[Be sure to read previous posts Groundwork and More Groundwork, preparatory prequels to this post.]

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You’ve probably been wondering when I would go off about Harvard president Larry Summers’ comments about women and science.

 Believe me, I’ve been fighting the urge.

You see, I understand why it is that Larry Summers made his comments.  It’d be easy to say Summers is a bigoted, bullying bonehead, but many people have already said that.

And it’s not really just that he’s all those things.  I won’t disagree entirely.

But Larry has an innate blindspot.  So do a substantive number of men.

And so do a substantive number of women.

The little chart I shared here in my previous post (More Groundwork) rocked my world, made it crystal clear why women haven’t been able to break the glass ceiling that exists not only in the sciences, but in business as well.

SUNY’s Professor Jenny Wade laid out a “unified field” theory of human consciousness and its pattern of emergence.  This chart depicts the progression of human awareness, at the level of the individual.  However, this same chart also works at the level of culture; we tend to cluster in groups somewhere along this line of development.

Note in particular the split between achievement and affiliative states of consciousness.  As we mature, we travel from the earliest states manifested in childhood, up through conformism that is so prevalent in our elementary and high school years.  At some point we tend to drift in one of two directions, towards either achievement and affiliative states.

This split tends to occur along gender lines, although not all the time.

Get it?  If consciousness represents our perception of reality, those of us in achievement and affiliative states are living in two different realities.

We don’t SEE each other.

In other words, Larry Summers doesn’t SEE the issues from what appears to be an achievement state of consciousness.  He only sees from his perspective, one that appears to be firmly in the achievement state.

Conversely, women who are disgusted by Summers’ comments about women in sciences may not SEE that he is blinded by the state of awareness in which he lives.  They may be as entrenched in their own different state of consciousness that can be oppositional to the one Summers' manifests.

Wade’s work describes the two states of consciousness pretty clearly, as you can see from my previous post (Groundwork).

It makes sense, reading these descriptions, as to the affinity a substantive majority of men have for sports – for them it’s all about the numbers.  Who won?  By how much?  What were the stats for the key players?  Did they do better than last game?  How’d they do over the last time they met?  How many yards did he run?  What’s his game average?  What was his best drive?  How many birdies?  It's all about achievement -- benchmarked, measured, compared.

That’s why Summers was concentrating on the numbers of women in science.  In his current state of awareness, the numbers of women penetrating tenured positions in the sciences is much like sports teams making the playoffs.  Obviously they aren’t a good team if they don’t make it this far…or at least that's what it looks like in his reality.

Many women protested Summers’ perspective, knowing as they do from within their reality that there are many dependencies that serve to block achievement.  Summers’ comment about women not wanting to work 80 hours a week in order to achieve tenured status struck a nerve with them; what did he think they were doing instead?  Not only are women who make it to the upper echelons working long hours, they are being accused by society of being poor mothers if they are parents.  They are in a lose-lose scenario.  They are only too aware that society won’t hold fathers accountable in the same way that they hold women accountable.  (See Salon’s article, “Mommy Madness” for a testimonial of this issue; note that few if any people questioned Summers’ ability to parent due to the hours he must put in as Harvard’s president.)  For women in the affiliative state of consciousness, everything is interconnected and interdependent; they are constantly wired into a network of relationships where any action on their part or the part of others impacts the network.  They see that women are constantly switched on.

But this is invisible to people in Summers’ state of consciousness.  There’s no way to quantify the grey area; only the hours actually spent behind the desk count as stats.

Women’s blindspot is manifest in the reaction to Summers’ comments.  We revert to the affiliative zone, feeling slighted and offended, upset that a key node in our network of relations has rejected us.  We don’t see the blinders that Summers wears that are in part hardwired because we are more focused on the relationship, more concerned that a figurehead leading a body of people would say this or act this way rather than addressing the disparity between his perspective and our own.  We have to learn to speak like the locals if we are going to get through; continuing to speak in our tongue won’t work.

Summers also fails to grasp that being female doesn’t mean less; it only means different than male.  How women experience the sciences is not less valuable; it’s merely different and inherently connected to the entirety of the human condition.  Where men may succeed in fields where quantifying is critical, women may exceed where qualifying is more important.  In other words, competing to solve for X may work for men.  Women may be more effective in identifying and resolving relationships between different factors, may be more comfortable working with an interconnected matrix of issues.  In other words, women may excel at systems.

But science, having long been dominated by men, may not see the value in that which is not black-and-white, win-lose, clearly measurable.  They may not promote women who achieve through affiliation.  For instance, a woman who can assemble an effective team that interacts well or who can coach a highly diverse group of students to work collaboratively may not be preferred over a man who has a string of discoveries to his credit.

In other words, the prototypical lone cowboys are rewarded.

Look at the research on HIV, at the dispute that arose over which scientists identified the virus.  This is a typical turf war giving evidence to the states of awareness these male researchers manifested.

It hurts us all when this happens; how much attention was given to this skirmish?  Did this detract from the underlying research itself?  Could we as a society have paid more attention to the real issues behind the research rather than the squabbling over who won the race to HIV identification?  Would we as a society have made more progress faster on effective treatments of HIV and AIDS had these two groups of predominantly male researchers simply agreed to collaborate and work together rather than expend energy on who discovered HIV first?

There will be detractors who disagree with my observation, claiming that not all men or all women are divided by consciousness.  This is very true, as the chart from Wade’s work attests.  Consciousness is fluid and can change under different circumstances and under focused attention alone.  Many adults can traverse between different states of consciousness at any given time, falling back into conformism under extreme stress, moving forward into authentic consciousness when fully optimized, or back and forth between affiliative and achievement states.

Yet differences in brain function along gender lines documents some fundamental difference in operation.  Is it not at all possible that we manifest different states of consciousness, live in different realities because of these hardware differences?

And is it at all possible this is an important feature of our humanity, that we are able to exist along a matrix of perspectives?  It’s not a random or occasional occurrence, after all; a persistent majority of adults live in these states and therefore must be critical to the human condition.

But is it not a problem for our society when we continually deny the differences and fail to find ways to resolve the gap by denigrating half of our humanity because of numbers?

It’s my personal belief that our failure to encourage women in the sciences costs us all, impacts the bottom line of our society.  Every time I experience or hear of a product design failure, I wonder whether there were enough women on the design team.  Were there people who would feel comfortable with asking questions about the impact of the work on others, or was the team intent only on making the numbers, whether that meant staying in budget, delivering on schedule, or solving for X?

12:50:46 AM    comment []