SIVACRACY.NET

From: Siva Vaidhyanathan
Hometown: Sivacracy.net
Harvard President Lawrence Summers is getting rightly smacked around for his profoundly stupid remarks over the weekend about the supposedly inherent difference between men's and women's ability to do math and science.  Maybe it's time he quit that job.  It's too important a public position for a loose cannon like him to hold.  Princeton, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania have all hired brilliant women presidents (Princeton hired a scientist!) in recent years.  Can't Harvard do better than this guy?

Since the 1920s scientists and social scientists have been slaying and re-slaying this dragon that allows us all to avoid collective and individual responsibility for disparities that clearly arise from social and cultural behaviors and attitudes.  But bigots continue to come out with this crap every few years.

Summers' excuse?  He was just raising the questions!  We need more research!  Sounds like he could be a science advisor to George W. Bush, doesn't he?  Global warming MIGHT be a myth.  We need more research!  I'm just saying ...

We are at a very dark moment in the intellectual history of this country.  We have a government run by a political party that resents science, denies basic tests of truth and standards of evidence, and generally leads assaults on "reality-based" thinkers such as the fine readers of this site.  More than 40 percent of Americans deny the scientific validity of natural selection.  Too many of us believe in UFOs, angels, and that Saddam had something to do with 9/11.

Why should we have to suffer the indignity of reading that the president of Harvard has joined the pseudoscience brigade?  Can't the reality-based community at least have Harvard on our team?  (This event sure makes me glad I never went there.  I went to the University of Texas at Austin, a school wise enough to reject the young George W. Bush when he applied there.  Where did he end up instead to pursue his graduate work?  Harvard, of course.)

As Garance Franke-Ruta writes in Tapped:

Summers' remarks, by questioning women's innate capacities, have only made this problem worse. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Lorna J. Gibson, who chaired the Committee on Women Faculty in that university's school of engineering, has noted that "[t]he same way money and interest compounds, the marginalization also compounds....You can sort of shrug it off if it happens once.” But over time, the impact of the small incidents wears away at women. MIT has done much to study the issue, and launched a landmark initiative in the late '90s to make life more welcoming for female professors -- an initiative that bore fruit with a significant upsurge in female tenured professors in the hard sciences and an outpacing of Harvard University in this arena.

Women have made great strides in the past decades, but we do not yet live in a world so free of gendered pressures that we can speak with any certainty of what women's natural capacities are. Each generation of women proves capable of more than the one that came before it, and so many have now passed through Harvard's halls that it seems worthwhile for them to again put some pressure on the institution, so that the next generation has even greater opportunities to discover what they're capable of doing.

Summers says he was trying to provoke debate.  I don't mean to dismiss provocation.  I just don't think what Summers said qualifies as effective provocation.  Summers only offered empty speculation in lieu of evidence or substance.  Provocation is only valuable and useful if you can go somewhere with it.  But his comments were so devoid of substance that they left those who study this stuff (and scientists themselves) nowhere to go but out of the room.

I can't argue that boys and girls don't differ. But those different traits don't map to complex experiences or talents. They certainly don't hold up across the vast diversity of people who happen to be female. The intellectual differences among women are so much greater than any differences between men and women.  No meaningful differences hold up across populations.

I take offense at Summers' simplistic take on biology.  He clearly does not understand the dynamic relationships among genes, traits, behaviors, environments, and experiences.  The relationships are so dynamic and so complex that we can't control for any of them.  So something as ill-defined and misunderstood as "biology" becomes nothing more than a red herring at best, and excuse at worst.  It becomes what sexist men use to absolve themselves of responsibility for the damage that they do.

More to the point of the culture and profession of science, I think it's worth considering that there is more than one way to be scientific.  There are more than a hundred ways to be scientific.  The variety of traits or talents that the community of scientists possess is so broad that we can't even generalize about them.  The talents and traits that Marie Curie employed were nothing like those Albert Einstein employed.  And Einstein's skills were vastly different from Faraday's or Saulk's.  There is no one way to design and build a scientist.  And there are many avenues into science and out of science.  So I can't for the life of me imagine what this mysterious trait that Summers thinks women lack could possibly be.

These days, for instance, universities are encouraging what my wife Melissa, a molecular biologist, calls "non-hypothetical" methods of doing scientific research: i.e. crunching huge collections of data and tracing patterns from that data.  These are computational scientists.  For them, science is an information processing project.  It's a very different intellectual and technical project than Melissa's: generating a hypothesis that would explain a phenomenon and then attempting a series of experiments to falsify or certify the hypothesis.  My father, a biophysicist, worked in a realm that was purely theoretical without being either hypothetical or empirical.  He used pens, paper, and calculus.  Melissa uses petri dishes, incubators, and lots of lab machines and test tubes and beakers and stuff that looks really cool in movies.  She wears a fetching lab coat.  My father did science in his boxers and a t-shirt at our dining room table.  My father could not have done Melissa's job, but not because he's a man.  Melissa could not have done my father's job, but not because she is a woman.  If they did not have the same title and degree there is no way that I could associate their work in any way.  Of course, I could not do either of their jobs.

So if the variety of ways of doing science is vast and diverse, and the personalities and backgrounds of those who go into science are so diverse, and the skills required to do each of these ways are so varied, then we can't boil the aggregate success of men or women within these professions down to the presence or absence of a Y chromosome.  There is no single trait that makes a successful scientist.

Yet we can be certain that the various cultures of science have been structured to favor men.  They were designed and maintained by men.  That's what the conference at which Summers spoke was meant to explore.  And that's what MIT commissioned that study a few years back to analyze.  It's also true that the old dudes who control the gates of the profession often act as if women can't cut it.  So they make sure few women challenge their prejudices.  I grew up among too many scientists to have a sunnier view of the profession.  James Watson is a notorious sexist.  And he is not only representative of the attitude of his generation of scientists (those who run departments right now), he is still worshipped for his "stones."  Rosalind Franklin, a more brilliant scientist on whose work Watson relied, is not worshipped.  He got the Nobel.  She was left out.

So I have three problems with Summers' comments: they were ill-informed about the work already done on this question, irresponsible considering his position in American intellectual life, and geared to retard exploration of the problem rather than inspire it.  That's why people walked out of the room.  I would have, too.  The conversation is way beyond Summers.  He's holding it back.

Of course, Summers has taken anti-intellectual stances before, such as when he declared that those who criticize Israel are anti-Semitic.  He's not really interested in provocation for the sake of deliberation and exploration.  He's derailing progress.  Harvard has been failing at recruiting women to its faculty since he took office while the rest of the Ivy League and MIT have been making great strides to hire more women.  He's part of the problem and he probably resents being reminded of that.

So I wish it were merely an intellectual debate going on here.  There are too many smart women who have had their careers hampered by those who dismiss them based on their gender rather than their work.  So many people justifiably take it personally and politically.  When there is so much entrenched bigotry in the academy and society at large, it seems to me that we have a pretty clear answer to the question about why women are underrepresented in the sciences.  There is no great mystery.  This is not rocket science.