Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 440 Editor's Choice: 86
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The Hillary issue isn't that she's a woman...
[Read the article: Americans ready for a female president]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...it's that she sucks.
Far from being the far-left cariacture the right-wing noise machine has painted her as, Senator Clinton has consistently proven herself to be a war hawk and a tool of big corporate money. She does her husband's triangulation thing to try to position herself in the middle, but at this point the country has swung so far to the right that whatever the Beltway conventional wisdom may be, this is *not* a position that can really carry. The country has polarized, and all a Democrat will accomplish by frequently voting with Republicans is driving off some committed Democratic voters; the Republicans will still vote for the Republican, so the Democrat will lose. Senator Clinton is okay as a senator, but would be a disaster as a President, because at this time we desperately need a strong, decisive president who stands up for his or her beliefs, is competent, and strongly supports our constitution and civil liberties. Hillary doesn't fit anything except competent. (Which rules out Rice, too, who's not competent. Also, McCain and Giuliani, both of whom are weak on civil liberties.)
And that's not *even* considering the political issue that the Right managed to totally destroy her reputation among a large segment of the population; the right has a profound knee-jerk hatred of Hillary similar to the left's hatred of Bush, except that we have good reasons for our hatred and they don't.
There are probably women who would make great presidents. Hillary Clinton isn't one of them.
On the other hand, Condoleeza Rice has no chance whatsoever, no matter what the polls say. No Democrat will vote for her, because of her connection with Bush and her terrible track record (even the kind of black people that normally vote a straight race ticket when they can will likely reject her, given that she shopped for shoes while people died in New Orleans); no independent who hates Bush will vote for her (and there's more of them than independents who like Bush); and more Republicans than Democrats believe the country isn't ready for a woman president, *and* more Republicans are racists. A black woman Republican would need to have a record of stellar competence and a lot of bipartisan appeal to win the Presidency, and Condoleeza doesn't have either.
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Actually, the human skill is likely to be multitasking.
[Read the article: What else we're reading]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Rats are really good at running mazes. It's a survival skill. Humans, however, suck at it, and it's unlikely that a mother human's ability to solve mazes would actually improve, as that would do nothing to improve the fitness of her offspring.
However, the ability to split your concentration in multiple directions without dropping the ball? *That* is a vitally necessary mom skill and always has been. Therefore it is much more likely that the "intelligence" gains seen in *humans*, as opposed to rats, would be an improved ability to multitask.
This would show up in lab tests, but in real life, it's not so valuable. It *is* profoundly valuable to be able to multitask in our society, and the more you can do it, the better -- but working mothers really do have far more tasks to accomplish than non-mother workers (with perhaps the very rare exception of the working dad who does most of the child care, too), so their greater ability to multitask is used up by the extra tasks required for their baby.
What would be valuable is if the ability remains. I would first like to see a study concentrate on whether mothers' ability to multitask improves over non-mother women. Then, if an improvement is seen, I'd like to see a study of 40-year-old working women, some of whom have had biological children, some of whom have adopted children, and some of whom are childless (hell, throw in some 40-something working men in these categories, too), and see if the gains persist after the children no longer require so much parental attention. If this were the case, and it were widely publicized, it might make it easier for former stay-at-home moms to enter or re-enter the work force in middle age, because multitasking is a business skill everyone needs, nowadays.
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There are probably actual biological differences...
[Read the article: Summers steps down]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...but they don't come anywhere near accounting for the discrepancy between men and women in the sciences. We know this because we can look at the Soviet Union, which apparently had a lot more female scientists than we do, and we can infer this from the fact that the difference found between men and women in mathematical ability on tests is about equal to the opposite difference found between men and women in verbal and written ability, yet there's absolutely no shortage of men in professions that require verbal and written skills.
Summers' comment was insensitive and idiotic, not because there are no biological sex differences between men and women's brains -- there probably are -- but because these differences are not *nearly* as large as the popular press would paint them, and they do not remotely account for the discrepancy he was talking about, and he should have known that.