Summers is out for school

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.

Can you provide any scientific evidence that sex differences are "irrelevant" to the explanation of the variation between male and female scientific achievement?

Also, you misspelled "deserts".

Also, you misspelled "deserts".

Thanks for the irony.

What irony?

"Just desserts" is the correct phrase.

You also misspelled "steeped", "four", "no", "Anne" and "two"!

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.

""Just desserts" is the correct phrase"

No it's not. A desert is a deserved reward or punishment. A dessert is something you eat after dinner.

Lets 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?

Ulik is right about the usage of the word deserts. Here is snopes on the "deserts" versus "desserts" confusion:

When one gets what one deserves, good or bad, one is getting one's "just deserts," accent on the second syllable but spelled like the arid, barren lands.

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...

Can you provide any evidence that sex differences between men and women are irrelevant to the performance of men and women in science?

You don't have to prove a negative. Unless people arguing for gender or race differences in performance or intelligence can provide any evidence to support their assertions, there is absolutely no reasonable reason to assume there are any differences.

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

Hmm. One learns something new from Snopes all the time.

We have a situation where there is variation all over the place, and some women are smarter than some men and vice versa. If it is your claim that there is some consistent difference, it's up to you to provide the evidence for it. I would argue, though, that 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.

That's also true for race.

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.

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.

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

"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?

Hi, cognitive scientist here.

There's plenty of evidence showing that there is a small but reliable difference in IQ scores between men and women. Men are more likely to have extreme scores than women -- probably because they have only one X chromosome. The female distribution is more heavily weighted towards the mean, which is what would be expected with the addition of another normally-distibuted variable to the mix.

There's also a great deal of evidence showing that male and female brains are built very differently.

"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.

Summers's comments are a rorschach test: everyone sees what they want to. Feminists see a jackass; evolutionary phychologists see a convert. Here are his actual comments:

http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html

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.

Is this really such an insult?

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?

Just to be clear, my previous comment (which is timestamped for me at 4:46 PM) was directed at Ulik's comment (from 4:35 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.

It might be noted however that a) women are not as encouraged to enter the field, so that can seriously skew the data and b) a recent examination of peer reviewed works, especially with regard to Nobel prizes, indicated that the only women who *ever* won any significant rewards ended up publishing 2-3 times as much work to get there, even when their only competition was noticibly less competent and/or made fewer advancements.

Don't remember where I read the article on that unfortunately, so don't have a cite. I might have been in Skeptic's Magazine though.

In any case, if you have a larger percentage of men being actively encouraged to enter such fields the results are going to be drastically skewed, even without the apparent bias in appearance, which requires women to work twice as hard to have their research recognized at all. And *smart* women are likely to be turned off from entering such a field, simply because only someone obsessed or stupid would want to work with a stacked deck.

Fact is, IQ tests are not worth much in many ways that count, an examination of skill level for existing scientists is likely to be bad and maybe even unintentionally biased, and I haven't heard of any study done on the subject that even tries to eliminate the inherent bias impossed by using what have tended to be male oriented tests/studies to test what *is* a measurably different set of thought processes.

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.

"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."

Would you explain the lack of racial diversity in academic science in the same way, Ulik?
Just wondering.

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"! ;-)

Miss Prism: Sure, why not?

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.

Would you explain the lack of racial diversity in academic science in the same way, Ulik?
Just wondering.

I can't speak for Ulik, but I see no reason to discard such a hypothesis out of hand. It's commonly acknowledged that all sorts of biological traits are differently distributed within various ethnic groups -- those differences are most of what we mean by 'ethnic groups' in the first place.

Why should traits that affect the working and structure of the mind be any different than traits that affect the working and structure of red blood cells, or the liver, or the skin? Besides cultural and political taboos, of course.

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.

Since you bring up the history of women in science, it's particularly interesting how women were practically non-existent in the sciences over a century ago (Marie Curie one of the very rare exceptions), and have been consistently expanding their contributions ever since.

I presume we must be seeing some really amazing genetic changes in the population over this narrow window of time.

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.

I have to say that I was responding to Caledonian's first comment when I said I agree with him/her. I have to disagree with his/her second comment regarding effects of race and/or gender on intelligence. It IS a very different thing to compare physiological differences between sexes/races and to compare intelligence differences. For one thing, we can point to specific alleles of proteins with specific physiological functions (ie, hemoglobin and sickle-cell trait) that are correlated with race/origin. 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.

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.

I presume we must be seeing some really amazing genetic changes in the population over this narrow window of time.

The old farts have been dying out, thereby cleaning up the gene pool?

I clearly remember being told 'girls are no good at math/science' as a student, despite my straight A's in both subjects and my 800 SAT Math score. My sister [who thought organic chem was a gut course] was frequently told that women had no place in the lab - tho' not by the professor who hired her as a research assistant out of his own pocket when she was an undergrad.

Give it a few more years - I remember when female doctors were a rarity; they are now so common that my son, at the age of five, with female doctors, dentists and Mum's med student roommates all around him, felt obliged to ask if boys could be doctors...

I don't think Mr Ulik quite gets it. Women's roles have been expanding to allow them to contribute more and more to all fields, even the "cognitively demanding" ones (methinks I get a whiff of ignorant snobbery there, I do). Are their genes getting better?

It's worth noting that Summers didn't make the argument that women are genetically inferior or less intelligent. His ultimate conclusion in the speech was that women may have on the margin different priorities and ideas as to what makes a good career (the hours, balance between work and family, the perceived geeky obsessiveness of science), and the way that sciences careers were set up might turn them off. His whole speech was geared towards the idea that something should be done about getting more women involved in science, and that focusing purely on discrimination as the only explanation wasn't working. A good portion of the problem clearly IS that women are disproportionately less _interested_ in science as a _lifetime career_, and until we acknowledge that fact, we're not going to be able to solve the problem.

I may be a bit of an apologist for Summers here, but frankly I think a lot of the criticism he took for it was as poorly aimed and sloppy as some of the things he said, and what he said was nowhere near the kind of thing that Ulik is trying to "defend."

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.

I think I may have to grab one of the women Loris is speaking of. There's apparently a shortage of those sorts around here. We need a breeding program. ;)

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.

And don't forget daddy and baby trucks . . .

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.

. (And whatever your view on this, the fact is that little kids of a certain age, regardless of gender, will suck all sorts of toys into family/relationship-themed fantasy play. ).

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.

Yep. No way. Wait, you hear that sound? It's the world's tiniest violins! And there being played by an orchestra, a kind of institution where, Summers-equivalents used to insist, there was almost no discrimination any more, it just worked out that a lot fewer women were hired. At least, until they started having blind, behind-a-curtain auditions. It was amazing. All of the sudden, the women got a lot better! It must be another example of that crazy instant evolution. What next, a racoon giving birth to kittens? Goo turning into you? Wow.
(To be fair, Summers addressed this idea, kinda, in a vague, both sides have an opinion and I just don't know! way - ok, ok, it is a tough question).

"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?

I really hate HTML.
And it's true, Summers wasn't being as bad as some. While I obviously don't know for sure, based on what I've seen of people behaving similarly, and given the previous, pre-speech criticism he took re: discrimination, I think there may have been a bit of "I'm gonna show them!" goin' on.

But it's not horrible. If you ignore the assumption that really, women just can't cut it, but we can do our bit to help them in the few small ways we can, he does discuss a number of areas where things could be improved. Of course, if we don't ignore it, we might well get a clue as to why the % of women, etc. dropped after Summers showed up.

Has anyone done a study where one group had to decide if Daniel should get tenure/etc., and another group had to decide if the (otherwise identical) Danielle did?

"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.

loris, how do you resist the temptation to comment under the name "slow loris"? No way I could . . .

- wandered into neat site by a slow loris researcher here.
Yay, poisonous prosimians!

"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' . . )

Female physicists are less common than female chemists or female mathematicians. How you could get this out of innate aptitude is beyond me, given that physics is basically something a lot like chemistry nailed to something a lot like mathematics.

You could, I suppose, argue that physics is simply more intellectually demanding than those other subjects, thereby weeding out more of the women; but you would be wrong, at least based on my own academic experience. When it came to sheer brainpower I always felt as if the mathematicians (the women included) could run rings around us physics people. They were also more likely to be barking mad, but that is another story.

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

PZ, I think it's unfortunate that you cast Larry Summers' resignation primarily in terms of his remarks on women. Though one can find many different motivations among the faculty who vocally (and quietly) opposed him, the key problem with his tenure was his desire to micro-manage departmental matters in areas far beyond his expertise (or even general comprehension). This interference was in the vast majority of cases motivated by his utter inability to think of anything but the bottom line. What happens at Harvard now is, of course, a big open question. But today I am celebrating his departure as a victory in the fight against the incursion of industry and further corporatisation of higher education.

That said, in the several substantive conversations that I've had with Summers while I was a student there, I was left without any doubt that the man was a bigot and a jingoist. He also is the sort of fellow who makes bright people shy away from human sociobiolgy, which I think is rather a shame. The fact that so much of the work done in the area is so bloody lousy is due, I think, to a distaste that promising young scientists develop for it after listening to such odious dolts like Summers and narcissistic bloviators like Steve Pinker. And Summers himself, as much as he was fond for tossing around pop evolutionisms, never took his hands of the evolutionary biology department's neck in his five years as President. Because of this, I think of him as an enemy of evolution on par with any of the IDots you normally mince here.

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.

Yes, Randy, which is why *that* stupid thing did *not* cost him his job.

"Ulik" is hazy on the way hypotheses work -- you cannot prove a negative, so his initial request for
"evidence that sex differences between men and women are irrelevant to the performance of men and women in science?" is just silly. At some points he uses historical data as evidence, at other points he admits past discrimination but asserts it's now over -- this is, sadly, the typically confused argumentation of a bigot.

PZM had a decent rundown of the whole thing a year or so back when the Summers remarks came out.

Randy writes:

I would like to think that what we call free speech allows someone in his position â the President of Harvard University â 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!

The real reason that there are fewer women than men in science is the ban on gay marriage. If I had a wife, I'd have been tenured long ago. Damn these Texas conservatives! I'm moving to Masschusetts to get *my* just desserts..

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

Dan S said

loris, how do you resist the temptation to comment under the name "slow loris"? No way I could . . .

I'm actually pygmy loris so maybe that explains it. All the lorises are poisonous in some way due to the toxic insects they eat, which makes them totally cool!

Anyway, to address Ulik, Dan S. has it right. The consensus among pysical anthropologists has not changed. Check out Molnar (2002) Human Variation for a discussion of current approaches to variation in human populations.

As for the students in my AP calculus class, I am no longer in mathematics, but I do pretty sophisticated statistical analyses in my research. The others I haven't really kept track of, but at least one (female) is making high rank in the Navy and two (one male, one female) have engineering degrees from a pretty good school (both were summa cum laude in college) and now have really good jobs.

I think Ulik is looking for a reason to justify his significant bias against women in general. Anthropology does not support his stance and he should know that if he had an anthropology course in the last thirty years.

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&do…

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.

As for inequities of gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class in science and other professions: I suspect that these things will turn out to have a half-life (now that they've been addressed by law and, increasingly, by custom, of course; prejudices won't disappear unless someone steps up in protest). Active recruiting of women, minorities, and the offspring of blue-collar families has brought more members of all of these groups into higher education and the professions -- but I think it's easier to emulate a role model than to be one. (I'll never forget the first time (about 12 years back) that I met a male student who decided to study engineering because that was his mother's profession, and he thought she had a pretty cool job!)

As for Lawrence Summers: When I read his quotes about women, I thought he was being insensitive, but couldn't really see any malice behind it. His overall reputation with the Harvard faculty, though, suggests that the guy doesn't have a clue as to what collegiality is. That's not the kind of personality that inspires respect or confidence in any workplace.

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.

Please check out the following article:

Wenneras C and Wold A (1997) Nepotism and sexism in peer review. Nature 387: 341-343.

This is an incredibly good, quantitative, comprehensive review of sexism in science (particularly around jobs). One of my favorite quotes?

"A female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score as he."

May be helpful to those folks who are straining to find all these important genetic sex differences to excuse the rampant sexism in science...

See?! This proves it.

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

There is also evidence from studies that readers rate the same passage of prose much more highly when described as written by a male than when made to appear as though written by a female.

More women are hired to play in orchestras when they audition behind a screen, and so on.

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.

It has been shown that men have a higher standard deviation in IQ scores than women, and that men are (on average) better at certain types of spatial relations while women are (on average) better at certain types of memory. The logical conclusion is that men could naturally be overrepresented in the highest levels of an occupation if success in that occupation is strongly correlated with high IQ, especially where spacial relations are important.

I don't know whether these conditions apply to physics and engineering, but it is at least plausible. Certainly it is worth further investigation, instead of kneejerk criticism.

I don't see how this can be interpreted as criticism of the female members of the faculty, since if it happened to be true they would simply be the ones that made the cut. Lower standard deviation in this case would mean less quantity, not less quality.

As for sexism in peer reviewing, it seems to me that this would be impossible if the reviewer didn't know the identity of the writer, just like with the auditions. In fact, this could eliminate a lot of other biases as well. Is there any good reason this can't be done?

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.

Harold and Ryan G: One doesn't have to be at an elite university to good work in theoretical physics or mathematics. This was true in the past, when a patent clerk was able to revolutionize physics; it is even more true now. If elite universities truly discriminate against brilliant female physicists and mathematicians, we should still be able to find them on the faculties of less prestigious universities, such as P.C.'s, - if such women existed. But they don't, 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.

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.

Women have expanded their contributions to the less cognitively demanding areas of science, as well as to less cognitively demanding academic fields in general.

I think Ulik is really Steve Sailer. The above remark is pure Sailer. And if I remember correctly, Steve and his imaginary wife were very angry over the Summers flap.

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?

MCCM, That looks really interesting. I'm not surprised that genetic polymorphisms would have some influence on cognitive functioning. This raises lots of questions that can be investigated regarding the topic at hand:
1: What proportion of the population variance in cognitive function can be explained by gene polymorphisms?
2: Are these polymorphisms correlated with gender/race?
3: Is there an experimental analysis that can support the role of these genes in the regulation of cognitive function?

Genomics is a correlative analysis, and experimental studies need to be done to test these hypotheses of course.

RyanG, the article I mentioned is on peer review for postdoc fellowships (in Sweden, where I naively thought "things are better there than here in the US"). The problem the authors are revealing is not that sexism is neatly confined to, say, when papers are peer-reviewed. They tackle funding and jobs. Here is the link to get there (But you do need a subscription.): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v387/n6631/abs/387341a0.html;jsess…

Really, everyone here needs to read this article. If you don't have a subscription email me at k8andcat at yahoo dot com and I'll send you the pdf.

When gender is such a strong predictor of success in such a robust study, how can we continue to push supposed genetic differences that do not phenotypically result in poorer scientific scholarship in women?

"but on the basis of his actual words I don't see why he should be tarred as Larry "Innate Differences" Summers."
I really think it was the "daddy truck/baby truck" story. That was the point - when I first heard about it - when I stopped groaning, "oh, c'mon!" and started smacking my head to make it stop . . . Really, so much is the way one says things - partially because it can help show how one thinks . . .

