Harvard's President says men have a natural advantage in math and science

Great Debates
21

It needs to be remembered that speaking of gender differences in this manner is painting with VERY broad strokes.

I wish I could better recall a talk I attended by a doctor from the University of Chicago who was studying the differences between male and female brains. Turns out there are differences…humans are not all the same brain stuffed into a male or female body. She (the doctor) would study people with brain damage and compare what effects it had. So, a man and a woman both had the same physical part of the brain destroyed and would exhibit distinct differences in the effects that had. In short we are actually wired differently and this different wiring does result in men and women, broadly speaking, showing different aptitudes for different things. For instance, while men may be better at math women tend to be better with language.

She gave the audience a series of simple tests to illustrate that men would do better at some tasks and women do better at others. Interestingly she said that her students at University of Chicago seemed androgynous. The women and men at that school both tended to perform equal to each other in all aspects on these tests. Given the caliber of students at that school this may not be surprising but it also shows that none of this is hard and fast “women suck at task-X”.

It really was fascinating…I’ll have to dig through some boxes and see if I can find the details on who she was and more of her studies.

22

But this is at a basic level, no? The point of my hypothetical was that there are conditions for “mastery” or genius level mathematics that men are more likely to meet: not because they are smarter, but because they are more likely to behave in a certain way that happens to be beneficial in those fields.

There is no power to this conclusion. Since the measurements take place over time, presumably in an environment of increasing difficulty, the explanation could just as easily be that the simpler concepts of math are easy for anyone to grasp, but as the concepts get harder and harder, we start to see a wider variation of aptitude.

23

Yeah, what have women done? Aside from some French broad inventing kryptonite or something…

24

You aren’t thinking of that French broad whop discovered radium and polonium, are you? The only person (male or female) who has won a Nobel prize in both physics and chemistry? Yes, just your typical woman scientist, wasn’t she?

25

I think Bryan was being facetious.

Be careful, there have been a few multiple Nobel winners, just only one (that I know of) with chemistry and physics. Here is some text from an email I sent my boss, who came back from Poland claiming that Curie and her daughter were the only parent-child winners. Basically my point is not to use prizes as a measure of ability. Especially for male-female inequality, because a bias on the part of those awarding prizes plays a huge part.

I feel the statements on nature vs society given here shed more light on their authors than the topic. The fact is, there aren’t enough facts either way - which is why it should be studied. At one time, at least, it was standard procedure to toss away questions for which one gender performed better than another. So, standardized test scores should eventually show no difference. Me, I’d study the questions that had statistically significant differences, especially in math.

FYI, American physicists spent a good deal of time in the 90’s analyzing why so few women choose a career in physics. Surveys are pretty much useless, because most men don’t take up physics, either, and give many of the same reasons. E.g., I left the field when it became apparent that I couldn’t raise my family as a prof wannabe.

One finding that has not been brought up here is that the mathematics and theoretical physics tends to be learned in a confrontational manner - arguing with other graduate students, etc., and that women were more likely to be discouraged. Of course, that style probably derives from earlier days, when women weren’t supposed to do these things.

26

But there are differences and they are being studied.

  • Women have a larger Corpus Collosum than men do which should allow them to transfer information between the left and right hemispheres more quickly than men.

  • Women use both left and right hemispheres in communication. Men generally use just the left side (or at the least nowhere near as much of the brain as women do for language).

  • Men have more brain cells.

  • Women have more dendritic connections.

  • The cortex in females is symmetrical (or near enough) and the male’s is asymmetrical (at least parts are).

There may well be other differences but clearly the male and female brains differ in structure and how various abilities are mapped (IIRC PET scans have shown differeing regions in men and women being active when performing a given task).

All of that said it is hard to draw distinct conclusions of what it all means in the end. For instance men may be said to generally be as good as women in language and the differences, if they exist, are too small to make a judgement one way or another. Then again if a brain injury occurs in an area affecting language women are more able to recover (or adapt) than men are as regard maintaining language skills. Except in the broadest generalities each person’s brain is unique and any given individual may buck the trends. Society and “nurture” can certainly have a large effect as individuals are steered, intentionally or not, away from some things and into others regardless of actual ability.

27

I thought that this response from Stephen Pinker was the best yet on the controversy:
http://www.thecrimson.com/today/article505366.html

One thing I didn’t know was that we don’t just find differences between men and women, but differences that rank according to levels of sex horomone. Now THAT is intriguing.

28

You’re right, that seemed very well reasoned and said what I am trying to say. The fact that they hypothesis meets with such emotional resistence is distressing.

