What Larry Summers Got Right

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I was all set to have my regular chat on the phone last week with my 19-year-old niece Chloe, a sophomore at Harvard, when I got an e-mail from her asking if we could reschedule. She was so busy with schoolwork, she said in her message, that she couldn't spare any time to talk with her dear aunt for the rest of the week.

A few days later came the full transcript of the notorious remarks by the president of her university, Lawrence Summers, who evidently has no shortage of theories about women and achievement. The document confirmed what Summers had reportedly said a month earlier in a closed-door session in which he gave his ideas about genetics and gender. "In the special case of science and engineering," he said, "there are issues of intrinsic aptitude." He did allow for the fact that he might be wrong. But he wasn't finished drawing new battle lines in the gender wars. He went on to speculate that women, especially when they have families, aren't willing to put in the hours necessary to get ahead. I guess he doesn't know Chloe. Because that seems to be just what his university is teaching her to do.

Summers asked, "Who wants to do high-powered, intense work?" The answer, he implied, is mostly men. It's easy to see why his remarks would offend women who have made great sacrifices to succeed. But maybe this is where Summers has a good point. If women react to his theory by declaring their commitment to work 80-hour weeks, they're making the same mistake that many men do. By contorting to fit the current system, they're missing an opportunity to reshape it according to their needs. Indeed, Summers also asked if it is right for our society to have family arrangements that require women to make these hard choices more than men. He said he would get back to that point later. He never did.

In one of his apologies last week to faculty members, Summers acknowledged what Chloe and her female professors must experience every day. "Universities like ours," he said, "were originally designed by men and for men." He said he had come to see how that "sometimes hidden fact" shapes everything from career paths to the standards used to evaluate faculty and student performance. He even called for a rethinking of the assumptions that set that up. Whether he follows through is another question, but in his ham-handed way, Summers reminded everyone that we still have a work culture in America that ignores the real-life needs of all its workers to juggle careers and family.