By the time the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted that it had no confidence in the leadership of University President Lawrence H. Summers in March 2005, the speech that touched off the crisis had largely become second order.

As allegations of insensitivity and bad facts turned to accusations of poor leadership, it was apparent that Summers’ remarks, delivered at a closed Jan. 14 conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), were the straw that broke the camel’s back.

THE PROVOCATEUR

By his own admission, Summers came to the NBER conference ready to give a speech with “some attempts at provocation” rather than “an institutional talk” on Harvard’s policies. He was there, he said, to discuss “the issue of women’s representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions.” Summers presented three hypotheses—predicated in part on research, part on his own observations—to explain the observed underrepresentation of female scientists and engineers at top universities.

First, Summers said, women may be less willing to choose a high-powered job with an intense level of commitment and an 80-hour work week. Summers continued with his second point, saying that there is “relatively clear evidence” that there may be a greater variance between men and women in aptitude areas such as mathematical and scientific ability, which may account for more men rising to top positions in these fields.

The third cause, Summers said, was that there may be cultural norms, expectations, and societal discrimination that leave women at a disadvantage in some areas.

“Somehow little girls are all socialized towards nursing and little boys are socialized towards building bridges,” Summers said. “No doubt there is some truth in that.

Summers said repeatedly that he was “speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively,” and that questions such as whether women ought to be asked to make a choice between work and family were different from the hypotheses he was proposing.

“I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable,” he added.

THE AFTERMATH

On Jan. 17, three days after the closed NBER conference, the Boston Globe reported that Summers’ remarks “sparked an uproar” with claims of “innate differences” between men and women. His remarks, the Globe reported, prompted Nancy Hopkins ’64, a chemistry professor at MIT, to leave the meeting in disgust.

Hopkins’ reaction, printed in the Globe, prompted a media frenzy, even though no official record of the talk was available.

“For him to say that ‘aptitude’ is the second most important reason that women don’t get to the top when he leads an institution that is 50 percent women students—that’s profoundly disturbing to me,” Hopkins told The Crimson on Jan. 17 “He shouldn’t admit women to Harvard if he’s going to announce when they come that, ‘hey, we don’t feel that you can make it to the top.’”

University of California-Davis sociologist Kimberlee A. Shauman, whose research with University of Michigan colleague Yu Xie was cited in Summers’ remarks, called Summers’ claims “uninformed,” in an interview with The Crimson that month. And Xie said he accepted Summers’ comments as “scholarly propositions,” although he said his own analysis “goes against Larry’s suggestion that math ability is something innate.”

Ascherman Professor of Economics Richard B. Freeman, who organized and attended the conference, says Summers’ ordering of the various causes was the most controversial aspect of his speech. “My sense would be that most people disagreed with what seemed to be the weighting put on it,” says Freeman. “There seems to be a lot of indicators men have more variance than women,” Freeman says. “I’m not sure that irritated people because it’s largely a fact. Making a big point of it was maybe a bit far-fetched.”