Whack-a-Mole, your facts are irrelevant to the topic at hand. For example, women might have “more dendritic connections” (on average). More likely, they might have more per cell, but that is different. Men have more brain cells (on average), but men are also larger (on average). A bigger beast requires a larger brain to accomplish the same tasks. Neither “fact” is obviously nor directly related to mathematics performance, and more facts are needed to determine if abilities are in fact, different. (IIRC, even the Corpus Collosum fact is not without controversy, different results with different stains.)

I would hold there are all sorts of subtelities. I suspect, but do not know, that in any given measure of linguistic ability average for females may exceed the average for males, but the variance for men may exceed that of women, thus the reason that there have been plenty of great male and female writers over time.

29

I can’t help but laughing since from the first article it seems pretty clear that Summers put his foot in his mouth and that he knows he put his foot in his mouth,

In that context, why is he bringing up this sort of debatable idea that women aren’t succeeding in his department because science tells us that there is a chance that is not proven that they just aren’t equipped to do as well in his department?

And then Stephen Pinker who also misses the point, says that it’s Nancy Hopkins who is misunderstanding?

I would submit that we all understand the hypothesis, we just don’t think it is a very good excuse. The whole reason it’s a sensitive issue is that for quite a while, it was common knowledge that women were innately good at sciencing up some coffee and that’s about it. It’s called context.

There’s criticism of a hypothesis, and there’s criticism of some oaf who should really ask people if it’s okay for him to talk before he says the wrong thing at the wrong time. He’s not creating new antidepressants that take the “gendered brain” into account for the benefit of all, he’s in education!

Since there’s no transcript, it’s stupid to really argue about, but it’s also stupid to call a woman “hysterical” for her reaction to comments when you don’t even know what exactly was said. He paraphrases himself in the article, and he certainly sounds less than smooth.

Steven Pinker seems to be another annoying person playing devil’s advocate for no reason.

That’s crazy too. If his mom has a relatively large ass, and I say so at dinner with Steven Pinker, I bet he changes his mind on that one.

I’m not going to make a joke about social context being too sublte and difficult for the economist and science writer’s brains to grasp because I don’t believe in biological determinism but holy shit, what a couple of dolts.

It’s a provocative topic. Who knows if the reaction was overly “emotional” or reasonable?

30

I disagree.

Clearly there are structural differences between male and female brains. Some abilities are also mapped differently in male and female brains. As mentioned PET scans show women activating both the right and left hemispheres when using language where men predominantly just use the left hemisphere.

Why then would one assume that given structural and processing differences the end result should be identical for men and women? Why wouldn’t some of these differences translate into a greater aptitude for this or that task?

The answer to that is not just academic and need not be seen as an attempt to find a factual basis for discrimination. A lot of this research can (hopefully) be applied to mental disorders. For instance women attempt suicide far more than men do (although men are more “successful” in committing suicide than women). Making men and women the same in their heads and approaching these issues does a disservice to everyone. Perhaps better teaching methods may be found that take into account differences in how men and women process information and lessons could be tailored to better suit the given sexes.

Breaking out teaching or approaches to mental disorders into male and female approaches may be considered still too broad as individuals can vary so widely (homosexual men’s brains seem more in line with female brains on PET scans in many ways for example) but I would still see it as an improvement over a one size fits all, male and female brains are the same, approach.

31

I wholeheartedly agree with Steven Pinker here. And the comparison to Pinker’s mom’s ass at dinner to a consideration of innate differences? Sorry, I don’t get the point. Don’t you understand a difference between talking to what are supposed to be academics in an academic environment and a gratuitous statement about someone’s big ass while eating dinner?

32

I understnad the difference between being offended by a fact (or a hypothesis) at dinner, and at an academic conference. What many people in this thread don’t seem to understand is that just because it’s not okay to be offended by a fact, doesn’t mean that Summers is well informed of the facts, or presenting them in a context that makes sense. It’s logic. The fact that he said something that might have some basis in truth and that someone was offended does not equal people have a hysterical reaction to the truth.

33

As academics, being “offended” by evidence, whereever it may lead, isn’t a part of their job description. As academics, it’s their job to discover the places the evidence leads — not throw their personal bias into the mix and move it elsewhere because they’re “offended.” And if Pinker’s mother’s big ass was a point of academic inquiry in that academic setting – I doubt he would disagree.

Now if you want to talk politics, if you want to talk about political correctness stifling academic freedom – well that’s an entirely other matter.

