Pharyngula

It also doesn't help that Summers is a terrible leader, incapable of working with his deans or his faculty, who believes so much in the superiority of his own discipline (he remarks that economists are smarter than poltical scientists, and political scientists are smarter than economists) that he is actually willing to starve the parts of the university he doesn't like or doesn't understand in order to feed the parts he thinks are especially great. (See this Boston Globe interview with a former dean: http://tinyurl.com/o8y8n)

Also he cut a secret deal to pay out $26.5 million from Harvard's endowment to bail out a friend, Andrei Shleifer, who has been found guilty of defrauding the U.S. government of many millions of dollars in development aid to Russia as part of a Harvard project on Russian economic reform. (This is the so-called "Tawdry Schleifer Affair", see http://tinyurl.com/jnxou.)

To my mind, Summers' comments about women in science were of a piece with all this. The guy thinks he and a few others like him have a lock on real intellectualism at Harvard; and he thinks lots of other people (including half the human race) just don't have what it takes.

Good riddance.

Posted by: JR | February 21, 2006 3:16 PM

I'm not really sure weighing in on any side of this is much fun. Summers certainly failed to govern the faculty at Harvard and proved himself little more than a bully, but the faculty and various departments at Harvard are hardly saints themselves, and after all the heated rhetoric and accusations, a lot of this boils down to power struggles and whining about this or that department getting more or less money and resources: Summers was a bully among bullies.

So now he's gone, and the problems remain unsolved. He should have stuck to economics, because a huge ego managing huge egos is never a winning proposition.

"The guy thinks he and a few others like him have a lock on real intellectualism at Harvard;"

OMG! What a unique and rare view this is at Harvard!

"and he thinks lots of other people (including half the human race) just don't have what it takes."

Summarizing what Summers said this way is basically lying, and not particularly productive to the debate.

Posted by: plunge | February 21, 2006 3:38 PM

Let’s put aside your ignorance of the English language for a moment. Can you provide any evidence that sex differences between men and women are irrelevant to the performance of men and women in science? Could you furnish a link to any studies demonstrating that men and women are innately equal in math ability or intelligence?

Posted by: Ulik | February 21, 2006 3:52 PM

Ulik:

I'm just a girl on her way to an MD/PhD, but I think you're confusing "desert" (that dry place without water and with lots of sand) and "dessert", which may be just or otherwise.

But feel free to ignore this if you only take advisement from men. Just my .02 *.67 cents...

Posted by: Liz Tracey | February 21, 2006 4:03 PM

From the Common English Errors website:

Perhaps these two words are confused partly because 'dessert' is one of the few words in English with a double 'S' pronounced like 'Z' ('brassiere' is another). That impoverished stretch of sand called a desert can only afford one 'S.' In contrast, that rich gooey extra thing at the end of the meal called a dessert indulges in two of them. The word in the phrase 'he got his just deserts' is confusingly pronounced just like 'desserts.'

Very interesting! Learn something new (most) every day...
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/desert.html

Posted by: pough | February 21, 2006 4:08 PM

You should consider buying a dictionary Liz, or getting Google.

Jonathan: Given that men outperform women in science, without any evidence to prove otherwise, it's logical to conclude that sex differences are relevant. The burden of proof is on those arguing for sameness.

Posted by: Ulik | February 21, 2006 4:22 PM

"even if there were a slight difference in capability one way or the other (and I don't think the evidence is clear enough to even judge which sex would be, on average, better), the variation is so large that it is counterproductive and, well, just plain stupid to use sex as a marker for intelligence."

If the variability in male intelligence were slightly greater than the variability in females, as most evidence suggests is the case, that would entirely explain the ratio of men to women on the science faculty at Harvard.

What does judging which sex is "better on average" and using sex as a "marker" for intelligence have to do with anything Summers said?

Posted by: Ulik | February 21, 2006 4:31 PM

"you can't take "men outperform women in science" as a given. That's what you're trying to prove."

It's a fact that men have outperformed women in science in the past, and that men outperform women in science today. If you think this is for some reason other than men have a greater aptitude for science than women, then you must provide that reason.

Posted by: Ulik | February 21, 2006 4:35 PM

You're joking, right? I mean, men have out-preformed women at everything historically except sewing -- there are immense social forces that are (and have been) at work here. Why do you suppose that you can attribute the difference to genetic causes (notoriously difficult to pin down) rather than social causes?

Posted by: JBL | February 21, 2006 4:46 PM

Since we're labeling ourselves, I'm a developmental neurobiologist...

