The Moron in Charge of Harvard

[Weirddave]

@Angua

I’m arguing from my own experience. My own experience of going into schools, of teaching. I’m arguing from what others have seen. Fuck, I’m arguing from the experience of my female peers, who were good scientists, but who were put off going into scientific careers. I make no claims whatsoever about being an expert in this field. What I will claim to be, is someone who has experienced the societal pressures that put girls off doing science, and someone who is seeing those same societal pressures at play today, still putting girls off science.

I am not claiming to be an expert in this field, far from it. I am however, claiming that I have seen far too many good female scientists scared off the profession, and that that needs to be remedied.

This is what’s know as “anecdotal evidence”, and for the purpose if proving something one way or the other it is, in fact, worthless.

The question I really have is why is it that some people see “different” as “inferior”? Angua was the one who started claiming that the president of Harvard was somehow implying that women were "inferior’, when in fact, he was doing no such thing, or even anything close to that. Angua, why is it that you see different as inferior? AFAICT, that’s 100% your inference to a neutral statement-“There seem to be difference between Men and Women in math and science achievement. We should try and determine if it’s cultural, genetic or sexist”

[Krinthis]

While I agree that his comments about his daughter were out of place, what Summers was really responding to was the following (from the NYT):

In citing a second factor, Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes.

He is arguing that perhaps there is a larger spread in ability in mathematics in boys than in girls. We see the high end of this spread in the fact that there are more male tenured professors, but we cannot see the low end because there is no occupation which actively selects for poor mathematics ability. Certainly this is not arguing an “innate superiority”, but rather just innate differences.

Furthermore, Summers also spent a great deal of time arguing from an economics perspective, which, I believe, is why he was asked to attend. His argument essentially was this: Suppose male and female professors truly are of the same quality and in the same abundance. Then, by hiring in a discriminatory fashion, Harvard must necessarily be hiring inferior professors. One would guess then that there is at least one instutition out there that is not preferentially hiring males. Shouldn’t they receive a great benefit, then, from being able to hire top quality female professors whom Harvard refuses to hire because of sexism? Instead, it seems that Harvard has remained competitive with other top schools in the country, which suggests that either all these schools have similarly discriminatory policies or that the supposition is incorrect.

[jackelope]

Angua, please relax; this Harvard guy is ON YOUR SIDE.

As near as I can tell from the scant information available, he’s saying, “There are disproportionately few women in science-related fields.”

Which is what you’re saying.

He’s saying, “We need to figure out if this is due to nature or nurture.”

Which is what you’re saying.

He’s saying, “We do not know; there may be innate differences between the genders that are leading to the gender disparity in the sciences.”

Which is a necessary thing to say if one intends to approach this topic with intellectual honesty. We don’t know, and that’s a fact.

This obviously touches on a sensitive nerve for you; but no one, either at Harvard or here on the SDMB, is saying “Women are inferior.” The point is that there are undeniably fewer women than men in science-related fields, and if we want to go about changing that, which we apparently do, then we must first figure out what is causing it.

You know better than I do that bad science begins with conclusions and then figures out how to back them up with evidence.

[Angua]

@Weirdave

This is what’s know as “anecdotal evidence”, and for the purpose if proving something one way or the other it is, in fact, worthless.

So what about when lots of people say the same thing, and its put into a report?

Angua, why is it that you see different as inferior?

I don’t, different can be good. However, I think the reason I said what I did was because in my experience when people start making references to “innate differences”, they’re doing it to imply some sort of unsuitability. I should not have made that inference, and I apologise for that.

Jackelope, I see that now. I do realise that he is trying to help, and I should not have been so knee jerk-ish about it. I’ve had a lifetime of people telling me I shouldn’t be in science because I’m a girl, and asking me what a girl’s doing in science. When I studied A-level physics at school, no one assumed that it was because I enjoyed the subject, and was good at it, but rather, they all assumed that I was doing it because I fancied the A-level teacher. I guess years of other scientists patronising you because you are female makes me take offence where none should have been taken.

[Angua]

I will add that there is a report here (its a Powerpoint presentation, with accompanying notes in Word), by a specialist in the education and gender field on the barriers that women in physics face.

