CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 17 - Bowing to intense pressure from his faculty, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, on Thursday released a month-old transcript of his contentious closed-door remarks about the shortage of women in the sciences and engineering. The transcript revealed several provocative statements by Dr. Summers about the "intrinsic aptitude" of women, the career pressures they face and discrimination within universities.
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Dr. Summers's remarks, which have only been described by others until now, have fueled a widening crisis on campus, with several professors talking about taking a vote of no confidence on the president next week. - That idea alone is unprecedented at Harvard in modern times.
Among his comments to a conference of economists last month, according to the transcript, Dr. Summers, a former secretary of the United States Treasury, compared the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the numbers of Catholics in investment banking, whites in the National Basketball Association and Jews in farming.
He theorized that a "much higher fraction of married men" than married women were willing to work 80-hour weeks to attain "high powered" jobs. He said racial and sex discrimination needed to be "absolutely, vigorously" combated, yet he argued that bias could not entirely explain the lack of diversity in the sciences. At that point, the Harvard leader suggested he believed that the innate aptitude of women was a factor behind their low numbers in the sciences and engineering.
"My best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this 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; that in the special case of science and engineering, 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," Dr. Summers said, according to the transcript.
"I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them," he added.
Over and over in the transcript, he made clear that he might be wrong in his theories, and he challenged researchers to study his propositions.
He also urged research on "the quality of marginal hires" to the faculty when efforts to diversify are under way. Do these hires, he asked, eventually turn into star professors? Or "plausible compromises" that are not unreasonable additions to the faculty? And "how many of them are what the right-wing critics of all of this suppose represent clear abandonments of quality standards?"
Several professors said Thursday that they were only more furious after reading his precise remarks , saying they felt he believed women were intellectually inferior to men.
Everett I. Mendelsohn, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, said that once he read the remarks, he could understand why Dr. Summers "might have wanted to keep it a secret."
"Where he seems to be off the mark particularly is in his sweeping claims that women don't have the ability to do well in high-powered jobs," said Professor Mendelsohn, who was one of a group of faculty members who sharply criticized Dr. Summers's leadership at a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Tuesday. "There's an implication that they've taken themselves out of that role. But he brings forward no evidence."
But Dr. Summers seemed to back away from those theories on Thursday in a letter to the faculty released with the 7,000-word transcript. In it, he said he should "have spoken differently on matters so complex," and he said he had "substantially understated the impact of socialization and discrimination."
"The issue of gender difference is far more complex than comes through in my comments," he said in the letter.
The senior member of Harvard's governing corporation, James Houghton, released a letter shortly after the transcript was made public, offering praise and support for Dr. Summers.
Williams proposes that through the 10 Lenses, individuals can learn more about their own cultural-belief systems. A better understanding of these systems, and those of others, can help people "build bridges, manage conflict, and find common ground." It also can help managers communicate with and respond to diverse employees and customers. Once those skills are mastered, Williams even points readers to "an 11th Lens," which, by combining the best qualities of the other 10 lenses, "can liberate us from the boundaries of those lenses and propel us toward healing ourselves, each other, and our planet.
At the very least, Williams's framework provides a constructive tool for self-analysis. We've summarized the diagnostic test behind the 10 Lenses. Click here
to take the test.
Seeing past failure to business success
Robert Heller is one of the world's best-selling authors on business management.
When Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, observed that success lies on the far side of failure, he was preaching a double sermon. The first lesson is the need to persevere through all setbacks. The second is equally important: learn from your mistakes.
They can yield far more value than rejoicing in success. That's why another American entrepreneur, Royal D. Little, entitled his book How to Lose $100 Million and Other Useful Information. The ability to analyse one's own errors, and correct them, is an indispensable, highly instructive part of the entrepreneurial kit.
Sometimes this means making the best of what initially seems a very bad job - like the company whose brand-new product, thought certain of success, was losing money heavily, making no impact in the market and causing extreme stress and overwork. The disaster flowed from a common error: extrapolation of the past into the future.
That can prove fateful even when the future is very recent. The company had experienced strong demand in this particular market segment in the preceding months. As the new product, designed to cream off more boomtime sales, was launched, the market went dead flat. The company had been misled by looking only at its own sales.
In its resulting predicament, thorough homework, wrongly absent before, showed that of three alternatives - battling on regardless, closure, or tweaking - only the third made economic sense. By scaling down production and attacking a different market segment, first-year losses would be kept to £50,000. Breakeven next year would be followed by £100,000 profit in the third.
So it transpired. Better still, the product surged on to dominate its segment and become a highly profitable market leader. The plans could be scaled down without loss of opportunity - simply because the original segment offered none. So beware of extrapolation - and never neglect that homework.
In another, sadder case, though, efforts to recover from unwise extrapolation became self-defeating. The start-up, a service business, had expanded to the limits of its existing offices. Market conditions looked buoyant, and a move to larger premises seemed sensible. But instead of cutting overheads, by moving to a cheaper area, the company took on much bigger and dearer offices.
Recession, hitting its business and savaging the value of London offices, delivered a double whammy. The more the firm tried to cut insupportable overheads, by subletting and cutting staff, the more its business suffered. It was chasing its own tail - the same fate that's overtaken some major companies, which have become leaner and meaner, all right, but also less able to compete.
So keep the ratio of fixed costs to turnover as low as possible. The attack on overheads is easily relaxed when business is booming, and the boom is being extrapolated into the future. If the breakeven point where income covers costs rises too high, not only will profits be inadequate, but the business will be highly vulnerable to any downturn.
On the other hand, having low-cost offices over a pub, say, with tiny staff and big ambitions has dangers of its own. As in another real-life example, it encourages the proliferation of low-profit activities. This company was undertaking far too much activity at far too tiny a return. So, even though the breakeven was low, it couldn't get past the vital mark - and failed accordingly.
So always work to high gross margins. The two latter examples provide another warning. There wasn't enough room to learn from failure and proceed to its far side, success. It's hard for a small company, especially when going well, to ask what's the worse that could happen, and what must be done if the worst (as it sometimes will) comes to the worst.
That isn't the same as prudent budgeting. Time and again, boards accept budgets which look immensely prudent compared to the previous year's wonderful rise in sales and profits. But the budgeters have merely aimed off from the extrapolated past. Just as dangerous, they're still in an upside mentality, which affects decisions as well as costs.
Nobody likes to present pessimistic forecasts. But adverse future trends won't disappear for being ignored. Nor will past failures - so exploit them. After all, they've cost plenty.
Yours 
Robert Heller
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