There are differences in the brain between the sexes, however, I would hesitate to say that they are built "very differently." A few regions have profound differences, where you would expect (in the hypothalamus, for instance, where regulation of internal states takes place). Some studies have shown predictable population-wide differences in lateralization of functions, with men's brains being on average more lateralized. I'm sorry I can't find the paper offhand, but there was a recent article in Scientific American that pointed out that, while you can see some differences in the averages across a population, you can't pick up a brain scan and look at it and say "that's male" or "that's female." In other words, the differences are NOT predictive. Thus, the brains developing "very differently" isn't really supported.

Finally, there's the whole other question of jumping levels of analysis between brain structure and cognitive abilities. You can't say that because a brain region is bigger/more lateralized/more branched or whatever says anything about any cognitive function, unless you have the data to back it up.

If you want to be a true skeptic, on all sides of the argument, you really have to say that there is no definitive evidence for sex differences in brains that lead to the primary differences in behaviors between the sexes. So the statement that Summers made was completely inappropriate, especially to that audience.

Posted by: rjb | February 21, 2006 4:52 PM

And, a few other reasons...

Rita Levi-Montalcini, Barbara McClintock, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, Marie Curie...

Story Landis (Director of NINDS), Carole Barnes (President of the Society for Neuroscience), etc...

I know, using anecdotes is a silly way to argue, but it does point out the danger of a prominent person whose statements imply that "women just can't cut it in the sciences." They have, they currently are, and they will in the future. Clearly, there are many capable women.

Another study that I recall reading about in Science or Nature, I believe. It's been a while, and I'm forgetting the details, but a few years ago there was a European Union-wide fellowship program for the best and brightest grad students (or was it post-docs??) from around Europe. At the end of the competition, it was noticed that a very small number of women were awarded fellowships. The applicant pool was studied, and it was realized that at each review step, a disproportionate number of women were eliminated from the pool. This provides an excellent study for those who want to say that gender plays a role in ability. Look at these proposals, and determine whether you really think the men were disproportionately better. I don't know if that's been done.

Posted by: rjb | February 21, 2006 5:00 PM

You should consider buying a dictionary Liz, or getting Google.

That's an interesting thing to say. A dictionary would provide defintions of the words, but not necessarily which one is used in the phrase in question. Can't "just desserts" also make sense, in strange sort of way? Not all common expressions make sense. A few days ago, an Irish friend had to explain "big girl's blouse" to me. I still don't quite get how it makes sense, but I can use it in a sentence.

As for "getting Google", I think that might require billions of dollars. But I did use Google to search for "just deserts." Google said: "Did you mean: just desserts"! ;-)

Posted by: pough | February 21, 2006 5:05 PM

Summers suggested that we may need to look beyond social explanations for gender disparity and consider biological ones. What is offensive about that, other than bringing up ghosts of 19th century anthropology?

Female brains are also, statistically speaking, smaller than male brains. They don't seem to have fewer little grey cells, they're just packed slightly differently.

But let's ignore physiology. Let's even ignore cognition. There is a much simpler possible explanation: rudimentary biology. It's simply easier for males to have children AND a competitive career than it is for females, and that really has nothing to do with culture. Our technological and sociological structures can only minimize that female difficulty, not eliminate it. Women therefore face a choice that men do not -- and even if the gender populations were absolutely identical beforehand, the existence of such a choice will skew the distribution.

Posted by: Caledonian | February 21, 2006 5:09 PM

Caledonian, you are very correct. This is especially true in academia, where the critical years to make your mark fall during your postdoctoral/junior faculty years that typically fall through your 20's-30-s. If you choose to have a child, even if you have a stay-at-home husband and a well-meaning chair and dean, you still will likely experience a reduced productivity period at a time when, to succeed at the highest level, you can't have the slightest blip. You can definitely be successful, but it will make competing for the best grants and the top jobs very difficult. It is much easier for a man to have his cake and eat it to, due to the structure of academia.

Posted by: rjb | February 21, 2006 5:15 PM

wow. dredging up an old horse again.

i'm wondering if "Larry Summers" will become a verb some day.

from what i've seen there was much more going on than this matter which gained all the publicity, the quip about possible gender differences. that publicity wasn't good for Harvard but from what i know, which isn't much, that didn't seem to be enough to justify "no confidence" votes. on the other hand, according to The Crimson, President Summers forced Dean Kirby out. i was surprised at that, as Kirby seemed a balanced hand in the mix. but, then, as i said, i don't know what is and was going on behind the scenes.

i do know enough to reject some of the wingnut comments i heard that this was a liberal versus moderate or conservative thing. the political intrigues seemed deeper than that.

