Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services, Housing, Youth and Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today in question time the Prime Minister quoted his favourite climate change sceptic, Mr Larry Summers. Mr Summers, says the PM, ‘comes to this debate with absolutely impeccable credentials’. In fact, the PM spent quite some time in question time today talking about just how great Mr Summers is. I think he mentioned him about seven times in all in question time today.

So Mr Summers is a modern man, is he—a great thinker? According to the PM he is. Unfortunately, as well as being a climate change denier, the PM’s favourite expert seems also to be an amateur, I do not know, phrenologist. He caused quite a stir in 2005 when he told an audience, including prominent scientists, that the reason so few women succeed in maths and science careers is because of innate differences—perhaps their brains are smaller.

It might not be phrenology that has informed his views; perhaps it is something different. It might be the view of past centuries that women should not be allowed to go to university, because if they thought too much their brains would grow, the blood would rush from their reproductive organs into their brains and they would be barren. As long as they are not intentionally barren, as Senator Heffernan said of Julia Gillard, perhaps it is all right.

Mr Summers said that women and men have a ‘different availability of aptitude at the high end’. I do not think there is any possible explanation for that comment other than he thinks that women are not as smart as men; that they have lower IQs. He does acknowledge that the ‘relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately unmarried or without children’. But instead of asking himself or his audience why scientific workplaces—and, for that matter, the parliament—are so madly family-unfriendly or, perhaps being more realistic about it, mother-unfriendly, he puts it down to a level of commitment—he means a lower level of commitment from women to scientific careers. He asks:

Who wants to do the high-powered intense work?

Plainly not women, he implies. There are other explanations besides the fact that women are not as intelligent or as committed as men as to why there are not as many women in scientific careers. It could be one of any number of reasons—for example, those in a 1991 publication called Women In Science, edited by Veronica Stolte-Heiskanen. She says some of the reasons are the biases in the educational system; reconciliation of professional and family obligations; the public image of scientific disciplines such as technology and engineering; the interruption of child bearing on a career and the institutional response to that; the lack of recognition of gender equity in academic circles; and that women experience greater difficulty than men in finding suitable employment and certainly in being promoted. If you look at the lack of emphasis in many of our schools on teaching maths and science to girls and the desperate shortage of maths and science trained teachers, that has an influence in Australia. Women also have greater difficulty in obtaining tenure in the science and maths fields. All of these are possibly factors. But Summers says that it is because we are not as smart and not as committed.

What bothers me about this is not that Summers thinks this—he has a right to his own opinion—but that the Prime Minister of Australia would come into this place and commend a person whose views are so far behind the times in relation to gender and science, a person who is still a climate change denier despite the fact that science all around the world has worked out that climate change is real and humans are causing it. No wonder this fellow is the Prime Minister’s favourite climate change denier! They have got very similar views on the role of women in society and on climate change. (Time expired)