Dear Editor,
Your editorial on Thursday, June 4, 2009 entitled, ‘Nurture, not nature,’ was supportive of the results of a study which concluded that females were equal to males is mathematics, a surrogate for analytical sciences. It is premature to arrive at this position based on this study performed by two women, Drs Hyde and Mertz, from the University of Wisconsin. Since the 1960s, the US feminist movement headed by Betty Friedman and the more radical Gloria Steinem have sought to elevate the image of women to that of superiority over their male counterparts. That movement is still active despite the gains of women through affirmative action, work programmes, higher participation rates in institutions of higher learning, increased mentoring and support programmes such as ‘take-your-daughter-to-work day’ and TV programmes involving criminal investigations where women are promoted beyond their numbers in a male-dominated field, and funding of elite girl schools by wealthy philanthropists, Oprah Winfrey, to name one.
With all these opportunities, there is little wonder that boys are failing and girls succeeding. But when Larry Summers, President of Harvard University, pointed out in 2005 the one area that they have not succeeded at, which is maths/science, and wondered aloud whether their innate abilities were responsible, the feminists at Harvard had him removed. The message is simple.
Any remarks that degrade the abilities of women will fetch a heavy price. Dr Summers, a prominent economist, was unemployed for about a year before landing a teaching job, and more recently, was selected to be President Obama’s Director of the US National Economic Council.
Now on the heels of Dr Summer’s remark, comes a study using correlations which show no difference in maths aptitude despite the factual evidence Dr Summers referred to.
As someone who has used regression analysis to forecast outcomes, I can assure you that one can find any and everything to correlate to any and everything.
From my experience with family members, college-trained staff members who I managed for over twenty years, and colleagues at university, I have observed differences between the aptitude of males and females. Females excel in communications and subjects/topics relying on memory, whereas males excel in those relying on analytical methods. During my years in engineering school in New York, USA, I only encountered two females attending classes and in one case she did not last the entire semester.
In NY where nurturing and gender equality is not an issue, and where females are over represented at universities, they do not opt for the analytical sciences such as engineering, because they are better able to cope with other disciplines. The differences that are innate in all of us give us our strengths and weaknesses.
It makes no sense to deny these differences or to think that they can be overcome through nurturing. Instead our strengths should be exploited and combined in teamwork to achieve the goals of society.
Yours faithfully,
Louis Holder
