Perhaps it's gender block

Boston.com / News / Local: "Personally, I blame PMS. Between the bloating and the foul mood, it was just easier to curl up with a heating pad and read romance novels than to measure the hypotenuse of a triangle. I make no claim to the intellectual rigor that President Lawrence H. Summers brought to his unscripted remarks at a luncheon of the National Bureau of Economic Research the other day. I pulled my theory of female ineptitude out of thin air. Summers, on the other hand, characterizes as a "purely academic exploration of hypotheses" his idea that female scientists might be underrepresented in the academy and the professions because of innate differences between men and women.

It is biology, not sociology, that intrigues Summers as a cause for women's paltry representation in the higher ranks of the sciences. Maybe there is a "math gene" that girls lack, although that sounds suspiciously like "math block," the less-than-scientific label that was slapped on girls of a certain age who struggled through algebra and, defeated, abandoned math well before calculus.

We know now that "math block" was a myth, that math failure for so many females in my generation was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Summers, however, thinks we should not lean too heavily on cultural explanations for the absence of women at the top of the sciences. We should not overestimate the role of discrimination in the obvious gender disparity, said the man who presides over an institution that last year made only four of its 32 tenure offers to women.

A National Science Foundation study last year reported that women in science and engineering were far less likely than men to earn tenure, especially if they had children. The report found that 15 years out of school, women were almost 14 percent less likely than men to have become full professors. Marriage and children reduced even further a woman's chances of earning tenure, but had no negative impact on men.

That sounds like a cultural, not a biological, problem to me. Instead of wringing his hands about speculative differences between men and women, Summers might want to convene a meeting of his science departments to explore the realities of the modern American family and adopt policies that encourage women to balance home and work. Mentor women. Provide child care. Encourage flex-time. Stop the tenure clock during pregnancy or maternity leave.

The academy is tailor-made for just such experimentation. Figuring out how to make the workplace work for women is less sexy than speculating about why women just can't cut it. Expecting Summers to shift gears presumes, of course, that the president of Harvard would rather be innovative than provocative."