[personal profile] kittenscribble
A bit ago, [livejournal.com profile] cheetahmaster posted a link to the speech made by the president of Harvard at a recent conference. It was made particularly notable for his implications that women in science and technology are not only socially hampered, but are by their very nature indisposed to those fields.

No points for guessing how I feel about that, considering my gender and my chosen field. Took it all rather personally, I'm afraid. Yes, there's quite a bit of societal pressure going on, but... genetic? (Is he calling me unnatural?)

The bit that struck me was Mr Summers's use of his children as illustration: So I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess 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. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize.

It struck a chord because I had a truck, too. My parents, perhaps in a bid to avoid gender-training me, offered my baby self a selection of toys suited to both genders. My favorites were a stuffed sheep and a large red dump truck. I used the dump truck to cart around the sheep. I remember particularly liking the dumping motion: tilt, slide. Later, when I was about eight or ten, the dump truck became the focus of an almost religious worship from my Hot Wheels cars. The cars were members of a restrictive society with rigid castes based upon make, model, and paint job. This story eventually spawned a star, the low-class rebel car who rose defiantly through the ranks by being the fastest. Admittedly, I stacked the deck in its favor; I sought out textures that suited its wheels, arranged it and its fellows carefully, then tilted the surface and let them run. The protagonist, carefully positioned in the center of the board, was sometimes the only one that made it to the finish line and earned an audience with the dump truck. (Goodness knows what my parents thought of that. I guess they were glad that I kept myself occupied.)

Poor Mr Summers; after carefully not giving dolls to his daughters, he finds them mothering their trucks instead. So girls anthropomorphosize objects; so what? In what possible way does the girls' mothering instinct imply anything about their technical aptitude? The traits have nothing to do with one another. They could overlap, I suppose; I've been known to find onboard components "cute." Makes me a bit odd, perhaps, but it doesn't impact on my technical ability.

Date: 2005-02-19 08:09 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bouncygryphon.livejournal.com
Huh. And I got into M.I.T. *because* I was atypical - not super tech-inclined, compared to the rest of the student body (they were doing this "better-rounded students" thing in the late 80's). And gee, I *still* did just fine, and came out with a gengineering degree and went to work in the Radiation Biophysics lab at MassGeneral.

And, oh yeah - I took Organic Chem and Neurophysiology over at Harvard during summer school for the easy A's.

Summers is a nitwit.

Date: 2005-02-19 08:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kittenscribble.livejournal.com
not super tech-inclined

^___^ You are the perfect counterargument!

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