Dear Alas Readers,
I”m a new guest blogger here and I wish to thank Ampersand for his exquisite taste in allowing me this opportunity. I will do my best to maintain the high standards of discourse on this site.
January has been a tough month for women in the field of gender science. This field contains a mixture of subfields ranging from microbiology to various origin myths in the shadier kinds of evolutionary psychology. Though the proponents of gender science view it as a pure, objective form of science which will tell us all the definite answer to any questions we might have about sex or gender differences, I am concerned with its almost complete lack of interest in cultural or environmental explanations and also with the whole question of objectivity in a field where every researcher is both part of the subject matter and an individual with particular biases, values and personal experiences. Trying to be neutral is important in sciences but I doubt that it is completely feasible here. Just leafing through some of the literature in evolutionary psychology has me pretty convinced that this particular subspecialty attracts a large number of people with conservative and anti-feminist values. These individuals might argue that it is their science which informs their opinions, but these things tend to go in circles.
All this is background for the news in the last month. It all started with the way (presumably heterosexual) undergraduates rated the attractiveness of photographs of the other sex for purposes of both one-night stands and long-term relationships. The crux of the study was that some photographs were randomly assigned to be the rater’s superior at work, whereas others were also randomly assigned to belong to a subordinate at work.
Women tended to rate attractiveness independently of the boss-subordinate status of the pictures, and so did men in the case of considering someone for a quickie. But when it came to long-term relationships, men rated the women who were marked as bosses lower than the women who were marked as subordinates.
Popularization of these results was instantaneous. We were told that educated women will not find husbands, we were told that feminism was a great hoax (this one courtesy of Maureen Dowd in the New York Times) and other similar idiocies. We were also told that the explanation for these findings is in our deep prehistory where we somehow decided that uppity women are more likely to be unfaithful…
Very few popularizers pointed out the faults in the study which were many. For example, the superiors were described as monitoring the rater all the time and as correcting the rater’s behavior. These might be odd quirks in the behavior of a long-term partner and not exactly the kinds of things most of us look for in a potential mate. It’s actually more interesting that the female students didn’t seem to mind such descriptions. Perhaps this is why the study did not find, as it expected, that women preferred the superiors for long-term mating purposes. This is one of evolutionary psychology’s major speculations: that women find money and power sexy and therefore marry older men while men find fertility sexy and therefore marry younger women.
The reality is, of course, rather different and surely affected by the actual distributions of income and power in the society. But gender science appears to regard these sorts of explanations as unscientific.
Anyway, only a week later we are offered the whole debate over women’s scientific abilities, ignited by the comments of Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University. The burning question is, once again, whether the scarcity of women in the fields of mathematics, physics and engineering is best explained by innate biological differences between the sexes or not. Few appear to mind that we literally cannot answer this question, given our current knowledge of genetics. Instead, it is perfectly acceptable to have an opinion on this issue and to use studies which find gender differences or don’t find them in various test taking as proof of genetic differences. That all such test taking is based on the tests humans make up and administer on individuals who already have years of history as members of a culture is ignored by those who believe in the biological explanations.
And today a study argues that it is the lack of testosterone that makes women supposedly less capable parallel parkers and mapreaders. This study is another one done on a sample of undergraduates, this time in Germany, and it finds that men score better, on average, in mental rotation of three dimensional figures and similar tests. The finding is old-hat. What is new about the study is that those women who supposedly had higher testosterone levels scored better than women who had lower levels, and that you can predict a woman’s parking abilities by how long her ring fingers are. Oddly enough, the study didn’t actually try to find out how well the subjects could do in mapreading or parallel parking.
There is something smelly about this all. Poor and sloppy research is not only given a pass but immediately popularized all over the media, but only if its results confirm age-old sex stereotypes about women’s weaknesses. I have looked hard for those studies in gender science which pursue similar stereotypes of men’s weaknesses but I have had little luck so far.