34

I understand what you’re saying, Tigers2B1, but you’re reading things into the article. It doesn’t say what he said, it only says what he *thinks * he said. He didn’t necessarily present any evidence at all. He made some remarks and his remarks were offensive. Who knows what he said? Just because you’re at an academic conference doesn’t mean you can’t say something very stupid. I’m not going to assume he did, but I’m not going to assume he didn’t. There’s just no way to say his remarks were reasonable and sound.

It would be nice if you could read that and assume he made some unbiased comments involving some established facts about biology, but you just don’t know. If you read the article carefully, you will see that it doesn’t tell you exactly what happened very specifically. It looks as if the morning was devoted to the topic, and maybe he was snoozing for that part, because when it was his turn to talk, he made remarks that were seen as simplistic and dismissive of the previous discussion. That’s different from if everyone spent the morning scratching their heads about the topic and then he jumped up and said, “well you know here’s one idea nobody’s mentioned!” That’s not what happened at all. If you try to read the article with an open mind, and forget about the scenario you are imagining, you might see that the article is not very good, and that the ideas you are getting from it about a politically correct over-reaction are not substantiated in the article in any way.

35

Looks like Summers has yet again been beaten into submission before the mob of political correctness:
http://reuters.myway.com/article/20050120/2005-01-20T161255Z_01_N20197396_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-LIFE-HARVARD-DC.html

36

What do you mean? You don’t believe he really sympathizes with females who feel they face barriers to success in their field of economics and that he’s just lying to keep his job?

Why would you leap to such huge conclusions? Where are you getting that from? Do you know him? Do you think he gave his daughters trucks because the PC police beat him into submission too?

37

Are you kidding? This is Harvard. They employed freakin’ Carol Gilligan and Cornel West (well, until West got all huffy about being asked to, like, maybe, teach a class once and awhile). Many of these professors build their careers out of being deeply offended at this or that. It’s clear from Summers discussing why he’s recanted three times that the sorts of emails he was getting were attacking him for saying things like women aren’t as good as men, tearful stories of discrimination that he was supposedly denying: in other words, totally hysterical misreads of things he never said. I would be VERY suprised if there hadn’t been a chain email going around demanding that people write in their outrage to him. That’s SOP for the PC outrage machine at Harvard. if you know anything about the intellectual culture of Harvard, this whole thing sounds very familiar.

4 out of 5 proffessors quoted said that they were not offended. His quoted remarks don’t sound offensive to me. And the statements by the prof who claimed offense really DO sound hysterical and silly. At worst, Summers’ speech wasn’t very interesting. But offensive? Prove it.

38

See my below post. Of course he symapathizes with these barriers. But he’s being browbeaten into weepy comiseration on this issue because people are throwing stories of horrible discrimination and probably even sexual abuse at his feet and demanding that he account for it. How would you respond if that happened to you? He knows he’s beaten. He made teh mistake of stepping on the orthodoxy’s feet, and now he must bow down and pay the price or else be labeled a sexist bigot who cares nothing for the abuse of women. That’s how it works.

39

Sadly, I wish I could say I’m surprised at the result – I’m not. You could see that one coming five miles down the road paved with these ‘offended’ intentions -

Guess it’s best apologize before this ad hoc ‘academic inquisition’ now - or be burned at the metaphorical stake later. Shit - he might have just saved his job -

40

You’re missing my point. The point is, you can’t prove either way what happened. There is no sense getting upset or feeling that it is a battle between a poor beaten down man versus a bunch of harpies if you don’t know. Is Carol Gilligan even alive anymore? It’s 2005 now.

You are also misreading it a bit. It says 5 other people said they were offended, and 4 others were not. Also, he is not quoted, he paraphrases himself. So it is more like he said something and offended some people but he didn’t mean it. That’s fair enough, but I would blame CNN for putting out this stupid article about it then.

I had to read it more than once to see how stupid this article is. It says that he said something, but won’t say what. It says people were offended, but he didn’t mean it to be offensive. Wow big news flash!

My opinion is that this the type of man bites dog story that makes people say gosh what’s this world coming to over nothing. Like I say, it’s not 1984. We live in a different world now, you have to be sensitive. Nobody is beating the scientific spirit out of anyone. He’s an economist. If he takes a layman’s knowledge of biological differences and tries to tell MIT biologist what’s what, yeah they will think he’s an offensive ass. I don’t think it’s a red flag that we are all living in a Philip Roth novel.

It is good and healthy to take some skepticism about these things and not let yourself be manipulated. If a news story makes you react emotionally, maybe read it two or three times and make sure it says what you think it says.