- Dickwad!
I have yet another great big "fuck you!" to hand out today. This one goes to Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University who suggested that the reason women aren't as successful in the sciences has nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with the fact that we can't wrap our wee little brains around big, manly concepts like um, numbers and stuff.
I could go get a bunch of statistics and studies and whatnot to present my position on this particular fuck up, but I think my point would be better made with the telling of a story.
I have always been a geek. Was born a geek and will die a geek. Growing up, books were my best friends. I had a microscope. I had a chemistry set. I watched the Discovery channel on a near daily basis. In my junior year of high school I scored in the top 2% of the nation in science. My (male) counselor suggested that I'd make a great nurse or teacher. Those were the only options he presented to me.
I majored in Biology in college. Graduated with a B average and started looking for a job. 6 months later I took a job assembling electronic components for minimum wage. It was that or join the military, as my student loan payment were due. The company I worked for had a policy of giving all the applicants a mechanical apptitude test. I was told later that I had the highest score in the history of the company, but I can't tell you if thats true or not. Based on my results, I was interviewed and offered a position in Quality Assurance. A male coworker and I started on the same day. Six months later, my boss quit. My coworker was promoted.
Eventually I worked my way into a position in the chem lab. I stayed in that position for almost a year, then applied for and got a similar position at a different company. There was one other lab tech, who had started a week before me. He had no lab experience and no experience in the electroplating industry (which at this point I had been working in for 2 years). About a month after I started, the lab supervisor quit. Mr. No Experience co worker was promoted to supervisor.
I spent about 2 1/2 years under Mr. No Experience. He was threatened by the fact that I actually knew what the hell was going on and made my job and my life as difficult as possible, hoping I'd quit. That way his job would be safe ya see. I discussed the problem with every manager I had (I think we went through four. all men.)- not one of them confronted him with his unprofessional behavior. Finally we got a manager that saw the problem. He moved my supervisor to a different position and promoted me to lab supervisor and process engineer. I got a 5% raise with the promotion from lab tech to engineer/supervisor.
I spent 2 years in that position, making ~20K less than I was worth. Eventually I got fed up and found a job that would pay me what I was worth. Upon leaving the company, I recommended one of my lab techs for the supervisor position. He had worked for me maybe 4 or 5 months. No previous experience in electroplating, minimal experience in lab work. I pretty much taught him everything he knew. He was offered the position of lab supervisor (no engineering duties) for 2K more than I was making when I left. After working for that company for 5 years.
Well, maybe I just really sucked at my job right? I mean hey, its possible. But take into consideration that I currently work for the manager that promoted me to engineer in the first place. He left the company shortly after I did, and when I was laid off a year and a half later, he had enough confidence in my abilities to hire me as an engineer in a small R&D company, in an area I had no experience in.
So, Mr. Summers, what exactly do you think has kept me from being as successful as my male counterparts? Where in my story do you find an innate inability to comprehend things scientific? Or maybe its simply your inability to comprehend things realistic.