All this is political, of course. Individuals with conservative opinions tend to have prior beliefs in the genetic determination of sex differences of all kinds and they will welcome these sorts of findings uncritically. Individuals with liberal opinions have more varied prior beliefs, but on the whole we tend to assume that cultural effects at least exacerbate any existing biological differences. Something very important is at stake here: the way the society organizes itself into hierarchies by gender and the way its rewards and punishments are distributed. To argue that our interest in the findings is purely scientific is ludicrous.
You’re right, Echidne. Anyone who argues that these findings are purely scientific and not political in any way is ludicrous.
As Sean Carroll said in his post, history shows us that those who have argued for these superior/inforior hierarchies as innate differences have historically been proven quite wrong.
That should read “inferior.” It must be my lack of testosterone and weak finger lengths that make my typing so poor.
In another thread, Bob Snodgrass mentioned that women are better on the Purdue Pegboard test of fine motor speed. I don’t know if this counts as gender studies.
Dylan, I don’t know, either, whether gender science regards all the studies about various test results as part of their domain. My guess is that they don’t, at least not directly, but I may be wrong.
There are other tests in which women or girls consistently test better such as perceptive speed. There is even a different three dimensional test in which women perform better than men, but it has never attracted the same kind of attention as the tests that are always discussed.
More generally, I wonder how these tests were initially created, for what purposes and by whom. What would make the currently existing tests the most appropriate ones? Maybe we don’t have the tests that would really predict whatever the tests are trying to predict?
Then of course none of these tests measures all the different aspects of intelligence in the real world, assuming that we could all agree on just one definition of intelligence.
Ring finger–doesn’t that also tell you if you’re a lesbian or not? :)
Seriously, the 3-D rotation only matters when you get to multivariable calculus, and even then can be helped through computer diagrams. Mmmm, technology….
The thing about the motor speed studies is that the write-ups strike me as concilliatory in tone. Like, “Well, you’re not as bright, but you broads are quick.” The ugly truth is that the skills set aside for women to excel at are almost always ones that can quickly devalued by the culture at large. Better verbal skills=gossipy women. Better motor skills=better housekeepers.
I remember in college I was forever playing racing video games with my male friends. I was really good–out of a dozen or so players in rotation on the racing game, I was #1 or #2. And they were always trying to explain away my rapid response skills, because as we *all know*, women have inferior motor skills and can’t possibly compete with their betters at video games. But clearly I could compete and was better.
Long story, short point. My point is that whenever men and women are placed in direct competition in a field where winning carries some prestige and less shit work, women’s “natural” abilities will be disparaged every time. If it had been a floor-mopping contest, I doubt “everyone” would know that women had slower motor skills.
Carol Tavris’s book The Mismeasure of Woman does a fine job in showing how quickly preliminary results get blown up into Gender Facts. (She’s also an equal-opportunity skeptic; she skewers bad research favoring women as well as that favoring men.)
I once had a great guest history lecturer as an undergrad. Before she even began her lecture, the guest speaker asked us all to keep our eyes on her and guestimate aloud what percentage of the class was female. The quickly shouted consensus was around 25%. She then asked us to look around and count the women. I was one of 3, in a class of around 35 students.
She went on to give what I recall being an interesting lecture, though I don’t remember a word of it. What I do remember is a group of us (mostly male) asking her afterwards about the initial gender question. She said she didn’t believe it herself, but she’d read a paper suggesting if you put as few as 2 women in a group, men would assume around a quarter of the group was female. At a quarter female, men would assume the ratios were about even, and between 30 -40%, men would assume they were outnumbered. She said she’d been doing quick real-world spot checks in her lectures, trying to keep people offguard so they wouldn’t have time to stop and actually count. She was understandably upset to report that, if anything, the paper she’d read understated the matter.
I can’t help but think of that lecture any time I read about studies which seem tailor made to prove the inferority of women. Given the pay, prestige, and social costs of being female, I am consistantly amazed by how threatened these “researchers” seem by women.
I don’t understand why the researcher was upset. My offhand hypothesis to explain the phenomenon is that in a non-threatening situation/environment, men are paying more attention to women around them, and deprecating the presence of other men as being less important. Ergo, over-estimating the number of women present when they can’t make an exact count.
The studies don’t really matter even if they are true. You can’t judge a person’s abilities by membership in a group.
