The Feminist Paradox

Icky. I missed the grovel

Marvellous ability to interpret Summers you've got goin' on there, Georgeob.

Well it was sad to see. He should have made an ironic reference to Gallileo and the Inquisition, and made fun of his detractors.

The academic culture in this country, particularly in the most prestigous universities has become an absurd farce.

One is reminded of the old Yankee epithet -- "Them ez can, do. Them ez can't, teach."

Appropriately so, in my opinion. After all, he wasn't assuming the role of a pope proclaiming a religious doctrine ex cathedra -- not even that of a social scientist presenting a paper. Instead, according to his own words, the intent of his speech was "to think about and offer some hypotheses as to why we observe what we observe without seeing this through the kind of judgmental tendency that inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality." In the context of him opening a conference and pitching a few hypotheses to its participants, I don't see anything Summers said as being out of line.

Certainly not out of line enough to merit the witch hunt he received.

The thing is though, the radical libs won't let him off the hook once there is blood in the water. AOL news this morning was telling of one department giving him a 'no confidence' vote due to his 'management style' etc. The PC police are relentless and if they want to get him, in today's academnia, I think they'll get him.

"Blood in the water?" Like the blood we see of our soldiers in Iraq?

I think I picked this up in the New York Times too, Foxfyre. If I remember correctly, their beef was with Summers' autocratic management style, and the women thing only played a minor role. Summers' management style had been the target of faculty complaints well before he made those remarks at the conference. Without any special knowledge of Harvard's internal politics, I'm guessing that as far as the faculty is concerned, Summers' remarks were only the straw that broke the camel's back. It is the reaction outside Harvard that worries me.

It seems the Trustees of the university has high regards for Summers. Without really knowing the internal politics, it's difficult to come to any conclusions as to his ability to lead the university - even though I disagree with his thesis about women's inability to compete in math and science.

I'd forgotten about this, wanted to post after I read about the "no confidence" thing.

I agree with Thomas that it seems to be more about his leadership in general than this one thing.

I guess I don't really know how big of a deal it is outside of Harvard. This thread is the only thing I've seen, which means nothing about how much there is, just how much of it I've seen -- about the only TV I watch is children's programming these days.

For me, I'm satisfied with: he said something pretty dumb, which as the president of an extremely influential university, and explicitly in the context of a conference called "Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce", was just that. Dumb. It wasn't just something he said, like, over coffee, it was something he said in the capacity of president of Harvard University at an academic conference on this very subject.

If he'd said the dumb thing and then apologized for it (as he did) that'd be pretty much the end of the story for me.

While I'm never a fan of witch hunts (and don't know if one is in process), I think that's separate from pointing out it was dumb.

Judging by what I read in the last two months, it was a very big deal outside Harvard, with several feminist organizations calling for him to resign. I have no problem with saying 'woah, this is dumb!' -- that's what academic discusion is for -- but that's fundamentally different from saying: 'This man shouldn't have a job'. The Anita Borg Institute, an organization for the advancement of women in science and engineering, has a timeline that looks comprehensive and competent, judging by the titles of the links in it. (UPDATE: Here is another list of reactions from the "Women in math" project at the University of Oregon in Eugene.)

I think you are probably right Thomas. Because Summers is also getting votes of confidence from other staff, and it is only the traditional 'ultra-liberal' groups that I've seen going after him, I think the speech is what set them off and now they'll accuse him of everything they can think of, including war, poverty, and all injustice in the world. (Okay I'm being melodramaic and exaggerating wildly, but you get my drift.)

Then I ran across the following piece today that is interesting for two reasons: 1) It reinforces the initial post in this thread pointing out that feminist hysterics might get the feminists what they want, but the rest of us hate it because we can never know whether we've made it on our own merits or whether we are being capitulated to in order to make some quota. 2) The target of the current rant is none other than Michael Kinsley of famous CNN "Crossfire" fame-- he was on the left side of the crossfire. (He is also one of those rare liberals in the media that I do appreciate and respect.)


