. He believes that the US business (and academic) culture that worships 80 hour work weeks is not as appealing to women, in general, as it is to men, and that this - coupled with "inate ability" explains why there are so few women faculty in hard sciences at Harvard.
However, his introductory anecdote sets the stage for a focus on "inate" characteristics:
To take a set of diverse examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal ... that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association...
Summers received a vote of confidence from Harvard Corporation, the university's governing body, after he released a transcript of January remarks.
He faces a possible no-confidence vote from Harvard faculty on Tuesday; the vote would be non-binding on the Corporation, however.
Are the theories that Summers espoused supported in academia? Not according to the London Guardian.
But over the last decade we have hardly been able to move without knocking into the idea that evolutionary pressures have turned men and women into utterly different beings, with one sex so good at driving and mathematics, and the other so good at chatting.
That kind of fatalism about sexual inequality runs through society. But generally it stays outside academic circles because inside there are too many people who know that these theories have no basis in fact. It was not that Summers was breaking some taboo that infuriated his critics, but the fact that he was suggesting, in a room full of people who knew their stuff, that there was scientific evidence for the theory.
Many studies are being carried out to try to prove that differences in cognition are innate - down to genes and hormones - and unchanging, but the research remains defiantly inconclusive.
As a counterpoint, (mostly) male columnists have criticized the critics for being "politically correct" while citing mainstream media like Time magazine. In response, the Washington Post authors write:
Although Summers's comments were without scientific merit, the media response suggests that they resonate with a large audience that chooses to believe, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that girls can't do math -- at least not as well as boys.
Ironically, research results (Yu Xie and Kimberlee Shauman) presented before Summers spoke to the group directly contradicts this stereotype, according to Nature (emphasis added):
They find that although young men are twice as likely as women to enter college with the intention of majoring in science or engineering, this is not explained by gender differences in high-school maths achievement or coursework. The gender gap in mathematics achievement is small and has been declining, and girls not only take as many maths and science courses as boys, but also get significantly better grades in them.
One scientist, interviewed by The Harvard Crimson, called Summers' remarks "uniformed" and both said their analysis did not support Summers' assertion of inate differences in ability. Their book was published by Harvard University Press.
Old stereotypes die hard, even in the face of compelling data.Comment
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Legitimate questions concerning both SUmmers leadership and academic integrity
19 January 2005 The Controversy Continues
This morning's Boston Globe editorial page is full of Larry Summers. The editorial has the most measured viewpoint, as is to be expected. "In the present case, Summers deserves some credit for tackling a sticky issue. But missing, apparently, was the diplomacy that could have sparked a productive conversation. Fortunately, ample chance remains to talk, to dismiss myths and solve problems."
Really? I certainly don't see where problems are being solved personally. Indeed, of the 32 offers of tenure made at Harvard last year, only 4 were to women. Both diplomacy in discussing the problem and the actual "tackling a sticky issue" are absent from Mr Summers' leadership at Harvard.
Eileen McNamara picks up where the editorial left off. "To the untrained ear, that might sound like making it up out of whole cloth, but Larry Summers is the president of Harvard University, so let's just say his theory needs further study. Not that "anatomy is destiny" is exactly an original idea. Women have been hearing for eons that their lack of achievement, in the arts as well as the sciences, is the result of, variously, their weaker constitutions, their smaller brains, their delicate uteruses, and/or their unruly hormones."
Yes, as I pointed out yesterday, the supposed weak female constitution was once a reason advanced against women studying history. McNamara supposes that Mr Summers has a gender block (instead of a math block).
Lastly, Derrick Jackson makes the connection between Summers' gender example and similar issues with race I alluded to yesterday, only much more eloquently. "Now you have Summers, whose Faculty of Arts and Sciences offered only four of its last 32 tenured job spots to women. Despite offering only 12.5 percent of these plum positions to women, he felt utterly qualified to lecture women that we should open or reopen the debate as to whether females are intellectually different from men and, of course, in this context, natively inferior." Jackson goes on to say that "Summers's mind was fixed on a target as stale as a decade ago when Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein tried to revive notions of racial inferiority in their best-selling book "The Bell Curve." The authors cited IQ scores as fixed facts that should make us abandon the American dream."
The overwhelming conclusion here is that no one believes human biology to be so fixed that it determines aptitude. We don't believe it with regard to race; to attempt to inject the theory back into a discussion of gender is both wrong-headed and offensive.
All the comments note that Mr Summers spoke from notes, not a written draft. I find that to be unbelievable. As an historian who has given two conference papers recently, I always go with my remarks both written out and fully documented. Even if I edit as I talk, anyone who asks me a question about sources will get a prompt and accurate reply. For Summers to speak extemporaneously about such a controversial subjecy was irresponsible.
Luckily, The Harvard Crimson did some leg work there and tracked down two authors of one of the studies Mr Summers supposedly cited.
"Two sociologists whose research University President Lawrence H. Summers cited at an economics conference Friday said yesterday their findings do not support Summers’ suggestion that “innate differences” may account for the under-representation of women in the sciences.
University of California-Davis sociologist Kimberlee A. Shauman said that Summers’ remarks were “uninformed.” The other researcher, University of Michigan sociologist Yu Xie, said he accepted Summers’ comments as “scholarly propositions,” although he said his own analysis “goes against Larry’s suggestion that math ability is something innate.”
Xie and Shauman presented their findings at the National Bureau of Economic Research Friday afternoon, shortly after Summers’ remarks.
In an interview with The Crimson last night, Summers stressed that he only cited Xie and Shauman’s research as evidence that females are underrepresnted among the top 5 percent of test-takers on standardized assessments. Summers said the evidence for his speculative hypothesis that biological differences may partially account for this gender gap comes instead from scholars cited in Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker’s bestselling 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. "
Which scholars are these? The Crimson article does not say, and it seems vague and ill-thought out to me.
The controversy is growing on campus. As the Globe also reported today, some 50 women professors sent a letter of protest to Summers. "Melissa Franklin, a physics professor, said she wished that Harvard had "a president who can add something positive rather than something negative." And while she didn't call for Summers to resign, she said his remarks constituted "a resignable thing." I think I'm with Professor Franklin on this one. It will be interesting to see now if the controversy dies away or accelerates. Given that Summers has been less than forthcoming about the sources of the biology argument and the actual text of his remarks, I suspect the controversy is here to stay.Comment
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winoman great articles... LOL! i love the way anonymouse goes and finds the most pathetic articles to support him, but at the face of the UN and the world, it seems like he is not only NOT moving forward but he is moving backwards at a considerable pace...
anonymouse you like to think that armenians are "european" right? then why dont you think like a european? it seems like you are very influenced by the puritans here in the US, who are mainly in the SOUTH!
anywho, i knew about this guy too, but i dont have the patience for this guy... i think if people dont want to find out the truth, and if they know it exists, then its their own fault that they are THAT ignorant...
if every country was like the US, we would all be in constant war, and women would be fighting an giving up throughout every generation...Comment
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Are you really that infuriated and bothered by my views? I know you and winoman like to get personal, but I wont. I'll bask in my victory.Originally posted by nunechka
By the way, Armenians are not European, they are, however, white.Achkerov kute.Comment
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by the way? lol!
anywho, i think you are the one that is so infuriated and bothered by my views, and actually you are the one that gets personal, calling names, etc...
i think its much more fitting for the WINNER to bask in their VICTORY! and that is ME! LOL!
thank you, thank you ALL!Comment
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