Harvard committee criticizes leader's remarks on women

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — The suggestion by Harvard University's president that innate differences might help explain why women lag in science and math could hurt efforts to recruit female scholars, a faculty committee said.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Standing Committee on Women told school president Lawrence Summers in a letter Tuesday that his remarks at a conference Friday did not "serve our institution well."

"Indeed, they serve to reinforce an institutional culture at Harvard that erects numerous barriers to improving the representation of women on the faculty, and to impede our current efforts to recruit top women scholars," the letter said. "They also send at best mixed signals to our high-achieving women students in Harvard College and in the graduate and professional schools."

In a return letter, Summers wrote that he did not believe "that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of math and science."

He continued, "I apologize for any adverse impact ... on our common efforts to make steady progress in this critical area."

Summers' remarks at the National Bureau of Economic Research's conference were taped, but he has denied requests for a copy, saying it was a private, off-the-record meeting. He said his goal was to underscore the need for further research to understand a situation that is likely due to a variety of factors.

"It's possible I made some reference to innate differences," he told The Boston Globe. He said people "would prefer to believe" that the differences in performance between the sexes are due only to social factors, "but these are things that need to be studied." Another possible factor that he cited was mothers' reluctance or inability to work 80-hour weeks.

Summers also said that when he spoke, he was presenting hypotheses based on the research of others, rather than offering his personal views.

However, the committee said it its letter, "It is obvious that the president of a university never speaks entirely as an individual, especially when that institution is Harvard and when the issue on the table is so highly charged."

About 50 professors added their name to the committee's letter, The Boston Globe reported.

Summers told the panel it was "clearly right in suggesting that I misjudged the impact of my role as a conference participant." He said he had hoped to stimulate research on the "many interrelated factors that bear on women's careers in science. I surely could have done a better job of framing that inquiry."

Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Nancy Hopkins walked out on Summers' talk, and other conference participants said they were offended. Others, however, were not.

"What he said was said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economics professor, called the comments "extremely interesting" and said academics need to "look under every rock they can find for the answers to difficult problems."

Conference organizers said Summers, a former U.S. treasury secretary, was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.

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