Are men still from Mars and women still from Venus? The differences between the sexes are indeed ripe for scrutiny and debate to this date. Despite the advances in women’s rights in the past century, the issue of equality between men and women still proves to be a lightning rod for controversy at the beginning of the 21st century.
Take for example the recent comments of Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers. who pondered why there were so few women on the math and engineering faculty at an economics conference this month. According to a Jan. 18 Washington Post article, “He has provoked a new storm of controversy by suggesting that the shortage of elite female scientists may stem in part from ‘innate’ differences between men and women. … Summers laid out a series of possible explanations for the underrepresentation of women in the upper echelons of professional life, including upbringing, genetics and time spent on child-rearing. … Summers pointed to research showing that girls are less likely to score top marks than boys in standardized math and science tests, even though the median scores of both sexes are comparable.”
Summers later clarified his statements, indicating that his intention was not to suggest that women were incapable or somehow inhibited from succeeding in technical or scientific fields, but rather to provoke and stimulate. Well, he certainly accomplished that!
In terms of the UCSD undergraduate body, it is hard to dispute the fact that males and females are in no way evenly distributed across all majors. For instance, according to fall 2004 third-week statistics, females made up 13 percent of electrical and computer engineering majors, and 24 percent of computer engineering majors. Contrast this to the 74 percent of psychology majors and 74 percent of communication majors that are female. Let’s have a CSE/psychology mixer, yeah? Majors with a more even distribution of the sexes include economics, political science and, gasp, math! And who would have known biology is made up of 60 percent women?
Of course, numbers can mean a lot and can also mean very little. But I always think about how I can count the number of guys in an upper division communications class on one hand; how there was one male student among maybe 15 in a career center humanities and social sciences graduate application workshop; how my gal pal tells me she is one of the few and proud females in most of her ECE classes. And I admire her a lot for sticking it out with the rest of the guys.
It’s worth asking whether women’s relative attraction to non-technical fields correlates to their gender-specific ways of thinking. I’m pretty sure any guy would testify to the mismatch of perceptions and feelings between themselves and their female peers. We’re pretty emotional and analytical — is that why many of us flock to the humanities and social sciences — where papers requiring critical thinking and dissecting symbols are more prevalent? Dissecting a man’s intentions, or an author’s literary devices, what’s the difference? Guys, I’d argue, are more objective in their thought processes. They are often fond of video games and sports (not like some girls aren’t, though), are straightforward in their actions, rarely reading into anything. Is that at all linked to why many of them prefer numbers instead of words, programming instead of essays?
I guess that would suggest “innate differences” in the configuration of our choices of majors and careers, but it wouldn’t cover why there are successful female chemical engineers or brilliant male communication scholars.
The emphasis on math and science proficiency, reflected in Advanced Placement courses and in technological competition with other countries — such as India and China — might also conceal an indirect and inadvertent preference toward males. But that’s another story.
I also suppose that trying to figure out why there exists few “elite female scientists” and a great imbalance in certain majors is beside the point. While forces of discouragement, both social and institutional, most likely exist along gender lines in academic fields, opportunities to fulfill whichever track of life one desires seem to abound more than ever before. Is there a need to make all majors gender balanced? No. But if something is preventing girls from becoming engineers and boys from being psychologists or nurses, it should be addressed.
The beauty of the differences between men and women is in their compatibility as well as in their lack of rigidity. And when differences do cause friction, such as in the academic realm, it can be a sign of insufficiency, but also of progress. Summers’ comments may have caused a hubbub, but that’s not a terrible thing, lest we forget that having this debate at all would have been unheard of less than a century ago. The future is boundless, and not colored blue or pink.
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