I had forgotten about the Larry "Toxic Waste for Africa!" Summers bit! And it perfectly characterized the sort of retarded reasonableness that one hears when economics runs entirely off the ethical rails . . .

He has some sort of odd tone-deafness, like the person at the party who really doesn't get why it suddenly got very quiet and now everyone is looking at him with a hard-to-read expression, and all he was saying was (fill in the blank). Probably due to innate differences and the greater variance one finds in the male brain . . .

I'm certainly open to the possibility that these sorts of things are significantly influenced by on-average sex differences. It's just that given the history and social climate, it makes me a bit more cautious (in my case, esp. because I lack the skill set to really assess the research - : ( damn you, statistics!). I wonder if this is a pale shadow of what being a creationist feels like?

Excellent point, Frumious B.

Given what everyone agrees is a very small fraction of the population, I would think this actually suggests what a role systematic (as well as out-and-out) discrimination can play. Way back on the old Pharyngula, somebody made a great point comparing olympic training to science ed - how the very few, very good people at the top represent this entire pyramid of effort and training and tons of other of people at all the other levels, etc. Up until the last one or two generations, women have been placed at a massive disadvantage in building/climbing this sort of metaphorical pyramid, and it is not really reasonable to assume that all social/cultural roadblocks, to mix metaphors, have been entirely removed. Given the extremely high level of performance, I would think that even a small effect from discrimination could have a significant effect. Hmm. Do folks see what I'm trying to say? It's coming out a bit garbly.

Ulik said: "Who said women aren't "as good" as men?

Well, given that you describe even the rest of science as "less cognitively demanding" than math and science, and that you expect that women will not come to equal men in their contributions to these fields, for reasons discussed above, you at least think that, at least in terms of cognitive ability, the 'best' women aren't as good as the 'best' men.

"Are men who are not physicists not as good as men who are?"
Well, in terms of cognitive ability, no, you would seem to say. And if, coincidentally, there was a need to excuse some sort of fading discrimination against non-physicists - even if said non-physicists came from a place where physics wasn't, until quite recently, a realistic or even possible career choice . . .well . ..

"...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."
Yet.

"even the rest of science as "less cognitively demanding" than math and science"
physics, I meant physics . . .

But again, I think everyone agrees with Summers' first point - about how social structures and policies - esp. re. family, etc. - work against women. What can we do here?

It is funny, what a little difference we're talking about - a (probably) slight difference in range of variation, possibly translating into a teeny difference at the highest levels of performance in a specific kind of intellectual endeavor. With, that is, an unknown level of non-level-playing-fieldness . .

Dan S -- I would add that we won't find those amazing female scholars that have persevered at West Texas State because they left science. There is a seriously leaky pipeline.

From the little literature I've read on the topic, I'd say that one of the main ways to fix gender discrimination in the academic workplace isn't that much different than the way you do it in other industries: make a more family-friendly workplace. This includes sensitivity training around parent issues, just like the sensitivity training sorely needed around race issues. (In addition to other obvious factors, like flex time, affordable, quality, nearby daycare, etc etc).

I make the sensitivity training the main point because there is a huge degree of discrimination around parents, especially mothers. Work done by scholars at Stanford and Haverford (I just can't remember their names right now) have shown that men with kids are more likely to get hired than men without kids, and women with kids are the least likely to get hired of all candidates. Pregnant candidates are in for big trouble. And making pro-family choices -- like taking advantage of pausing the tenure-clock, working parttime for some period of time, etc -- is regarded poorly by many mothers' peers. Sensitivity training has been exceedingly successful at stopping at least the most overt forms of mother discrimination in many other industries.

My impression, for what little it's worth (I'm a Harvard alum, but not one who really cares about keeping in touch with classmates or institution) is that the storm over Summers's remarks about women- which after all did contain some good stuff about making the academic career more human-friendly, alongside the dumbass amateur evo-psych- would have blown over quickly if Summers weren't an arrogant prick who alienates everybody who has to work with him. You won't get far by trying to outdo the Harvard faculty in arrogance!

Though I am loathe to bring this up, the discussion seems to be centering on IQ scores and variation at the top of the spectrum. The highest IQ score ever was Marilyn vos Savant (from Parade magazine). Even though there is much debate over said IQ score, this is at least somewhat true. Therefore, arguing about IQ scores ultimately shows that the difference at the top is that a woman has the highest ever recorded IQ.

Alternatively, IQ tests don't really measure anything and there is considerable variation in scores due to the person administering the test.

As an anthropologist I am inclined to attribute the lack of women in top hard science and math positions to cultural problem in society and academia that make such positions either unattainable for women or undesirable for women.

I do remember an article from the 1980s in Science magazine about a British woman who had been very belated awarded a noble prize in physics -- she was in her nineties at the time. It seems that it took many years for her contribution to be recognized. Interestingly, and perhaps indicative of a more "female" approach, when interviewed, she remarked self-deprecatingly, "Oh, I really know very little about physics."

I agree with Dan S. that the Olympic-Marathon analogy is apt for areas of very high performace -- as you go up the scale in achievment you have to work harder for a smaller and smaller payoff.

To change the subject slighly, no one now maintains that in music virtuoso performance males have an innate advantage -- I am thinking of Anne Sophie Mutter and Marta Agerich. Granted, there have always been women soloists, but in my memory -- and even a few years ago, women were not hired by symphony orchestras.

30-40 years ago there were far fewer female MDs than now. Back then, the common refrain was that women simply didn't have what it takes to make it through med school, internship and residency, and they weren't "intrinsically suited" for the long hours, extreme pressures, and high stakes of medical practice. Moreover, women were on average considered less intellectually able than men, both in terms of understanding the complexities of the human body and having the presence of mind to handle emergencies and life-and-death decisions. Although I was quite small back then :-) I remember hearing laments that putting women through medical school would endanger the American population and decrease the quality of health care; it would also be a waste of resources because they'd just drop out to have families and never re-enter practice. All this, of course, was due to irrevocable, intrinsic differences in scientific ability and general "toughness" between men and women.

Now we have close to a fifty-fifty balance on average between male and female MDs. One can't say the women are less able or competent, because they do the same internships and residencies, are held to the same state- and AMA-mandated standards, and pass the same board exams. One might even argue that medical training and practice require high cognitive ability, and in terms of hours worked and potential for sheer exhaustion are quite physically demanding...all of which used to be seen as areas of clear male superiority.

So gee, what happened over the last 30 years? Did women magically evolve into higher life forms?

No doubt someone will opine that excellence in physics and math requires higher "cognitive ability" than medicine, with its emphasis on biology. As a physical chemist, I see this attitude in some of my colleagues who look down on biologists as one step away from sociologists.

But those who want to question women's scientific ability tend to move the goalposts and mark any field that women have made inroads into as "less demanding." 30 years from now when women are close to fifty-fifty in physics departments, the Uliks of the world will point to their dearth in engineering departments as proof that women are less cognitively able -- because engineering is so much more demanding than physics.

:-)

Violet: I'm not Steve Sailer, but thanks for the lead, he seems like an interesting writer.

Dan S said: "Well, given that you describe even the rest of science as "less cognitively demanding" than math and science, and that you expect that women will not come to equal men in their contributions to these fields, for reasons discussed above"

Those other fields are less cognitively demanding. That's a fact.

"you at least think that, at least in terms of cognitive ability, the 'best' women aren't as good as the 'best' men."

I think that female geniuses are far rarer than male ones. Why do you assume they exist in equal numbers?

Kate said: "I would add that we won't find those amazing female scholars that have persevered at West Texas State because they left science...I'd say that one of the main ways to fix gender discrimination in the academic workplace isn't that much different than the way you do it in other industries: make a more family-friendly workplace"

So all of the potentially great female mathemeticians and physicists have been driven out of those fields at every level of academia because of discrimination? What a joke.

No one so far has provided any evidence that the mathematics department is more sexist than the law school, or how women can overcome sexism in business, for example, but not in physics.

Madam Pomfrey said: "Now we have close to a fifty-fifty balance on average between male and female MDs"

Which proves my point. If one is truly a genius, it is easier to become a mathemetician than it is a doctor. There have been mathematicians who have made major contributions to the field of math as teenagers.

"those who want to question women's scientific ability tend to move the goalposts and mark any field that women have made inroads into as "less demanding"

It's not moving the goalposts to say being a doctor is less cognitively demanding than being a theoretical physicist, it's a statement of fact.

"30 years from now when women are close to fifty-fifty in physics departments"

Do you have any evidence for this trend? No, you don't.

"It's not moving the goalposts to say being a doctor is less cognitively demanding than being a theoretical physicist, it's a statement of fact."

Of course I knew you would say that, because your entire argument is based on your personal opinion of which scientific fields are more cognitively demanding, which is designed by you to coincide with fields in which women are not well represented.

When women were poorly represented in medicine, whether theoretical physics is more cognitively demanding than medicine wasn't an issue even among the most entrenched misogynists, because they assumed women couldn't handle either one. It only becomes an issue now, to you, because women have made successful inroads into medicine.

You proved my point quite well; thanks!

Madam Pomfrey, my mother was one of those women you're describing. In med school in Alabama in the 1950s, she had a biology teacher who refused to teach women. Being mean and stubborn enough to persevere despite that, she didn't fall victim to what Kate aptly describes as a "leaky pipeline", but many other talented women who would have made excellent physicians did drop out.

So the historical sample is, as has been repeatedly pointed out, so skewed that the experiment of nature which Ulik and others are basing their conclusions on is fatally flawed for reasons in addition to the cultural ones referred to in earlier comments.

Additionally, Ulik has not provided a sound basis to validate his metric of what constitutes "cognitively demanding". I suspect that it's a classic case of overextrapolating lab results without regard to their external validity, combined with the shaky internal validity of his "cognitively demanding" scale. I also suspect that if the differences observed to date were somehow reversed, he'd find a way in that case to argue that higher facility at multitasking is "more cognitively demanding" than is facility at simulating rotation in 3D space.

This hypothesis of mine is, of course, easily disproved by Ulik's providing and validating the "cognitively demanding" scale he bases his conclusions on, and correlating those phenotypes to the particular genotypes associated with the differences reported in the lab.

Well done 'Was it THAT bad?' I thought I was going to have to read this whole long stack of comments and not find ONE person to point out that Summers did not say women have less innate ability than men. Maddeningly, that's exactly what the BBC did say he said in its report on the story, so you can include the Beeb along with the NY Times.

"your entire argument is based on your personal opinion of which scientific fields are more cognitively demanding, which is designed by you to coincide with fields in which women are not well represented"

You deny it take more brainpower to be a theoretical physicist than a doctor? Are you kidding me? My pointing out this fact is not part of some sort of conspiracy against women.

"It only becomes an issue now, to you, because women have made successful inroads into medicine."

You, weirdly, act as if I'm upset with the sucess of women in medicine, or any other field. I'm not. I just find it preposterous someone can be attacked and lose his job because reality does not conform to others ideological expectations.

BTW, you and the others still haven't explained how it is there is less sexism in medicine and law than in math and physics.

You deny it take more brainpower to be a theoretical physicist than a doctor? Are you kidding me? My pointing out this fact is not part of some sort of conspiracy against women.

If is is that obvious, it should be trivially easy for you to produce your validated "cognitively demanding" metric, and rigorously demonstrate its correlation with the phenotypes and genotypes we are discussing.

Ophelia, what he did strongly suggest, based on the variance argument, was that the number of women at the very highest ability levels in field like math and theoretical physics may indeed be lower than the number of men of similar ability. I don't know what a vague statement with many possible interpretations such as your "women have less innate ability" would even mean, so your "gotcha" attempt is not very impressive, but the much more precise suggestion that Summers actually made was plenty dumb enough given the combination of inflammatory content and nonexistent evidence. He said some other things that were much more enlightened, but he was right to apologize for the amateur exercise in quantitative genetics. And that apology would have been the end of the story had he not already alienated so many of his faculty with his arrogance and high-handedness.

Raven T said: "Ulik has not provided a sound basis to validate his metric of what constitutes "cognitively demanding"

Quit being phony.

"I also suspect that if the differences observed to date were somehow reversed, he'd find a way in that case to argue that higher facility at multitasking is "more cognitively demanding" than is facility at simulating rotation in 3D space."

No, I wouldn't be arguing anything. I don't care what the sex ratio of scientists is. You're the ones upset a tiny percentage of the population is vastly more male than female. What I do care about is punishing people who state the true reasons why this is the case.

"If is is that obvious, it should be trivially easy for you to produce your validated "cognitively demanding" metric, and rigorously demonstrate its correlation with the phenotypes and genotypes we are discussing."

Exactly. How, precisely, does one define and measure "brainpower"? What steps do you take to ensure that your metric of "brainpower" is grounded in observable data and is not simply based on your personal opinions and impressions?

If you take no such steps, then why is your personal opinion on what constitutes "brainpower," and on which fields demand more of it, more valuable or reliable than anyone else's?

*sigh*. anyway...

it is a little sad to see this presented as a result of only his comments on intelligence ( and speaking of which, are all those smart people who can't get highly competative and extremely political jobs in top-tier maths and physics departments grue? the inductive arguments being brought to bear to argue either side here are full of holes. in such situations, one must realise that one is dealing with humans, not arguments, and therefore 'do the least harm'. or at least try to curb any possibility of harm, and wait for the data to settle...)

ahem. anyway (again). i work a lowly job at harvard, and JPK (and a couple other folks?) seem to have it right. summers did not carry himself well amongst the faculty. every ounce of harvard energy has been pointed at the new 'allston campus' and hard sciences (read: industry funding) have seemingly been pushed ahead of all else. he seemed to be a hit as a minor celebrity ( look! the students loved him!) but as an administrator...he left a lot to be desired. Dean Kirby's sudden exit, and the russian money fiasco all combined to shine a bright hot light on certain facets of his character. this did not reflect too well on the university at large. thus, he is gone.

can't wait to see what happens next!

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the worlds best physcisists and mathemeticians have more brainpower than everyone else.

But if you are going to claim these things are unknowable, then it is also unknowable if the distribution of women's intelligence is the same as that of men, which is the entire basis of your argument that discrimination exists.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the worlds best physcisists and mathemeticians have more brainpower than everyone else.

I don't think that it's reasonable at all.

How, exactly, in a measurable way, does physics and mathematics require more brainpower than genetics or paleontology?

Or literature?

"You deny it take more brainpower to be a theoretical physicist than a doctor? Are you kidding me?"

The search for what you're calling "brainpower" has gone on for centuries, and it simply does not exist. Some occupations and tasks draw on certain neural resources, some draw on others, and it's meaningless to take all of that complexity and summarize it in a single number. Your assertion that theoretical physics rests on top of a scale of linearly increasing cognitive demand is not even coherent enough to be wrong.

Next you'll probably want to point to brain size, but 1)creatures with smaller bodies also have smaller brains, and 2)brain size has never been reliably correlated with any cognitive function. Whales have enormous brains, so why haven't they inherited the earth?

I didn't claim that "these things are unknowable."

