FIST youth leader: 'Biology is not destiny!'

Excerpted from remarks to a Workers World Party International Women's Day event in New York on March 4.

FIST

The president of Harvard Uni ver sity, Lawrence Summers, made some disgusting sexist remarks Jan. 14 at the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce.

He said that the reason such a low percentage of women graduate college with PhD's compared to men is because "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."

WW speakers shared IWD program with Cuban guests.

He was saying that women have a lower intrinsic aptitude than men when it comes to subjects like mathematics and science. Intrinsic aptitude means one's inherent ability to understand.

This is actually part of a "scientific" theory called biological determinism [that] basically justifies the class and race structure of capitalism. It claims that humans--their appearance, behavior and even long-term fate--are entirely determined by genes. Biological determinists disregard or deny the effects of environmental variables on the expression of a given gene. It rules out the discrimination and oppression in society, and instead it actually justifies these things.

It also justifies the ruling class by claiming that they just have better genes than everyone else. It justifies lower wages for women because we're supposedly genetically inferior.

Biological determinism is the same theory that the Ku Klux Klan uses.

And it was actually taught as a required course at Harvard University up until the early 1980s.

President Summers, a former chief economist at the World Bank and former U.S. Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, also stated during this conference that "The relatively few women who are in the highest-ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to."

During a good portion of his remarks he tried to make a case that females are only genetically inclined for child rearing and that we're not capable of handling hard work on top of that.

War on women

While doing some research for this speech, I typed the word "woman" into the Google news search.

This is where the word "woman" is used most often in the news: "Woman drops indecent assault complaint," "Mystery of Derry woman's abduction," "Woman, 90, attacked at Montreal metro station," "Woman, 81, beaten to death in home," "Woman cut in the face during theft attempt," "Man held in rape of lost woman, 24," "Eyed in wife's murder, husband nabbed in North Carolina," "Australian soldiers shoot Iraqi woman and her child while on patrol in Baghdad."

Those were articles from just the first two pages of the search results.

This week the Associated Press ran an article [that] opened, "Ten years after a landmark UN conference adopted a platform aimed at global equality for women, the United States is demanding that a declaration issued by a follow-up meeting make clear that women are not guaranteed a right to abortion."

It has been almost a year since over a million women marched in Washington, D.C., on April 25 at the March for Women's Lives. What has happened in the year since that march? Most of that movement slipped and fell for the Democratic Party.

We are living in a time when most women and children don't have access to decent health care. We still don't have equal pay or equal access to decent jobs, either. Women make up more than 60 percent of workers who earn minimum wage, which amounts to only a little over $10,000 per year before taxes.

The inequality and inferiority created by capitalism also breeds violence against women. Every nine seconds, a woman is being beaten in the United States. Nearly two out of every five women in the U.S. have been physically or sexually assaulted sometime during their lives.

Young women, women who are separated, divorced or single, low-income women and women of color are disproportionately victims of assault and rape. Every year approximately 132,000 women report they have been victims of rape or attempted rape; more than half knew their attackers. It's estimated that two to six times that many women are raped, but do not report it.

Approximately 17 percent of pregnant women report having been battered, and the results include miscarriages, stillbirths and a two to four times greater likelihood of bearing a low birth-weight baby. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between 15 and 44 years of age in the U.S.--more than car accidents, muggings and rapes combined.

Abused women are disproportionately represented among the homeless and suicide victims. Fifty percent of all homeless women and children are fleeing domestic violence.

The average sentence for the murder of women [in domestic violence] is only two to six years in prison. The average prison sentence for a woman who kills her intimate partner is 15 years. Sixty-three percent of young men between the ages of 11 and 20 who are serving time for homicide have killed their mothers' abusers.

And there are some starling new statistics put out by the Justice Department in December about the number of women in prison, which has been increasing dramatically over the past decade. Just over 101,000 women served in prison last year. The incarceration of women is growing much faster than men. Since 1995, the total number of women in prison has jumped 48 percent, largely due to the so-called war on drugs. It's a war on women and children.

Sexism: Who profits?

During the 1960s and 1970s, women were mobilized out on the streets fighting back, not only against the Vietnam War, but demanding the right to our own bodies.

In comrade Dorothy Ballan's book, "Feminism and Marxism," which she wrote during that period, she says, "It is perfectly obvious that in contemporary bourgeois society, sexism pervades practically all areas of life. Indeed, sexism has become the predominant feature of bourgeois culture in America, and becomes more so every day. ...

"Is it not plain even to the most naïve, that sexism is a 'commodity' in a general system of commodity production and exchange where profit is the very essence of all that exists?"

Right now, while imperialism is on the brink of possibly losing to the heroic Iraqi resistance; while it pumps billions and billions more dollars into that war alone, it is trying more and more ways to steal from our class in order to keep fueling its empire.

Capitalism is in a crisis.

Now, more than ever, it must be our objec tive to fight back. Just as sexism pervades all areas of life under capitalist society, we must fight back against it in all areas of our work [and in] the movement, as well.

Our party has a revolutionary history in this struggle. And we must keep that struggle alive, smash this oppressive system as a whole and guarantee the basic human rights and needs to an education, health care, a decent job and equality--with socialism.