Bowing to intense pressure from his faculty, Harvard President Lawrence Summers on Thursday released a transcript of his controversial, closed-door remarks about the shortage of women in the sciences and engineering. The transcript revealed several provocative statements by Summers about the “intrinsic aptitude” of women, the career pressures they face and discrimination within universities.
Summers’ remarks, which until now had only been described by others, have fueled a widening crisis on campus. Several professors threatened to hold a vote of no confidence on Summers next week–that idea being unprecedented at Harvard in modern times.
Among his comments to a conference of economists last month, according to the transcript, Summers compared the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the numbers of Catholics in investment banking, whites in the National Basketball Association and Jews in farming.
Summers, a former treasury secretary, theorized that a “much higher fraction of married men” than married women are willing to work 80-hour weeks to attain “high-powered” jobs. He suggested he believed that, in the sciences and engineering, the innate aptitude of women was a factor behind their low numbers in the field.
“My best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon–by far–is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity; that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude; and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination,” he said.
Over and over in the transcript, he makes clear that he may be wrong in his theories.
Several professors said they were only more furious after reading his precise remarks, interpreting them to mean Summers believes women are intellectually inferior to men.
But Summers seemed to back away from those theories Thursday in a letter to the faculty released with the 7,000-word transcript. In it, he said, “The issue of gender difference is far more complex than comes through in my comments.”
The senior member of Harvard’s governing corporation, James Houghton, also released a letter Thursday, offering praise and support of Summers.