I asked how you define and measure "brainpower," and how you can tell that your metric is based in reality as opposed to your personal opinion. You should be able to define the terms you use in your own assertions.

Surely that isn't too cognitively demanding?

:-)

Quit being phony.

I beg your pardon?

You are providing unsubstantiated assertions, and I am requesting that you back your assertions up with some actual evidence.

Perhaps that concept is too cognitively demanding for you.

You know, it's very telling that when a woman acts like a real scientist and asks him to produce actual evidence for his emotionally-constructed assertion, he perceives that as somehow being "phony".

This discussion makes me think of the "brainy" theoretical physicists who have been taken in by "psychic" frauds like Uri Geller and had to be educated by a magician. In other words, what Tierney said.

"You know, it's very telling that when a woman acts like a real scientist "

What does your being a woman have to do with anything?

If Einstein wasn't smarter than everyone else, and Einstein was able to revolutionize physics while working as a patent clerk, then women have no excuse for not contributing to physics more than they do. You can't have it both ways. You, in fact, shouldn't be here, you should be focusing on winning the Fields Medal or the Nobel Prize in physics. You have no excuse as you think women are as smart as men AND mathemeticians and physcists are as smart as everyone else. I look forward to your acceptance speech.

Mr. LaBonne, the point about Ophelia's and my objection to the reporting of the NYT, the BBC and others is they make precisely the "vague statement with many possible interpretations" that you tut-tut Ophelia for. The Times said this: "Dr. Summers said at an academic conference that "women's 'intrinsic aptitude' might contribute to their low numbers in science and engineering." Everything else you say may be correct about how he was wrong to engage in amateur quantitative genetics for the (tiny) subset of the population, male or female, that might have a shot at getting tenure at his university, Stamford or MIT, but the 'gotcha' is aimed at the reporting and the stupid side arguments it spawns about what people think he said, rather than what he actually said. In that sense, PZ's original comment at the top of the thread is more accurate than the reporting he links to, which I didn't recognize at first, because at least he talks about insulting the faculty and not the entire population ...

What does your being a woman have to do with anything?

I'm referring to the gasket you blew when I asked you for evidence in the form of a validated metric to back up your unsubstantiated assertions, and you accused me of being "phony". I was behaving in the best scientific tradition; the only way that can appear "phony" to you is if you have a big emotional investment in the concept of "women" and "scientists" as disjunct sets.

You, in fact, shouldn't be here, you should be focusing on winning the Fields Medal or the Nobel Prize in physics.

No, that would be a big waste of time on my part. As far as I can tell, I am the only person in the world working on the development of an anatomical algebra from my particular approach. To stop that unique research just to start over in another discipline would be nothing more than a silly distraction.

I look forward to your acceptance speech.

I look forward to your backing up your assertions with evidence, rather than appeals to emotion.

(sound of crickets chirping, [Hi, Lenny!])

Can't define his own terminology, avoids the simplest of questions, responds with rhetoric, teenage talk ("smarter than everyone else") and bizarre, hyperbolic nonsequiturs ("you should be focusing on winning the Fields Medal...") -- everything but real data.

Sorry, but your personal opinions don't mean much on their own. Rhetoric doesn't make up for lack of evidence.

Case closed.

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.

i am repeating myself from Old Pharyngula, but this is a new venue and the subject is back.

i disagree with PZ and the rest who say Summers' quip about women on distributional tails is worthy of Eternal Damnation. well, they didn't say that, not explicitly, but worthy of Removal from the Harvard presidency. i believe he should not have said it, not because he wasn't entitled to as professor at Harvard but because as Harvard president he has more responsbility and stature.

as reported above, while the Quip got the world's attention, and didn't make Harvard look the best, i don't think that's what finally got Professor Summers into hot water. i have said the first faculty vote of no confidence was an overreaction, as would have been the second. there may be stuff going on which Summers did which i don't know about. his role in displacing Dean Professor Kirby is mysterious and seems odd, as i mentioned.

but Summers isn't going anywhere. he'll be a faculty member now, and per my criteria above is now free to make all kinds of comments.

as far as Summers argument goes, quoted above by Was It THAT Bad?, all i know is that non-normality also shows up on the tails, even if the distribution is adequately represented as a Gaussian closer to the mean. you're talking about extreme values and associated theory. inferences based upon assumptions of statistical normality are hard to believe up there, three or four or more standard deviations away, including inferences based parameters which characterize the distribution. and non-normality tends to show up in cases of high statistical power, with millions and billions of samples. indeed, there's a statistical aphorism that says all you need to make a distribution fail to pass a test of normality is take enough observations.

should Professor Summers not have said silly things? no. as univesity professor he's entitled to say them, but not as president. in my book, that's not enough of a cause to dump him, modulo things like the details of the Kirby affair i know zip about.

oh well.

rephrase!

should Professor Summers have said silly things? no. as univesity professor he's entitled to say them, but not as president. in my book, that's not enough of a cause to dump him, modulo things like the details of the Kirby affair i know zip about.

Ulik, what field do you work in?

As do many others, Ulik is confusing the rarity of a talent for its difficulty. Not many people, period, are capable of the focus and discipline and abstraction required to be a top-notch mathematician or physicist, but that doesn't mean they are the best or the smartest human beings around. It means they're way out there on the weirdness scale.

Raven T: I "blew a gasket"? I find this discussion amusing, I don't know why you continue to accuse me of sexism or having an "emotional investment" in anything. Please, don't project your own mindset on me. If you and pomfrey want evidence read some general works about intelligence, you might start with Lars links above in the thread.

JBL: I'm a student.

PZ said: "that doesn't mean they are the best or the smartest human beings around"

Of course it does not mean they are the "best". But they are smarter. Individuals such as Martinus J.G. Veltman are exceedingly rare, what he does is exceedingly difficult, and he is smarter than all of us. If you think you are so smart don't you publish more?

Like I said, Ulik confuses the rarity of a particular trait or way of thinking for its superiority. Thank you for confirming my point!

Though I am loathe to bring this up, the discussion seems to be centering on IQ scores and variation at the top of the spectrum. The highest IQ score ever was Marilyn vos Savant (from Parade magazine). Even though there is much debate over said IQ score, this is at least somewhat true. Therefore, arguing about IQ scores ultimately shows that the difference at the top is that a woman has the highest ever recorded IQ.

Now you're making arguments from a single datapoint.

The people with the highest IQs are disproportionally male. The people with the lowest IQs are disproportionally male.

We're mentioning IQs because they're purely mathematical artifacts that are easy to analyze statistically. We can't measure our intuitive ideas about "intelligence", so we can't speak meaningfully about them.

What point? Being 7ft tall is rare. Do you deny some people are taller than others? You can't support your argument so you resort to semantic games.

"Ulik confuses the rarity of a particular trait"

By the way, how do you know this rare trait is evenly distributed among men and women?

Like I said, Ulik confuses the rarity of a particular trait or way of thinking for its superiority. Thank you for confirming my point!

Aren't you embarassed to be posting strawmen on your own blog?

Given that the traits necessary to be a truly exceptional scientist are rare, and given that being a truly exceptional scientist is a valuable thing, it follows that the traits necessary to be a truly exceptional scientists are extremely valuable -- and since those traits involve doing something better than most people can do them, they are in fact superior.

Ignoring intristic differences and focusing only on social influence is ultimately as vulnerable to error as vice versa. It's like the article linked to below about how Americans and Japanese measure athletic success -- if you attribute success or failure to inherent talent, you lose the opportunity to create success from failure when all that's needed is more effort (or effort of a different kind, etc.). If you attribute success or failure to hard work, you'll end up working yourself to death trying to improve the impossible.

I see you're doing it, too.

No, rarity is not the same as superior or even better. There are a great many traits involved in being an excellent scientist, and the ones everyone focuses on are a tiny subset of the key abilities. It's selective data-mining: you're picking one property that happens to be exemplified in a few known successful male scientists, and pretending that that one property is the exclusive marker for success. And, of course, if some brilliant woman comes along who has that property, you'll just move on to a different, arbitrary marker.

Stop thinking two dimensionally. This is not a skill set that can be resolved in a linear way.

No, rarity is not the same as superior or even better. Superiority is necessarily uncommon. When it becomes common enough, it turns into basic competence.

At no point does Ulik imply that just because something is rare, it must be valuable. Profound retardation is also rare, and it's about as far from valuable as you can get. Scarcity often increases value, however -- and scare traits that are required for valued positions are more valuable than common traits that are required for such positions.

You're not this stupid, at least not on other topics. One wonders why your intellectual competency is so diminished when it comes to this particular topic -- is it possible you have strong feelings on the matter, feelings strong enough to impede the proper functioning of your faculties?

"if some brilliant woman comes along who has that property, you'll just move on to a different, arbitrary marker"

What do you mean "move on to"? Quit implying that that the ratio of males to females in the upper echelons of science is something we desire when it's something we are observing.

"There are a great many traits involved in being an excellent scientist"

And women posess all these traits at the same rate as men? How do you know?

Attacking arguments that haven't been made, impugning the opponents' motives, drawing unwarranted conclusions about their intentions and methods...

On this topic, PZ, it seems you act exactly like an IDist. How... interesting.

You remember all of the scorn you so justly heap upon their heads?

... feelings strong enough to impede the proper functioning of your faculties?

hey, wait a minute: since when do feelings necessarily impede intellect?

Yes, I do remember. And it's for the same reason that I justly heap scorn on the heads of those who make ad hoc justifications for discrimination.

We are seeing a shift in the ranks of scientists right now: more and more women are pushing in to essentially all scientific fields. We are graduating more, we are training more...and we're also still seeing this dismissive attitude everywhere. Some of the smartest, most ambitious, most successful, most driven people in my field are women. I've worked with them. I know. Ulik, that is what we are observing. It makes you uncomfortable, apparently, since you're trying to argue that there is some intangible property only held by men that excludes them from the topmost ranks.

That's bullshit.

It's nothing but chauvinistic wishful thinking. It's the same bigotry that let 19th century men accuse women of hysteria and tiny, weak brains to justify excluding them from everything but the kitchen and bedroom.

You guys are arguing with a person who thinks innate differences in cognitive ability are a perfectly reasonable theory as to why certain races might be under-represented in science.

The man is clearly an imbecile.

Besides the fact that he wants us to prove a negative, he also wants us to ignore history. My dad is 50. He remembers whites only drinking fountains. Racism was officially sanctioned until the mid-60s, and beyond that both sexism and racism were highly common unofficially.

Only one or two generations have passed since the civil-rights era. It's pretty clear that a person's own chances at success have a lot to do with how succesful their parents were; If my parents have no money, and no college education, it's harder for me to get a college education then it would be if they were wealthy college graduates.

To ignore context, and just assume that minority groups don't succeed because minority groups are inferior is the hight of ignorance.

Not to mention that racism and sexism tend to work as positive feedback loops. This was how not educating slaves was justified; I've never met a slave who could solve a calculous problem. This is because slaves are stupuid, and therefore it isn't worth educating them about calculus.

This kind of feedback loop is likely to, and in fact has, fed itself for some time after it is forced out legally. Look at Jim Crow laws.

This is some pretty fucking basic stuff, and if somebody can't figure it out, I have trouble seeing them as somebody worth arguing with.

Caledonian: Ignoring intristic differences and focusing only on social influence is ultimately as vulnerable to error as vice versa.

This may be true, but it seems to me that in terms of actual policy, it's better to underestimate the innate differences then it is to overestimate.

Overestimation tends to lead to the feedback loop I talked about above, and it very often ends up being an excuse to ignore the social factors in success. People assume they don't need to address social factors because, hey, it won't change things anyway.

The danger of underestimation is that you could end up having people in fields they are unqaulified for. Obviously a concern, but in the modern American social climate, it's a much lower risk then those that come with overestimation.

And the bigotry gets a lot of extra fuel from the way even the putatively quality media insist on getting it wrong. I wasn't making a 'gotcha' point, Steve L, and I certainly wasn't trying to be impressive; I was just hoping other people would have noticed what I've been noticing (with huge frustration) ever since Summers said what he said: what he said does get reported as 'women have less innate scientific ability than men' - which is exactly what the BBC said last night, and also what it has said on its website in the past. I know that because I've commented on it at my own site. Summers didn't say that. But even trained reporters apparently can't hear what he did say, so they translate it into that ridiculous statement.

And I know this gets around, because I've had someone on my site just last week claiming that men are smarter than women and so if you meet a woman and a man there's a 70% probability the man is the smarter of the two.

I most certainly can tell that's not what Ulik's arguing. Neither one of us (or Summers either, from what I've been able to ascertain about his statements) has claimed that there's no discrimination involved, or that "women can't be scientists".

You seem to be operating with the assumption that since you are opposed to gender discrimination, anyone who opposes *you* must be in favor of discrimination or seeking to excuse it somehow. Permit me to disabuse you of this notion.

We've been trying to get more women to enter technical fields for decades. The result wasn't what we hoped and expectated. Can you offer a single rational reason why speculating about factors that might lead to this beyond simple social discrimination should be forbidden?

"Some of the smartest"

I thought there was no such thing?

"It makes you uncomfortable"

No it doesn't. You're the one having the emotional reactions.

"you're trying to argue that there is some intangible property only held by men that excludes them from the topmost ranks."

Yes, intelligence. And you think it's the intangible property of sexism, so intangible you can't provide any evidence of it.

I repeat myself: men and women graduate from Harvard law in nearly equal numbers, but men vastly outnumber women as the recipients of physics and mathematics PhD's from Harvard. Is this really because of sexism? Are science professors really much, much, more sexist than law professors? Can this sexism really be so great and so widespread that effects all women attempting to do math and physics everywhere? Where is the evidence?

The requirements of rational thought are straightforward:

First, we ask questions. Then we endeavor to discover what the answers are. Then we draw our conclusions.

There are people here who are ruling out lines of questioning because they don't like the potential answers. That is *not* acceptable.

P.S. Here is the quote from the BBC website story on Summers's departure -

"Lawrence Summers lost the first vote in March last year after suggesting women had less "intrinsic aptitude" than men for science."

No, he, didn't. He didn't even come close to saying that all women have less "intrinsic aptitude" for all science than all men. But if even the Beeb can't get it right, who is going to? It's so irritating.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4738030.stm

Are science professors really much, much, more sexist than law professors? Can this sexism really be so great and so widespread that effects all women attempting to do math and physics everywhere?

Can you provide any evidence that this is wrong?

Okay, especially this last statement is again bizarrely ignorant of history. Name one society which was matriarchal to the point that men were prevented from holding most high paying jobs, and were seen as fit only for fucking and child-rearing.

While you chew on that, I'll mention that whichever one you name, it won't be one of the developed nations that turn out lots of science students; Those societies all were heavily patriarchal in the recent past, with heavy, blatant sexism again enduring to my dad's childhood.

Of course it could be that widespread.

There are people here who are ruling out lines of questioning because they don't like the potential answers. That is *not* acceptable.

No, it's not. It's also asinine to suggest that that kind of censorship is going on. You don't know anything about me, but one of the research projects in my lab is on behavioral genetics in zebrafish. Question it? I'm interested in studying it.