Even if a flawless study showed that on average men did better than women on X (and I’m not saying any sutdy shows such a thing), that doesn’t mean every man is better than every woman at X. There may be (probably are) women who are better than 98% of the men at X.
The purpose of these studies is, in my opinion, to protect the sensibilities of men who are lousy at X and in that sense these studies are inherently political, as someone earlier suggested.
Because the fact is most men and women are pathetic at any of map reading, spatial visualization. And furthermore, these studies will probably be used to backslide girls out of high school math and science that is not exceptionally difficult even for people in high school.
Anyone, man or woman, who displays any acuity in these fields should be encourgaged to pursue them. These studies exist to re-establish a boys club.
THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL
Whets the big deal? Either it’s true or it’s not. If I say “men are taller than women” well that’s generally true but it still leaves many millions of women taller than many millions of men. Suppose females on average do better at language and worse at math and science. Suppose another stereotype is true, that women are better at multitasking than men and men are better focusing. What is wrong with that? Language, communication, and multitasking are all important. Even if its true we can’t predict where an individual will end up in the continuum of mathematical ability and it still leaves plenty of outliers to become fine scientists and engineers.
With environmental science (global warming and the like), aids research, evolution, gender and racial science, stem cell research, far too much science is involved with politics and vice-versa. Faith based world views (religious and secular) or political considerations should have no part in finding the truth. Maybe there is no difference in innate gender mathematical ability but the that way we teach math benefits how boys think more than girls. That might be useful information. Maybe gender based bias and discrimination have a lot to do with it. It may not be a pretty process, but the truth will all come out in the end if we let the scientific process do its thing without political interference. Really, a lot of criticism surrounding this issue (not necessarily here on this blog) sounds a little like Christian fundamentalists upset at science looking for answers we shouldn’t know.
So tell me, Larry, which area of science is not political or tainted by a world view (religious or secular)?
Sara: “So tell me, Larry, which area of science is not political or tainted by a world view (religious or secular)?”
Other than the cost of research, particle physics, astrophysics? Maybe topology, fluid mechanics, or mineralogy? I don’t know of one for sure. I am not suggesting that science can be completely untainted (although that’s the ideal), but rather the difference of the degree of taint from astrophysics to stem cell research or environmental science is enormous.
The thing is, Larry, science isn’t separable from the social and cultural context in which it is situated. That doesn’t mean it’s invalid, or doesn’t provide important knowledge, but rather that how we do science and how we interpret its results is often put through mental filters that we get from our surroundings. Hence, our research agendas can themselves should be subject to critical inquiry. Consider the following statement (borrowed from a reader of another blog):
“Perhaps innate differences between White and Negro physiology can explain the unfortunate Negroid affinity for crack cocaine.”
Granted, this is an outrageous example, but it’s intended to show the cultural assumptions we sometimes put in our research questions. If you look at the historical evidence, you’ll see that questions couched in similar terms as these were considered serious science within the past century.
I don’t think anyone is seriously trying to stifle science, but rather trying to raise awareness of where science can lead when the research itself is (perhaps) biased. You indicate, for example, that knowledge of “innate differences” can lead to, say, different educational practices. A fair point. You will, of course, need to be prepared to argue against those who, using the same set of data, will argue that in fact because these differences are innate, they can’t be changed socially, and that the social order must reflect biological inclinations.
Science should stand on its own regardless of the politics or personalities behind it.
The problem with these studies is that they prove nothing, but imply everything. How do you know that girls worse performance wasn’t due to environmental factors? Frankly, science can’t explain how the brain even generates thoughts and retains memories, so these studies are at best clumsy statistics that don’t even attempt to control for the myriad of other variables (like race, childhood environment, etc.) that might influence the outcome.
Larry, political equivocation is even present in your comment.
Suppose another stereotype is true, that women are better at multitasking than men and men are better focusing.
Why do you assume that each sex has its strengths? How is multitasking even a thing worth studying? Who decides? Did people multitask in the 17th century? Did people drive? These are studies of meaningless things.
