This Just In: “It’s the socialization, stupid”
It’s kind of funny for a humanities-type like me to wake up to the likes of this (in an article on the Larry Summers controversy at Harvard) in the Times:
Howard Georgi, a physics professor [at Harvard] who has been part of a successful
effort in his department to recruit women for tenured positions, said,
"It’s crazy to think that it’s an innate difference." He added: "It’s
socialization. We’ve trained young women to be average. We’ve trained
young men to be adventurous."
So you mean that these ostensibly natural, innate differences are actually socially constructed? Hmm…
All that I’m trying to say, without knowing all that much about the actors involved, that it’s interesting that when it comes to an actual political issue, a question about the current state of affairs and their arrangement or re-arrangement, the issue breaks down to a conservative articulation of the "natural" against a quasi-progressive reminder of the social, the constructed. Even in the sciences…
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