Long Winter for Summers at Harvard?
by Marc H. RudovThree excellent articles — posted below — appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes regarding the brouhaha at Harvard University over the comments of its president, Lawrence Summers, about women in science. Many women, like Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice, prove repeatedly that women can debate, with thoughtful logic, without running from the room to vomit.
The first article is a fascinating op-ed piece by Ruth R. Wisse (see below) appeared in the Wall Street Journal on January 21, 2005. It demonstrates the existence in the hallowed halls of liberal academia, albeit in small numbers, of independent-minded women who can debate with calm, well-articulated logic — without automatically crying foul and discrimination every time a man challenges them… whether he’s right or wrong. Let’s not forget that Dr. Susan Hockfield, a distinguished neuroscientist, is the president of MIT, the pinnacle of scientific institutions of higher learning and a Charles River neighbor to Harvard. Brava Professor Wisse!
The second article, by columnist Sharon Begley, appeared in the Wall Street Journal a week later, on January 28, 2005. Her article claims that the only reason women opt out of top science positions is to raise families, not because of incompetence or intimidation.
The third article, by Dan Seligman at Forbes, gives scientific evidence, based on tests and career choices, that there are differences in visuospatial skills between some men and some women. This is the kind of evidence Lawrence Summers was referring to in his comments, before being beaten into submission and forced to grovel for forgiveness. Contrast this with Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who compared 9/11 victims in the World Trade Center to “little Adolph Eichmanns.” The liberals never once called Churchill on the carpet for this asinine, insane remark. Hypocrisy? You bet.
Seligman is reporting facts. Ruth Wisse and Sharon Begley counter their professional sisters who find it necessary to protest and whine to be heard. In fact, protesting and whining achieve the opposite result: disrespect. Learn more about this at NoNonsenseDating.com.
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Article #1: Gender Fender-Bender
By RUTH R. WISSE, January 21, 2005, Wall Street Journal; Page A8
Last week, the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, inadvertently provided further evidence of the opposition to free inquiry that currently governs our institutions of higher learning. Invited to speculate off the record on the “underrepresentation” of women in science, President Summers threw out some hypotheses, including one about innate differentials in aptitude between men and women, that may account for the phenomenon. At this point in his remarks, an MIT female professor of science quit the room, declaring to the press that she couldn’t breathe because “this kind of bias makes me physically ill.”
“What better proof than she of Summers’ thesis?” quipped a friend of mine — and, indeed, what better evidence of underprofessionalism than a scientist who becomes nauseated at the mere hint of a theory that differs from hers? But this woman had artfully framed her outrage. Her claim of “bias” was intended not simply to discredit the male who had asked whether there may be substantive differences between men and women, but to define the permissible terms of discussion. Her show of outrage and the ensuing media attention it elicited were designed to reinforce the claim that “bias” alone is responsible for the situation President Summers addressed.
This accusation of bias, advanced by feminists and often accepted at face value by the academic community, attempts to transform guarantees of equal opportunity into a demand for equal outcome. Thus, a huge majority of female professors at Harvard recently formed a Caucus for Gender Equality to protest the drop in senior job offers to women since President Summers came into office. Offering no evidence of discrimination in hiring and not a single example of a superior female applicant overlooked in favor of a less qualified male, the Caucus charged the president with having reduced “diversity” by failing to hire enough female professors. Although the university denied these unsubstantiated charges, it nonetheless instituted new rules for departmental searches that now require every committee to provide quantitative proof of how many women it has considered for a position at each stage of the screening and selection process.
Ironically, President Summers himself has on occasion advanced the view that affirmative-action procedures for women are necessary because of men’s unconscious bias. That particular unsubstantiated assumption, however, satisfies feminist dogma, whereas there mere possibility of other differences between the sexes offends it. The true character of the campaign against President Summers was corroborated when the same Harvard women’s group that is lobbying for more female professors reproached him for “speaking his mind as an individual” last week rather than toeing what they believe should be the university’s party line. Lobbying for women in the name of greater diversity, they used the club of gender to silence diversity.
