B and B

Misrepresentation, reparation, and resignation

Harvard president Larry Summers misrepresented, or at best ignored, the results of a sociological study in his talk earlier this week in which he claimed the possibility of innate differences in mathematical and scientific ability between men and women.  Garance Franke-Ruta at The American Prospect's blog TAPPED highlights an article in the Harvard Crimson from Wednesday that says this:

Two sociologists whose research University President Lawrence H. Summers cited at an economics conference Friday said yesterday their findings do not support Summers’ suggestion that “innate differences” may account for the under-representation of women in the sciences.

University of California-Davis sociologist Kimberlee A. Shauman said that Summers’ remarks were “uninformed.” The other researcher, University of Michigan sociologist Yu Xie, said he accepted Summers’ comments as “scholarly propositions,” although he said his own analysis “goes against Larry’s suggestion that math ability is something innate.”

Xie and Shauman presented their findings at the National Bureau of Economic Research Friday afternoon, shortly after Summers’ remarks.

In an interview with The Crimson last night, Summers stressed that he only cited Xie and Shauman’s research as evidence that females are underrepresnted among the top 5 percent of test-takers on standardized assessments. Summers said the evidence for his speculative hypothesis that biological differences may partially account for this gender gap comes instead from scholars cited in Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker’s bestselling 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

So Summers' defense is that he didn't misrepresent Xie and Shauman's work, he just ignored it in favor of Steven Pinker's book.  As for that book, Franke-Ruta writes:

I haven't read this book, but if you look at the amazon.com readers' comments, it appears that some female readers found its discussions of rape and the maternal instinct highly offensive and sexist. One newspaper reviewer described Pinker's book, in 2002, as "breathtaking, rabid stuff.... likely to reduce most university common-rooms to states of gibbering apoplexy." (Mission accomplished, clearly.) If Summers based his remarks in part on a reading of Pinker's book, the response he generated was something that was not only predictable but predicted.

Meanwhile, Summers is trying to smooth things over, at least with his colleagues at Harvard:

Continuing efforts to soothe professors angry about his remarks on women, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, met last night with faculty members who wrote to him this week that his comments would hurt Harvard's ability to recruit top female scholars.

Summers repeated the apology he has made at least twice in writing, according to spokeswoman Lucie McNeil.

"It was a good meeting," she said. "He apologized, and they moved on to a discussion of a variety of steps the university can take to address the issues, and they agreed to continue to address them in the coming days."

...

Between a half-dozen and a dozen professors, members of Harvard's official Standing Committee on Women, attended yesterday evening's hourlong meeting at the Barker Center for the Humanities.

The participants were reluctant to discuss details of the meeting for fear of jeopardizing their ongoing discussions with Summers.

"It was a constructive discussion on very difficult issues of importance to the university," said Caroline Hoxby, a professor of economics. "The discussion is ongoing, and we believe there will be some resolution on important issues next week."

Finally, the National Organization for Women, along with a certain female member of my household, yesterday called for Summers' resignation:

The National Organization for Women calls for the resignation of Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who has failed to lead the prominent (and previously all-male) university toward true inclusion of women. His recent comments generated a firestorm of response from Harvard/Radcliffe women who were outraged that he would embarrass Harvard with such a public demonstration of sexism and ignorance.

"Summers' suggestion that women are inferior to men in their ability to excel at math and science is more than an example of personal sexism, it is a clue to why women have not been more fully accepted and integrated into the tenured faculty at Harvard since he has been president," said NOW President Kim Gandy. According to reports, the number of female faculty receiving tenure has declined over the past four years — down to just four of the last 32 tenure offers in the school's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

"Harvard University holds itself out as the pinnacle of higher education in this country," said Gandy. "Such an esteemed institution should set a standard for other colleges and universities — a standard that Lawrence Summers appears unable to maintain."