The only people who are jumping to conclusions here are the idiots who assume that a difference in achievement by gender in a culture with palpably sexist attitudes must be due to intrinsic differences between the sexes.

So how can we determine that it really IS that widespread in science? If that's the case, why ISN'T it as much of a problem in certain technical fields? Why only some?

We can't point to the disparity and say that it's evidence of discrimination that has yet to be eliminated. Now, studies showing that significantly more women are accepted into graduate positions, et cetera, are powerful evidence that there's still discrimination remaining.

"There are people here who are ruling out lines of questioning because they don't like the potential answers. That is *not* acceptable."

Actually, people are ruling out lines of questioning because they've been tentatively answered, and the people doing the questioning don't bring any new data to the table, and generally are serving disgusting interests rather then working on actual science.

It's pretty much the same reason people are scornful of creationism.

Given that bigotry and sexism have played such a large part in causing various employment disparities, and given that as science proggresses it continues to narrow the gap in inherent differences, you really need to work hard to present the "inherent differences" theory, and not just come in with a "Can you prove there aren't inherent differences"?

It's not censorship, and your suggestion that I'm saying it is censorship is inane.

Loudly attacking a false representation of a position while drowning out people attempting to correct you most certainly isn't censorship. It's also not intellectually honest.

Who has said that a difference in achievement by gender in a culture witih palpably sexist attitudes must be due to intrinsic differences? Give us an example of someone involved in this debate that has made that claim, PZ.

Emphasizing the studies that downplay differences between the genders is not the same as showing that the other side is bringing nothing to the table.

I have little patience for the people who insist that men and women inherently and necessarily think in a profoundly different manner, but it's obvious that there are reliable trends that persist despite attempts to adjust social environments and prejudices.

For decades, people insisted that gender identity and gender-related personality traits were acquired environmentally, not because there was convincing evidence showing this to be the case, but because they had accepted theoretical models that required that to be true. We now know that it's far, far more complicated, and some traits simply aren't subject to environmental alteration at all.

There's much less controversy over noting that some basic physiological and biochemical differences exist among different "races" (ethnic groups, whatever), at least on a statistical basis. Frankly, I was amazed when people insisted that a drug which could help save lives not be directed at a population studies had shown were most likely to benefit merely because that population was an ethnic minority.

Are you blind?

You claim people are "ruling out lines of questioning because they don't like the potential answers"...and now you want to pretend you weren't accusing people of censorship?

"Drowning out people"? What kind of stupid claim is that? You're here on my blog, making any ol' claim you want, with no restrictions...and you accuse me of being intellectually dishonest? I don't even know how to "drown" someone out here: you must be confusing that with the fact that someone is actually replying to you.

If you want an example of someone talking about innate differences, heeeere's Ulik:

Could you furnish a link to any studies demonstrating that men and women are innately equal in math ability or intelligence?

Caledonian: "Who has said that a difference in achievement by gender in a culture witih palpably sexist attitudes must be due to intrinsic differences? Give us an example of someone involved in this debate that has made that claim, PZ."

Dude, what the fuck?

Ullik: "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."

And: "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."

And: "If elite universities truly discriminate against brilliant female physicists and mathematicians, we should still be able to find them on the faculties of less prestigious universities, such as P.C.'s, - if such women existed. But they don't, 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."

And: "I think that female geniuses are far rarer than male ones. Why do you assume they exist in equal numbers?
...
So all of the potentially great female mathemeticians and physicists have been driven out of those fields at every level of academia because of discrimination? What a joke.

No one so far has provided any evidence that the mathematics department is more sexist than the law school, or how women can overcome sexism in business, for example, but not in physics."

That's Ullik's exact fucking point. What thread have you been reading?

If you want an example of someone talking about innate differences

Now, it seems to me that I hadn't asked for something talking about innate differences. My post was made just a few minutes ago. You really shouldn't have forgotten my request, or even become confused about it.

IDists frequently resort to the "spamming invalid arguments" tactic. Now you're doing the same thing. It's like reading Uncommon Descent, only with a slightly wittier pompous twit calling the shots.

Again: can you offer us an example of anyone in this debate who has claimed that the difference in gender representation in science MUST be due to inherent gender differences?

I can offer several examples of people saying that's what other people are saying, but I can't seem to find an example of someone actually saying that. Hmmm...

Raven T: I "blew a gasket"? I find this discussion amusing, I don't know why you continue to accuse me of sexism or having an "emotional investment" in anything.

When I asked you for evidence, and your response was "Quit being phony", that was an emotional non-sequitur, not a logical response. The only way the word "phony" makes sense in that context is if you believe that a woman behaving as a scientist is somehow not behaving as a woman--in other words, "phony". The necessary condition for that is that you conceive of the sets "women" and "scientist" as disjunct. QED.

When you are repeatedly asked for evidence, you resort to hyperbole, non-sequiturs, anything but providing the evidence. You refuse to answer direct questions about your arguments. That's emotion, not reasoned argumentation.

You can't deny your own words in this forum, and you don't seem able to provide evidence for them, either. Your argument rests on:

1) an experiment of nature that has been shown to be biased in multiple ways, including sampling bias and confusion between correlation and causation;

2) the necessity for a validated scale for "cognitive difficulty";

3) a robust, validated correlation between genotype and phenotype.

Until you can address any of these flaws in your argument with anything other than personal attacks and your assurance that these things are obvious, you will understand, I trust, the perception that "evidence" is too cognitively difficult a concept for you.

Ullik: "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."

Yes. And... so what?

That's a true statement even if we substitute 'men' in for 'women'. Even ignoring the simple fact that very few people in AP classes for a field will go on to contribute signifigantly to that field, that's a straightforward statement of statistical fact.

Women *ARE* different at the extreme ends of intelligence (and by "intelligence" I mean "mental property X", where X can be any property of interest).

Female geniuses ARE rarer than male genuises. This is not a statement which has a great deal of controversy surrounding it. It's just a fact. Female idiots (in the old categorical sense) are also rarer than male idiots. It's just one of the side effects of having two chromosomes instead of one: the trait distribution becomes less extreme.

If you don't like this, learn to cope.

"No one so far has provided any evidence that the mathematics department is more sexist than the law school, or how women can overcome sexism in business, for example, but not in physics."

That's Ullik's exact fucking point. What thread have you been reading?

No, his point is NOT that the differences must be due to inherent differences. His point is that they CAN be due to inherent differences, and that the data is difficult to explain if you assume that the difference CANNOT be due to inherent differences and is therefore caused by discrimination.

What thread have you been reading, and how exactly did you get to the Neptunian forums? We're talking about something quite different here on Earth - why don't you join us?

Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, Caledonian...you're playing an awfully blatant game.

It's like a conversation I had with an Aryan Nations type some time ago. Oh, no, he wasn't saying black people are inferior -- he was just trying to advance the cause of the greatest race on the planet, his own.

Again: If elite universities truly discriminate against brilliant female physicists and mathematicians, we should still be able to find them on the faculties of less prestigious universities, such as P.C.'s, - if such women existed. But they don't, 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.

Look at the bolded part. It's a statement of fact: There are no female geniuses (Currently). Not, "I don't know any of them" or "I suspect they aren't there".

Let's go to another one:

Ullik: "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."

Again, statement of fact. Ullik thinks discrimination does not exist.

His thesis is quite clearly that differences in representation cannot be the result of discrimination, and must be the result of innate differences between the sexes.

This is exactly what you asked for:

Caledonian: "Again: can you offer us an example of anyone in this debate who has claimed that the difference in gender representation in science MUST be due to inherent gender differences?"

I say this because I assume you were quoting me, because nobody else had mentioned that statement since yesterday.

Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, Caledonian...you're playing an awfully blatant game.

It's like a conversation I had with an Aryan Nations type some time ago. Oh, no, he wasn't saying black people are inferior -- he was just trying to advance the cause of the greatest race on the planet, his own.

And you're not lying to demonize your opponents and set up easy strawmen to be knocked down - you're fighting gender inequity. Sure.

And you're now implying that anyone who even suggests that differences in performance might be partially the result of inherent differences instead of being totally the fault of unfairly discriminatory admissions practices is equivalent to a neo-Nazi skinhead.

It seems you've fought against Dembski and his ilk so long that you've become them -- or at least taken on their debating strategies.

"Look at the bolded part. It's a statement of fact: There are no female geniuses (Currently)."

No, that's not what he's saying. He's talking about hypothetical populations of discriminated-against women who do work that would get a man a position in prestigious universities but have to settle for lesser universities instead.

I expect that does happen. I don't think it's the only or even the primary factor responsible for the disparity.

Speaking personally, I'm far more interested in hearing actual data that might shed light on the problem (like the study involving blinded examiniation of grad students for a desirable position) than I am in reading Godwinesque rantings about skinheads.

I'm not fighting gender inequity here. I'm fighting stupidity and dishonesty.

For you to argue that you and Ulik are not claiming there are intrinsic or innate or inherent differences between the sexes that are responsible for differential success in the upper tiers of academia is breathtakingly ridiculous. Of course you are. That's exactly what you are insisting on.

The issue is most definitely not whether there are differences due to sex -- of course there are. You can just look at people and see. You can chop into their brains and take samples and measure lots of parameters that vary predictably between men and women. The only questions are whether those differences are significant enough to make a difference in performance in science, and whether sex is a useful marker or predictor of performance.

I think it's obvious that it's never been tested, and that the current differences in the distribution of the genders in these professions is best accounted for by historical and social differences in how men and women are treated...and that that is an overwhelming factor that makes any assumption of innate differences naive and useless. If you even want to honestly test the hypothesis that there are inherent differences in performance, than the first thing you have to do is eliminate the social bias to see how they do, yet bigots like you and Ulik just want to perpetuate it.

And you can knock off the comparisons to creationist strategies. It just makes you look like an ass as well as a sexist pig.

Speaking personally, I'm far more interested in hearing actual data that might shed light on the problem

Yeah, right. Like I believe that. Here. It's been done.

Ullik: Emmy Noether

And the reason that the percentage of women in physics is less than you find in engineering I explain for the following reason: if you're going to jump over the wall into something so unfeminine, you might as do it into a field that pays well.

Me--I went into theoretical physics. I think it's harder for women to develop the obsessive single-mindedness that seems required (have you ever tried visualizing non-trivial mappings in 5-D? Made my head ache) because society has pestered them since day one to "take care of other people" and it's hard to develop the habit of intense concentration needed.

No, that's not what I'm insisting on, and I'm growing very tired of your repeated claims that I am.

Get this through your skull: I'm not opposing you because I advocate a position you reject. I'm opposing you because you're insisting that I must accept that position if I'm opposing you -- and because you keep misrepresenting what myself and others are actually saying.

You can't accurately state what Summers said, for example. You compare those you disagree with to Nazi skinheads and insist that they're bigots, you impugn their motives, and you show absolutely no signs that you understand what they're arguing.

Who Godwinized this thread? Who keeps slinging around the term 'bigot'? Who insists that the people he's arguing with want to oppress women?

tzs: May I ask you a question?

As a woman in theoretical physics, have you ever felt discriminated against due to your gender? I have no opportunity to collect personal anecdotes myself, as everyone I know in physics is male, and if there is systematic discrimination I can't necessarily trust their impressions.

As your words and Ulik's have been repeatedly quoted here, your disavowals are most disingenuous. If you want to claim you've been misrepresented, you're going to have to acknowledge that you have repeatedly misrepresented my position, claiming it is one of ignoring intristic differences, which is simply not true. It is that any intrinsic differences are known to be far smaller in magnitude than the obvious differences in achievement, which are of course largely due to cultural biases. Ignoring the more plastic and possibly correctable cultural differences to fall back on the excuse of fixed differences is advocacy for bigotry.

while i have no inside information, there are portions of Professor Summers' departure letter which hint at the power struggles that rolled across the university community. i'm no professional academic, but my dad was, and i know some of these issues can be incredibly divisive. as bystander employee, i also observed power struggles at another Ivy League university which seemed petty from an outsider's perspective but no doubt meant a great deal to those involved.

i quote what i think are pertinent sections, and others can read them in context if they like.

At a time when the median age of our tenured professoriate is approaching 60, the renewal of the faculty has to be a central concern. A number of faculties, notably the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have seen their most rapid growth in over a generation in the last several years. As the Harvard faculty is renewed, I believe it essential that the University do much better than it has done traditionally to ensure that we are doing everything we can to attract, develop, and retain the most promising emerging scholars who will define the future of their disciplines. Significant steps have been announced with respect to hiring, mentoring, research support, and tenure review, but continued attention to these issues over the next several years is essential, especially if we are to achieve the shared objectives of promoting diversity and interdisciplinary appointments.

[snip]

Even as we have continued to build our faculty in the humanities and social sciences and create new facilities for the arts, the University is in the midst of unprecedented commitments to science and technology. The success of these investments will be crucial over the next several decades to the University's global standing and to the economic health of our region. We are building, or have plans to build, scientific facilities with area totaling more than 25 football fields. And we are entering into new collaborations, such as the Broad Institute and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which bring together different Schools within Harvard, MIT, and area hospitals to work on the kind of large-scale cross-disciplinary inquiry that increasingly defines modern science. Recognizing the centrality of technology in today's intellectual life, we also have plans for dramatic increases in Harvard's commitment to engineering. All of this energy will require careful focus.

[snip]

... [W]e still have a great distance to travel. We cannot maintain pre-eminence in intellectual fields if we remain constrained by artificial boundaries of departments and Schools. "Each Tub On Its Own Bottom" is a vivid, but limiting, metaphor for decision making at Harvard. We will not escape its limits unless our Schools and Faculties increase their willingness to transcend parochial interests in support of broader university goals.

with a constraint on costs, with limits on hiring, and with an aging tenured faculty, it's not hard at all to imagine great rivalries developing between liberal arts departments and sciences in a context where the demand for scientific advancement has grown and continues to grow. the bottom line of campus politics is that it follows the money. liberal arts need people and libraries, sometimes collections, but sciences need people, libraries, laboratories, collections, and expensive equipment. perceived unfairness in allocation can make people bitter.

moreover, big universities often seem to have endless wars between administrations which centralize in the name of operational and budgetary efficiency, and powerful departments which protect their turf and oppose excessive administrative intrusion. i've seen that clearly operate at the level of academic information systems. no doubt the same struggles extend to more important aspects of doing education.

i do not know, but i can easily imagine.

Repeatedly quoted by people with less-than-stellar reading comprehension skills, I'll note.

Your position has repeatedly centered around either lying about other people's arguments or (invoking Hanlon's Razor) grossly misunderstanding them, as your initial comments about Summers' statements demonstrate.

It's that of course that's the problem here. Other fields have seriously minimized if not eliminated gender disparity in achievement. It is not immediately clear where the responsibility for the continuing gender disparity in science lies. Is it due to gender prejudices on the part of scientists? Gender biases in schools -- and if so, which schools, at which levels? Expectations on the part of students themselves?