Feminists Get Hysterical
First it was Harvard vs. Summers?-and now Estrich vs. Kinsley. | 24 February 2005


Gee thanks, Susan. Political pundit Susan Estrich has launched a venomous campaign (links here and here and here) against the Los Angeles Times's op-ed editor, Michael Kinsley, for alleged discrimination against female writers. As it happens, I have published in the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages over the years, without worrying too much about whether I was merely filling a gender quota. Now, however, if I appear in the Times again, I will assume that my sex characteristics, rather than my ideas, got me accepted.

Estrich's insane ravings against the Times cap a month that left one wondering whether the entry of women into the intellectual and political arena has been an unqualified boon. In January, nearly the entire female professoriate at Harvard (and many of their feminized male colleagues) rose up in outrage at the mere suggestion of an open discussion about a scientific hypothesis. That hypothesis, of course, concerned the possibly unequal distribution of cognitive skills across the male and female populations. Harvard President Larry Summers had had the temerity to suggest that the continuing preponderance of men in scientific fields, despite decades of vigorous gender equity initiatives in schools and universities, may reflect something other than sexism. It might reflect the fact, Summers hypothesized, that the male population has a higher percentage of mathematical geniuses (and mathematical dolts) than the female population, in which mathematical reasoning skills may be more evenly distributed.

A feminist gadfly in the audience, MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, infamously reported that she avoided fainting or vomiting at Summers's remarks only by running from the room. And with that remarkable expression of science-phobia, a great feminist vendetta was launched. It has reduced Summers to a toadying appeaser who has promised to atone for his sins with ever more unforgiving diversity initiatives (read: gender quotas) in the sciences. But the damage will not be limited to Harvard. Summers's scourging means that, from now on, no one in power will stray from official propaganda to explain why women are not proportionally represented in every profession.

The Harvard rationality rout was a mere warm-up, however, to the spectacle unfolding in Los Angeles, brought to light by the upstart newspaper, the D.C. Examiner. USC law professor, Fox News commentator, and former Dukakis presidential campaign chairman Susan Estrich has come out as a snarling bitch in response to L.A. Times's editor Michael Kinsley's unwillingness to be blackmailed. Estrich had demanded that Kinsley run a manifesto signed by several dozen women preposterously accusing him of refusing to publish females. When Kinsley declined, while offering Estrich the opportunity to write a critique of the Times in a few weeks, Estrich sunk to the lowest rung imaginable: playing Kinsley's struggle with Parkinson's disease against him. Said Estrich: Your refusal to bend to my demands "underscores the question I've been asked repeatedly in recent days, and that does worry me, and should worry you: people are beginning to think that your illness may have affected your brain, your judgment, and your ability to do this job."

It is curious how feminists, when crossed, turn into shrill, hysterical harpies?-or, in the case of MIT's Nancy Hopkins, delicate flowers who collapse at the slightest provocation?-precisely the images of women that they claim patriarchal sexists have fabricated to keep them down. Actually, Estrich's hissy fit is more histrionic than anything the most bitter misogynist could come up with on his own. Witness her faux remorse at engaging in blackmail: "I really do hate to be doing this. I counted e-mail after e-mail that I sent and was totally ignored. I can't tell you how much I wanted to help quietly. If this is what it takes, so be it." Witness too her self-pitying amour propre: "You owe me an apology. NO one tried harder to educate you about Los Angeles, introduce you to key players in the city, bring to your attention, quietly, the issues of gender inequality than I did?-and you have the arrogance and audacity to say that you couldn't be bothered reading my emails." Add to that her petty insults: "if you prefer me to conduct this discussion outside your pages . . . that makes you look even more afraid and more foolish." And finally, mix in shameless self-promotion: "I hope [this current crusade is] a lesson in how you can make change happen if you're willing to stand up to people who call you names, and reach out to other women, and not get scared and back down. If you recall, I wrote a book about that, called Sex and Power. It's what I have spent my whole life doing."