And, again, the argument is pointless for high school and lower math and science. Those subjects are so rudimentary that anyone should be able to grasp them. But studies like this give parents and kids alike an excuse. “Little Suzy got a C in algebra? Well, girls aren’t as good at math as boys are anyway and she’s never going to need it, so it doesn’t really matter.” Kids are quick to rationalize failure.
I remember kids in high school simply assuming that the Asian kids would top the curve in math as if they had some magical power. So they said stupid things like “I got the highest grade for a white kid.” No, loser, you’re mediocre, full stop.
Believe me, if women’s mass media (TV shows, magazines, etc) made women in science cool or sexy, the statistics would change.
THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL
Politics is the business of deciding what we will do with the resources at our disposal. Everything humans do is political.
The virtue of science is that scientists are supposed to state their biases as clearly as they can at the beginning of an experiment, and put those biases to the test. Denying that scientists have any biases amounts to denying the scientific method the chance to operate properly.
The problem is that it’s bad science that clings in public memory because it “confirms” what people want to believe–that women are dumber than men.
Foolishowl: “The virtue of science is that scientists are supposed to state their biases as clearly as they can at the beginning of an experiment, and put those biases to the test. Denying that scientists have any biases amounts to denying the scientific method the chance to operate properly.”
No, the virtue of science is that it doesn’t matter what the biases are as long as the science is done properly. The scientific process doesn’t end at the conclusion of a study. The science should stand or fall on its own merit through the peer review process. Political carping about the merits of the research, or what the results mean to the public at large, whether “it ‘confirms’ what people want to believe”, are all secondary questions as to the truth of the hypothesis.
No, the virtue of science is that it doesn’t matter what the biases are as long as the science is done properly. The scientific process doesn’t end at the conclusion of a study. The science should stand or fall on its own merit through the peer review process. Political carping about the merits of the research, or what the results mean to the public at large, whether “it ‘confirms’ what people want to believe”, are all secondary questions as to the truth of the hypothesis.
Well, you are right but not completely so. For example, many of the things done in the seventies and eighties have ultimately been proved wrong by others. But it takes a long time, especially if the researchers are all from one side of the political spectrum initially. And during that long time the false results affect how people think and act.
Also, the questions we ask to begin with are determined by the societal values around us. Certain questions are simply not asked, and therefore science has very little to say about such questions. What this means to me is that we need to quarantee people with very different societal views to do the same fields in science, and this is not really happening today.
I have in mind the 1970s theories about prehistoric men as hunters and women as essentially prehistoric housewives. Only when more women entered the field we got studies about the importance of gathering in the diets of various African tribes, and only then did we find that gathering is at least as important as hunting and in many cases more important in providing the necessary nutrients. But this idea was not something the early researchers thought about because they were affected by the then-prevailing ideas of the sexual division of labor among middle-class Americans.
Interesting post, Echidne, and nice to see you here.
One thing I’ve noticed is that studies like the two you mention and comments like those made by Summers tend to focus on things that men do better than women, rather than the other way ’round. Women supposedly test lower than men, on average, in innate mathematical ability, and Summers argues that this is why Harvard has virtually no women on its Science faculty. But men supposedly test lower than women, on average, in innate language skills — and yet I notice that Summers isn’t using this to argue that all the men in the English department should lose their jobs. The inferiority of women is innate and absolute. The inferiority of men can be readily overriden by cultural factors, such as the long standing assumption that only men of a certain class should get Harvard professorships..
Note, I’m not arguing that men are inferior in language skills — just that they typically test that way.
Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology, has an article on the Summers controversy at http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/kleinfeld200501250746.asp
She makes the interesting point that men who score very high on mathematical aptitude on the SAT don’t generally score in the same range on verbal aptitude. Women who score high on mathematical aptitude, however, do tend to score high in the verbal arena.
Assuming the truth of the proposition, there is an obvious implication: high-math-scoring women have a greater range of choices than do high-math-scoring men. The guy with a Math 750 Verbal 600 can be a professor of engineering, but he will have a tougher row to hoe to make it as a philosopher; the woman with Math 750 Verbal 750 can do either one. Assuming the interest of the sexes is split evenly among all possible topics, we would expect to see fewer women choosing a numeric track simply because of the other opportunities that they have.