Science appears to be different than other fields. What's the difference? You're starting off with the assumption that it's a social discriminiation problem. That may well be the case, but no one will be helped by assuming the nature of the problem. If it is discrimination, why haven't the methods which have been so useful elsewhere worked in science? More to the point, what if it turns out that social discrimination isn't the only part of the problem, or even the greatest part? Blindly charging ahead with a determination to end gender discrimination isn't going to help.

Once there were very few female doctors. There was a great deal of unreasoning prejudice that was responsible for that. Now there are many, many female doctors -- as someone noted previously, they vastly outnumber male doctors in some places. Once there were very few female scientists. There was a great deal of unreasoning prejudice that was responsible for that. Now there are more female scientists. Why aren't there as many as there are female doctors?

We need to find out why. And the first step to doing that is re-examining our assumptions, not to smugly presume we know what the problem is.

Question for Caledonian and Ullik:

What year were women first admitted to Harvard? I don't mean admitted to Radcliffe and permitted to take a few classes at Harvard with special permission. I mean, what year were women allowed to apply to Harvard on an equal basis with men? Was it fifty years ago? Sixty years ago?

Mnemosyne, according to this it was 1943 or so.

Mnemosyne, if you meant diplomas, it was 1963.

We need to find out why. And the first step to doing that is re-examining our assumptions, not to smugly presume we know what the problem is.

If you held Ulik and his unsubstantiated claims that:

"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."

and:

"I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the worlds best physcisists and mathemeticians have more brainpower than everyone else."

to the same standard of rigor that you hold PZ, your claim to be an honest, non-cherry-picking scientific investigator would be a lot more convincing.

I mean, what year were women allowed to apply to Harvard on an equal basis with men?

Could you define "equal basis", please? If you're asking when as many women as men were admitted, some quick searching suggests it was 2003.

According to the Columbia Law School (not exactly an unbiased source), Harvard didn't admit women until 1950. I'm not sure if that's in regard to its law program or in general.

Ulik said

Now you're making arguments from a single datapoint.

The people with the highest IQs are disproportionally male. The people with the lowest IQs are disproportionally male.

You're arguing women don't have an innate ability you call intelligence that you measure using an IQ test which you deem neccessary to success in the fields of mathematics and science. I offered a single datum that disproves your theory of innate differences. If a single female can have a measurable IQ greater than that of any measured male, then there are not innate differences in the range of IQ. Women are not inherently less intelligent than men. By the way, notice Marilyn vos Savant is not a physicist or mathematician. For some reason other than innate aptitude she did not choose either of those fields. Hmmm...could it be culture or society or her own personal desire to have a life that made her choose not to enter an obsure realm of academia?

There may be differences in the distribution of IQ around the mean, but I beleive you don't really understand what you're talking about. Furthermore, IQ tests are not administered to everyone, so you have sampling error at the base of the argument.

To Ulik and Caledonian: Stop being rude to our host. Calling people names has been the fallback position of schoolyard bullies for decades. This tactic inhibits a person's ability/desire to look at the argument you actually make and really consider it.

That being said, you're both idiots. Your theoretical positions are untestable. When the only sample you have to test a hypothesis is inherently skewed, the hypothesis can't be tested. If you want to really address innate differences in the sexes in math and science, you would have to raise children from infancy in an environment that did not differ at all. This is not possible due to ethical constraints on human subject testing. It is impossible to test this idea in the real world. Males and females are enculturated from the second they leave the womb. By age three they have already internalized cultural norms. Therefore the sample of women in math and physics is the result of years of repeated sampling error. Additionally at the undergraduate, graduate and post-doc levels there is covert and overt systematic anti-women bias in the fields of physics and math that is incredibly widespread despite the fact that women continue to force glass doors open!

I said women admitted to Harvard, not Radcliffe. Read again -- in 1943, women were admitted to Radcliffe.

Women were first admitted to Harvard in 1969. That's 37 years. Barely a generation.

I guess they didn't pay attention to the Samuel Alito hearings, where it came out that Alito protested the admission of women to Yale when he was a student there in the 1960s.

Caledonian and Ullik should probably take a minute to study the history they so disdain. Their lack of knowledge of basic facts -- like that women were not admitted on an equal basis to Ivy League schools until the 1970s -- is becoming embarrassing.

stupid blockquote looked fine in the preview. The second line of my last post is not me but Ulik

Mathematics in particular is thought to be far more strongly related to raw processing power and spatial skill than most other disciplines. It's speculated that's why mathematicians typically do their best and most groundbreaking work when they're young and their brains haven't started to deteriorate yet.

Literature, in contrast, is a field where the best work is done by the seasoned and experienced.

There's still a great deal of uncertainty about gender differences in mathematical skill (and the type of mathematical skill is important), but it's not unreasonable to conclude that even a small difference might have a great effect on the population tails.

So: is the fact that there are fewer female mathematicians due to social factors, innate factors, or a combination, and if it's a combination, to what degree are the factors relevant?

We have no idea.

Caledonian, "equal basis" means "same criteria for admission." Prior to 1969, women had to prove themselves "exceptional" to even be allowed to apply. There were strict quotas applied and only a certain number of women would be admitted.

It astonishes me that you can look at this history of discrimination within our lifetime and decide that the fact that the students of yesterday who protested the admission of women to Harvard and Yale are now the professors at those same institutions is not worth considering.

Another data point for you: I have a friend who is working on her PhD in geology -- you know, one of those soft sciences that don't involve any math? She's done quite a bit of work at JPL with the Mars rover.

Anyway, she is under great pressure from her professors not to get married. She has been told, flat out, that getting married (not even having children, but getting married) will severely impede her career and make it difficult for her to advance in her field.

I have another friend who was told that having a child had ruined her academic career, but she's not a scientist -- she's in linguistics.

Just a couple of anecdotes for you to consider.

Mnemosyne, my observation was based upon the excerpt

Radcliffe women began taking classes at Harvard alongside men during World War II.

from the source. your comment I said women admitted to Harvard, not Radcliffe. Read again -- in 1943, women were admitted to Radcliffe suggests i misread the source. i did not. i simply did not understand what you were asking.

although your conclusions drawn from the fact that women were only fully admitted to Harvard in 1969 may still stand, there is a social complication which you haven't mentioned which may make this fact appear to be more misogynistic than it actually is. that complication is simply that mixed gender colleges were new features of the social scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as much a product of the sexual revolution as liberation of women, however partial that might be.

now, i know this isn't a clean distinction. widespread availability of birth control does liberate women. and i acknowledge that having a separate but comparable school does not make the education equal. still, the reasons why Harvard and Radcliffe were kept separate were not entirely because of nonsense like women aren't up to it. my undergraduate college didn't go coed until 1971.

Caledonian and Ullik should probably take a minute to study the history they so disdain.

What disdaining?

No, never mind.

So: is the fact that there are fewer female mathematicians due to social factors, innate factors, or a combination, and if it's a combination, to what degree are the factors relevant?

We have no idea.

Funny, that's not what you (or Ullik) were arguing just a few hours ago. If we have "no idea" to what degree the factors are relevant, should we be trying to change the factors that are within our control (academic culture, possible sexism) or should we shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh, well, it's probably innate ability anyway."

It has been shown again and again that, when barriers against women are taken down, women excel. Women were forbidden from studying law and medicine; now they are the majority of lawyers, and close to the majority of physicians. Women weren't allowed to run marathons at all until the 1970s and weren't allowed to run them in the Olympics until 1984. Now their times are close to men's times.

What's the harm in controlling the variables that are within our control, Caledonian?

One thing that can rouse me to fury, far worse than creationism, is this pseudo-scientific bigotry that people like Caledonian and Ulik espouse. And when they stupidly say things like "And the first step to doing that is re-examining our assumptions", when what they are doing is making a reactionary commitment to what has always been the default assumption of an innate difference, it is doubly infuriating. When their strategy is to minimize a history of discrimination to the point where they can blankly claim they have no idea what factors could possibly be most significant, they are lying. Flat out straining to sweep the elephant in the room under the rug.

I suppose the advantage of my state school background is that my undergrad always admitted women.

I didn't know Harvard did not admit women until the 70s or that Alito protested admitting women at Yale. That's very interesting....

that complication is simply that mixed gender colleges were new features of the social scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as much a product of the sexual revolution as liberation of women, however partial that might be.

Mixed-race colleges were likewise new features. It's not a coincidence that the racial barriers at these colleges were attacked at the same time as the gender barriers.

So I think you're over-reading to a small extent: the equal admission of both women and minorities were part of the overall civil rights movements going on at the time.

Anyway, she is under great pressure from her professors not to get married. She has been told, flat out, that getting married (not even having children, but getting married) will severely impede her career and make it difficult for her to advance in her field.

i am not at all defending the awkwardness which Summers exhibited raising the issue, but might not this have been part of the problem he was trying to get at, the cultural biases present in academe against women? MIT had a similar program which resulted in several changes.

the history of women at MIT is summarized here.

Loris, some of the quotes you're attributing to Ulik are mine.

Males and females are enculturated from the second they leave the womb. There's some species of monkey that treats its infants very differently based on their gender. The gender differences aren't biologically hardwired into the kids themselves, they're learned -- it's the teaching that's genetically hardwired.

So far, all attempts to induce boys and girls to take up alternate behavioral patterns by altering their cultural environment have failed. You're assuming the skew is in the surroundings instead of the subjects, and as a result you cannot test your belief that certain behaviors are culturally derived.

Fortunately, since you seem to have no interest in testing that belief, this isn't exactly a problem for you.

Mnemosyne, if there are gender and sexual and race barriers dropping all at the same time, isn't it reasonable to expect there will be those who react to these dramatic social events and want to turn the clock back?

they are very wrong but it isn't at all surprising to they exist or that they find sympatheizers and even achieve some success.

revise as: they are very wrong but it isn't at all surprising to me they exist or that they find sympatheizers and even achieve some success.

Funny, that's not what you (or Ullik) were arguing just a few hours ago. I don't think you have any idea what I was arguing a few hours ago.

If we have "no idea" to what degree the factors are relevant, should we be trying to change the factors that are within our control (academic culture, possible sexism) or should we shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh, well, it's probably innate ability anyway."

If we don't know whether there is systematic social discrimination, we don't know whether the factors that we can "control" (really, influence at best) need to be changed at all.

Maybe we should figure out what the problem is before engaging in attempts to eliminate it? Noting that our current strategy hasn't been as effective as we'd like, why should we just assume that we're right about the usefulness and correctness of our strategy and redouble our efforts?

Women were forbidden from studying law and medicine; now they are the majority of lawyers, and close to the majority of physicians. Women weren't allowed to run marathons at all until the 1970s and weren't allowed to run them in the Olympics until 1984. Now their times are close to men's times.

Women were permitted to be scientists... and yet they're not yet present in the same numbers as men. Why? You're not even asking that question.

What's the harm in trying to control everything that we can control without knowing whether it's even pathological or not? Sweet merciful Buddha on a pogo stick, what a question -- and what a horrible set of assumptions that question must proceed from.

Caledonian,

I'm sorry I attributed your quotes to Ulik. I am a biological anthropologist so don't imply I have a lack of knowledge in the field of primatology (in fact this discipline is female dominated). Human phenotype is a product of genotype+environment (including culture). A huge portion of my research deals with tweezing the two apart.

Did you notice the !Kung San are severely underrepresented in the top physics and math departments? Maybe this is innate difference at work. (feel the sarcasm?)

Primates enculturate their offspring, just as humans do. The differential treatment of the sexes serves the purpose of teaching them how to be adult males and females within the social groups. In primates that are primarily solitary or live in monogamous groups, such differential treatment of the offspring remains unobserved.

What's the harm in trying to control everything that we can control without knowing whether it's even pathological or not? Sweet merciful Buddha on a pogo stick, what a question -- and what a horrible set of assumptions that question must proceed from.

While I'm still waiting for you to address the question of your cherrypicking what assumptions you're willing to re-examine--giving Ulik an unwarranted pass on his evidence-free assumptions, while upbraiding PZ for pointing out the real evidence for discrimination--I'll just note that your conflation of the scientific term "control for" here with the implication of social control is naively uninformed at best and deliberately malicious at worst.

That's okay. These things will happen.

Did you notice the !Kung San are severely underrepresented in the top physics and math departments? Maybe this is innate difference at work. (feel the sarcasm?)

Ah, but it's not a case of cultural discrimination either, is it? I doubt very much so much as one !Kung has ever applied. (I could be mistaken, of course, but it seems like a safe bet.)

So why shouldn't we start trying to reform university culture, just in case there are nasty lurking prejudices against glottal stops and clicks? (feel the sarcasm?)

Ah! Thanks for knocking down my little straw man while ignoring anything I seriously stated.

I'll just note that your conflation of the scientific term "control for" here with the implication of social control is naively uninformed at best and deliberately malicious at worst.

When you can only perform experiments by trying to alter the society you're in, experimental control and social control is necessarily the same thing. This is obvious -- almost as obvious as your attempts to create a smokescreen by your subtle innuendos of fascism.

We shouldn't try to fix what isn't broken. Before we can productively act to change gender disparity in the sciences, we need to know what's causing it, and why the strategies that worked for other disciplines (law and medicine among them) didn't give the same result in science.

But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, doesn't it?

For the sake of argument, I'll address a cultural/societal/personal(for the woman) reason women are now well represented in law and medicine. Some evidence has shown that women gravitate towards careers they see as helping people. Law and medicine are careers that help people. High level physics and math are not perceived as occupations that help people or society in general. Additionally, the kind of environment top academics live in is void of the social interaction many females feel is necessary to a full life.

But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, doesn't it?

Not so much--I can still recognize a cherrypicking pseudoscientist when I see one.

Good grief. Who says it isn't working in science? Over the course of my career, I've seen progressively greater involvement of women at all levels.

If we're seeing discrimination against women, we should change it, period. Even if women were somehow 'inferior' than men, we should work to remove all the social barriers that prevent them from rising to whatever level their talents allow. I suspect that they'd do just as well as men, and we'd be taking better advantage of the pool of talent available in our population.

It is interesting that your response to gender discrimination is to argue that we shouldn't try to fix what isn't broken. It is broken. I've pointed you to one paper (which, of course, you ignore) that shows a glaring discrepancy in how women are treated in the sciences; to suggest that we should disregard that and not correct it because some people think their might be some small innate component to differential success is just plain dumb.

…about what I'm coming to expect from you, actually.

Some evidence has shown that women gravitate towards careers they see as helping people.

Additionally, the kind of environment top academics live in is void of the social interaction many females feel is necessary to a full life.

Let's be honest, Loris. Those comments make assertions about women - statistical assertions, granted, and they describe only rough trends. But they're the same kind of assertions that so many people here have objected to quite vehemently. The only real difference I can see is that your assertions would be considered to reflect well on women, while the offensive assertions wouldn't.

Don't many men feel social interaction is necessary to live a full life? And yet you clearly intend to suggest that a difference in the average importance attached to that social interaction between men and women may be at least partially responsible for the gender disparity in science.

Being compassionate is usually considered to be a good thing. Being social is usually considered to be a good thing. Do you consider positive prejudices to be ethically problematic, Loris?

Wow. Silliness is really bubbling at the blog comments today, isn't it?