Shamefully, they appear to have succeeded. Sounding more like a prisoner in a Soviet show trial than the original thinker that he is, President Summers recanted his error, has apologized at least three times for his insensitivity, and will no doubt hasten to appoint and to promote as many females as he can. The casualties of this exercise are genuine discussion of why women excel faster in some fields than in others, and the kind of intellectual independence that universities were once expected to promote.
The slogan “gender equality” reduces diversity on campus still further by pretending that all women share the same set of views. Protesting that there are currently only 85 tenured female professors at Harvard, about one-quarter of the faculty, the Women’s Caucus boasts that almost all of them agree with its politics. Meanwhile, in a country that has just elected a Republican president and a Republican Congress, one could not find, among Harvard professors, a quarter of a quarter who hold conservative views. Divergent thinkers are driven out of the universities to the think tanks where intellectual initiatives are encouraged rather than suppressed. On the campus, intimidation; beyond the campus, the democratic arena where better ideas can contend and prevail.
Had he been allowed to go on speculating about gender differentiation in the academy, President Summers might have taken up related issues, such as the effects of seeking parity in a marketplace of unequal resources. Given the far lower number of women in the sciences, one unacknowledged consequence of female preference in hiring may be the compensatory pressure to hire and promote women in the humanities and social sciences. The “feminization” of some branches of these “soft” disciplines has been a palpable byproduct of this strategy — feminization referring not just to the numbers but to what and how women who ostensibly share the ideological disposition of the Women’s Caucus tend to teach. Does this not necessarily reshape the nature of higher learning in ways that we would be wise to scrutinize?
Unfortunately, the problem President Summers addressed will persist despite the attempts to silence him. No one doubts that women seeking careers in science face greater challenges than those in other academic and research fields. At a recent forum of Harvard graduate students, a succession of budding female scientists expressed their anxieties about having chosen careers that will conflict, more than most, with their no less strong desires to raise and nurture a family. More than one young woman present felt that a job with reduced pressure during her childbearing years might better suit her needs than competition at the very highest levels. The good news is that most of the young women acknowledged that their dilemma was one of choice rather than a product of discrimination against them.
The very notion of “underrepresentation,” based as it is on the implicit goal of numerical parity, greatly prejudices our ability to understand why women make the choices that they do. If women gravitate to the hard sciences less than to other fields, we ought to grant them the intelligence of sentient creatures, recognizing the potential loneliness of such choices while trying to understand why groups and individuals act as they do. It is not President Summers who owes women an apology; it is the complainers and agitators who owe both him and all of us an apology for trying to shut down discussion of an “inequality” that is not likely to disappear.
Ms. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard.
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Article #2: Harvard Chief’s Words On Innate Differences Lack Basis in Science
By SHARON BEGLEY (Science Journal), January 28, 2005, Wall Street Journal; Page B1
That’s odd, mathematician Lenore Blum thought. At a math institute where she once served as deputy director, Mondays seemed to bring more than their share of announcements of new theorems, the gold rings of mathematical discovery.
Prof. Blum, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, quickly figured out why. Male mathematicians hanging out together on weekends wound up doing math, inspiring each other in a way that produced breakthroughs. Women were rarely included in these get-togethers; they weren’t invited and felt awkward inviting themselves.
Stories like this have been making the rounds of academics ever since Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, in a now infamous lunch address, suggested that the relative paucity of women in science and math (they represent 25% of the work force in these fields) might reflect “innate differences” between men and women more than social forces.
Scholars have demolished some of the widely held beliefs about why fewer women enter science. Contrary to myth, for instance, women are not handicapped in becoming scientists because social forces steer them away from math and science in high school. To the contrary. As sociologists Yu Xie of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Kimberlee Shauman of the University of California, Davis, showed in a 2003 book, “Women in Science,” “girls are not only on a par with boys” in how many math and science courses they take. “They also attain significantly better grades.”
