Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post via the San Francisco Chronicle on the Larry Summers matter:
Is it so heretical, though, so irredeemably oafish, to consider whether gender differences also play some role? As the daughter of two scientists and the mother of two daughters, I think not. After all, scientists are reporting day by day about their breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of diseases or personality traits. Brain studies of men and women show that the two genders use different parts of their brain to process language. (Men tend to be left-siders, women both-lobers.)
Summers drew fire for relating the story of how he bought a set of trucks for his daughter, only to find her naming them “Daddy Truck” and “Baby Truck.” A clumsy and ill-advised anecdote perhaps, but one that resonated with legions of would-be gender-neutral parents of girls. I, for one, have a basement full of Brio train tracks, as pristine as they were pricey. We use the train table to fold our laundry.
Many of the same people denouncing Summers, I’d venture, believe fervently that homosexuality, for example, is a matter of biology rather than of choice or childhood experience. Many would demand that medical studies be structured to consider differences between men and women in metabolizing drugs, say, or responding to a particular disease. And many who find Summers’ remarks offensive seem perfectly happy to trumpet the supposed attributes that women bring to the workplace — that they are more intuitive, or more empathetic or some such. If that is so — and I’ve always rather cringed at such assertions — why is it impermissible to suggest that there might be some downside differences as well?
The point is not whether it is stupid to consider it, but whether it is stupid to consider it even before you have taken into consideration the things that the President of Harvard University presumably has control over, for example tenure requirements that provide almost no benefit to mentoring, allowing a female member to “stop the clock” when it comes to tenure to allow time to raise a family and sexual harrassment of graduate students and junior faculty members that is very hard to root out in a tenure system.
We understand there are differences between the way men and women think. But we also recognize that they are FAR less important than the traditional ways males in academe have suppressed women in their fields.
Study the Cherokee tribe. It is a matrilinear society. Women controled all property and the child traces lineage through the mother and her clan. The most important man in a child’s life was his mother’s brother, his uncle. There are biological differences in males and females. However, this discussion, feminism, Phyllis Schlafly, etc. are all reactions to the patriarchy. Patriarchy is a ridiculous construct.
The anecdote resonates with would-be gender-neutral parents of boys, too. I would never have believed it before I became a parent. But now I believe there is a biological reason that – while my niece likes to tuck her baby dolls into their pretend cribs – my sons like to smash theirs into each other like swords.