His basic premise was challenged fervently. Denton walks around with a folder full of research -- studies by the National Science Foundation, an op-ed with graphics that ran in the New York Times -- to prove that qualified women are earning more and more advanced degrees in the scientific fields and that institutions that make an effort can have a more diverse workforce.
Michael Cox and Richard Alm at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas have done research that shows a continual increase in women earning science degrees between 1970 and 2002. Doctorates in physics earned by women are up from 2.9 percent of the total to 15.5 percent. Engineering? 0.6 percent to 17.3 percent. He can go on and on.
Astronomer Vera Rubin views the issue of women in science differently from Harvard's Lawrence Summers. "I think the question is, are there women . . . who want to do science . . . but they never really got the opportunity?"
(Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)
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"I see no reason to think that the world won't be filled with women physicists in the future," Cox says. "If women want it -- and they are answering that question, one degree at a time -- it will happen. It's about what they want, not whether they can."
For Summers, things came to a head earlier this week, when, in a stunning move, the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences voted 215 to 185 to declare a "lack of confidence" in its president. A second motion, declaring regret over aspects of his managerial style and some of the statements he made at the conference, carried 253 to 137.
Harvard is having an institutional crisis.
But for the women who love science, who live it, who excel at it, this is not about the institution. This is personal. Deeply personal. Summers, Vera Rubin will tell you, asked the wrong question. He saw the surface and missed what was behind it.
"I think the question is," Rubin says, "are there women and have there been women who want to do science and could be doing great science, but they never really got the opportunity?"
Outside her office at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Northwest Washington, Rubin has two bulletin boards. One she uses to pin up articles and research that pertain to her field of study. The other she uses for articles and research about her other pet project: women and their opportunities and advancements in the field. The second board has been taking on paper of late.
"I have so many responses to [Summers], I don't even know where to start," she says.
Perhaps she should start with her own life. Rubin, 76, is an esteemed scientist whose pioneering research on galaxies is considered some of the most significant work in her field. She has raised innovative questions about the movements of galaxies and the existence of dark matter. She has accumulated honors and accolades too numerous to list. Harvard, among other schools, has given her an honorary degree.
"She's one of the world's outstanding astronomers and one of the great Carnegie scientists," says Maxine Singer, who long served as Rubin's superior at the institute.
It started simply. As a child, Rubin would spend her nights watching the sky outside the window by her bed, wondering, falling in love. If it hadn't been for that window, for those stars that beckoned her, she has no idea what path her life would have taken.
"Oh, of course I believe that I would have ended up doing something entirely different," she says. "I think we get captured by something and we spend our lives that way."
Her father, Philip Cooper, was an engineer; her mother, Rose, mainly a homemaker. From the beginning, her father encouraged her interest in astronomy; he took her to meetings of the D.C. Astronomy Club, where she was a young girl surrounded by grown men.