Their interest in science continues in college, where women earned 51% of the undergraduate degrees in science and engineering in 2001, compared with 25% in 1966. As Mr. Summers correctly implied, social forces shooing girls away from science just aren’t what they used to be.
So let’s look at “innate differences.” Exhibit A for the innate-difference crowd is that fewer girls than boys score in the top 1% on standardized math tests in high school, supposedly a sign that girls can’t master the math that underpins much of science and engineering.
But the gap at the top, while real, is irrelevant. Among those who ace these tests, boys are more likely to enter science than girls, who tend to choose other fields, find Profs. Xie and Shauman. Therefore, if equal numbers of girls landed on top, larger numbers would likely become scientists and engineers than do so now — but men would still continue to hold more science jobs: Top-scoring girls reject science careers. (As an aside, Prof. Xie tells me that a fair number of boys who don’t get eye-popping scores in such tests enter science and engineering, and succeed.)
Another tenet of “innate differences” is that male and female brains differ in a way relevant to the ability to understand and do science. Of all the claims like this over the years, the only one that has stood up even a little is that exposure to testosterone in utero is associated with better numerical and spatial ability, such as being able to mentally rotate objects or intuitively understand blueprints. Men generally have higher testosterone exposure before birth, when the brain is developing.
In a paper scheduled to appear in the journal Intelligence, however, scientists in Germany report that only women with relatively low testosterone exposure scored worse than men on tests of spatial and numerical ability. Women with relatively high exposure compared with other women — half the sample — scored as well as men. However testosterone boosts the brain’s spatial and numerical ability, an awful lot of women are getting enough of it to benefit, even when they’re getting less than men.
In general, for every finding that boy brains have an edge (they’re bigger) there’s a finding that girl brains do. For instance, scientists reported in Nature Neuroscience last year that women’s cortexes are more complex, with more of the intricate folds that underlie higher brain function such as that needed for science.
More important, if scientists have learned one thing about the brain it is that our gray matter is highly malleable, responding to signals from the outside world. That seems to come into play with spatial ability. “You can decrease the gap in spatial ability if you remind women of their identity as Ivy League students,” notes psychologist Joshua Aaronson of New York University. “When people invoke biology they’re implying a fixedness, but that’s not true: Biology can be changed by social context.”
Prof. Aaronson has shown this in his studies of “stereotype threat”: If you’re reminded before a test that society thinks the group you belong to does badly on whatever the test tests, you do worse than if you’re not reminded. This holds for girls taking math tests, blacks taking standardized tests and white boys on the basketball court. It also accounts for at least some of that gender gap in top scores on math tests.
The fact is, women leave science when they have kids. If you’re pushing a stroller you’re not building a quantum computer. “The tenure clock runs at the same time as the biological clock,” says Susan Ganter, executive director of the Association for Women in Science. “It doesn’t allow for women who want to both be successful and have families.” Women often have to choose between the two; men don’t. Perhaps that’s what Mr. Summers meant by innate differences.•
You can e-mail me at sciencejournal@wsj.com.
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Article #3: Sexism at Harvard: The violent reaction to Larry Summers’ comments about women mathematicians didn’t leave much room in the media for a discussion of the facts.
By Dan Seligman, February 28, 2005, Forbes Magazine; page 100
When all else fails, appoint a commission. In a real emergency–like when you’re the president of Harvard and are being hysterically assailed for wondering aloud about the possibility of an innate component to the male advantage in mathematics–appoint two commissions. Testifying to the ghastliness of his situation, and to the fact that he was running out of ways to merely apologize, that is what Lawrence H. Summers did the other day. Both commissions will look for ways to hire more female academics, and one of them will specialize in hiring on the hard sciences front.