Kleinfeld also notes that men tend to cluster at both ends of the mathematical aptitude curve. More geniuses, more dummies; women have a normal distribution. I don’t know why that is observed for math in particular and not other traits.
My own experience in academic circles tells me that the most powerful factor at work in things like professor selection (and PhD training) is the personal relationships between people. I can’t claim to know, of course, but I would lay good money that the primary reason for a deficit of women in the male-dominated fields is neither genetics nor upbringing nor systematic bias nor discrimination, though these things may all factor in. Instead, it’s the simple fact that like calls to like; geeky engineering guys are likely to mentor and foster the career of other geeky engineering guys.
People should hope I’m right; genetics are hard to overcome, systematic bias is a bitch, and discrimination is both pervasive and probably ineradicable. But selection bias is relatively easy to fix; just increase the rewards for recruiting and retention of the target group until a rough parity is reached, and let economics compensate for selection bias. (“I’d LIKE to mentor a pimply Star Trek nerd boy, but that huge fellowship money would let me get a higher caliber pimply Star Trek nerd girl, and she’d do a better job of doing all my grading…I’ll do it!”) Once you get parity, you can drop the incentives, and let selection bias take over again.
Instead, it’s the simple fact that like calls to like; geeky engineering guys are likely to mentor and foster the career of other geeky engineering guys.
That is systematic bias, Robert.
Nope. A systematic bias is a bias that is endemic to the system itself, whether intentionally or not, not to avatars or representatives thereof. If you shoot all the male profs and hire a new slate that has a different gender mix, you haven’t changed the system, just its members – but the total outcomes from the various selection biases will change.
A school that requires all PhD candidates to bench press 300 pounds as part of their doctoral defense would be an example of a systematic bias. The resulting discrimination is part of the system, not a contingent outcome from one member of the system’s whim. Shooting all the professors and replacing them won’t change the bench-press policy; it’s part of the system, not tied to individual members thereof.
It might be possible to (weakly) argue that selection bias is systematic if everybody in the system has the same selection bias, but everybody doesn’t.
No, Robert, it’s still systematic bias. The first half of your statement is based on false logic. Getting rid of an entire faculty of male engineering professors would lead to another generation of male engineering professors. The ranks of engineering graduate students and adjunct professors, the pool from which the new faculty search would draw, are mostly male. And those male grad students are encouraged to attend university by their male professors. “Encouraged” in this sense can mean a lot of things – taken under a senior professors wing; given autonomy in experiments; granted authorship in a journal; kept informed about the newest developments in the field; told which graduate schools are best for one’s career. Thus, women and people of color are locked out, and will continue to be until the university puts in place mentoring programs and other incentives that get more women into the sciences and reward them for their hard work. Discrimination, which is a synonym for systematic bias, takes many forms, and even good-hearted, well-meaning people fall into it. Discrimination is often institutionalized, and when it becomes part of an institution, it forms its own culture and capacity to continue itself. Tearing down the cultural and social roots of discrimination is a much more difficult, complex task.
Discrimination, systematic bias, and selection bias are all very different things. These are statistical terms with relatively fixed meanings. Discrimination is not systematic bias is not selection bias. There are no Albanian nationals working for me because I dislike Albanians; there are no Albanian nationals working at HypothetiCorp because HypothetiCorp lost its ability to sponsor H-1B visas and thus has no non-citizen employees; there are few Albanian nationals working in Boston pubs because Irish pubs use an apprentice system where people mentor their friends, and there aren’t many Albanians in Beantown. Different causes, different reasons, different outcomes.
It’s certainly possible to use these words as shorthand for one another, particularly in casual conversation, but there isn’t really any point; the distinctions between them are sometimes fine but almost always meaningful. The causes and the potential actions in response to a discrimination problem are different than the causes and the potential actions in response to other sorts of problems.
Your vivid, and alas all too real, descriptive scenario is a textbook example of selection bias, and the methods you recommend (mentoring and incentives) are in my view the exact correct remedies for such biases. They are largely pointless and may even be counterproductive for other forms of bias. Consider; would it have made much difference if the University of Alabama had opened a mentoring office for black college students in 1940? Precious little, because the problem then was rank discrimination.
