The Science of Gender and Science
On January 16th, 2005, Lawrence Summers (President of Harvard), made a few public comments on women’s careers in science and engineering, suggesting that the gender difference is due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” rather than discrimination and/or socialisation. These remarks sturred further public discussion on the under-representation of women in tenure-track faculty in elite universities in physical science, math and engineering, sciences (with preponderant emphasis on US).
On April 22, 2005, Elisabeth Spelke and Steven Pinker held a debate under the Harvard University’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative, focusing “on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes”.
The debate can be watched here, and the slides of both speakers are available there.
Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8
Related materials:
- The Guardian’s response to Summers’s comments.
- A PNAS article by Weber et al (2013) on changing trends in Europe – The changing face of cognitive gender differences in Europe