Selective quotation cannot do justice to Estrich's rants. But their underlying substance is as irrational as their tone. Estrich lodges the standard charge in all fake discrimination charges: the absence of proportional representation in any field is conclusive proof of bias. Determining the supply of qualified candidates is wholly unnecessary.

For the last three years, Estrich's female law students at USC have been counting the number of female writers on the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages (and she complains that there aren't more female policy writers? Suggestion to Estrich: how about having your students master a subject rather than count beans.). She provides only selective tallies of the results: "TWENTY FOUR MEN AND ONE WOMAN IN A THREE DAY PERIOD [caps in original]" (she does not explain how she chose that three-day period or whether it was representative); "THIRTEEN MEN AND NO WOMEN" as authors of pieces on Iraq.

Several questions present themselves: how many pieces by women that met the Times's standards were offered during these periods? What is the ratio of men to women among experts on Iraq? Estrich never bothers to ask these questions, because for the radical feminist, being a woman is qualification enough for any topic. Any female is qualified to write on Iraq, for example, because in so doing, she is providing THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE. (This belief in the essential difference between male and female "voices," of course, utterly contradicts the premise of the anti-Larry Summers crusade.) Thus, to buttress her claim that Kinsley "refuses" to publish women, Estrich merely provides a few examples of women whose offerings have been rejected: "Carla Sanger . . . tells me she can't get a piece in; I have women writing to me who have submitted four piece [sic] and not gotten the courtesy of a call?-and they teach gender studies at UCLA. . . ." It goes without saying, without further examination, that each of those writers deserved to be published?-especially, for heaven's sakes, the gender studies professors!

Self-centered? Thin-skinned? Takes things personally? Misogynist tropes that sum up Estrich to a T. It is the fate of probably 98 percent of all op-ed hopefuls to have their work silently rejected, without the "courtesy of a call." But when a woman experiences the silent treatment, it's because of sexism. Similarly, it is the fate of most e-mail correspondence to editors to be ignored. But when Estrich's e-mails are ignored ("I sent e-mails to my old friends at the Times. Neither time did they even bother to respond."), it's because the editor is a chauvinist pig.

The assumption that being female obviates the need for any further examination into one's qualifications allows Estrich to sidestep the most fundamental question raised by her crusade: Why should anyone care what the proportion of female writers is on an op-ed page? If an analysis is strong, it should make no difference what its author's sex is. But for Estrich, it is an article of faith that female representation matters: "What could be more important?-or easier for that matter?-than ensuring that women's voices are heard in public discourse in our community?" Her embedded question?-"or easier for that matter?"?- is quickly answered. She is right: Nothing is easier than ensuring that "women's voices" are heard; simply set up a quota and publish whatever comes across your desk. But as for why it is of paramount importance to get the "women's" perspective on farm subsidies or OPEC price manipulations, Estrich does not say.

She provides a clue to her thinking, however. For Estrich, apparently, having a "woman's voice" means being left-wing. She blasts the Times for publishing an article by Charlotte Allen on the decline of female public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag. Allen had argued that too many women writers today specialize in being female, rather than addressing the broader range of issues covered by their male counterparts. For Estrich, this argument performs a magical sex change on Allen, turning her into a male. After sneering at Allen's article and her affiliation with the "Independent Women's Forum which is a group of right-wing women who exist to get on TV," Estrich concludes: "the voices of women . . . are [not] found within a thousand miles" of the Los Angeles Times.

In other words, Allen's is not a "voice of a woman" because she criticizes radical feminism. Estrich does not disclose if she conducted this sex change operation on all conservative women when compiling her phony statistics on the proportion of female writers on the op-ed page.

"Women's liberation," for the radical feminists, means liberation to think like a robot, mindlessly following the dictates of the victimologists. But if all bona fide women think alike, then publishing one female writer every year or so should suffice, since we know in advance what she will say.

