SlowpokeBlog

To continue with yesterday's discussion of this week's cartoon, an "old Navy guy" -- interestingly enough -- named Nicholas Pisano makes a great point about women and science over on Eric Alterman's blog (sorry for the huge cut-and-paste job, but the post will rotate off Alterman's site soon):

Let's start with some basic facts. (Creationists and Intelligent Design types need read no further). Homo sapiens has been around for about a million years give or take a couple hundred thousand. Human civilization may have begun about 100,000 years ago with early hunter-gatherer societies. Agriculture developed about 10,000 years ago; urban society about 6,000 years ago. Modern formal education was not introduced to Western Civilization until late in the 12th century and consisted mainly in reintroducing the lost classical knowledge from the Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilizations. Public education was a concept unknown until the mid-19th century -and it is still under attack in many ways. The education of women was not accepted in the most advanced Western societies until the early-20th century and even there it was not uniformly applied (and still not widely accepted in the world). Modern mathematics and science as we would recognize it today weren't even introduced until well into the 19th century in those same societies and -as in my side comment on Creationist and Intelligent Design non-science- also under continuous attack. Women were banned from advanced education and certain professions through de jure and de facto discrimination well into the 1960's -and it's not as if we've achieved in the year 2005 the perfect egalitarian and non-discriminatory society in terms of sex, race or class.

So the question why there are not as many women as men in the disciplines of math and science seems ludicrous on its face... We can forgive Summers his humanness and limitations. On the other hand, he should just think before opening his mouth again -and use that high priced education to ask more compelling questions.