Summers' simplistic stereotyping

Women fail or succeed just as men do, for all sorts of reasons. Why not leave it at that until science proves otherwise?

By Kirsten Powers

Feb 18, 2005 | The storm of controversy that swirled in the media in response to Harvard University president Lawrence Summers' thoughtless hypothesizing last month that innate sex differences might account for the dearth of women in high-level positions in science doesn't show signs of abating anytime soon. Indeed, next week the university's faculty is to meet for the second time to express its unhappiness with Summers, who ultimately could be forced to resign.

Much of the press coverage simply reinforced the gender stereotyping evident in Summers' comments. Readers of the New York Times, for instance, learned interesting -- but irrelevant -- facts, such as the existence of sex differences in green spoon worms. And in the New Republic the outcry of women's groups was derided as a fatwa. But those who still don't understand why the Summers controversy represents a setback for women's equality, need look no further than the media's coverage of Carly Fiorina's dismissal as CEO of Hewlett-Packard last week, which more than anything else linked her firing to the fact that she is female.

USA Today's headline screamed "Did Glass Ceiling Just Slam Down?" The paper quoted an industry analyst who asserted that if Fiorina had succeeded in her position, it could have "opened wide the doors for women, but now any board director on the fence has an excuse to not take the chance." Did I miss the coverage of how board directors were going to think twice about hiring male CEOs after Kenneth Lay, Gerald Levin, Michael Eisner and countless other men were fired from their CEO jobs?

USA Today further reported that "the stock of the eight Fortune 500 companies run by women rose 2.2% in 2004 vs. 9% in all S&P 500 stocks." It is gimmicky, and statistically meaningless, to compare the stock earnings of eight companies with the stock earnings of 500 companies. I'm just a girl, but even I know that that sample is skewed. When male CEOs preside over low stock earnings, nobody raises gender issues, nor do their failures have broader implications for other male leaders.

USA Today featured a box with the eight Fortune 500 companies run by women that showed that investing in them in 2004 "was not a good strategy." The companies -- from Avon to Rite Aid to Xerox -- were not even in the same sectors. To imply that the companies were not as successful because they were run by women is part of the same attitude that informed Summers' statement that being female was a determinative factor above all else.

If only this view had been limited to one newspaper. The Los Angeles Times referred to Fiorina as the "high-gloss chief executive," and the New York Times informed readers that management specialists say "it is naive to pretend that Ms. Fiorina's downfall will not have an impact on women's aspirations." Walter D. Scott, a professor at Northwestern's business school, told the Times, "There are still a lot of people who do not feel women are as accomplished as men, and they will simply shake their heads and say, 'I told you so.'"

Unfortunately, when Summers and his defenders suggest that there is a genetic reason for the underrepresentation of women in science, they open the door for that argument -- basically just old-fashioned stereotyping -- to be made more widely. That 20 percent of positions in science, engineering and technology development are held by women, as noted in the New Republic, proves nothing but that 20 percent of those positions are held by women. As any sixth-grade science student knows, the effect is the not the cause. So one would hope that university presidents, journalists and scientists would know better than to equate the two.

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