President Summers is rather popular with the students.

Posted by: ekzept | February 21, 2006 5:20 PM

Women have expanded their contributions to the less cognitively demanding areas of science, as well as to less cognitively demanding academic fields in general. But despite vastly increased opportunity, women are still outnumbered and outperformed by men in maths and physics. I happen to think this is for the reasons Caledonian has been describing, but if you have some evidence that the physics departments and Harvard and MIT are a more discriminatory environment for women than the other science departments or the law and medical schools at those universities then please share it.

Posted by: Ulik | February 21, 2006 5:37 PM

I believe I must defend anthropology here.

In biological anthropology we have discovered (>30 yrs. ago) that controlling other variables (socio-economic status, parents' interenst in education, access to education etc.) reveals that race and sex have little effect on IQ. The Bell Curve is a ridiculous book based on antiquated data and analysis that no self-respecting anthropologist would ever support!

Furthermore, while women have smaller brains than males do, women are smaller in general. Women actually have larger brains relative to body size than men. Part of this is because women retain brachycephaly more than men do across populations.

Human beings do not vary in a racial way. Race refers to a distinct sub-species. Homo sapiens varies clinally. There is no one trait to distinguish different races and no clear differences in any cognitive abilities among human beings.

All this being said, I will offer a few person anecdotes as information, not data. In my advanced placement calculus class in high school there were 3 males and 20 females so Ulik can just mull that over for awhile.

Secondly, the top graduate fellowship at my university has been awarded to females so often that a colleague thought it was limited to women. That's not true (the limiting to women part) but the women were invariably the better qualified candidates.

Finally, I personally have scored in the 99th percentile on nearly every standardized test I have ever taken. My brother (with a .5 kinship coefficient) cannot say the same he scores in the 80th percentile or so usually.

Posted by: Loris | February 21, 2006 6:39 PM

Ulik said "If the variability in male intelligence were slightly greater than the variability in females, as most evidence suggests is the case, that would entirely explain the ratio of men to women on the science faculty at Harvard."

Maybe. But how to explain the apparent shift in variability that happened just as Summers became Harvard Pres? That's part of the backstory, of course - under Summers, the % of women being offered tenure nosedived, creating a public outcry among the faculty that led to him promising to deal with the problem. Forget about amazing genetic changes over a century - we're talking a year or two!

JP said "Here's his main point: to be a high-level professor, you have to dedicate yourself to your job to the sacrifice of other things-- family, friendship, whatever. For whatever reason, more men than women are willing to do that."

Well, using the text that JP kindly linked to - I'd been meaning to look for that! - we can see that this isn't exactly his main point - or at least, there are two closely linked subsidiary points.

First off, it's worth looking at what he set out to do. He asked the conference organizer[?] "whether he wanted an institutional talk about Harvard's policies toward diversity or whether he wanted some questions asked and some attempts at provocation, because I was willing to do the second and didn't feel like doing the first." [Huh!] It is decided that's he's going to be provocative. Having already come under fire for this very issue, he proceeds not to provide a useful and professional contribution as an administrator, but instead go off on a 'provocative' review of the topic, most of which is far outside his other area of expertise (economics). He further goes on to address this touchy topic - one on which he is already seen by some as decidedly unfriendly -in a perhaps loose and unserious-seeming manner. For example

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 . . .To take a set of diverse examples . . . Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it's important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation.

What he presents as the most probable/important explantion is as JP described, and that's something that we can have a lot of agreement on. However, Caledonian's comment " It's simply easier for males to have children AND a competitive career than it is for females, and that really has nothing to do with culture" goes off the track in its second half. Obviously there is just a little bit o' biological difference when it comes to bearing, feeding and even raising children. To imagine that there is no cultural or social influence here - especially when "a competitive career" is all about culture/society (what, it's a biological given?) is ridiculous. Summers acknowledged the effect of social arrangements, albeit in a somewhat cursory and wishy-washy manner. Even Caledonian does, although the wording - "our technological and sociological structures can only minimize that female difficulty, not eliminate it" - speaks for itself, and overlooks how is a product of our technological and sociological structures. - more specifically, it's not a question of biological difficulties that can be minimized by tech. and soc. - like being female is equivalent to needing glasses -it' a question of what part of this difficulty is created by tech. and soc. structures, and of how we can change these structures to remove it.

The second most likely explanation is the variances point, which he turns into a general blast on how socialization is a stupid explanation (ok, I'm overstating a little. But just a little). This is where he starts going on about taste differences between little boys and little girls and how little boys like to build bridges and little girls like to take care of babies, and that infamous comment - and while rjb may find anecdotes a silly way to argue, Summers clearly doesn't mind -

So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize.