The main conclusion of this study was:

These young women didn’t come to research careers with a blank sheet, they have already undergone the socialisation of being in a minority and have jumped many hurdles on their way with each hurdle demanding yet greater effort. Established staff can help or hinder the effects of this socialisation according to their own awareness and willingness to go beyond the status quo. Leadership from senior management is essential if cultures are to change and the research lab become a place where young women feel comfortable and wish to remain to develop successful careers.

[Kimstu]

Epimetheus: *Now correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t this topic be IN this guys field of expertise? *

Since you asked, yes, you’re wrong. Just because Prof. Summers’ field of expertise, which happens to be macroeconomics (particularly, IIRC, tax policy), falls in the broad disciplinary category of “social science” doesn’t mean that it’s significantly related to the subject of women in science and engineering.

Hell, I happen to be a historian (specializing in the history of the exact sciences in medieval India and Islam), and history is also generally considered one of the social sciences. Does that mean that the subject of women in science and engineering is automatically in my field of expertise too? My academic specialty is about as closely related to it as Prof. Summers’ is.

AD: [Summers] never said that his example was proof, just an anecdote that leads him to believe that the subject needs to be researched more thoroughly.

I know. I never said that he said it was proof. However, I don’t think respected scholars ought to be basing their personal conclusions about which subjects need to be researched more thoroughly on anecdotes about their toddlers, for Chrissakes. And if they do base their conclusions on such blatantly unscientific grounds, they ought to have the sense to keep their mouths shut about it when speaking to a roomful of other respected scholars.

[Dead_Badger]

@Kimstu

Since you asked, yes, you’re wrong. Just because Prof. Summers’ field of expertise, which happens to be macroeconomics (particularly, IIRC, tax policy), falls in the broad disciplinary category of “social science” doesn’t mean that it’s significantly related to the subject of women in science and engineering.

This is quite right, however it appears to be the case that he was invited specifically because he is not actively involved in the area of gender research. Getting outsiders to come and challenge your built-in assumptions is a great way of ensuring that you don’t get stuck in a particular mindset - I love (and hate) explaining my research to laymen because it forces me to justify several things from first principles which I would otherwise fall in to accepting as gospel. That seems to have been the very purpose of this conference and the selection of panellists. Sometimes, there really aren’t stupid questions or suggestions.

I know. I never said that he said it was proof. However, I don’t think respected scholars ought to be basing their personal conclusions about which subjects need to be researched more thoroughly on anecdotes about their toddlers, for Chrissakes. And if they do base their conclusions on such blatantly unscientific grounds, they ought to have the sense to keep their mouths shut about it when speaking to a roomful of other respected scholars.

Again, he didn’t present it as a conclusion, he asked “what about this?”, and illustrated his broader point with an anecdote. The anecdote seems ill-chosen and can no doubt very easily be rebutted as showing any sort of innate tendencies in girls. However, the idea that he should keep his thoughts to himself since he’s not an expert is antithetical to the scientific process in general and (apparently) the purpose of this conference in particular. It’s only if he starts asserting his thoughts as fact that it becomes a problem.

[Shalmanese]

It’s disheartening but I guess not surprising that even some otherwise intelligent members of the board can fail to keep an open mind about such an issue. If what was being said by the Harvard Professor was shocking, then modern evolutionary biology is going to get your dander up.

For certain schools of thought (and, AFAIK, the dominant one at the moment), theres no may, sex lies at the very core of our social structures. The very fact that women give birth is intrinsicly tied to almost every social practise we currently engage in, even ones that were traditionally thought by anthropologists to be purely cultural.

Simply put, women have only a few eggs and requires a vast amount of time and resources to care for each child. Men have huge amounts of sperm and can afford to throw it around rather wastefully. This difference has forced vastly different evolutionary strategies on the two sexes which has shaped how we develop mentally.

I think that they might have overstated their case just a tad but their arguments do seem compelling even if they are largely untested. At least you should be aware of it because it radically alters your way of thinking about the world.

The seminal text would probably be Sociobiology:The New Synthesis by EO Wilson. Matt Ridley is also eminently readable and Pinker is a good choice if your into linguistics.