Certainly, as UCLA professor Mark Kleiman's recent comments illustrate, Summers' attitude of male superiority is far from unique in the academic world—and not even the worst example.  So Summers' resignation as Harvard president alone will not solve anything.  But his resignation is a necessary step for the fair treatment of women in acadmics, precisely because of the prevalence of this attitude.

Excusing male domination and anti-female discrimination

A modestly prominent, moderately liberal academic blogger has weighed in on the controversy regarding the comments of Harvard president Larry Summers on the sparsity of women in academic science and engineering positions (see this article from Monday's Boston Globe and these earlier posts for the details).  Unfortunately, this blogger, Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of policy studies at UCLA, who I've been reading for over a year and whose writings I generally respect, has weighed in firmly on the wrong side.  Even more repulsive, an argument he proffers could be used to justify male domination of every skilled field of endeavor.

First, here is an excerpt of what Kleiman says about Summers' comments:

My reader says:

1. Summers does or should realize that he is never speaking just as an intellectual or as an economist, and that it is possible (and I mean possible) that his comments were incompatible with his role as President.

2.  The content of his remarks seems entirely unobjectionable and probably true.

3. The behavior of those who walked out or condemned him is truly regrettable and I am disappointed that it has not sparked more comment.

I agree with #2 and #3 entirely, and #1 in part. The President of Harvard needs to mind his manners and to make sure that he speaks in ways that are less likely, rather than more likely, to lead to pernicious misinterpretation. But this should be a matter of form, not substance. It should not be inconsistent with the function of a university president to make true statements on important issues.

True statements?  Entirely unobjectionable?  Let's review what Summers said, based on the Boston Globe article that initially publicized his words:

Summers spoke during a working lunch. He declined to provide a tape or transcript of his remarks, but the description he gave in an interview was generally in keeping with what 10 participants recalled. He said he was synthesizing the scholarship that the organizers had asked him to discuss, and that in his talk he repeated several times: ''I'm going to provoke you."

He offered three possible explanations, in declining order of importance, for the small number of women in high-level positions in science and engineering. The first was the reluctance or inability of women who have children to work 80-hour weeks.

The second point was that fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years. ''I said no one really understands why this is, and it's an area of ferment in social science," Summers said in an interview Saturday. ''Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren't" due to socialization after all.

This was the point that most angered some of the listeners, several of whom said Summers said that women do not have the same ''innate ability" or ''natural ability" as men in some fields.

Asked about this, Summers said, ''It's possible I made some reference to innate differences. . . I did say that you have to be careful in attributing things to socialization. . . That's what we would prefer to believe, but these are things that need to be studied."

Summers said cutting-edge research has shown that genetics are more important than previously thought, compared with environment or upbringing. As an example, he mentioned autism, once believed to be a result of parenting but now widely seen to have a genetic basis.

In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ''daddy truck," and one ''baby truck."

...

Summers' third point was about discrimination. Referencing a well-known concept in economics, he said that if discrimination was the main factor limiting the advancement of women in science and engineering, then a school that does not discriminate would gain an advantage by hiring away the top women who were discriminated against elsewhere.

Because that doesn't seem to be a widespread phenomenon, Summers said, ''the real issue is the overall size of the pool, and it's less clear how much the size of the pool was held down by discrimination."

Summers ended his talk by describing some of the efforts Harvard is making to improve its hiring record and help women balance work and family.

''I believe that it's an important part of what I do to encourage frank scientific discussion," he said. ''I would hope and trust that no one could [doubt] that we are absolutely committed to promoting the diversity of the faculty."

So Summers, using only theoretical economic hand-waving, essentially dismisses discrimination completely.  His argument, as related here, neglects all the factors that contribute to advancement that are outside the control of the individual and the institution that hired her.  Advancement in science requires not just an employer, but collaboration opportunities, published papers, and funded grant proposals.  Summers' hypothetical non-discriminatory school could not obtain any advantage by hiring talented women shunned at leading institutions if the women continued to be shunned by the leaders in their field. 