The third explanation - the least important/least likely - was that discrimination was happening. Why is it the least important? Because economics says so.

If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. . . if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.

"Women have expanded their contributions to the less cognitively demanding areas of science, as well as to less cognitively demanding academic fields in general"
Having deleted my first few attempts at a reply, may I suggest that the idea of "cognitvely demanding" may have something in common with Cohen's idea of writing as the highest form of reasoning?

Posted by: Dan S. | February 21, 2006 7:03 PM

"Give it a few more years - I remember when female doctors were a rarity; they are now so common"

Yet female physicists are still uncommon. Is there more bigotry in the physics dept. than in the med school? I don't think so. I suspect there is less, actually.

Loris: You may be right about the consesus 30 years ago, but you are wrong about the present day.

"In my advanced placement calculus class in high school there were 3 males and 20 females so Ulik can just mull that over for awhile."

Which is yet another indicator that women are not being discriminated against. Despite this lack of discrimination, it's safe bet that none of those women in your AP class will ever go on to contribute significantly to the fields of mathematics or physics.

Posted by: Ulik | February 21, 2006 7:18 PM

"Yet female physicists are still uncommon. Is there more bigotry in the physics dept. than in the med school? I don't think so. I suspect there is less, actually."
Why? If anything, I would suspect there would be more - in part because of the status of physics.

"You may be right about the conse[n]sus 30 years ago, but you are wrong about the present day"
Um, not quite. Here's the American Anthropogical Association's statement on race, from 1998; while "it does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of "race" . . . we believe that it represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists."

"Despite this lack of discrimination, it's safe bet that none of those women in your AP class will ever go on to contribute significantly to the fields of mathematics or physics."
I would think that it would be a safe bet than no one in a high school AP calculus class will ever go on to contribute significantly to the fields of mathematics or physics, no? Not 100%, but pretty safe.
Let's revisit this issue in another 50 years. We'll see. I wonder what proof will be given that women just aren't as good as men then . . . (sadly, it will probably be their underpresentation in the rarified and difficult field of algebra, although given the various restrictions placed upon them by the Republic of Gilead (former U.S.), it won't need much explainin' . . )

Posted by: Dan S. | February 21, 2006 7:39 PM

I wonder if Ulik has a stamp-collecting comment coming on . . .

Posted by: Dan S. | February 21, 2006 7:50 PM

Summers is wrong. I disagreed with him the instant that I read his comments.

But...

I would like to think that what we call free speech allows someone in his position - the President of Harvard University - to say one stupid thing (even one REALLY stupid thing) without losing his job.

Posted by: Randy | February 21, 2006 8:05 PM

Randy writes:

I would like to think that what we call free speech allows someone in his position – the President of Harvard University – to say one stupid thing (even one REALLY stupid thing) without losing his job.

Of course, as other people have said, he is not losing his job because of saying one really stupid thing; he is losing his job because of a long series of decisions that have made Harvard a less impressive educational institution.

But I would make the case for kicking the fool out over just that "one REALLY stupid thing" (as Randy so succinctly puts it). Often people on both sides of the fence seem to think free speech means speech without consequences. I've heard that from those coming to the defensive of Ann Coulter as well as Ward Churchill. What utter foolishness. That you are free to say stupid things goes hand in hand with everyone else being free to call you on precisely what you say. When the head of what is perceived as the most prestigious educational institution on the planet says what Summers said about women and science, he doesn't get to lay down a get out of jail free card and go about business as usual. We have to tag him for it. You're out! You committed a ridiculous error. You showed yourself to have a poor understanding of state of contemporary science. You no longer have the respect of the people you are responsible for leading.

Good show, Harvard!

Posted by: AndyS | February 21, 2006 8:57 PM

the news, and an article about Summers' student support.

Posted by: ekzept | February 21, 2006 9:04 PM

But I'd like to see anyone point out a specific protein, coded for by a specific gene allele, that makes person A more intelligent than person B. It hasn't been done. In animal studies that have looked at this, they have knocked out entire genes (ie, CREB, PKA) in brain regions, and have shown quite often subtle changes in specific task learning (ie, water maze learning in mice following hippocampal PKA knockout). That's not slight differences in alleles, that's an entire gene knockout, and the data are clear, but the knockout mice still do OK in most tasks.

