ABSTRACT
In January 2005, when Harvard University President Lawrence Summers commented that men might have a higher aptitude for math and science than women, indignant outrage ensued. Academics, bloggers, feminists, and scientists condemned his comments, arguing that differences were rooted in social practices and not in mental capacity determined by biological sex. His observations reinvigorated calls to use law to change inequalities. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) called for broader enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to address “the entrenched attitudes of the math and science establishment that women are somehow second-class scholars.” 1 Wyden’s comment about “second class scholars,” was not a new articulation of inequality. In The History of Woman Suffrage, authors Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage argued that a woman’s social “training,” rather than her innate ability had “dwarfed her capacity [and]… made her a retarding force in civilization.” A century before the suffrage debates, John Adams contended that, “there are inequalities which God and nature have planted [in humans], and which no human legislator ever can eradicate.” Summers, nineteenth-century suffragists, and Adams revealed the same contradiction; in a nation whose most soaring, inspiring rhetoric trumpets the equality of its citizens, law and social practices have been used to exclude citizens from full participation based on perceptions of their lack of capacity. 2
