The Boston Globe on Summers and The New Agenda
November 9, 2008
by Sheryl Lee
|Is Larry Summers inevitable? It’s beginning to sound as though he is. Yesterday in a Boston Globe article, Michael Kranish reported that Summers
sat directly across from Obama during a meeting of his advisory board yesterday and stood by him at a press conference, fueling further speculation that he might move back into the job he held in the Clinton administration as secretary of the Treasury.
Kranish identifies The New Agenda as an opponent of a Summers’ appointment (and see previous posts here and here).
A women’s rights group called The New Agenda, established earlier this year by former supporters of Hillary Clinton, this week urged Obama not to invite Summers into his administration. Amy Siskind, the group’s cofounder, called Summers a “known misogynist.”
Summers, a Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration, took part in the financial deregulation that is the central cause of the present economic crisis. He and Rubin and Greenspan had energetically sought to silence Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who correctly foresaw that unregulated derivatives trading could put other financial markets at risk. As she attempted to draft regulations to address this risk, Summers and his cronies accused her of fostering a financial crisis. Congress, apparently under pressure from Summers et al, suspended Born’s Commissions’ regulatory authority. Soon after, Born left her position as head of the Commission.
“It was Larry Summers who called her up and screamed at her,” said Siskind, who argued that the financial meltdown might have been averted if Summers had listened to Born.
Under Summers’ guidance, tenured positions at Harvard offered to women decreased every year, and no wonder, since he believes that women don’t work as hard as men.
Linda H. Krieger, a professor of law at Boalt Hall, who attended the symposium, said that a belief that women are less likely than men to be productive could influence decisions on granting tenure—the ultimate bet on a professor’s likely future output.
A new study to be published in next month’s Notices of the American Mathematical Society looks at differences in math aptitude by gender in other countries. The researchers found that girls in places such as Bulgaria and Romania and the former East Germany have a greater presence at the upper end of math performance than do girls in the US. They attribute this difference to an environment that doesn’t discriminate against girls in math, and doesn’t dissuade them from pursuing careers in math and science.
Another startling revelation from that study is that “80 percent of the female tenured and junior faculty at the top five US math departments were born in other countries.”
The message: Cultural or environmental factors, not intellect, are what really limit women’s math achievements.
Peter G. Gosselin of the LA Times observes that
Obama’s choice will have huge symbolic importance, offering voters an early chance to assess his judgment and decision-making process. Regardless of who is chosen, the Treasury secretary will play a central role in the administration’s economic team—influencing the substance of policy and how effectively it is pursued.
Summers’ past problems appear to make him a poor candidate to gain the public trust and steer the storm-tossed US economy to safe harbor.
Others whom Obama may be considering for Treasury Secretary are Paul Volcker and Timothy Geithner. The Boston Globe has a list of people being considered for cabinet positions. There are 16 positions, 9 of them with women candidates, and 16 of them with male candidates. Of 49 total candidates, 38 are men, and 11 are women.
Would we forgive the appointment of Summers for gender parity in cabinet? That’s 8 women.
We encourage readers to weigh in with their recommendations for Obama’s cabinet, and you can take action by contacting Valerie Jarrett, who is part of Obama’s Transition Team, at vjarrett@barackobama.com, to tell her what you think about Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary.
Thanks for the post, Dawn, and thanks for Valerie Jarrett’s email. The answer to your question for me is No, I will not forgive the appointment of Summers even in the unlikely event of gender parity. Gender parity starts with numbers, but I can just imagine the group dynamics of a cabinet meeting if the men who are there dismiss the intelligent challenges of women. Don’t call me “sweetie” President-elect Obama, and don’t appoint a man who has a track record of dismissing sound advice if it happens to come from a woman.
So glad to find an organization that has taken a public position I’ve been urging on other women’s advocacy groups. Floating Summers’ name as on the “A” list of candidates reflects a worrisome tin ear on the part of Obama’s advisors when it comes to women’s issues. By the way, how many women are in the inner circle there?
30 founders but we are growing the group as we expand to become a national organization. women who have time, commitment and energy to be involved can reach out to us.
Great post. We must mobilize quickly and let Obama and his Transition Team know that appointing Summers would be a terrible mistake. The decision as to who will be Treasury Secretary may be made very soon. Please urge your friends and colleagues to do the following:
1. As Dawn C. suggests, take action by contacting Valerie Jarrett, who is part of Obama’s Transition Team at vjarrett@barackobama.com to tell her what you think about Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary.
2. Sign the Petition to Stop Barack Obama from Considering Appointing Larry Summers for the Secretary of the Treasury Post
http://action.openleft.com/page/petition/nosummers
3. Leave a note on Obama’s transition website about your vision—NO to Larry Summers
http://change.gov/page/s/yourvision
Need more information? Check here:
http://www.opednews.com/articl.....6-709.html
http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html?
You were asking about women to suggest to Obama for positions in his administration.
I don’t know if it’s too late, or what she’s doing these days, but Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was a excellent governor of Maryland, and last year wrote a book on the separation of church and state….how churches getting involved in politics is bad all around.
ER, thank-you for those additional links.
Here’s the stuff I cut out of the post, because it was too long:
On January 14, 2005, as President of Harvard University, Summers appeared as a speaker on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” a two-day symposium hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research. His subject was “Faculty Diversity: Research Agenda.”
He introduced the topic of innate gender differences in math aptitude, suggesting that perhaps this difference was the most significant factor in the dearth of women in Math and Science faculties. Second to genetic difference, he said that women probably weren’t prepared to work the 80 hour weeks that men did to reach the upper levels, and that socialization might be less significant that previously thought. His remarks during that talk set off a storm controversy.