The Washington Post felt the need to weigh in on this issue and, as has often been the case in recent years, they do so on the wrong side, and in a fairly condescending manner.

The problem is not that people who oppose Mr. Summers' attitude, which appears to be shared by some of the commenters here, are people weighed under by prejudice, or people who are too 'politically correct' to admit 'uncomfortable truths'. The problem is that the alleged gender link is identical to the kind of sexist argument that has been used for millenia, but is presented with repulsive faux sympathy. "I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true," said Mr. Summers.

Why would Mr. Summers, or the Post editor, think that solving a social problem would be easier to do than to label said problem as an insolvable genetic problem? Efforts to include women in the math and sciences have had visible effects in improving the number of women in the field. Is the percentage of women involved up to 50%? No. Does that fact by itself mean that it's impossible for the percentage to ever reach 50%? Is our society purged of sexism in every other respect, so that "residual sexism" is unthinkable as an explanation?

What bugs me the most about Mr. Summers' attitude is the pretension that he is the one who has approached the problem with the open mind, and that those who disagree with him are the ones who are biased or prejudiced. Witness the title of the Post editorial: "Prejudice wins".

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/21/AR20060…

Actually, prejudice lost.

I did not attribute the aforementioned trends to innate differences. I would argue that they are largely a product of enculturation.

Even if women were somehow 'inferior' than men, we should work to remove all the social barriers that prevent them from rising to whatever level their talents allow.

No kidding. But how can we tell when we've removed the social barriers unless we understand them first? And how can we understand them until we can at least detect them?

If we don't know what's going on, we can't know how to respond -- or even whether we *should* respond.

I also did not attach subjective, good/bad weights to those trends. I merely offered some evidence in explanation. There is systemic sexism in those programs and there are other cultural reasons women don't choose math and physics as careers.

i think you all are wallowing in the public caricature of the ejection of Summers. you are thereby failing to discuss points which are as important to the future of academia in the United States, such as how to balance the ever increasing costs of doing science in the absence of government support against the need to have lively non-science departments and programs.

I did not attribute the aforementioned trends to innate differences. I would argue that they are largely a product of enculturation.

Now here's the catch: on what basis do you make that argument?

In the simian species whose name eludes me at the moment, we consider it ethically appropriate to conduct a control experiment by raising the infants away from contact with adults from the species. More importantly, it was *possible* to do so. That's how we determined that the behavioral gender differences weren't biologically inherent in the infants. How can you determine what features of gender disparity in humans are culturally determined? We could try looking at different human cultures, but they're being watered down in this modern age. Attempts to artificially control the cultural environment of children have failed, and the draconian measures that would be necessary to really accomplish this violate ethical standards. Finally, we can't raise children without exposing them to adults who will almost certainly send subtle social signals. So how do you acquire the evidence necessary to justify your conclusion?

tzs: Yes, Emmy Noether was a genius, and therefore was able to make a significant contribution to mathematics despite outright discrimination as well has fleeing Nazi Germany. Since a women in America today does not remotely face such opression, not even close, it's reasonable to conclude women unable to perform as Noether did are not geniuses.

Mnemosyne said: "Women were first admitted to Harvard in 1969. That's 37 years. Barely a generation"

Yes, in barely a generation women have achieved equality in law and medicine at Harvard. But not physics and math. The burden is on those who think that this is because the physics and math dept. are full of evil sexists to provide evidence for that.

PC said: "which are of course largely due to cultural biases"

Of course? You have no evidence for that. None.

"bigots like you and Ulik just want to perpetuate it."

How does anything I do effect the ability of any woman anywhere to do physics?

Since your so quick to label me and Cal. bigots, why is it you don't name any of the bigots actually doing the discriminating you claim exists? Name some names, tell us who the notable mathemeticians and physicists are that are preventing women from achieving in science. Glauber? Is he the one? John Huth? Bary Mazur? Gerald Sacks? Peter Galison? Are they the evil sexists?

Caledonian,

You're referencing Harlowe's experiments on rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) that today would be horrifying to any primatologist or to many psychologists.

I have not said you can actually test my hypothesis. In anthropology we utilize cross-cultural analyses among other things to try to determine what is innate and what is culturally learned. Furthermore, we look at cognitive studies in our closest relatives to determine what kinds of abilities are innate or biologically controlled.

Sally Boysen has done some interesting experiments with chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to look at cognitive development. One test she used is a scale model task where the chimpanzee is shown a scale model of a room. The researcher hides a soda in the scale model of the room, showing the chimpanzee where the soda is. The chimpanzee is then allowed into the full-scale room where a real soda is hidden in the same place the researcher showed the chimpanzee in the model. Female chimpanzees make this association and find the soda in the full-sized room. Male chimpanzees don't. They look everywhere in the room for the soda. The results were clear cut across the board, even for chimpanzees that were not accustomed to congnitive tasks.

What Boysen's experiment shows is that there are differences between the sexes for chimpanzees. For human children in the same experiment, those under three don't get it, those over three do regardless of sex.

BTW the male chimps never got the scale model task, even with repeated efforts to teach them to associate the small room with the real thing. Every adult female got it nearly right away.

I also did not attach subjective, good/bad weights to those trends.

You may not, but frankly it's not your position on the subject I'm concerned about. Most people in my society would consider those traits to be positive (or so I think, at least, but on this particular matter I trust my judgment).

I merely offered some evidence in explanation. There is systemic sexism in those programs and there are other cultural reasons women don't choose math and physics as careers.

Ah, but are you sure those reasons are cultural? To what degree are they cultural? How exactly *do* you know? Testing psychological hypotheses on human beings is a royal pain, for more than one reason.

Thank you for the data, Loris. I'm afraid I have many random bits of scientific trivia floating around in my head, unattached to names or journal citations. It makes for some awkward discussions at times.

Smiling is innate. Speech is innate, although facility isn't necessarily.

Responding differently to male and female infants seems to be innate -- at the very least people feel a profound need to know. Does it actually make a practical difference if the trends we're interested in aren't innate in children, but are innate in the adults that surround them?

Speech is innate but facility isn't? I'm not sure what you're talking about. Smiling because you're happy isn't necessarily innate.

See, that's the problem with science blogs - too dull and mannered! No fire!

Anyway, a few things.

The whole gender/cognition thing isn't, to the best of my nearly non-existent knowledge, like the situation with evolution, which is, as we have to always point out, both a fact and a theory, and etc. If anything, it perhaps seems akin to the situation back in the early part of the 20thC. (?), where folks knew something was going on, but whether it was best explained by Darwinism, Lamarkism, orthogenesis, etc. was an open question. Is this the case?

The issue of comparitive discrimination (overt, individual, systematic, or structural) in different fields (law and medicine vs. math and physics) is an interesting one. I would suggest that to the degree that the former are considered to have less intellectual cachet, and the latter more, it would be entirely expected that women would face more discrimination in math and physics. A rough analogy would be with politics - one would expect to find women (at least in any quantity) moving up the pyramid, as time goes by, first in lower-status positions and then in progressively higher positions as access expanded. Indeed, as Wikipedia points out

"there were still few women in the Senate far into the 20th century, long after women began to make up a significant percentage of the membership of the House. As late as 1992, in fact, only two women (Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) were serving in the Senate."

The page points out that this began to change in 1992, but the timeline there makes this point quite graphically - you get a trickle from 1922 onwards - including a number of examples of women being appointed to fill out the term following the death/resignation of a male relative, and then, in the last 14 years, bam! (if14% counts as bam-quality material). We'd expect to have a woman president pretty much last - if we elect President Hillary Clinton in '08, that would be a lapse of 91 years after the first woman in the House, and 86 years after the first woman in the Senate. It would also be fun to watch some people's heads literally explode as a result, but that's another matter. ( I 'd guess we'll probably be waiting into the '20s, but who knows?) Similar pattern in many other fields, I think?
Also, I get the impression there's been more of a push - and for longer - for women to break into law and medicine than math and science. Is this correct?

Christopher said "Overestimation tends to lead to the feedback loop I talked about above, and it very often ends up being an excuse to ignore the social factors in success. People assume they don't need to address social factors because, hey, it won't change things anyway."

And this is a bit like the feel I got from Summers' speech. He starts off talking about the high-pressure job/family issue, barely touches on gender roles (spends more time talking about whether it's fair to ask this of anyone, and promises to get back to this.

Then he brings up the variance issue, concluding that

if . . there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

. He then goes off about how little boys like building bridges and little girls like nursing, and daddy and baby trucks, and how "there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization" which explains why you have more boy engineers.

Last and definitely least is the issue of discrimination. Now, what he already missed is that the first option is in part a special case/variety of discrimination, but he's dealing strictly with discrimination as a personal issue - the furthest he can get from overt in-your-face sexism is when "people like to choose people like themselves, and the people in the previous group are disproportionately white male, " and that's not very far. But whatever. He admits that there is some of both kinds, surely, but they can't be too important, they just can't be. In the end, he says,

So 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.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.

And then, finally, as promised, we get to the suggestions, the "What's to be done?" section, and let me tell you - I'm a master of low-idea-density disorganized dithering (in fact, given recent research, I have a sinking feeling that my particular cognitive future is not all that bright), but Summers' just leaves me in the dust here. Go and read it. All hedging and hemming and hawing and " it's an area in which there's conviction but where it doesn't seem to me there's an enormous amount of evidence" (!!) and how hard it is for the employer who has to "provide different compensation packages that will attract the people who would otherwise have enormous difficulty with child care" and so on. Sure, it's a real difficult set of issues, but the contrast between Summers boldly rushing in on the "intrinsic aptitude" (his words)/socialization/discrimination bits, on one hand, and suddenly turning into a cautious old man on any possible actions, and all those 'gee I really wish it wasn't so and hope I'm proved wrong, because it's going to be really hard to fix bits makes the whole thing - whatever the reality - sound a little like an excuse not to do anything. Look, it's not our fault, really . . . Women want to have kids and they're not blessed/cursed with the kind of variation that gets you a good haul of both idiots and geniuses - it's nothing we can fix. It's not our fault! Really, why should we even bother? Providing child care is expensive, you know!

Hmm. In terms of making a clear and concise point, I am clearly not scaling the heights here . . .

You know, his first argument seems a little shaky. Women dropping out because working 80 hours a week doesn't let you raise a family? Ok. But that's not limited to math and physics. There are other fields that are very demanding, and women are represented in them. It's a very, very real problem, but I get the impression from the argument here that it is more extreme in these specific fields - although Summers said that it's a problem across the board. If not, why should that be? Intrinisic aptitude? (which he also suggests, via variability, is again across the board) Interestingly, a questioner at the end brings up, rather telegraphically, "Physics, France, very high powered women in science in top positions. Same nature, same hormones, same ambitions we have to assume. Different cultural, given." - which, if comparable and accurate, doesn't match either of the first two of Summers' assumptions.

Interestingly, in terms of discrimination, Summers (in questions) offers an excellent measure of discrimination, illustrated by a study of racial discrimination in baseball,

The prediction is that if there's a discriminated-against group, that if you measure subsequent performance, their subsequent performance will be stronger than that of the non-discriminated-against group. And that's a simple prediction of a theory of discrimination. And it's a testable prediction of a theory of discrimination, and it would be a revolution, and it would be an enormously powerful finding in this field.

I would think the Wenner�s and Wold article that PZ discusses via his 7:49 PM post is an more or less an example of testing this prediction - and indeed, it would seem to confirm it - "a female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score as he."

And no - when measuring brainpower, one don't get extra points because another organ does some of the thinking. However you might measure cognitive abilities, it's not with a ruler.

I'm not saying here that, eg, the variance issue isn'timportant - how the heck do I know?! - it's just given even moderate knowledge about both the past and the present, it seems reasonable to assume that other factors can be playing quite a role - probably in insanely complex and subtle ways, no doubt, what fun . .

It's like Bush. After a while you start assuming that anything he touches will turn to crap (or you haven't been paying attention); you may be wrong, but in the absense of convincing evidence, it's a reasonable assumption.

And on that note, good night!

Facility with speech isn't innate. I don't think that's a particularly surprising statement.

Smiling, and the meaning of smiling, seems to be innate. If I recall correctly, it's the same in every culture and ethnic group. Relatively few things are -- there are populations that have different sexual anatomical 'fetishes', whether cultural or innate, but smiling is still the same. It's also very odd in the sense that most mammals interpret bared teeth as a threatening gesture.

My knowledge of anthropology and comparative cultures is cursory -- do you know of any cultures where the meaning of a smile is different?

About speech, the capacity to produce language is both innate, language itself is learned. All of the great apes (Gorilla, Pan, Pongo) have been shown to have the latent capacity for language. Language is not innate though. If you prevent a human child from hearing language, they don't learn it. Once the threshold is crossed for learning language (ca. 6 yrs. old) a child will never be a fully competent speaker of any language.

In Korean culture smiling signals thoughtlessness or shallowness. In some cultures smiling indicates embarrassment not happiness. There are actually no cultural universals other than culture itself.

crud, my ridiculously long post is being held for approval. Until then (or not), here's probably the only coherent bit:

The issue of comparitive discrimination (overt, individual, systematic, or structural) in different fields (law and medicine vs. math and physics) is an interesting one. I would suggest that to the degree that the former are considered to have less intellectual cachet, and the latter more, it would be entirely expected that women would face more discrimination in math and physics.

A rough analogy would be with politics - one would expect to find women (at least in any quantity) moving up the pyramid, as time goes by, first in lower-status positions and then in progressively higher positions as access expanded. Indeed, as Wikipedia points out

"there were still few women in the Senate far into the 20th century, long after women began to make up a significant percentage of the membership of the House. As late as 1992, in fact, only two women (Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) were serving in the Senate."

The page points out that this began to change in 1992, but the timeline there makes this point quite graphically - you get a trickle from 1922 onwards - including a number of examples of women being appointed to fill out the term following the death/resignation of a male relative, and then, in the last 14 years, bam! (if14% counts as bam-quality material). We'd expect to have a woman president pretty much last - if we elect President Hillary Clinton in '08, that would be a lapse of 91 years after the first woman in the House, and 86 years after the first woman in the Senate. It would also be fun to watch some people's heads literally explode as a result, but that's another matter. ( I 'd guess we'll probably be waiting into the '20s, but who knows?) Similar pattern in many other fields, I think?
Also, I get the impression there's been more of a push - and for longer - for women to break into law and medicine than math and science. Is this correct?

Christopher said "Overestimation tends to lead to the feedback loop I talked about above, and it very often ends up being an excuse to ignore the social factors in success. People assume they don't need to address social factors because, hey, it won't change things anyway."
Summers said something not all that far from this several times during his speech - basically, I wish it wasn't this way, "because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true," "because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-"

He also - in the Q&A - discussed a test for discrimination: "The prediction is that if there's a discriminated-against group, that if you measure subsequent performance, their subsequent performance will be stronger than that of the non-discriminated-against group." The Wenner�s and Wold article PZ links to via old Pharyngula, showing that "a female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score as he" would seem to confirm this.