Summers then fills the vacuum that his dismissal of discrimination creates by elevating some alleged innate female inferiority.  That such sexist arguments can still be put forward by supposedly serious people like Summers, and accepted as "entirely unobjectionable" by other supposedly serious people like Kleiman, shows how far the fight against gender discrimination has yet to go.  Someone making similar suggestions that racial disparities might be due to inferiority of certain races would, and should, lose professional respect and likely their job (unless they work for a conservative think tank, of course).

Alas, Kleiman takes his argument further into the depths:

That invidious gender bias and skewed social arrangements exist it would be hard to doubt without deliberately closing one's eyes and ears. But that those problems explain most of the underrepresentation of women among tenured scientists and mathematicians is open to doubt.

Matt [Yglesias, blogger and journalist] misstates the evidence about the relative skills of the two sexes in a subtle but important way. What matters isn't the difference in central tendencies between the two distributions, but rather their dispersion around that central tendency.

For excellent evolutionary reasons, human males display higher variance than human females on many important traits, including measures of mental capacity. That means that they are likely to predominate among the top one hundredth of one percent of almost any cognitive talent, unless women are on average much better endowed in that particular department.

So it wouldn't be surprising to find that women, on average, write better than men do, but that there are more men than women among the handful of the very best writers in the world.

I'll skip over the supreme, albeit typical in academics, arrogance that is evident in Kleiman's implicit assumption that academic positions are reserved for the "top hundredth of one percent."  But with this argument, Kleiman appears to excuse male domination of every skilled field into eternity.

Exhibit A in the academic glass ceiling:  Larry Summers.

Exhibit B:  Mark Kleiman.

Exhibit C:  Far too many other men.

It would be nice to see some evidence that these men have ever listened to a significant number—or even any—academic or other professional women about their experiences in building their careers.  I know a few who might be able to educate them.

Other blogs commenting on the Harvard president/gender discrimination firestorm

Below, I'm compiling links, with excerpts, to posts on other blogs about the remarks on gender differences in the sciences made by the president of Harvard a few days ago.  The comments are also well worth reading in many cases.

Pharyngula, who appears to be a male scientist at a university in Minnesota:

I’ll tell you how much of a role discrimination plays in limiting female professors in so-called “elite” universities: 100%. There is no shortage of brilliant women scientists (or brilliant male scientists), but there is a dearth of jobs and we still have bigoted ignoramuses like Summers standing guard over the gateways.

Bitch, Ph.D.:

Having said that his hypothesis is "based on . . . scholarly work," Summers goes on to offer this incredibly scholarly piece of evidence:

"In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ''daddy truck,' and one ''baby truck.'"

Well, I've got news for you, Larry.  My son, whose father took him to see the first X-Prize launch, calls SpaceShipOne the "Mama Plane" and the "Baby Plane." Click on the link, you'll see why. So I think maybe a little more research needs to be done on this topic before your darling daughter--who I'm sure was raised in a completely non-sexist environment (not)--can really serve as definitive proof that girls can't do math and science.

Dumbass.

Feministing:

Women at the conference—which was about women and minorities in science and engineering—were less than pleased. Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT, walked out on his talk, saying that if she hadn't she “would've either blacked out or thrown up.”

And I have to say, I don’t buy Summers’ attempt to spin his comments as “hypotheses,” especially after learning that the number of tenured job offers made to Harvard women has dropped significantly since he took office. What a coincidence…

Harvard president downplays gender discrimination in the sciences

Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, has apparently ignited quite a firestorm about why women are so severely underrepresented in science and engineering academic positions.  Here is a brief summary of what he said, according to the New York Times:

At Friday's conference, Mr. Summers discussed possible reasons so few women were on the science and engineering faculties at research universities, and he said he would be provocative.

Among his hypotheses were that faculty positions at elite universities required more time and energy than married women with children were willing to accept, that innate sex differences might leave women less capable of succeeding at the most advanced mathematics and that discrimination may also play a role, participants said. There was no transcript of his remarks.

