Warning: This Transcript May Cause Nausea and Loss of Consciousness

Harvard President Lawrence Summers' critics seem to think the transcript of his remarks on women in science and engineering, released yesterday, vindicates their complaints that what he said was beyond the pale of acceptable discussion. Shirley Malcom, director of education for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told The New York Times: "I'm glad his words are finally out there…because so many of us have been accused of implying that he said things he did not, and now people can actually judge for themselves."

Not to spoil it for you, but Summers says his "best guess," based on his reading of the research and his conversations with experts and employers, is that the most important factor explaining the paucity of women on science and engineering faculties at top universities (and in various other high-powered jobs) is that mothers are less inclined than fathers to put in the hours demanded by such positions. He stresses this is not necessarily the way it should be, that the difference could be largely due to unfair expectations vis-a-vis child rearing.

Summers suggests the second most important explanation is a greater variability in aptitude among men, which makes them overrepresented among the sort of people who tend to become physics professors. (Men are also overrepresented at the other end of the bell curve.) There is strong evidence of this pattern, although people continue to argue about the relative role of genes and environment in producing it.

Summers by no means dismisses the roles of socialization and discrimination, but he does say people tend to exaggerate their importance. He cites evidence of sex differences that cannot plausibly be explained by how kids are raised and argues that if discrimination against women were pervasive, more universities would take advantage of it by snatching up all the brilliant women shunned by their competitors.

Summers repeatedly emphasizes that his conclusions are tentative and open to challenge and that more research is needed to definitively resolve these issues. His conclusion:

I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can. That's why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable.

There is no smoking gun, no moment where Summers says, "Let's face it: Women just can't hack it in science and engineering. They should stick to nursing and raising children."

Despite the easy availability of the transcript, Summers' critics continue to brazenly misrepresent what he said. "It's crazy to think that it's an innate difference," Harvard physicist Howard Georgi told the Times. "It's socialization. We've trained young women to be average. We've trained young men to be adventurous."

Summers never suggested that "innate difference" was the only, or even the most important, explanation for the gap between men and women in science and engineering. He did argue that it's implausible to attribute the entire difference to socialization, as Georgi blithely does.

"Where he seems to be off the mark particularly," another Harvard professor told the Times, "is in his sweeping claims that women don't have the ability to do well in high-powered jobs." Summers never said this.

Although Summers has apologized (over and over again) for an insufficiently nuanced presentation, his off-the-cuff remarks were a model of rigor, judiciousness, and intellectual honesty compared to the attacks they have generated.

Comments

[thoreau]

Summers hypothesizes that gender disparities in the top tiers of science can be attributed to the fact that the distribution of scientific talent among females has a smaller standard deviation than the distribution of scientific talent among men. Since the top tiers of the scientific workforce are drawn from the statistical outliers, he is suggesting that the female talent distribution has fewer outliers.

I wonder if his point would have been more palatable had the following points also been made:

1) There are plausible reasons to believe that the average woman may be more academically talented (even in math and science) than the average male, even if there are fewer female outliers. My understanding from reading the newspaper (supported by my anecdotal observations in high school and college) is that in high school females outperform males in most subjects, and are closing the gaps in other subjects. Even in introductory college science classes, females frequently seemed to do better than males. Furthermore, we know that males outnumber females in the lowest tier of society: prison inmates. So it is at least plausible that the male talent distribution is wider while the female distribution is narrower but clustered at a somewhat higher level.

2) Also, biology seems to be ancillary to the essence of that point about the talent distribution. Biology determines the distribution of potential talents in infants. Socialization then determines how much of that potential is realized. We can debate the extent to which socialization and biology matter, but it's irrelevant to the issue facing a University President like Summers. What does matter is the distribution of talents in people deciding whether to begin the serious pursuit of a scientific career: College freshmen.

If indeed the distribution of talent among female undergrads has a smaller standard deviation (and I am by no means convinced on that point), then his point stands regardless of whether biology or society is the primary factor driving that. The pool of people that he deals with has this distribution. That is the pool that he is responsible for training, and that is the pool from which he will recruit.

3) He should have emphasized that regardless of how talent is distributed, a highly talented scientist is a highly talented scientist regardless of gender, and none of his hypotheses should imply that talented female scientists should be taken any less seriously than their male colleagues.

Then again, it could very well be that even if he had added the disclaimers that he suggested he still would have been skewered. I don't know if his points are correct, but I do think that his comments have been received in an unfair manner. His speech is already full of caveats and qualifications, so it's probably arrogant to think that adding my 3 points would have been enough to satisfy his critics. The topic itself is simply too taboo.

[Serafina]

Eh, I think it's his tone that rankles and his wonderfully "rigorous" basis for his opinions. In the three reasons he gives, he ignores the interplay between why women might not want to work in academia and the social factors that deaden the desire. And further, even assuming that more men were marginally more brilliant at math and science than women might be, it still doesn't explain the difference in numbers because sheer ability isn't the way that people reach the top of their fields. There are so many other innate and societal factors that play into who gets jobs and who gets tenure. He was condescending and got called on it.