Interestingly enough, children exposed to the crude rudiments of language will generate complex linguistic systems spontaneously: creoles. We're trying to examine creoles to get a better understanding of the hypothetical "Grammar Circuit".

But we're diverging from the topic. How *do* you know that the traits leading to the trends you described are truly cultural? I can imagine explanations compatible with the available evidence either way. What if it's shown that, statistically speaking, females are more likely to wish to be helpful? Would you try to change this (the behavior if not necessarily the innate propensity)?

I know that Wikipedia cites are generally considered to be shameful, but I can't resist:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile

Belching can be considered a sign of appreciation for a meal, or a dreadful faux pas, but it is inherent. Smiling as a form of friendliness or greeting still seems to be innate, although I can imagine that highly ritualistic cultures might look poorly on spontaneous facial expressions of any kind. (I thought it was giggling that was a sign of embarassment.)

We need to distinguish between the reaction and the social traditions that have been created around the reaction.

To address the first comment, creoles do not develop when children are exposed to "the crude rudiments of language" but rather creoles are a blend of fully competent languages. English is widely believed to be a creole of a Germanic and Romance language. You're referring to pidgins which are pseudolanguages that develop when speakers of different languages develop a crude communication system usually as a result of trade interactions.

As for the second point, I would have to look at women's career choices across many different cultures that had similar opportunities for women in the education/job market. Unfortunately, most of those cultures are so closely related to ours that the data might be uninformative.

I don't think I would try to change the desire of anyone to be helpful. My argument is that the underrepresentation of women in math and physics is not the product of innate differences in cognitive abilities.

Huh. I've heard the word used in the context of what children produced from crude make-languages formed when people enslaved from different regions were thrown together.

Ah, Wikipedia claims a pigdin is such a make-language and specifies that it's not learned natively. When children learn pigdins, they create creoles. You are correct. (I stand by my characterization of pigdins as "crude rudiments of language", though. They're always far more basic than any natural language.) Creoles are also more than mere blends of two languages: they're independent languages of their own, frequently with distinct features not found in their parent tongues.

I think I would put a slightly different emphasis on your last statement: not the product of innate differences in cognitive abilities. One way or another, much of the disparity is likely to arise from women's cognition. It's not clear whether either gender has an advantage in computational power, even for specific cognitive tasks. We don't know how the specialization arises.

I did not say creoles weren't independent languages of their own. Did I not say English is a creole.

The disparity is not from women's congition but from endemic sexism.

On that note, I'm going back to finishing my lecture for tomorrow.

"Before we can productively act to change gender disparity in the sciences, we need to know what's causing it, and why the strategies that worked for other disciplines (law and medicine among them) didn't give the same result in science. [if this is actually the case -ds]"
"ut how can we tell when we've removed the social barriers unless we understand them first? And how can we understand them until we can at least detect them?
If we don't know what's going on, we can't know how to respond -- or even whether we *should* respond."

You seem to be assuming that sexism - personal or structural - is simply being assumed, and that there is no research of any quality being carried out. This is a wildly inaccurate assumption.

If you meet the Buddha in the road with a pogo stick, hit him with a hammer and hide him in a room with a scale model duplicate for a chimp to find . . .

No, I'm complaining that some people have drawn their conclusions before the evidence is in -- and more problematically, have decided which conclusions are morally acceptable before the evidence is in.

I'm sure it would be great, feeling righteous by denying wholesale a potential conclusion because its consequences would be unpleasant. I can't do that, though. Reality is not politically correct, and it's frequently unpleasant, unjust, and generally unfair (at least, by human standards).

Injustice needs to be corrected... once it's shown to exist. Not before. Trying to do so tends to create injustice.

Yeah, I've run into discrimination in physics. It's been more of the "having kids means that you are Not Serious about being a physicist."

Here's the catch: it was addressed to my advisor's other student, a guy with a wife (who brought in most of the bacon as a investment banker) and a child. Physics has gotten so cut-throat that unless you are willing to devote every single moment of your life to it you're accused of "not being serious." One reason why I finally left the field.

And there are quite a few women in theoretical physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies so I suggest Ullik shut his gob about intelligence and women.

Me, I just remember my ex-boyfriend. Brilliant physicist, total dingbat when it came to interacting with people. Intelligence lies along more than one axis.

Caledonian, I ask in all seriousness: Do you have a reading comprehension disorder?

When Mnemosyne asked you about Harvard she specifically said she didn't want to know about Radcliffe or special admittance

Meanwhile, your explanation of what Ullik's comments mean is completely nonsensical.

Mean-meanwhile, you haven't addressed any of our points about history;

Historically speaking, sexism and racism were widespread. This occured until roughly a generation ago. Given that, as I said, racist and sexist ideas tend to stay for a time after they are removed by law, why on earth would we assume that sexism has disapeered, especially given the anecdoatal evidence we've come up with about, say, hiring of women under Summer's tenor.

The fact that it seems to have dispersed faster in medicine or law is in some ways, immaterial. Let me reverse the question on you:

Can you prove that scientists aren't more sexist then people in other disciplines?

"The fact that it seems to have dispersed faster in medicine or law is in some ways, immaterial."

No, it's very material. Both the fields require brains, though not as much, and both are more subjective, meaning sexism should have a greater impact on women in those areas.

"Can you prove that scientists aren't more sexist then people in other disciplines?"

Why is the default assumption that scientists are more sexist than professors of medicine or law?

Did you notice that after Summers remarks, not a single woman, NOT ONE, came forward and claimed to have suffered sex discrimination from any of the current members of the Harvard physics and mathematics departments? You are all claiming rampant discrimination, not only can't you prove it, you can't even provide an allegation.

"Injustice needs to be corrected... once it's shown to exist. Not before."

"a female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score as he" . . .

"No, it's very material. Both the fields require brains, though not as much,"
Do you really need more brains to be a physicist than to be a lawyer?
Different brains, sure . . .

" You are all claiming rampant discrimination"
Well, I'm claiming (among other things) subtle, structural discrimination.

I'm still waiting for Ulik to demonstrate the metric by which he claims that physics requires "more brainpower" than any other field of endeavor.

"I'm still waiting for Ulik to demonstrate the metric by which he claims that physics requires "more brainpower" than any other field of endeavor."

centimeters.

"The five other women who were offended by Summers' speech also argued that their objections were based on research that indicates women do perform at the highest levels when given the same opportunities and encouragement as men.
'Here was this economist lecturing pompously [to] this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day," said Denton, the outgoing dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington."

Yes, dear . . . . yes, dear . . . yes, dear - what do you mean, what did you say? Of course I was listening! Ah . . . um . . .

You know what I find most interesting about all this? I, a commenter with an obviously female name, was the first person to make sure to cite empirical evidence of sexism in science.

Not only have Caledonian and Ulik largely ignored both my posts on the subject, but Dan S just quoted the article I mentioned (using the exact same quote as my previous post on it)... but linked when PZ quoted it in July 2005 (after PZ linked to his post on the subject much further down than me). I know my posts didn't get lost in the 200 comment shuffle because they were referred to earlier on.

The wealth of evidence for sexism -- subtle and not -- is widespread.

As for anecdotal evidence -- since I am definitely convinced neither Caledonian nor Ulik are scientists, and I am -- I can provide you with plenty. My friend, a pregnant evolutionary biology grad student, was told by her advisor, "congratulations, but you know I'm still only giving you five years of support, right? Don't let having a child get in the way of you finishing because I'm not going to help you with that."

Last year I read an article in the Chron about a pregnant woman on the job market. In an interview, the dept chair eyes bulged and he finally said, "are you really going to be a serious scholar if you are planning on having a baby?"

Through high school and college, though I had the support of some teachers, I was picked on by male colleagues for being interested in science.

A friend of mine met with her department chair a few years ago to talk about some activism taking place there around equity issues. She and her friend, another woman, were astonished when the chair said, "I don't care about you or what you are doing. You are irrelevant. Actually, you are a waste of space."

I and my other female grad colleagues in my department have been meeting over the last few weeks because we are furious with the lack of attention on our projects by our male faculty colleagues.

Clearly we women are only good for caring about people so, since my empirical evidence was ignored more than I'd like, I have provided you with what I'm sure you'd label more typically female person-to-person evidence.

there's an article in the Boston Globe this morning, although it's not really informative about things other than are already known, like Kirby and Cornel West.

" Dan S just quoted the article I mentioned (using the exact same quote as my previous post on it)"

I was thinking if it was mentioned enough, there might eventually be some response. Just grabbed the closest link - sorry. (or at least, that's why I think I did it).

Amusingly, I just read about a study in which employers were given identical resumes with one change - the name of the applicant either sounded very white or very African American (Bertrand, M. and Mullainathan, S. (2003) Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination. NBER Working Paper No. 9873). Guess what they found.

Well, not so amusingly, really.

When the findings became public, of course, numerous folks suggested that the proper response would be to stop giving black kids recognizably black names.

To quote Melville, " . . . we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending."

I hate to jump back into what has predictably degenerated into an extended troll-feeding exercise, but- One of my sisters is a developmental biologist and an assistant professor at a major research university. From the stories she's told me, I can assure one and all that anyone who thinks sexism has disappeared from academic science is utterly clueless.

Hey, my over-long from last night was finally let out of its holding cell and has joined the party, if a good bit up-thread. The shorter and more readable version has also appeared.

There, too, I completely fail to give kate any credit. : (

Yo, Ulik, Caledonian - what role do you think - we're talking common sense, feelings, hunches, in all their inexactitude and bias - sexism plays in academic science?

When Mnemosyne asked you about Harvard she specifically said she didn't want to know about Radcliffe or special admittance Your point?

Historically speaking, sexism and racism were widespread. This occured until roughly a generation ago. Given that, as I said, racist and sexist ideas tend to stay for a time after they are removed by law, why on earth would we assume that sexism has disapeered,

That's not the issue. Why hasn't sexism disappeared from science, when it seems to have been effectively removed from other highly-intellectually-demanding fields like law and medicine?

My friend, a pregnant evolutionary biology grad student, was told by her advisor, "congratulations, but you know I'm still only giving you five years of support, right? Don't let having a child get in the way of you finishing because I'm not going to help you with that."

A creepy overemphasis on total dedication to career isn't discrimination.

Through high school and college, though I had the support of some teachers, I was picked on by male colleagues for being interested in science.

In high school, so was I. If this teasing was about your gender and being interested in science, then it reveals prejudice -- on the part of your colleagues. It's the faculty and administration that are relevant here, not classmates.

A friend of mine met with her department chair a few years ago to talk about some activism taking place there around equity issues. She and her friend, another woman, were astonished when the chair said, "I don't care about you or what you are doing. You are irrelevant. Actually, you are a waste of space."

This is the only anecdote that appears to actually deal with discrimination.

Kate,

I'll be good and offer apologies for not recognizing your very relevant link. Personally, I was preoccupied with a couple of trolls who don't seem to like being here. I'm incredibly lucky that my male advisor sees my research as valuable and worthwhile, other male faculty in the department not so much.

Guess what they found.

Well, not so amusingly, really.

When the findings became public, of course, numerous folks suggested that the proper response would be to stop giving black kids recognizably black names.

That's awful.

It's also an example of societal discrimination on the part of employers. Would a study of law firms reveal similar patterns of racial bias? I suspect they would -- and yet there's little gender disparity in the lawyer population.

Since you asked, Dan S., I try not to rely on common sense. It's far too often totally nonsensical.

I will note that the anecdotes received so far favor my first hypothesis, that I posted so far above: women have to choose between career and family, even if it's only to choose which will receive the greater emphasis for a time. Possibly these fields are so competitive that men have to make such choices too, but women necessarily have more at stake.

A creepy overemphasis on total dedication to career isn't discrimination. When- as is nearly always the case- the burden falls disproportionately on women, then this statement is arrant bullshit, and merely serves to mark you as too clueless to be worth paying attention to. Which was obvious many comments earlier, of course.

Do you even know what the word 'discrimination' means?

Women who choose to have children necessarily have to shoulder a heavier burden than men for a time, no matter what social systems are set up to make things easier. That's just biology -- what, will you now attack biology for being stacked against one gender on this matter?

Demanding that everyone devote themselves totally, body and soul, to advancing in a career is just wrong on a variety of levels. Fearing that having children will impair an academic's performance is creepy and twisted. Being more afraid of female academics' performance suffering is just an inevitable consequence of messed-up priorities and the nature of childbearing.

Studies indicating that women need to do more to be perceived as equal -- they're relevant. Most of these anecdotal complaints simply aren't.

People who post things you don't like are not necessarily trolls. Trolls are people who post things only to get a response.

You know what? I give up.

Thanks to everyone who posted intelligent responses (particularly to tzs and Loris).

Thanks for humoring me Dan S and Loris :).

Dan S as for your long post, I agree with you. I also think there are several other reasons women have a harder time in academia than medicine or law.

1. The apprenticeship period is much longer in the academy. I am in my fifth year of grad school, expecting to submit this fall at 5.5 years, which is very early in my program. I'm being pushed to postdoc but would like to try for a faculty position. A friend of mine who graduated from college the same year as me and entered med school the same year is now a transplant surgeon. I'm still trying to be taken seriously as a scholar.

This has reproductive repercussions. Women are most fertile from 25-35 years old, which just happens to be during that increasingly long "apprenticeship." This ever-increasing apprenticeship is due to casualization and the corporatization of the academy. More and more kids going to college but no major expansion of profs... but plenty of TAs and adjuncts. Certain areas of science have expanded, but that's meant universities often allow profs to create giant armies of postdocs and students that they can push around, rather than share grants or create jobs for more profs (Woods Hole is a good example of a place that shares).

2. Medicine and law are professional degrees. You do a finite amount of work and you have a degree. They are corporatized like the rest of academia, but they took on one good thing from business: providing daycare. It's not great and lots of folks still struggle, but at every university I've worked at the med school has more daycare resources than the college/university.

Along with that, academic work doesn't have a defined workday. You're expected to take your work home with you. You're expected to work as much as 80 hours a week.

3. Academia is considered a liberal industry. I would rather call it pseudo liberal. To me, it's an industry where people can behave in a sexist way and not get called out for it. There are no good protections (at least at the private universities I've been at) against sexual or racial discrimination. We all assume we're good liberals and no one would ever behave poorly. This goodwill assumption has meant several of my friends have left science due to sexual harassment from male professors. I have been sexually harassed by two different profs notorious for harassment of grad students. One has tenure, one is associate and will probably get tenure. What kills me the most is that neither are good scholars and everyone knows it. But those of us who have been harassed are not in a position to do anything about it.

I once went with a friend to speak to a Dean at my school because my friend was being obviously racially discriminated against. The dean gave him a pamphlet on the grievance procedure -- the committee is faculty and students, not of ombudspeople like in a business or some public schools -- and then offered to call the racist prof. This, of course, would exacerbate the problem. The power dynamics suck. In fact, in another discrimination case this same dean went behind the back of a student to speak with the prof to find out "his side of the story," which then destroyed the student's anonymity.

Why is it people will fight to kick out anarchists like David Graeber from Yale (I can't find a link but you can do a google search, it was big news all last year), but not fight to kick out sexual predators that make women leave grad school?