[Kimstu]

DB: * That seems to have been the very purpose of this conference and the selection of panellists. *

You may well be right, but where are you getting this information about the motives for structuring the conference this way? It still seems to me like a rather out-of-left-field issue on which to convene a bunch of economists.

DB: The anecdote seems ill-chosen and can no doubt very easily be rebutted as showing any sort of innate tendencies in girls. However, the idea that he should keep his thoughts to himself since he’s not an expert is antithetical to the scientific process in general and (apparently) the purpose of this conference in particular.

I certainly don’t think that an invited outsider has to keep all his thoughts to himself, and in fact I said at the beginning of my first post to this thread that I supported the idea of doing research on gender differences to understand whether and to what extent they’re due to biological vs. cultural factors. I have no objection to Prof. Summers’ advocating the same thing.

However, I stand by my assertion that illustrating an argument for the scientific merits of a particular issue with an anecdote about the behavior of your toddler—especially an anecdote that, as you note, can be very easily rebutted as being scientifically irrelevant—just makes you sound like an idiot. Prof. Summers should have known better.

Shalmanese: Simply put, women have only a few eggs and requires a vast amount of time and resources to care for each child. Men have huge amounts of sperm and can afford to throw it around rather wastefully. This difference has forced vastly different evolutionary strategies on the two sexes which has shaped how we develop mentally.

Well, that’s the hypothesis, at any rate. There have not been a whole lot of controlled experiments done on the evolution of complex social behaviors over the entire developmental history of a species.

Shalmanese: *I think that they might have overstated their case just a tad but their arguments do seem compelling even if they are largely untested. *

A “seemingly compelling” untested argument plus $1.50 will buy you a cup of coffee. I don’t dispute that sociobiological hypotheses (or what are they calling it nowadays, “evolutionary psychology” I think?) might possibly be true. However, pending a way to make them actually testable and test results that actually confirm them, I tend to be indifferent or skeptical about evo-psych hypotheses in general, not just the gender-differences ones.

Most of them have a flavor of “Just So Stories” dressed up with modern genetics to make them sound like scientific theories. “Evolutionary advantage” is sort of the contemporary equivalent of the nineteenth-century natural theologians’ “divine design” or “God’s will”. Either concept can be fitted into lots of plausible narratives that conform to our current prejudices about what’s “natural”, and neither is particularly testable or usefully predictive. And the narratives about either of them may turn out to be perfectly true, but in the meantime I don’t happen to find them particularly compelling.

[Epimetheus]

@Kimstu

Epimetheus: *Now correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t this topic be IN this guys field of expertise? *

Since you asked, yes, you’re wrong. Just because Prof. Summers’ field of expertise, which happens to be macroeconomics (particularly, IIRC, tax policy), falls in the broad disciplinary category of “social science” doesn’t mean that it’s significantly related to the subject of women in science and engineering.

I see, for some reason I thought social science was another word for sociology. Color me informed.

[Dead_Badger]

@Kimstu

You may well be right, but where are you getting this information about the motives for structuring the conference this way? It still seems to me like a rather out-of-left-field issue on which to convene a bunch of economists.

From the Independent’s article:

Organisers of the conference, attended by some 50 economists from across the US, said the Harvard president had been asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a representative of the university. The subject of the conference was the position of women and minorities in science and engineering.

As I said earlier, it’s frequently very useful to gain an outside perspective on a field of research. You may get questions that make no sense, you may get ones based on common misconceptions, but you may also get ones that challenge things you had previously taken for granted. This is more than reason enough to organise such a conference. The article in the OP also notes that the conference was held deliberately off the record in order to avoid precisely the sort of misunderstanding we’ve seen.

[Earthworm_Jim]

There’s an interesting page titled Sex Differences in the Brain at http://www.womens-health.org

Among other things, it says

Women have smaller brains than men, with women having more gray matter and men having more white matter. This finding may help explain why women are typically better than men at verbal tasks, while men are typically better than women at spatial tasks, as well as why the sexes perform equally well on intelligence tests in spite of males having larger brains. 2
…
2. Gur, R.C., et al., Sex differences in brain gray and white matter in healthy young adults: correlations with cognitive performance. J Neurosci, 1999. 19(10): p. 4065-72.

