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.
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