At the same time, Obama refused to make any commitment at all to having women in his cabinet; so far his pattern seems to be the token female here and there. McCain was clearly the true feminist pick here — even before considering his groundbreaking move of choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Larry Summers would be a huge mistake for Obama, and a tragedy for women.

Our nation’s school administrators and teachers are on the front lines trying to remove the bias against girls in math and science. We do not need to have a man who would even question the innate or natural ability of females in math and science to be appointed to such an important position.

I have a teenage daughter who excels in these subjects – more so than my husband and my son. She is already starting to perform poorly in them at school because she doesn’t want to be a “nerd”. Let’s put some intelligent women in cabinet positions that require excellence in math and science – someone they can look up to, not someone who denigrates their abilities.

I imagine there will be a swing towards regulation in the next administration, and similar to Sarbanes-Oxley, likely we will swing too far the other way.

Brooksley Borg saw this coming in 1998 and was ignored. Many of us on Wall Street saw this as well. Greenspan has apologized. Summers had a chance to help the problem – and instead froze out Borg. This is not the type of leadership we need.

The best way forward would be to build such reform in a global context, involving commodity exchanges in the emerging markets, as part of a comprehensive Bretton Woods 2 renewal of the global financial architecture.

Here’s the stuff I cut out of the post, because it was too long:

On January 14, 2005, as President of Harvard University, Summers appeared as a speaker on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” a two-day symposium hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research. His subject was “Faculty Diversity: Research Agenda.”

He introduced the topic of innate gender differences in math aptitude, suggesting that perhaps this difference was the most significant factor in the dearth of women in Math and Science faculties. Second to genetic difference, he said that women probably weren’t prepared to work the 80 hour weeks that men did to reach the upper levels, and that socialization might be less significant that previously thought. His remarks during that talk set off a storm controversy.

By attributing career differences first to innate differences, and secondly to differences in priorities for women (family over career), Summers became an apologist for the status quo at Harvard: women aren’t smart enough, and they don’t work hard enough to achieve the success that men achieve in math and science.

Summers failed to note that women’s role in marriage and child-rearing frees up men to work those 80 hour weeks that the high achievers put in in order to be successful. Maria Tatar, Dean for the humanities at Harvard, reported that, “Only 44 percent of tenured women are married and have children, compared to 70 percent of tenured men—a suggestively significant imbalance in care obligations and conflicting family-career demands.”

Summers also said that discrimination might be given too much of the blame for the relative scarcity of women in science and engineering.

“My best guess, to provoke you . . . is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity,” Summers said at the conference, according to the transcript he later released. “In the special case of science and engineering,” he continued, “there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.”

Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at MIT who was present at the conference which sparked all the controversy, and who has since been an outspoken critic of Summers (and who is one of The New Agenda’s founders), said the new research shows that “this expectation that girls can’t do math has real consequences.” Research on gender differences in learning demonstrate that expectations and stereotypes have the greatest impact on the performance of those most gifted in math and science, and other studies have shown that “differences between men and women, and among races, can be erased with minor adjustments that influence test-takers’ confidence.”

After the situation blew up in his face, Summers became a “martyr to political correctness.” According to his defenders, he was an intellectually honest man asking hard questions that needed to be asked, and this valiant effort on his part was being thwarted by oversensitive critics who sought only to squelch debate. Nevertheless, however unintentionally, Summers had “casually downplayed, and actually ended up reinforcing, the social consensus that girls are innately less good at math than boys.”

William Saletan in Slate got hold of the transcript from the talk and concluded that Summers was misinterpreted. This was not a case of blatant sexism, Saletan said, but of deeply flawed thinking:

“In short, Summers got a bum rap. So, was his analysis of biological and cultural factors sound? The transcript answers that question, too. The answer is no. Summers grossly overreached the evidence, and he made a couple of glaring logical blunders.”

So, according to Saletan, Summers isn’t a misogynist, he just has a hard time considering hypotheses other than his own, or listening to alternate perspectives? Are we supposed to find this conclusion comforting? According to Saletan, Summers had “rashly extrapolated” evidence from dissimilar circumstances and applied them to women in math and science. He had come to faulty conclusions, based on no evidence, and refused to entertain others’ ideas. Doesn’t that sound just like what he did with Brooksley Born?

(Saletan:) “Why did Summers make these mistakes? The transcript suggests two conflicting reasons. One is that he’s stubborn and argumentative. He repeatedly deflected cultural explanations by saying things like, “No doubt there is some truth in that,” “This kind of taste does go on,” and “Yeah, look, anything could be social”—and then minimizing these explanations. The consistent tone of his remarks was “Yeah, but …” There are two possible explanations for that tone in this context. One is that he’s a sexist. The other is that once he offers a hypothesis, he’d rather defend and extend it than listen objectively to the alternatives. He’s got an open mind but not an open heart.”

We heard from one of our members that a commentator on Hardball with Chris Matthews said, “I hope that Obama won’t be swayed by fringe women’s groups.”

I guess we’ll see.

I don’t know if it’s too late, or what she’s doing these days, but Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was a excellent governor of Maryland, and last year wrote a book on the separation of church and state….how churches getting involved in politics is bad all around.

1. As Dawn C. suggests, take action by contacting Valerie Jarrett, who is part of Obama’s Transition Team at vjarrett@barackobama.com to tell her what you think about Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary.

2. Sign the Petition to Stop Barack Obama from Considering Appointing Larry Summers for the Secretary of the Treasury Post
http://action.openleft.com/page/petition/nosummers

3. Leave a note on Obama’s transition website about your vision—NO to Larry Summers
http://change.gov/page/s/yourvision

Need more information? Check here:
http://www.opednews.com/articl.....6-709.html
http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html?