Friday, March 20, 2009

For TNA people, my own opinion....

In haste....

By my reading, on the 'intrinsic' factor, Summers was in a very jumbled way trying to say that the evidence he'd seen suggested there might be an 'intrinsic' factor in women's INTEREST in some fields rather than other fields.  EG, kibbitzes (sp?) where in spite of all efforts, men gravitated toward the machine shop and women toward the kitchen.

The possible 'intrinsic' factor in women's  scoring on aptitude tests would be that both ends of the bell curve have more men: more dunces and more geniuses. This may be very relevant to women getting tenure at Harvard, but does NOT equate with the unfortunate meme 'girls can't do math.'

Personally, I'd attack the relevance of such tests, seeing if they are relevant to real accomplishment. Rather than some important factor causing both the test disparity and the tenure disparity, I'd look at whether the test disparity is causing the tenure disparity. And whether decreasing the importance of such tests, might increase the number of productive people of all genders.

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