Feminists win at Harvard??

Feminist Victory

By Carrie Lukas

Feb 24, 2006

Lawrence H. Summers is stepping down as president of Harvard University. His critics cite a number of missteps - from challenging the eminent African-American professor Cornell West to expressing support for the U.S. military - that contributed to his demise. But those were minor scrapes; he's leaving because he never recovered from a wound inflicted by the Harvard gender police.

At an academic conference last January, Summers made the mistake of speculating that innate differences between men and women may in part explain why more men than women reach the upper echelons of science and math. Radical feminists were aghast and called for his removal. More than a year later, they finally got their man.

It's testament to the bizarre world of academia. Leftist feminists are increasingly misfits in American politics (each election feminist groups promise that women are going to vote in mass for a liberal revolution-it has yet to happen), but they are big men on campus. In academia's ivory tower, they can instill their world view on impressionable youngsters and make or break aspiring academics.

In this bubble, a self-proclaimed feminist like MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins can with a straight face describe nearly fainting after hearing Summers suggest there are gender differences: "I felt I was going to be sick. My heart was pounding and my breath shallow. I was extremely upset." Her over-reaction is itself evidence of gender differences (can anyone imagining a male professor reacting like that?), but it would be taboo to say so on a politically correct campus.

Conservatives have spent years trying to raise awareness that true academic inquiry has been sacrificed to political correctness. Summers ousting may mark an important turning point in this effort. After all, Summers was the Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton-hardly a right-wing ideologue. His failure to pass the campus liberal litmus test may convince many that the problem is real.

Summers himself seems not to have understood the power and standard operating procedure of campus leftists. When he spoke at the fateful conference that purported to consider potential explanations for the gender disparate in hard sciences, he thought attendees were actually interested in answering that question. Under this mistaken logic, he listed numerous potential causes and committed the heresy of including innate aptitude among them.

Had he been more familiar with gender studies, he would have known that there is really only one acceptable explanation to the radical left: discrimination. The gender warriors may wish to ponder what kind of discrimination - is it our discriminatory socialization process that begins when we dress our baby girls in pink or garden variety sexism in the hiring process? - but our sexist society is undoubtedly the culprit.

Everyone recognizes that discrimination is bad, which allows gender warriors to think up programs and legislation to root it out. If women's preferences and choices are responsible for the differences in outcomes between men and women, gender warriors' reason for existence begins to disappear.

It's through this lens that the good news that women aren't being discriminated against becomes bad news for feminists. Liberal women's groups seize on the statistic showing that a full-time working woman makes less than a full-time working man as evidence of systematic discrimination against women. Data showing that the wage gap is primarily caused by factors other than discrimination (such as women's preference for jobs offering greater flexibility, physical comfort, and personal fulfillment instead of higher pay) is ignored.

Feminist groups envision a "genderless" society where men and women are equally represented in all facets of life. It frustrates them that women keep thwarting this ideal by making choices that are different then men's. Their only hope is that women are making these choices under a false consciousness. Alternative explanations cannot be considered or their dream vanishes.

Summers' mistake was not recognizing the rules of the gender victimology game. Now he has paid the price, and Harvard is worse for it. Gender warriors celebrating this should be wary that their victory came with a cost: their extremism was exposed to new eyes. For the sake of the next generation of students who are passing through these institutions, let's hope that greater awareness of just how intolerant colleges have become is impetuous for change.