Women who love science take Summers’ comments personally

WASHINGTON – The California desert was a natural choice for the mid-January family gathering. Vera and Robert Rubin, two of their grown children, a smattering of grandchildren – they had all been in San Diego for the annual American Astronomical Society convention. Theirs is a family of scientists – a biologist, a geologist, a geophysicist, a mathematician. Vera is an astronomer. So is her only daughter, Judith Young.

Outside, the desert provided scientific riches. The flowers were in bloom; the landscape beckoned. Above, the sky was brilliant, the stars clearly visible, the wonder of the galaxies spread out, begging for study, for exploration.

Inside, at the dinner table, there was one topic of conversation: Harvard President Lawrence Summers and the controversial remarks he had just made about women in the sciences.

Vera Rubin had her opinions, strong ones, and she was not hesitant to express them. Young tried to avoid the subject, declaring his comments “uninspiring and false.”

The effort was fruitless. “We discussed it every day from then on,” Rubin says.

Was there debate?

“Well,” she says, “if there was a debate, we were certainly all on the same side.”

Summers has since apologized, repeatedly, for what he said that January day, calling his remarks “ill-informed.” He saw what he considered to be a dearth of women in “high-end scientific professions” and had offered up his own personal conclusions. Maybe it’s because women do not have the same “intrinsic aptitude” for these fields, he suggested, or maybe they make tradeoffs when it comes to balancing work with family. Maybe, he said, the discrepancy wasn’t about socialization – girls being encouraged in certain fields, boys in others – but rather about taste.

Denice Denton, chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz and a specialist in electrical engineering, sat in the audience. By her own estimation, she was one of only a few female physical scientists there; most attendees were economists, like Summers. Listening to Summers, she says, was “weird.” And shocking.

“It’s almost inexpressible,” Denton says weeks later on a visit to Washington. “Difficult to listen to. Challenging. Provocative. But when you started hearing things that you knew were not right. …”

She shakes her head.

Once the remarks became public, they started a wildfire. The suggestion that women had less aptitude for science, in particular, made many people irate. Some academics and columnists rose to Summers’ defense, arguing that academia should be a place where open discussion is encouraged, not ruled by political correctness. Op-eds were written, statistics cited. Harvard’s own hiring record on diversity during Summers’ tenure was explored. Questions were raised about his managerial style, which had ruffled more than a few feathers on campus.

His premise was challenged fervently. Denton walks around with a folder full of research – studies by the National Science Foundation, an op-ed with graphics that ran in The New York Times – to prove that qualified women are earning more and more advanced degrees in the scientific fields and that institutions that make an effort can have a more diverse workforce.

Michael Cox and Richard Alm at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas have done research that shows a continual increase in women earning science degrees between 1970 and 2002. Doctorates in physics earned by women are up from 2.9 percent of the total to 15.5 percent. Engineering? 0.6 percent to 17.3 percent. He can go on and on.

For Summers, things came to a head this past week, when, in a stunning move, the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences voted 215 to 185 to declare a “lack of confidence” in its president. A second motion, declaring regret over aspects of his managerial style and some of the statements he made at the conference, carried 253 to 137.

But for the women who love science, who live it, who excel at it, this is not about the institution. This is personal. Deeply personal. Summers, Vera Rubin will tell you, asked the wrong question. He saw the surface and missed what was behind it.

“I think the question is,” Rubin says, “are there women and have there been women who want to do science and could be doing great science, but they never really got the opportunity?”