Depressingly, Estrich's crusade, no matter how bogus, will undoubtedly bear fruit. Anyone in a position of power today, facing accusations of bias and the knowledge that people are using crude numerical measures to prove his bias, will inevitably start counting beans himself, whether consciously or not. Michael Kinsley could reassure every female writer out there that Estrich has not cowed him by publishing only men for the next six months. It would be an impressive rebuff to Estrich's blackmail. I'll happily forgo the opportunity to appear in the Times for a while in order to get my pride back.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_02_24_05hm.html

Looks like we're both saying the same thing, Thomas -- losing his job over this specific thing (not as it fits in to his general leadership style), not so much. Saying it's dumb, sure.

A lot of the discussion here has been whether it was even dumb, and implications thereof.

For example, if it was actually dumb, it can't be pure PC to call it dumb.

Thanks for the timeline, interesting.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb... The real question is whether his beliefs impacts how he does his job as a university president, not that he made some dumb statement.

And I really don't like these long, tedious posts, but this one is also pertinent to the topic and won't be available to google in a few days, so here it is. (And I'm starting to feel really sorry for Susan Estrich)

Exerpted from the following:



Writing Women Into a Corner

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, March 16, 2005; Page A23

This week I had planned to write a column about Sinn Fein, the political front organization for the Irish Republican Army, whose leaders have recently been linked to acts of murder and grand larceny. I chose the subject because I wrote often about the IRA while living in Britain in the 1990s, because I've worked as a reporter in Belfast, because it's timely -- tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day -- and because there might be lessons in the story for Hamas and Hezbollah, terrorist groups that may or may not be able to make the transition to democratic politics as well.

These thoughts arose, in other words, out of work I've done as a journalist and columnist for nearly 20 years. But in the past 72 hours I've discovered that I am not just an ordinary journalist or an ordinary columnist. No. I am a token.

That, at any rate, is what I conclude from the bumper crop of articles, columns and blogs that have, over the past few days, pointed to the dearth of women on op-ed pages. Several have pointed out that I am, at the moment, The Post's only regular female columnist. This was not the case when I moved here, just over two years ago. At that time both Mary McGrory, a fixture for several decades, and Marjorie Williams, a witty and accomplished journalist, were writing regularly as well. By tragic coincidence, both died in the past year.

Possibly because I see so many excellent women around me at the newspaper, possibly because so many of The Post's best-known journalists are women, possibly because I've never thought of myself as a "female journalist" in any case, I hadn't felt especially lonely. But now that I know -- according to widely cited statistics, which I cannot verify -- that only 10.4 percent of articles on this newspaper's op-ed page in the first two months of this year were written by women, 16.9 percent of the New York Times's op-ed articles were by women, and 19.5 percent of the Los Angeles Times's op-eds were by women, lonely is how I feel. Or perhaps the right phrase is "self-conscious and vaguely embarrassed."

This conversation was sparked, as media junkies will know, by a bizarre attack launched on Michael Kinsley, now the editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, by Susan Estrich, a self-styled feminist. In a ranting, raving series of e-mails last month, all of which were leaked, naturally, Estrich accused Kinsley of failing to print enough articles by women, most notably herself, and of resorting instead to the use of articles by men, as well as by women who don't count as women because they don't write with "women's voices."

Here I declare an interest: Michael Kinsley hired me to write an op-ed column when he was the editor of the online magazine Slate. As for Estrich, I don't know much about her at all, except that she's just launched a conversation that is seriously bad for female columnists and writers. None of the ones I know -- and, yes, I conducted an informal survey -- want to think of themselves as beans to be counted, or as "female journalists" with a special obligation to write about "women's issues." Most of them got where they are by having clear views, knowing their subjects, writing well and learning to ignore the ad hominem attacks that go with the job. But now, thanks to Estrich, every woman who gets her article accepted will have to wonder whether it was her knowledge of Irish politics, her willingness to court controversy or just her gender that won the editor over.