By attributing career differences first to innate differences, and secondly to differences in priorities for women (family over career), Summers became an apologist for the status quo at Harvard: women aren’t smart enough, and they don’t work hard enough to achieve the success that men achieve in math and science.
Summers failed to note that women’s role in marriage and child-rearing frees up men to work those 80 hour weeks that the high achievers put in in order to be successful. Maria Tatar, Dean for the humanities at Harvard, reported that, “Only 44 percent of tenured women are married and have children, compared to 70 percent of tenured men—a suggestively significant imbalance in care obligations and conflicting family-career demands.”
Summers also said that discrimination might be given too much of the blame for the relative scarcity of women in science and engineering.
“My best guess, to provoke you . . . is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity,” Summers said at the conference, according to the transcript he later released. “In the special case of science and engineering,” he continued, “there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.”
Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at MIT who was present at the conference which sparked all the controversy, and who has since been an outspoken critic of Summers (and who is one of The New Agenda’s founders), said the new research shows that “this expectation that girls can’t do math has real consequences.” Research on gender differences in learning demonstrate that expectations and stereotypes have the greatest impact on the performance of those most gifted in math and science, and other studies have shown that “differences between men and women, and among races, can be erased with minor adjustments that influence test-takers’ confidence.”
After the situation blew up in his face, Summers became a “martyr to political correctness.” According to his defenders, he was an intellectually honest man asking hard questions that needed to be asked, and this valiant effort on his part was being thwarted by oversensitive critics who sought only to squelch debate. Nevertheless, however unintentionally, Summers had “casually downplayed, and actually ended up reinforcing, the social consensus that girls are innately less good at math than boys.”
William Saletan in Slate got hold of the transcript from the talk and concluded that Summers was misinterpreted. This was not a case of blatant sexism, Saletan said, but of deeply flawed thinking:
“In short, Summers got a bum rap. So, was his analysis of biological and cultural factors sound? The transcript answers that question, too. The answer is no. Summers grossly overreached the evidence, and he made a couple of glaring logical blunders.”
So, according to Saletan, Summers isn’t a misogynist, he just has a hard time considering hypotheses other than his own, or listening to alternate perspectives? Are we supposed to find this conclusion comforting? According to Saletan, Summers had “rashly extrapolated” evidence from dissimilar circumstances and applied them to women in math and science. He had come to faulty conclusions, based on no evidence, and refused to entertain others’ ideas. Doesn’t that sound just like what he did with Brooksley Born?
(Saletan:) “Why did Summers make these mistakes? The transcript suggests two conflicting reasons. One is that he’s stubborn and argumentative. He repeatedly deflected cultural explanations by saying things like, “No doubt there is some truth in that,” “This kind of taste does go on,” and “Yeah, look, anything could be social”—and then minimizing these explanations. The consistent tone of his remarks was “Yeah, but …” There are two possible explanations for that tone in this context. One is that he’s a sexist. The other is that once he offers a hypothesis, he’d rather defend and extend it than listen objectively to the alternatives. He’s got an open mind but not an open heart.”
We heard from one of our members that a commentator on Hardball with Chris Matthews said, “I hope that Obama won’t be swayed by fringe women’s groups.”
I guess we’ll see.
Summers is a brilliant man, but there are others just as brilliant but not as divisive that Obama could choose. Summers is not a good fit for this administration.
The WaPo now the Globe = exposure, exposure. The New Aenda will not be some ‘women’s fringe group’ that will fade away and give way to the good ol’ boy system of patriarchy that denies the larger collective the input and contributions by half the population.
I think it would be best if Obama was gender and race blind and appointed the most qualified person. Summers has already proven himself to be a sexist man who lacks finachial judgment, so I don’t see why on earth he is even BEING considered.
Whether it will be Larry Summers or Paul Volcker, whose stewardship was widely credited with pulling the US out of a period of stagflation under President Reagan, the key issue is to deal with commodities market regulation so that there is greater transparency in futres and swaps contracts, many of which are taking place on unregulated markets.
The best way forward would be to build such reform in a global context, involving commodity exchanges in the emerging markets, as part of a comprehensive Bretton Woods 2 renewal of the global financial architecture.
David,
I imagine there will be a swing towards regulation in the next administration, and similar to Sarbanes-Oxley, likely we will swing too far the other way.
Brooksley Borg saw this coming in 1998 and was ignored. Many of us on Wall Street saw this as well. Greenspan has apologized. Summers had a chance to help the problem – and instead froze out Borg. This is not the type of leadership we need.
I just sent my e-mail to Valerie Jarret encouraging President-Elect Obama to remove Larry Summers from consideration as Secretary of Treasury.
Our nation’s school administrators and teachers are on the front lines trying to remove the bias against girls in math and science. We do not need to have a man who would even question the innate or natural ability of females in math and science to be appointed to such an important position.
I have a teenage daughter who excels in these subjects – more so than my husband and my son. She is already starting to perform poorly in them at school because she doesn’t want to be a “nerd”. Let’s put some intelligent women in cabinet positions that require excellence in math and science – someone they can look up to, not someone who denigrates their abilities.
One of the telling moments in this campaign was McCain promising more women in his cabinet than ever before — at one point I believe he told a group of Hillary supporters that he would have at least gender parity in his cabinet. (This would mirror the majority of his Senate staff, and especially higher placed/higher paid staff members, being women — unlike Obama who only has women in junior and less well-paid positions.)
At the same time, Obama refused to make any commitment at all to having women in his cabinet; so far his pattern seems to be the token female here and there. McCain was clearly the true feminist pick here — even before considering his groundbreaking move of choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Larry Summers would be a huge mistake for Obama, and a tragedy for women.
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