Summers's Double-Dare

After weight training tonight -- not too late to avoid keeping me up due to the physical activity -- I took the time to read the Summers Transcript, to get a better idea of how the debate actually began.

I could go through the transcript point by point, but I think others have done that, so I'll just write about something else.

Summer seems to make the typically-male mistake of having the privilege to ignore questions of context and social power dynamics in his focused desire to "provoke" intellectual combat, but perhaps that is obvious.

I could go on, but I came across a statement by President Hockfield, John Hennessy, and Shirley Tilghman where they ask,

The question we must ask as a society is not “can women excel in math, science and engineering?” -- Marie Curie exploded that myth a century ago -- but “how can we encourage more women with exceptional abilities to pursue careers in these fields?”

The question I would rather ask instead -- we'll see how radical or politically charged this shall or shall not be one day -- is "how can you change these fields to make them attractive to women with exceptional abilities?"

Those without much imagination, who don't understand that our history != our future, who don't have the vision to see that we don't have to shackle ourselves only to our economies, our power, our past, our 'Math-Is' envy, or our quest for efficiency, will probably say nay.

I can't speak, myself, for all of mathematics, science, and engineering, but computer science is still a young field, and I dream it can only grow and flourish as we mix in gender-variant diversity.

The field shouldn't define us as much as we should define it. Why can't we talk about connection rather than control theory, or about the converse of programming, the harder inverse problem, after all, and plan to build and engineer systems that guide humans to be more effective and efficient in their own analog lives? And do all this on a GoogleAmaYahoo scale, with, I hope, a dao that is both systematic and empathetic in equal, balanced measure.