[Bookkeeper]

Note that brain size correlates strongly with overall body size, so an average smaller brain size for females would match the average smaller female body size. Brain size in humans does not appear to correlate significantly with intelligence.

[Gamaliel]

I don’t think anyone’s yet mentioned the fact that this is the same President Summers who managed to run Cornel West, Henry Gates, and the rest of the African-American studies department to Princeton after a spat that went public. I’d be willing to let this go as an insignificant minor offense if he didn’t have a history of being an insensitive jackass.

[Knorf]

OMFG the ignorance is thick in this thread.

People, it’s a simple fact that women were to all intents and purposes barred from serious academic careers for decades upon decades. It was beyond difficult for woman to even pursue a professional career of any sort. Learn some fucking history. Hell, it was only a couple hundred years ago when women were generally not even allowed to own property. They didn’t obtain the right to vote in the U.S. until under 100 years ago (1920!). The prejudices about women’s differing or inferior intellectual ability compared to men is an old, old, old excuse to keep women away from positions of power and authority. You can scream “PC” all you want, but such protestations are nothing more than expressions of ignorance and fear.

What makes me a feminist is that I am utterly convinced that society will be much better off when positions of authority (in business, finance, politics, academics, military, etc.) are shared as equally as possible between men and women. It has nothing to do with some bullshit “political correctness.” It has to do with what is best for the human race. Oppressing women and disseminating doubt about their abilities isn’t helping. This is the blunder committed by Dr. Summers and it is a damn serious one.

Given the profound struggle it has been for women to break past these barriers, and the long traditional of oppression against women, the Harvard presidents’s coments are extremely inappropriate at best. He should resign, and promtly, or he should be fired. No one who is insensitive to these issues should be allowed to be president of a university.

[Dewey_Cheatem_Undhow]

@Knorf

The prejudices about women’s differing or inferior intellectual ability compared to men is an old, old, old excuse to keep women away from positions of power and authority. You can scream “PC” all you want, but such protestations are nothing more than expressions of ignorance and fear.

The fact that some may harbor the view that women and men differ cognitively out of “ignorance and fear” does not means that such differences do not exist. They may or they may not. All possible explanations for differences in gender performance should be investigated, even if some of those explanations may be unpalatable.

The fact that you do not think this only shows a little “ignorance and fear” of your own.

@Knorf

Given the profound struggle it has been for women to break past these barriers, and the long traditional of oppression against women, the Harvard presidents’s coments are extremely inappropriate at best. He should resign, and promtly, or he should be fired. No one who is insensitive to these issues should be allowed to be president of a university.

Quite the contrary. The president of a leading university should be someone who is open to and promotes honest scientific inquiry, regardless of how “inappropriate” or “insensitive” a particular brand of politics may find such inquiries.

[pokey]

@Dewey Cheatem Undhow

The fact that you do not think this only shows a little “ignorance and fear” of your own.
Quite the contrary. The president of a leading university should be someone who is open to and promotes honest scientific inquiry, regardless of how “inappropriate” or “insensitive” a particular brand of politics may find such inquiries.

I already had an argument about this two days ago, but you know it really doesn’t sound like he spoke from an informed position so you could just as easily say that it would be wrong for nobody to challenge him. It’s not like any scientific inquiry has been stifled.

I see a lot of people who think “oh! I heard that too, science really is finding that women are bad at math! Shame on those PC police for not letting him speak the truth!” Meanwhile, it was an MIT biologist who walked out. I’m sure that she knows a bit more about this topic than the fucking googlers on this board know. But it’s easier to assume she’s just a shrew who can’t handle the truth. Why? Who fucking knows?

The article says that she was offended that after the conference spent the whole morning refuting this “new” discovery that women are innately just not as good at math, and that he “summarized” the discussion by saying that there is a new discovery that women might be innately bad at math.

Now, I might just be some man hater, but I think I could give the MIT biologist the benefit of the doubt about maybe knowing MORE about the topic than him.

The knee jerk reaction on this board seems to be that if a man can’t say a woman might be bad at math, it automatically means his freedom of scientific inquiry is being trashed and we’re all going to hell in a PC handcart. It’s fucking pathetic. There’s no reason to freak out about what he said, cause he’s apologized, and there’s no reason to freak out that he apologized because if he didn’t mean it, he’s no hero of intellectual courage anyway. Either way, you can’t draw all these conclusions about anything based on what happened, because all anyone knows is that he said something, someone was offended, and he apologized.