Consider; would it have made much difference if the University of Alabama had opened a mentoring office for black college students in 1940?
False dilemma.
No claim of bipolar exclusivity, therefore, no false dilemma.
Your hypothetical worlds where blacks and women run everything and women abort during labor are amusing to me, Robert, but don’t really address the issues at hand.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, Amanda.
I recall from my college experiences that unlike some other courses of study, the science department made a point of “thinning the herd” down to a smaller, more elite group of students right off the bat. The introductory courses in biology, which is my expertise, were by far more difficult than introductory courses in other disciplines, and actually harder than many of the advanced biology courses. Dropout rates for these courses were huge. The gauntlet was meant to weed out certain students ahead of time, I’d imagine, so that professors don’t waste space in more intimately-sized anatomy/physiology labs down the road on students who aren’t serious about their college studies or capable of getting through. Anyway, what I noticed in the process was, from the enormous number of students in a more-or-less 50-50 gendered introductory pool, the diminished population of science majors by the time I was an upperclassman was more like 70-30, or worse. The other thing I noticed, looking back, was that every single introductory professor, TA, and advisor I encountered at my school was male. It makes a difference – it wasn’t until I was in my third year (and had more female professors) that I discovered the benefits of office visits and individual time spent with professors, TAs and tutors, something that most of the male students had figured out long ago. I would have had a much easier time as a freshman with this support, I’m sure. Female mentors make a difference. Even when I switched advisors to a female chemistry professor (not even in my major course of study!) my college experience improved vastly.
I find it infuriating that a man who has allowed his female faculty to dwindle (and also his minority faculty, though you don’t hear it mentioned much) continuously over the last few years (and I live in Cambridge, so I’m pretty familiar with this subject) wants to complain about the lack of female scientists. There is no shortage of brilliant women who would love to be hired at his school. It sends a distinct message to the students of who is wanted and who is not.
Robert, you know better.
Nope. Clueless, here.
I agree completely with Amanda about Robert’s hypotheses. The University of Alabama didn’t have a mentoring office for black students in 1940. In fact, the University of Alabama rejected black applicants because they were black. I have a friend who teaches at the Law School there and has seen the actual letters that read, “Dear Mr. Jones: Thank you for your application. Unfortunately, you are a Negro student, but we do not allow Negroes to take classes at our institution.”
So what’s the point of bringing up a hypothetical situation that did not exist or could ever exist? Really, now. It seems to me that a mentoring office at the University of Alabama would have made a huge difference to the black students, as they do today in colleges around the country, at least in telling the students that they are indeed wanted and deserved to be there. Even if the market for sciences is still dominated by men, mentoring and other incentives change the employment dynamic in the future and encourage women to succeed in the present.
I know, as I am a graduate of one of those mentoring programs. Although my department is predominantly male and white, I would not have gotten this far without the help of mentors and the money of the university to fund the program. The academy is still overwhelmingly male and white, but there are many more women professors and professors of color now than there were 20 years ago. I find this pretty impressive, and I would posit that my female students now think so too.
Exactly, Maria. The problem in 1940 was not the same as the problem in 1980 was not the same as the problem in 2020. An idea that makes an outstanding contribution in 1980 – a mentoring office for black students – would make no sense in 1940. Because the problem is different. Discrimination is not the same thing as selection bias, is not the same thing as systemic bias.
If you want to actually improve bad situations, it is of primary importance to accurately understand the bad situation.
The entire mentality where one can walk around, calmly proclaiming oneself actually, literally superior–and therefore more deserving of a good life–to other human beings is totally alien to me.
I’d guess it’s alien to you because the option isn’t open to you at the present time. If the wheel turns and you become one of the lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view), then it will seem as natural as eating cherry pie. Then you’ll get to see whether you actually have moral virtue and can decline to take up the dominant position, or if you instead have always possessed the virtue of the untempted.
