Dr. B, Moebius Stripper, PZ Meyers, Jessica Valenti, and Meep Campbell vent some well-deserved ire at Harvard University president Lawrence Summers for his attempt to explain why Harvard has hired so few tenured female faculty while he's been in office so few women succeed in science and math careers.
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.
Okay, that makes sense. As one professor told me when I was a postdoc, “The great thing about being an assistant professor (in computer science) is you get to decide which 80 hours you want to work each week.” But don't men with children also resist working those hours?
No, I guess not.
But what about women without children?
Oh, right. All women have children.
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.
Well, sure. Men and women are different. I've heard of studies showing that on average, women have better linguistic ability and men have better spatial visualization skills. It's quite possible that men are better, on average, than women in mathematics. Certainly this is suggested by differences in SAT scores.
Or maybe it's the other way around. At least one study found that girls are actually better at math than boys through high school, but then choose less mathematically intense college majors because they don't believe math is as useful or socially relevant. (This study is discussed here and here.)
But even if men are innately better than women at math, suggesting that this genetic difference might explain the current gender imbalance in math and science faculty is just stupid. Summers' hypothesis ignores centuries of overt, systematic discrimination at every level of society. (Yes, I know he said that innate differences might be one factor, but by his ordering he proclaimed it a more important factor than discrimination, about which he later expressed disbelief.) Women were only recently even allowed into the hallowed halls of academe without special dispensation or male sponsorship. Girls are told from a very early age that math and science are things that only boys do, mostly by the boys themselves, but all too often by misguided teachers and parents. Girls are told not to appear too smart, because boys don't like girls who are smarter than them (except possibly on television).
Summers' suggestion reminds me of intelligent design. It's a convenient but unfalsifiable theory that far too easily justifies a questionable social/political agenda. Even if it's correct, it's useless.
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."
Huh. Professor Summers apparently hasn't heard of the CMU computer science department, one of the strongest in the country, in which almost half of the undergrauduate majors are women, largely as the result of targeted recruiting at high schools and changing attitudes within the department, not by lowering admission standards. (In my department, which is probably typical, less than 10% of the undergrads are women, and the number is falling.)
On the other hand, it's not at all clear that a similar initiative at a faculty-hiring level would be as successful. As Moebius stripper pointed out months ago, “If any progress is going to be made countering the anti-math socialization that females experience, it needs to be done with children, not with adults.” I don't think the situation is quite so black-and-white—I know a few women that only started doing math/science after college—but I agree that faculty recruiting isn't the most useful target.
Lest Mo dismiss me as yet another sensitive-but-clueless male scientist spewing the convenient, politically correct, knee-jerk party line, let me offer my personal answer to her pointed question "Why does math need more women?" My own experience (twenty-eight years of school and ten years of teaching) convinces me that the fraction of women with talent and interest in math and science, while perhaps smaller than the fraction of men with similar talents and interests, is still much larger than the fraction of women who actually become mathematicians and scientists. When I observe, with my own eyes, women who work along side, above, or below me in math and computer science programs, I do not conclude that men are better than women at math. I do not see a significant difference between the mathematical abilities of my male and female students; the only thing I see is a difference in sample size that grows with age. It's not so much that math and science need more women, but that by discouraging women—either by overt sexism or by a simple lack of role models—we are throwing away a source of mathematical talent.
It's not the mere existence of gender imbalance that I object to, but the fact that the gender imbalance increases with age, in no small part because of yahoos like Summers.
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