하버드 총장 로렌스 서머스가 젠더에 대해 문제거리가 되는 발언을 해서 잔뜩 얻어맞고 있습니다. 저번에 70년대 한국에 아동 매춘부가 백만이 어쩌고 했던 이 인간이 이번엔 학술회의에서 왜 과학과 공학쪽 높은 자리에 여자가 드문가에 대해 설명하면서, 세가지 이유를 들었답니다. 첫째 여자들이 아이 키우느라고 책임 있는 높은 자리에 요구되는 장시간 근무(주당 80시간)를 안하려고 하고, 둘째 고등학생 때 보면 남자들이 여자보다 수학과 과학을 더 잘하는데 이건 사회화의 결과가 아니고 타고난 자연스런 차이이며,  세째 진짜 이유는 전체 풀의 크기의 차이이고 이게 성차별 탓은 아니다, 즉 성차별은 여자들한테 더이상 장벽이 아니라고 했답니다.

이 학회에 참가했던 여자 교수들은 굉장히 분노했고 엠아이티의 한 여자 교수는 이 인간의 연설 중에 걸어 나가버렸다고 해요. 나중에 이 교수는 '그런 소릴 듣고 앉아 있자니 숨이 안 쉬어 지더라'고 했답니다. 이 연설은 보스턴 글로브가 보도한 이래 뉴욕 타임즈에서도 다루었고, 가디언도 어제 1면에 실었습니다. 문제가 커지자 서머스는 사과했지만 남녀 두뇌 차이는 자기 의견이 아니라 과학적 연구의 결과라고 했답니다. 그래도 파장은 쉽게 가라앉을 것 같진 않다고 하네요. 하버드 교수회의 멤버 몇 명은 서머스에게 항의서한을 보냈답니다. 헛소리해서 편견 조장하지 말라고요.


저는 라디오에서 이 문제에 대해 토론하는 걸 들었는데, 세계에서 가장 여자들한테 많은 기회를 보장해 주는 편인 스웨덴의 여자 과학자들도 실제 능력에 비해 심한 저평가를 받는다는 실증조사 결과가 나왔다고 하더군요. 영국에서도 학부와 박사과정까지도 여자가 반 정도 되는 생물학쪽의 예를 들면 위로 올라갈 수록 여자가 줄어서 단 10%정도만 책임 있는 자리에 있다고 해요. 원래 타고난 유전자때문이라면 이런 현상은 설명할 수 없겠죠.


가디언지 보도에 따르면 2001년 서머스가 총장이 된 이래 하바드에선 종신직 임명에 여자가 36%에서 13%로 줄었다고 합니다.

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가디언 기사

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1392742,00.html

보스턴 글로브 기사

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/01/19/summerss_tortured_logic/

뉴욕타임즈 기사는 회원가입하고 로그인해야 해서 복사해왔습니다.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/education/19harvard.html?oref=login

No Break in the Storm Over Harvard President's Words
By SAM DILLON and SARA RIMER

Published: January 19, 2005


Members of a Harvard faculty committee that has examined the recruiting of professors who are women sent a protest letter yesterday to Lawrence H. Summers, the university's president, saying his recent statements about innate differences between the sexes would only make it harder to attract top candidates.

The committee told Mr. Summers that his remarks did not "serve our institution well."

"Indeed," the letter said, "they serve to reinforce an institutional culture at Harvard that erects numerous barriers to improving the representation of women on the faculty, and to impede our current efforts to recruit top women scholars. They also send at best mixed signals to our high-achieving women students in Harvard College and in the graduate and professional schools."

The letter was one part of an outcry that continued to follow remarks Mr. Summers made Friday suggesting that biological differences between the sexes may be one explanation for why fewer women succeed in mathematic and science careers.

One university dean called the aftermath an "intellectual tsunami," and some Harvard alumnae said they would suspend donations to the university.

Perhaps the most outraged were prominent female professors at Harvard.

"If you were a woman scientist and had two competing offers and knew that the president of Harvard didn't think that women scientists were as good as men, which one would you take?" said Mary C. Waters, chairman of Harvard's sociology department, who with other faculty members has been pressing Mr. Summers to reverse a sharp decline in the hiring of tenured female professors during his administration.

At the center of the storm, Mr. Summers posted a statement late Monday night on his Web page, saying that his comments at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit economic research organization in Cambridge had been misconstrued and pledging to continue efforts to "attract and engage outstanding women scientists."

"My aim at the conference was to underscore that the situation is likely the product of a variety of factors and that further research can help us better understand their interplay," he said. "I do not presume to have confident answers, only the conviction that the harder we work to research and understand the situation, the better the prospects for long term success."

Mr. Summers also received support from Hanna H. Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago and a member of the Harvard Corporation, the university's governing body. Dr. Gray said she believed that Mr. Summers's remarks had been misinterpreted.

"I think that Larry Summers is an excellent president of Harvard, firmly committed and deeply respectful of the role of women in universities and one who is anxious to strengthen and enhance that," she said.

At Friday's conference, Mr. Summers discussed possible reasons so few women were on the science and engineering faculties at research universities, and he said he would be provocative.

Among his hypotheses were that faculty positions at elite universities required more time and energy than married women with children were willing to accept, that innate sex differences might leave women less capable of succeeding at the most advanced mathematics and that discrimination may also play a role, participants said. There was no transcript of his remarks.

His remarks caused one professor to walk out and another to openly challenge them.

In their letter to Mr. Summers, the standing committee on women, reproached him for thinking that he could speak as an individual and an economist at a small, private conference without it reflecting on the university.

They said it "was obvious that the president of the university never speaks entirely as an individual, especially when that institution is Harvard and when the issue on the table is so highly charged."

On and off the campus, Mr. Summers's remarks were the subject of heated debate yesterday.

Denice D. Denton, the dean of engineering at the University of Washington who confronted Mr. Summers over his remarks at the conference, said that her phone had not stopped ringing and that she had received scores of e-mail messages on the subject. She said Mr. Summers's remarks might have put new energy into a longstanding effort to improve the status of women in the sciences.

"I think they've provoked an intellectual tsunami," Dr. Denton said.

Howard Georgi, a physics professor and former chairman of the department, sent an e-mail message to Mr. Summers, saying he made a mistake in judgment in accepting the invitation to speak as a provoker. Dr. Georgi also sent a note to his students assuring them that they were appreciated.

Maud Lavin, who graduated from Harvard in the class of 1976, was one of the first women to take a demanding theoretical math sequence, Math 11 and Math 55, and is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ms Lavin said in an interview yesterday that she would not donate any more money to Harvard as long as Mr. Summers was president, after firing off an angry e-mail message to him.

"I am offended and furious about your remarks on women in science and mathematics," Ms. Lavin wrote. "Arguments of innate gender difference in math are hogwash and indirectly serve to feed the virulent prejudices still alas very alive and now even more so due to your ill-informed remarks."

Students were also discussing the remarks. Thea Daniels, 21, a Harvard senior majoring in sociology said she and her roommates spent Monday evening talking about them.

"We were just upset," Ms. Daniels said. "It's disconcerting that the man who is supposed to have your best interest in mind and is the leader of your education community thinks less of us."