Of course a mentoring office for blacks and women at university would have made a difference in 1940, if for no other reason than to undermine rank discrimination. But my question is – why exactly would you bring up a mentoring office as an example of anything?
And another thing – the University of Alabama no longer sends black applicants a rejection letter basing the cause of their rejection on their race, yes. So what? Lots of other ways are found to reject or limit the number of capable women and people of color in academics. Like asking women if they’re planning to have children, or asking them who’s taking care of their children now. Or asking blacks how much they study and if they’re the first member of their families to attend college. The language of discrimination may have changed, but the intent is still the same.
And the difference between discrimination and selection bias and systemic bias are all matters of degrees. But they end at the same point – few women and people of color in academics. It’s all about dragging heels and wasting time.
My reason for bringing it up as an example is obvious from the context of the thread. Go read it.
A mentoring office for nonexistent students would be both useless and stupid. You cannot build a roof before you build a foundation. You can insist that people deserve housing all day and all night; if you put up the roof before you lay the foundation, you’re just wasting time and resources, and adding to the homelessness rather than mitigating it.
The belief that discrimination, selection bias, and systemic bias are the same thing is counter to observed evidence, and counterproductive. If you genuinely believe that the effort to accurately observe the world and make intelligent decisions is simply an excuse for dragging heels, then you are welcome to that view, but you will not achieve much success in advancing an agenda.
–> A mentoring office for nonexistent students would be both useless and stupid. You cannot build a roof before you build a foundation. You can insist that people deserve housing all day and all night; if you put up the roof before you lay the foundation, you’re just wasting time and resources, and adding to the homelessness rather than mitigating it.<-- Yes, that's exactly my point. In your analogy of a mentoring office for black students at the University of Alabama, you conveniently jumped over the fact that the University of Alabama didn't allow black students to attend. That's the larger point, the more important point. Because it seems to me that before discrediting the usefulness of mentoring, we'd actually have to address the fact that many students are being turned away from even taking the classes they might excel at. As many women and people of color are turned away from pursuing professions in the sciences. Besides, the students to which you alluded in your analogy weren't nonexistent. They very much existed, and usually attended Tuskegee University, Spelman College, Oakwood College, Tougaloo College, and other historically black colleges and universities. (And a mentoring and guidance system also existed at these institutions.) And today, many women students and students of color make similar options - they go where they are accepted and make do with the best they can, even if means that their careers take a different path than they planned. No, we're no longer in a country in which universities put in writing that persons of color and women are not welcome. However, a system of bias, a discriminatory system, still exists, and it creates the exact same environment and carries out the exact same intent. And for the record, that the academy has only about 20% women and about 5% people of color on the tenure track indicates that something much more than selective bias or systemic bias is at work. This is the source of much anger at Larry Summers recent statements about women. It shows pretty clear that many people still don't believe women deserve, or are not capable of handling, a seat at the table. And another thing - at no point did I write that discrimination, selection bias or whatever bias were the same thing. I wrote that the differences were matters of degrees. We can argue about the size of the degrees, but it seems to me that that discussion indicates foot dragging and time wasting, instead of attacking and abolishing the structures of gender discrimination.
My goodness, the page swallowed up the rest of the my comment.
Anyway, snipped piece of Robert’s earlier post was exactly my point. The analogy of a mentoring office at the University of Alabama jumped over the point that no black students were allowed to attend the university in the first place. That’s the larger point, the much more important point. Before discrediting the usefulness of mentoring, it’s important to acknowledge and examine the structures of discrimination and sexist attitutudes that discourage students from taking classes or attending universities at which they might excel. Furthermore, the black students that Robert referred to in his analogy weren’t nonexistent. They very much existed. And when they were rejected by Bama, they attended Tuskegee, Tougaloo, Hampton, Spelman, and Oakwood colleges. Similar to what black students of 70+ years ago, women students and other students of color turn to the universities and careers where they will excel, despite the fact that their choices in careers and colleges have been reduced or taken away altogether.