Is it really absurd to think there might be innate gender differences in mathematical ability? An avalanche of scientific research, not to mention the wisdom of your grandmother, supports the idea of significant innate differences between the sexes. Some scholars, notably David Geary of the University of Missouri-Columbia, have argued persuasively that this premise is in fact required by the logic of Darwinian natural selection. (Darwin referred to this branch of his argument as sexual selection.) Yet when Summers mentioned the possibility of innate differences–and asked whether they might be related to underrepresentation of female academics in math and science–he got seriously pounded by fellow academics, the public and the press. His apologies ended with a fair amount of groveling.
But Summers has certain numbers on his side. Three telling details: 1) A 2001 survey conducted by the National Science Foundation established that there were 285,500 individuals with Ph.D.s working as mathematicians, computer scientists, physical scientists and engineers, and only 11.5% of them were women. 2) In the index of a math text the names attached to mathematical discoveries–Gauss, Euler, Riemann, Newton, Legendre, Poisson, Fourier, Cauchy and so on–almost invariably belong to men. 3) Since 1938 only 3 of the 335 winners in the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition have been women. The test, whose graders do not know the names of the contestants, is one of ingenuity, not knowledge, so a possible lack of access to advanced math courses is not very relevant to the outcome.
Did gender stereotyping yield these lopsided results? It could have influenced the Ph.D. count. But it’s hard to dismiss the other two phenomena as due primarily to sexism. Summers’ enemies did not present any evidence that gifted young women are urged not to take the Putnam exam.
The Harvard story got big-league national coverage. But like academe, the media proved overwhelmingly hostile to the idea of innate differences, and it is very hard to find articles registering any interest in the avalanche of research. A partial exception was a Jan. 24 New York Times article, which ran on the front page and performed an amazing feat: It cited a number of neurological and hormonal differences between the sexes, related them to lower female test scores in math, yet ended up supportively quoting experts who say that “baseless sexism” is the real reason for the paucity of females in math and the physical sciences.
What does the research tell us? Among scholars not passionately committed to explanations based on sexism, one finds three powerful and biologically based reasons for the shortage of women in the physical sciences.
The first is a male advantage in visuospatial skills, i.e., the ability to imagine what objects would look like when rotated in space. These skills are especially critical for geometric tasks and multistep problem-solving, where it often helps to “see” the solution in the mind’s eye. There is no doubt that visuospatial ability, which is affected by sex hormones, is biologically based. Doreen Kimura, professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University and author of Sex and Cognition, is among those who see innate factors at work. “I think there’s some biological basis for high-level mathematical reasoning,” she says. “It’s hard to see what else it might be that’s driving those winners in a Putnam competition. It’s such a peculiar skill set.”
Next is a greater male variability in intellectual skills. In math and many other disciplines men are overrepresented at the extremes: more gifted students but also more who are learning-disabled. On the math SAT men are 30% more likely than women to score in the 600 to 649 range. But they are 150% more likely to score over 750. And, as noted, they are 11,067% more numerous among Putnam winners. The variability pattern clearly has a biological basis, and it is not confined to Homo sapiens. In his 1998 book Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences, David Geary presents data indicating that many different bird and mammal species also exhibit greater male variability, in traits relating to health and vigor.
A final reason for the shortage of women in math and the physical sciences is a lack of female interest in the core content of these fields–many of which tend to emphasize abstract and mechanical themes. Studies matching equally gifted men and women, all of whom have the ability to make it in the physical sciences, have shown that the men are about eight times as likely as the women to enter these fields. The talented women repeatedly look around for something else, preferably involving disciplines affecting human beings (like, say, biology). A lot of research supports the idea that the male-female difference in interests is hormonal. This is also the view of Patricia Hausman, a behavioral scientist who often consults on employment issues. Addressing a National Academy of Engineering meeting a while back, she noted the widespread assumption that these differences are driven by “socialization,” then swatted the idea: “I find the evidence against this view overwhelming. Sex differences in behavior–with girls more attentive to people and boys to geometric shapes, blinking lights and three-dimensional objects–emerge in the earliest days or months of life, long before socialization begins.”
All very persuasive. Unless, of course, you are committed to a particular theory about baseless sexism.