Feet in mouth disease.docVIP

Comment Feet in mouth disease Gregory A Petsko Address: Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA. E-mail: petsko@ Published: 28 February 2005 Genome Biology 2005, 6:105 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2005/6/3/105 ? 2005 BioMed Central Ltd The fascinating thing about Dr Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard University’s beleaguered President, is not that he often puts his foot in his mouth. We all do that. It’s human nature to blurt things out and later wish we hadn’t. I can’t count the number of times I should have put my brain in gear before letting up the clutch on my tongue. (When I was inter- viewed for my first job, I actually said, “Oh, salary isn’t that important to me.” They never forgot that.) No, what makes Summers-watching such an irresistible sport - albeit a morbid one, rather like auto racing fans who attend to see crashes - is not seeing him put his foot in his mouth; it’s wondering how he’ll manage to get the other foot in there with it. Unless you’re a cave-dweller you probably have heard that this incident concerns the issue of women in science. Women, on average, get better grades in school, earn as many bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering, and nowadays attend grad- uate school in the sciences in about the same numbers as men. But by the time men become tenured faculty in science and engineering, they vastly outnumber women. The conference, which concerned the topic of diversity in the workplace, asked Summers to comment on this drop-off. “It is, after all, not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a short- age of role models for others who are considering being in that group”, he said. “To take a set o