His remarks caused one professor to walk out and another to openly challenge them.

Summers has apparently moved into damage control mode:

At the center of the storm, Mr. Summers posted a statement late Monday night on his Web page, saying that his comments at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit economic research organization in Cambridge had been misconstrued and pledging to continue efforts to "attract and engage outstanding women scientists."

"My aim at the conference was to underscore that the situation is likely the product of a variety of factors and that further research can help us better understand their interplay," he said. "I do not presume to have confident answers, only the conviction that the harder we work to research and understand the situation, the better the prospects for long term success."

Alas, there is no transcript available, so I don't know exactly what he said, but based on this reporting, I wonder whether Summers has ever seriously talked to female university scientists and engineers about their workplace experiences. 

Maud Lavin, who graduated from Harvard in the class of 1976, was one of the first women to take a demanding theoretical math sequence, Math 11 and Math 55, and is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ms Lavin said in an interview yesterday that she would not donate any more money to Harvard as long as Mr. Summers was president, after firing off an angry e-mail message to him.

"I am offended and furious about your remarks on women in science and mathematics," Ms. Lavin wrote. "Arguments of innate gender difference in math are hogwash and indirectly serve to feed the virulent prejudices still alas very alive and now even more so due to your ill-informed remarks."

Sadly, Summers' dismissive attitude toward gender discrimination is still extremely common among men, even those who should know better. Fortunately, his eagerness to explain away discrimination by appealing to notions of female inferiority is much rarer these days.  Well, at least voicing such an opinion is rare.

But perhaps some good will come out of all this:

On and off the campus, Mr. Summers's remarks were the subject of heated debate yesterday.

Denice D. Denton, the dean of engineering at the University of Washington who confronted Mr. Summers over his remarks at the conference, said that her phone had not stopped ringing and that she had received scores of e-mail messages on the subject. She said Mr. Summers's remarks might have put new energy into a longstanding effort to improve the status of women in the sciences.

"I think they've provoked an intellectual tsunami," Dr. Denton said.

Enough of one to wake huge numbers of men up from both their patronizing attitude towards women and from their ignorance of the existence and affects of gender discrimination?  I sure hope so.

No longer any need to hide it?

Never let anyone tell you that gender discrimination is ancient history.  Look what the huge corporation Viacom just got caught doing.  According to the Washington Post (scroll down):

Job Alert! There's an excellent job opportunity at media giant Viacom International Inc., which owns CBS among other things, judging from an e-mail we just got from Gail MacKinnon, Viacom vice president for government relations.

MacKinnon sent the note Tuesday to House Republican offices and to the offices of GOP Sens. John Ensign (Nev.), Gordon Smith (Ore.) and George Allen (Va.).

"Subject: Looking to fill a position in our office

"Importance: High We need to hire a junior lobbyist/PAC manager. Attached is a job description. Salary is $85-90K. Must be a male with Republican stripes.

"If you know of anyone who might be interested in interviewing for this position, would you please let me know? Thanks so much. Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday."

Oddly, the Washington Post writer, Al Kamen, only seems to find this noteworthy due to the phrase "Republican stripes."

Anyway, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Josh Marshall, and Ezra Klein at Pandagon note the seedier aspect of this brief note.  What is particularly shocking is that Viacom apparently sent this note, as is, not just to Republican politicans, but directly to the media.  I thought corporations had learned to be a lot more subtle about stuff like this over the years.

From CREW:

"This is a blatant violation of federal law prohibiting discrimination against women in hiring," Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW said today. "It is stunning that one of the largest corporations in America is so comfortable violating this 40 year-old prohibition that it has openly sent an e-mail advertising its discriminatory hiring practices to the very body that passed the anti-discrimination laws in the first place. One cannot help but be concerned that Viacom may have a practice of discriminating against women. As a result, CREW calls upon both Congress and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to begin immediate investigations in into Viacom's hiring practices."

Let's see what happens.