[Dewey_Cheatem_Undhow]

@pokey

I already had an argument about this two days ago, but you know it really doesn’t sound like he spoke from an informed position so you could just as easily say that it would be wrong for nobody to challenge him. It’s not like any scientific inquiry has been stifled.

This kind of reaction is what leads to the stifling of scientific inquiry, though. When you start saying that certain hypotheses are not only incorrect, but that they should not be investigated or even mentioned in polite company, you contribute to an environment that makes honest inquiry secondary to political correctness.

@pokey

Meanwhile, it was an MIT biologist who walked out. I’m sure that she knows a bit more about this topic than the fucking googlers on this board know. But it’s easier to assume she’s just a shrew who can’t handle the truth. Why? Who fucking knows?

No one has a problem with an MIT biologist saying that a gender-based explanation is unlikely and unsupported by the evidence currently available to the biological research community.

What I, and others, do have a problem with is the suggestion that such explanations should be discarded out of hand without any sort of consideration whatsoever.

@pokey

The article says that she was offended that after the conference spent the whole morning refuting this “new” discovery that women are innately just not as good at math, and that he “summarized” the discussion by saying that there is a new discovery that women might be innately bad at math.

Which article? I’ve read the one from the OP and the New York Times, and don’t see anything like this.

At any rate, it’s bullshit. She walked out in the middle of his remarks, showing she was offended by what Summers said, and not by the burden of refuting those remarks after the conference.

@pokey

Now, I might just be some man hater, but I think I could give the MIT biologist the benefit of the doubt about maybe knowing MORE about the topic than him.

Well, sure; her statements about the state of biological research carry considerable weight. It isn’t the notion that she disagrees with Summers’ hypothesis that disturbs; it is her taking offense at Summers having the temerity to even proffer that hypothesis in the first place.

@pokey

The knee jerk reaction on this board seems to be that if a man can’t say a woman might be bad at math, it automatically means his freedom of scientific inquiry is being trashed and we’re all going to hell in a PC handcart.

Well, yeah, actually. Take away the unnecesary pejoratives (“knee jerk,” etc) and the dismissive tone and that’s a pretty accurate statement. This kind of screeching is what discourages scientific inquiry into controversial areas.

[Dead_Badger]

@Knorf

OMFG the ignorance is thick in this thread.

Perhaps you’d care to point out specific instances of it, then.

People, it’s a simple fact that women were to all intents and purposes barred from serious academic careers for decades upon decades. It was beyond difficult for woman to even pursue a professional career of any sort. Learn some fucking history.

Can you point out anyone who has disputed this, please?

No-one is saying that discrimination is not a factor. No-one is saying that it isn’t the major factor. No-one is saying that women are less intelligent than men. In fact, no-one is saying that anything is definitely the case. What is being said is that cognitive differences are a potential cause of differences in representation in research positions, and therefore deserve to be considered, even if only to be excluded as a possible explanation. Why is this so controversial?

Given the profound struggle it has been for women to break past these barriers, and the long traditional of oppression against women, the Harvard presidents’s coments are extremely inappropriate at best. He should resign, and promtly, or he should be fired. No one who is insensitive to these issues should be allowed to be president of a university.

Given the history, it is pretty clear that this conference was intended to be held in conditions that allowed the speakers to participate without being held to ransom by the PC police, and by God I resent being forced to use that phrase. Summers’ point was that if men are shown to score disproportionately at the high and low ends of the bell curve, they are inevitably going to be overrepresented in a sample that selects the top proportion, without saying anything about the expected intelligence about the average man or woman. The point is that this conference was convened with the intention of avoiding speakers having to feel like they should avoid certain thoughts for fear of causing offence. This is a very good idea, since science shouldn’t care about who it offends; it should care about whether it’s right or not.

As I said before, it may well be the case that we discover that women are innately advantaged at mathematics and science, and that therefore there is more of a problem than previously anticipated. But apparently it’s a sacking offence to even suggest that there might be a difference, at a conference convened for that precise purpose. Where’s the fucking scientific enquiry here?