Could someone please explain to Caledonian that men are also involved in making babies, and moreover are perfectly capable of taking care of them after they're born? I really don't have the patience...

Is discrimination worse in physics than other areas? Here is a story about the Duke Univeristy Physics department, and here is a the transcript of a colloquium which suggests Duke is not unique.

Sorry about that, here's the first link again

Thanks for the links hydropsyche. Just confirms what I've seen in other science departments... and makes me sick to my stomach.

"and makes me sick to my stomach."
Agreed. And excellent points above . . .

""The root of the issue," says Linda B. McGown, a professor of chemistry who served on the committee, "is a deeply ingrained reluctance to accept women as equals in the scientific community, giving women the impression that they don't belong in physics."

The bit about guys in physics not always having the best social skills can't help . .

"Do you even know what the word 'discrimination' means?"
Do you? Discrimination, etc., can be subtly woven into the social fabric, as other posters are pointing out.
"Women who choose to have children necessarily have to shoulder a heavier burden than men for a time, no matter what social systems are set up to make things easier. That's just biology --"
Let's grant that - they don't, technically, with enough resources of one kind or another, but let's go with that, since it gets so much more complicated. The point is, the social system hasn't been set up to make things easier, except in very small (and in some cases, recent) ways. It's still in many ways still stuck in a situation where people will either be unmarried or provided with free childcare/housework/dissertation typing via marriage. Obviously not totally - things have changed for the better - but we obviously still have a long way to go. That fixing this would involve changing cultural and professional norms - from the colloquy: " In many departments, it is acknowledged that having children is a normal part of life and necessary accommodations are made. Other departments may be less sympathetic and consider time off for childbirth a sign of weakness" - and arguably at some point hit biological roadblocks - so?

Caledonian, - re racial name-based discrimination:
"That's awful."
Agreed.
"It's also an example of societal discrimination on the part of employers. Would a study of law firms reveal similar patterns of racial bias? I suspect they would -- and yet there's little gender disparity in the lawyer population."
Huh? Is this a typo or am I jut missing an obvious point?

"Since you asked, Dan S., I try not to rely on common sense. It's far too often totally nonsensical."
Very, very true. But what do you think? Unless you have astonishing mental discipline, you must have some feelings about the role sexism plays in academic science, no?

.

From the colloquy linked above - someone brings up how France and Germany have wildly different % of women in science - one explanation given is that France has had boys and girls take math well into high school - and I don't think they mean intro to algebra . . .

Something that came up both in the Summers' speech Q&A and the Chronicle article (hydropsyche's first link) - a high % of students/faculty in this area are from other countries - indeed, it was framed in the Q&A explicitly as a - look, fewer ad fewer Americans - men and women - want this 80hr model (although that's of course quite an oversimplification)

the latest from Larry.

Since you were interested enough to ask the questions, I should respond in kind.

My first attempt seems to be refused for some mysterious reason, so I'll have to reproduce it as well as I can.

Let's remember that there's a difference between stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Discrimination requires that an action be taken against an individual. Most of the anecdotal evidence deals with stereotyping.

I don't disagree with your statement that programs can try to be accomodating, but taking care of the child isn't the only issue. Childbearing is a massive physiological and psychological drain, or so I'm given to understand, until TechnoWombs are perfected there's really no alterative. Programs could bend over backwards to be accomodating, but sufficiently cutthroat disciplines would still favor the people who aren't going to be having children. The resources necessary to have all childcare taken care of are simply beyond the reach of most people.

What do I think? I don't know what to think.

My own experiences of undergrad and graduate programs in psychology are that they were dominated by young women. Granted, most of them were really following the Liberal Art, not Cognitive Science, but they predominated in both programs. I only experienced undergrad physics, and only in my first four semesters, but there were many women in those relatively basic classes. I can't say much about the later classes or the graduate programs, except that I think they were dominated by men.

The best reseachers in the psychology department were women, too.

Look who I found at Harvard

"Lisa Randall studies particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University, where she is Professor of Theoretical Physics. Her research concerns the fundamental nature of particles and forces and the relationships among matters most basic elements. Prof. Randall has worked on a wide variety of models and theories, the most recent of which involve extra dimensions of space. She has also worked on supersymmetry, Standard Model observables, cosmological inflation, baryogenesis, grand unified theories, and aspects of string theory. She has made seminal contributions in all these areas and as of last autumn, was the most cited theoretical physicist of the past five years."

Well, well.... the world's top physicist (in terms of cites) is a woman.

And on that note, Ulik, blow me.

"Let's remember that there's a difference between stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Discrimination requires that an action be taken against an individual"

Yes, but . . . it gets a bit complex here. I'm going to quote a big chunk from a certain Fred Pincus (2000) Readings for Diversity and Social Justice. Maurianne Adams, etc., (eds.) -know nothing of him, just first source I found online covering this - the [group]s are replacing "race/ethnic/gender" etc. - . Sorry for big quote - horrible at summarizing .

three different levels of discrimination: individual, institutional, and structural . . .. structural discrimination refers to the policies of dominant institutions and the behavior of the individuals who implement these policies and control these institutions, which are [group] neutral in intent but which have a differential and/or harmful effect on minority groups. . . . Structural discrimination is a more controversial but also a more fascinating concept to discuss because it involves behavior that is race and gender neutral in intent. In fact, the issue of intent is the main distinction between institutional and structural discrimination. Many scholars would not even call this race/gender neutral behavior discrimination. However, I think it is important to emphasize the negative effects on minority groups.... Consider the lending practices of banks, for example. There is voluminous evidence that Blacks and Hispanics are less likely than Whites to get loans or home mortgages. There are several explanations for this finding, some of which suggest intentional institutional discrimination . . . . However, even if banks act in a race-neutral manner toward each customer by only considering their "creditworthiness," Blacks and Hispanics would still be less likely than Whites to get loans because of their lower incomes*; that is, their creditworthiness is not as strong as it is for Whites. I call this legal lending policy structural discrimination because it has a negative impact on low-income minority groups.... If one is trying to decide how to combat institutional discrimination, it is necessary to convince the leaders or policy-makers of the particular institution that it is wrong (immoral, illegal) to purposely treat minority groups in negative ways . . .These arguments, however, are irrelevant to eliminating structural discrimination. For the banks, it is necessary to make the argument that equality is as important as profits or that there should be a better balance between the two. . . Confronting structural discrimination requires the reexamination of basic cultural values and fundamental principles of social organization.

* It's really a lot more complex - it's been argued that along with an income gap, the history of racism/discrimination has created a still-present wealth gap - for example, when post WWII policies promoted/subsidized widespread home ownership among whites, while blacks were shut out due to restrictive covenants, redlining, etc. On one hand you get a pretty significant - and inheritable asset - yay, home equity - on the other hand, you have income going down the rental drain . . . (simple, simple version)

Pretty much everyone agrees - including Summers and Caledonian that part of the issue involves widespread and pervasive structural discrimination - whatever they might call it - and, many would agree, some degree of individual and institutional discrimination - with the latter two occuring at various sites - ie, high school, grad school, pop culture, etc. I think it is important to frame it this way because it emphasizes that it isn't just society trying to deal - even bending over backwards to do so - with a natural state: it is, up to a point, a cultural/social arrangement (one which of course is both shaped/constrained by biology, like everything else we do).

Graculus: I thought sexism prevented women from becoming physicists at Harvard? She's proof that a woman who is smart enough she can be a physicist at Harvard, and therefore the lack of women is not from sexism, it's because, like we've been saying all along, of greater variability in (both ends of) the male intelligence curve, male geniuses outnumber female ones.

Ulik, produce your metric or blow me.

Dude, who stole my grammar?

I would be very interested to look at the pattern of African-American representation in the fields we've been talking about (medicine&law, the soft and less-hard sciences, math and physics).

Hey, whadaya know (pdf):

With each step in an academic career, from highschool graduation to promotion to full professor, there are progressive decreases in the representation of African Americans . . . most fields show only minuscule improvements in their sparse representation among graduate degree recipients . . .. In the sciences and engineering, black scholars comprised only 2.4% of the faculty in four-year institutions in 1995, just under 2% of those with tenure, and only 1.3% of the full professors . . . .
[there are] shifts in the types of advanced degrees sought by black students, with more of them gravitating to relatively lucrative business, health, law, and engineering professions and away from the sciences and education. Black students earning doctorates remain heavily concentrated in just a few fields, especially education, psychology, certain social sciences, and biology . . . Between 1985 and 1995 African Americans' proportional representation in the entire pool of [doctoral recipients in the sciences and engineering] recipients barely budged, from 2.7% in 1985, to 2.4% in 1990, and 2.9% in 1995 . . .Even in the early and mid-1990s, fewer than a dozen black PhDs graduated annually in the fields of physics/astronomy, geoscience, mathematics, and most branches of engineering. Of the 2,092 PhDs awarded in computer science throughout the 1980s, African Americans earned only 14, less than onepercent . . . black faculty appointments are closely linked to black representation among doctoral recipients in the same field or subfield . . .
After further controlling for other labor market factors, the health sciences emerge as fields that have much higher odds of employing black doctoral recipients in faculty positions, whereas agriculture [!], engineering, and math/ computer science have especially low odds.

The 60% of African-American doctoral recipients who are women might be used to it, but it must surely suck for all the men who are giving birth, etc. Right? Surely that's it?

(Actually, they point out that "[t]he health sciences may be unusual because they are centered in medical school environments that have been at the vortex of legal and social controversies over affirmative action," which may have both increased awareness of (and opposition to) discrimination while diversifying the student body and transforming med school culture, etc. They also suggest that the underepresented fields have such low numbers of African-Americans that they might be unable to escape isolation and tokenism).

Kulis, S., Shaw, H. & Chong, Y. (2000). External Labor Markets and the Distribution of Black Scientists and Engineers in Academia. The Journal of Higher Education, 71: 187-222.

Back to women: from the American Institute of Physics site, the highlights of Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2005.:

Examination of the academic �pipeline� reveals that women disproportionately leave physics between taking it in high school and earning a bachelor�s degree. While almost half of high school physics students are girls, less that one-fourth of bachelor�s degrees in physics are earned by women. After this initial �leak� in the pipeline, women are represented at about the levels we would expect based on degree production in the past. There appears to be no leak in the pipeline at the faculty level in either physics or astronomy

Also, the associated FAQ pointed out that

Among the top 20 departments (using NRC rankings), 6% of the full professors are women, 11% of the associate professors are women, and 12% of the assistant professors are women. hese percentages are also consistent with degree production in the past, meaning that women are represented on the top 20 faculties at about the levels we would expect.

. For me, this throws that variability argument in doubt - ie, would the relatively small effects be showing up during the undergraduate years.

Research by Shauman and Xie support the family/pressure hypothesis, and especially kate's apprenticeship angle, adding

We, as a society, are wasting a huge amount of potential because of the way the science career is structured," says Shauman. "Short-term slowdowns [such as maternal leave] can have a very significant negative effect on a career overall."
The response shouldn't be taken to say that women shouldn't have kids, or that it's their choice and there's nothing we can do about it, she says. "There needs to be an institutional recognition that having kids is normal and it should be supported�or we're going to lose this human capital."

"she's proof that a woman who is smart enough she can be a physicist at Harvard, and therefore the lack of women is not from sexism,"

Hmm. Well, as Summers pointed out, one good test of whether discrimination is happening to a group is whether subsequent performance is better than non-group members. As I understand this (and I may have it wrong), the fact that a woman who "has made seminal contributions in [multiple areas] and as of last autumn, was the most cited theoretical physicist of the past five years" manages to be a physicist at Harvard could be seen as a suggestive example.

When my most recent post gets out of the moderation box - either length or links tripped the spam filter - you'll find a link to a study arguing that the main leak in the pipeline is between "women taking [physics] in high school and and earning a bachelor's degree," with faculty being represented at expected levels based on past degree production. If this is the case, the 'gods and morons' variability argument seems to not make any sense - unless you need to be a genius to get a bachelor's degree in physics. Granted, it seems that way to me, but . . .

Look, individual and institutional discrimination certainly plays a part in this issue, along with structural discrimination based on biology (the family thing). The kind of differences you (and Summers, but not as badly) are going on about are - to the degree they matter/are meaningful - almost certainly being swamped by everything else - at best interacting with it . . .

Cracklus: There's no shortage of peer reviewed research that's been done on IQ. Look it up yourself. No one else is resorting to vulgar insult here your incivility is not appreciated.

Dan S: "The kind of differences you (and Summers, but not as badly) are going on about are - to the degree they matter/are meaningful - almost certainly being swamped by everything else"

No, given that we are speaking of a subset of the smartest of the world's population, and the non-subjective nature of the endeavour in question, the innate differences matter greatly.

"No, given that we are speaking of a subset of the smartest of the world's population, and the non-subjective nature of the endeavour in question, the innate differences matter greatly"
But if once women go ahead and get a bachelor's degree in physics, they end up on the faculty "at expected levels based on past degree production" - no mass pipeline leakage there - again, are you saying that these innate differences matter at the level of undergraduate education?

Hmm

In an undisclosed Northeastern city, she created 300 [almost identical] pairs of cover letters and resumes to apply for advertised midlevel marketing positions. One "applicant" said in her cover letter she was relocating with her family. The resume mentioned the parent-teacher board position. The other cover letter said the "applicant" was relocating but made no mention of a family.

Early results of this study show the applicant who did not mention a family was called in for an interview twice as frequently as the mother.

However, even if banks act in a race-neutral manner toward each customer by only considering their "creditworthiness," Blacks and Hispanics would still be less likely than Whites to get loans because of their lower incomes*; that is, their creditworthiness is not as strong as it is for Whites. I call this legal lending policy structural discrimination because it has a negative impact on low-income minority groups....

(By the way, how do you create the quotes in their own little sidebar thing?)

This 'discrimination' is distinguishing between individuals who have very relevant differences. Why in the world would we want to stop that? That's the *correct* form of discrimination. The wrong kind is distinguishing between individuals by referring to irrelevant differences -- like saying that a person with blue eyes isn't cut out to be a physicist or that a Sikh can't drive a bus because he might run over an animal.

The Economist weighs in on what happened to Summers.

i agree with 'em.

a semi-official summary of the endgame of Professor Larry Summers' presidency at Harvard is available. there is coverage of Dean Kirby's resignation, and detailed coverage of the faculty meeting of 7th February.

Lucy Kellaway at FT.com has an amusing if quirky take on the destiny of Summers and university heads.

I am late to join this thread, but... It is interesting that few women reach the top in hard sciences, but quite a lot in social sciences. Why is it that? Surely the social factors like having children, male chauvinism and all that work the same for female physicists and female sociologists? I think that the cultural image of math being the "male thing" could be responsible. Is it all one could say about it?

In this thread, an analogy has been made between the differences between sexes and differences between races. This is a weak analogy. Racial differences are very superficial -- it's just a color of skin, maybe propensities for some diseases (like the propensity of Ashkenazi Jews for the Creutzfeld-Jacobs disease). On the other hand, male and female organisms *are* different. I don't think a knee-jerk reaction "but they are equal!" is the best response here.