This is a storm in the media teacup, but it has echoes in universities, corporations and beyond. I am told, for example, that there is pressure at Harvard Law School, and at other law schools, to ensure that at least half the students chosen for the law review are women. Quite frankly, it's hard to think of anything that would do more damage to aspiring female lawyers. Neither they nor their prospective employers will ever know whether they got there as part of a quota or on their own merits. There's nothing wrong with a general conversation about how women can be helped to succeed in law school or taught not to fear having strong opinions. But trust me, in none of these contexts do you want to start calculating percentages.

In the paragraph I have remaining (this, girls, is truly the hardest thing about newspaper columns: making the idea fit the space) I'm not going to discuss the thorny question of whether some affirmative action policies do some good, of whether newspapers matter anymore anyway, or even return to the subject of Sinn Fein. Those are complex, gender-neutral issues, and I've now used up my allotted weekly slot on a "women's issue" instead. Happy, Susan Estrich?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38563-2005Mar15.html

I have a comment on the initial post of this thread. Assuming the observed paradox is real -- I'm not sure how realistic this assumption is -- I think it could be explained by the shifting rationale for affirmative-action-like systems of quotas and preferences. When they were first introduce, the rationale was that blacks (and women, and ...) were basically similar to whites (and men, ...). The main reason quotas and preferences seemed necessary was to rectify the effects of past discrimination.

Fourty years after the Civil Rights Act, this argument is loosing traction, and a new one has surfaced. Its claim is that blacks, and women, and whoever the quotas are supposed to favor, have a unique perspective on things, and that this makes diversity a compelling enough state interest to override the 14th Amendment's protections against preferential treatments of any kind. With this in mind, it would make sense for privilege-seeking interest groups to make the "we're all created equal" argument for historical reasons and the "we have a unique perspective" argument to adapt to the shifting rationale for such privileges.

As I said, I'm not sure to which extent this is really happening in the US. The New York Sun article seemed kind of axe-grinding to me.

Thomas writes


But does not this bring us full circle? Those who see blacks and whites as intellectual, physical, psychological, emotional equals and those who see male and female as intellectual, physical, psychological, emotion equals should expect everybody's perspective to be the same should they not? If there are no differences other than an incidental penis, an incidental womb and/or pigmentation of skin, then how can there be a female persepctive or a black persepctive? And if there are differences, would that not suggest the possibility of different inate abilities?

As a general rule, I don't think there is. There may be exceptions to this rule. For example, I can imagine that a musical conservatory might find an 'affirmative action' like policy useful for getting a good balance of musical styles. But as a rule, I think these 'unique perspectives' are fiction, and that affirmative action and friends have no good reason left to exist.

Nevertheless, it's there, and some people have a stake in keeping it alive. You can expect these people to come up with reasons for doing so. And if there are no real reasons left, they'll come up with ficticious ones, like the one about 'unique perspective'.

(Duplicate)

I agree that in most cases affirmative action now does more harm than good. The greatest good that came from it was in breaking down cultural barriers. Once a mixed and diverse society began to 'feel' normal, that war was won, and it has been won for decades now.

I certainly want to be hired on strength of my credentials and track record and not due to my race or my gender or any other irrelevant criteria (unless a specific race or gender is necessary for the job.) I don't want to be a 'token' or get a job to meet some quota.

But I still am not convinced there are not genetic differences built into us via gender, race, ethnicity, culture, etc. and these differences will in part explain both our strengths and our weaknesses.'

I'm still thinking about whether I think that extrapolates into a 'unqiue perspective' though.

I'm not sure I follow you, Fox. You're saying that if there are no differences in ability then there can be no differences in perspective (which I don't really agree with) but then you say that you do believe there are differences in ability, but you're not sure if that extrapolates into a unique perspective? I'm just curious what you're thinking of when you say unique perspective.

We all have differing abilities AND differing perspectives. Certainly myself and my 6 foot tall brother are both equally capable of washing our hands, but we probably have differing perspectives on how high a bathroom sink should be.