The Nobel for brisket goes to . . .

The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
By Ruth MarcusWednesday, October 28, 2009

"I bet he wasn't folding laundry."
-- Carol Greider, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine, on what she was doing at 5 a.m. when the big call came, and her thoughts on learning of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize.
Is there a woman around who read this quote and didn't smile with recognition? Greider's wry assessment encapsulates so much about the state of modern women: Nobel laureates but also -- if not inevitably, then at least overwhelmingly -- laundry-folders, school-lunch makers, play-date arrangers, schedule-managers.
This is less a complaint than an observation. In fact, to some extent women are reluctant to yield dominion over the home front even as they become the majority of the paid workforce.
"A Woman's Nation Changes Everything" is the title of a new report by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress. It does -- and it doesn't. The "Battle Between the Sexes is over. It was a draw," Shriver writes. "Now we're engaged in Negotiation Between the Sexes."
True, but from an unequal start, and with an unequal appreciation of that disparity. "Both sexes agree that women continue to bear a disproportionate burden in taking care of children and elderly parents, even when both partners in a relationship have jobs," John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira write in one chapter of the report. Here's the interesting subtext, though: Fifty-five percent of women strongly agreed (and 85 percent overall agreed) that "in households where both partners have jobs, women take on more responsibilities for the home and family than their male partners." Just 28 percent of men strongly agreed, and 67 percent agreed. That's a pretty big perception gap.
Put President Obama down as a strong agreer. "Today's Obama family is obviously not typical," he told NBC's Savannah Guthrie. "Five years ago, six years ago, though, we were having a lot of negotiations, because, you know, Michelle was trying to figure out: Okay, if the kids get sick, why is it that she's the one who has to take time off of her job to go pick them up from school, as opposed to me? If, you know, the girls need to shop for clothes, why is it that it's her burden and not mine?"

Full Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/27/AR2009102702842.html

Science and the female brain: Take that, Larry Summers

The Seattle Times
Thursday, October 15, 2009 - Page updated at 03:01 PM
Froma Harrop / Syndicated columnist

The recent award of Nobel Prizes in biology and chemistry to three women dredges up Larry Summers' suggestion in 2005 that differences in the female brain may account for the dearth of top women scientists. Now President Obama's economic adviser, Summers was then speechifying as president of Harvard.
Carol Greider, who just won a Nobel for biology, recalls being astounded by the remark. "I thought he couldn't possibly say that," the Johns Hopkins biologist told me. "I looked up the transcript, and he really said that."
Summers' defenders attacked Nancy Hopkins, the MIT biologist who walked out in protest when he made the controversial statement. Writing in The Harvard Crimson, professor of government Harvey Mansfield accused Hopkins of committing a "scandalous act of obscurantist intolerance."
Whatever. Hopkins now feels a certain vindication. And she traces the Nobel Prizes for Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, to a 1971 law that required universities to hire women onto their faculties or risk losing federal dollars.
Shortly after the regulations went into effect, Hopkins received calls from MIT and Harvard asking her to apply for a job.
"I was a true affirmative-action hire," she told me. In the late '60s, places like Harvard, Cal Tech and MIT had virtually no women teaching the sciences. Today, women account for just under 15 percent of MIT's science faculty.

Full Story: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2010072517_harrop16.html