Not intelligence, but cognitive/executive function and psychological disorders can be affected by the Val66Met polymorphism of brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Also there is a catecholamine O-methyl transferase polymorphism that I know less about.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15242692&query_hl=6&itool=pubmed_DocSum

You wouldn't expect CREB and PKA to affect the type of cognitive functions involved in physics and math. The studies you are referring to are looking at cellular mechanisms of the transition from short-term to long-term memory (consolidation). You need something that acts faster and probably works in the prefrontal cortex. I would look into dopamine receptors and ion channels if I were looking.

We don't need to look for race or gender differences to note that there is natural variance in intelligence and that a portion of this variance is going to be explained by genotype. I'm abstaining from the larger issue.

Posted by: mccm | February 21, 2006 9:44 PM

Dan S said: "women just aren't as good as men then"

Who said women aren't "as good" as men? Are men who are not physicists not as good as men who are? I sure don't think so. I'm saying women are different at the extreme ends of intelligence (both ends, actually, but no one ever talks about men on the low end of the brainpower scale), and therefore it is absurd to complain about the lack of female science professors at Harvard.

Posted by: Ulik | February 21, 2006 10:08 PM

See?! This proves it.

Women are clearly genetically predisposed to be less than 2.5 times as productive as men. ;-)

Posted by: Nullifidian | February 21, 2006 10:23 PM

This is an unfortunate incident, and a great loss for Harvard. The main contention of Larry Summers, namely that there is a possible biological substrate contributing to the notable overrepresentation of men among science and math faculty in top-notch universities, is well-supported in the literature. There is robust evidence for greater male variability with respect to IQ, and the best population-representative data also reveal slightly higher IQs in men compared to women, on average. These factors dwarf other factors when it comes to explaining why the science and math faculty of top-ranked institutions mostly comprise of men.

Posted by: Lars | February 21, 2006 10:44 PM

I personally think Summers has been misquoted a lot. He probably deserves many lashes for his pop sociological possible explanations about why there are fewer tenured women at the very top physics and math departments, but let's drop one canard right now: he did not make a blanket generalization about innate deficiencies in all women, most women, some women, or even a few women. He puts it out there as possible variations having a magnified effect at the extreme ends of the bell curve. To wit:

"And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out."

I read this to mean that just as the general increase in female doctors, engineers, scientists, military officers, you-name-it, suggests there's no substantial difference between the vast majority of men and women (what, 99.73+%?), and we can therefore look to other factors like endemic sexism to explain most discrepancies, is it possible that we're still more likely to find more male outliers at the flattened ends of both sides of the bell curve? He's suggesting possible variation at 3.5 - 4 standard deviations, not in the general population. Why would it be controversial to say that in a population of America's size, there might be only 20 men who can work on the highest, rarified levels of math that require some sort of neurowiring most of us can't even imagine, and only 10 women who can do it too? Think prodigies like (Good) Will Hunting here, not the National Honors Society at your local high school, or even the incoming frosh class at Harvard or, heck, MIT. Or, of course, UMM. This miniscule subset of humanity (prodigies, those possessed of remarkable mental talents) should be studied anyway, precisely for what they might teach us about biology and "intelligence."

That said, I'm still more likely to dismiss the relative importance of this argument compared to the influence of the sexism laid bare by the evidence of systemic and systematic sexism in hiring decisions, in discouraging women from pursuing scientific careers, in the ingrained cultures of tenures faculty socializing younger generations to think like they do ("women don't belong in science!" etc.). The only thing I object to is everyone from PZ Myers to the New York Times keeps talking about how he suggested there were innate differences between the sexes, when he really said maybe we can find a difference somewhere in .2% - .1% of the population. To emphasize that speck when there are obvious boulders all around you was stupid on his part, and there are evidently plenty of other problems with his presidency, but on the basis of his actual words I don't see why he should be tarred as Larry "Innate Differences" Summers.

Posted by: Was it THAT bad? | February 22, 2006 12:02 AM

Urik:

...no one can provide an example of a woman who is one of the world's greatest mathematicians but because of discrimination has to work at, say, West Texas State instead of Yale.

No one can provide an example of such a man either.

Posted by: AndyS | February 22, 2006 1:14 AM

Listen folks! We are talking about a guy who suggested that the "solution" for toxic waste disposal was to ship it to countries where life expectancy is lower than the time it requires for the toxins to sicken someone. He made this bizarre suggestion while working for the World Bank as an economist.

That Harvard would give their top job to a man so twisted as to dream up such an idea and sick enough to circulate it is one of the great embarrassments in the history of American education.

Oh well, they got Capone for tax evasion and Cheney's "unforgivable" sin may be that he is a careless hunter. So why not fire this ethical monster for being rude?

Posted by: Jonathan Larson | February 22, 2006 3:35 AM