No, American universities and colleges no longer put in writing that women and students of color are not welcome. But institutional attitudes still exist that perpetuate gender discrimination, that thrive on gender discrimination, and allow for gender discrimination to take on a life of its own. Much of the anger directed at Larry Summers comes from the experience that yet another professor justified why women didn’t have a seat at the table, without actually looking at the structures of discrimination that keep women and people of color locked out. And when only 20% of women and 5% of people of color hold tenure track positions at America’s universities and colleges, something much more insidious than selection and systemic biases are at work.
And another thing – at no point did I write that discrimination, selection bias and whatever other biases were the same thing. I wrote that the differences between them were matters of degrees. We can argue about the size of the degrees too, but that would indicate, again, that this is more foot dragging and time wasting. Our energies are much better spent examining the structures of discrimination for the purpose of attacking and abolishing it.
The refusal to give Robert even the tinest benefit of the doubt on this thread has resulted in some less-than-stellar comments, in my opinion. In general, trying to read other people’s comments in the most charitable light (rather than in the most negative light) leads to higher-quality discussions.
I don’t understand why making the distinction between discrimination, selection bias and systematic bias is contrary to “examining the structures of discrimination for the purpose of attacking and abolishing it.”
On the other hand, I’m not sure that I understand the distinctions Robert is making, either. If selection bias consists of white male professors choosing to mentor other white males, what is the difference between that and discrimination?
Also, Robert says that systematic bias is harder to fix than selection bias. That seems counter-intuitive to me. It’s far easier to change a system from the top-down than it is to change people’s attitudes and comfort levels. For instance, an institution that wants to hire more qualified people of color can make a systematic decision to not just advertise through word-of-mouth, but to also actively seek out trade publications read by people of color to advertise in.
But if the institution’s experienced employees are genuinely more comfortable and therefore more welcoming and mentoring to white men – what Robert calls selection bias – that’s much harder to change.
It depends on your definition of “harder”.
Selection bias can be changed through demographic change. If you have 99% white male professors, selection bias is all that is operative, and you want more balance, you (the administration) can bring in people of different backgrounds and alter the selection bias problem by the ordinary exercise of your administrative power to hire.
But then you have to wait for twenty years for the new professors to mentor students and for those students to wend their way through the system and become professors, etc.
So you don’t have to exert a lot of coercive force to make the change, but the change does take a long time to propagate. Plus, you don’t have to convince your existing staff to adapt any new world views or take any action.
Whereas, for systematic bias, you probably do have to do that kind of evangelization. Which is faster but also harder.
I guess correcting these various biases really depends on what kind of skills you have and what kind of work is harder for you to get accomplished in the particular environment.
Selection bias can be changed through demographic change.
I apologize. You were the *last* person I expected to present a powerful argument for affirmative action. ;)
An anecdote from my personal experience in the academy – I’ve sat in on hiring meetings where discrimination, selection bias, and systematic bias were debated for hours. A recent hiring committee for a new position went over the applicants’ cvs and weighed each one on its merits. But we also considered how each applicant would improve the department’s position on confronting gender and racial imbalance. Our university is pretty bad off when it came to gender and racial imbalances. One applicant, a white male from the Ivy League, had a well-known white male professor as his advisor and recommender, who was also a notorious womanizer and sexist. Do we take the advisor’s recommendation with a grain of salt? Is the white applicant’s success due to the advisor’s selection bias? And what about our university’s institutionalized discrimination – what were we going to do as a department to attract more women students and students of color, even though our university had no maternity leave policy and hadn’t hired a woman in our department in twenty years, prior to hiring me?
Other applicants were women of color, white women, and men of color, but none with the cache of the white male applicant in question. Still they had great applications and interesting projects. Should we bring them, too, for interviews, though their credentials, at at first glance were not as impressive as the white male’s credentials? The hiring committee wished aloud that we had a woman of color from an Ivy League and a potential Pulitzer Prize winner in the pool, because it would have made things so much easier. In the end, we ended up bringing in the white male, a white woman, and a man of color for the interviews. And after another round of debates, we chose the white male fpr the job. As a consolation point, one of my colleagues said that we could try another search in a couple of years, and maybe we could get another great bunch of applicants. But right now, we needed the expertise of the white male, his project, the courses he could teach, and the students he would bring in. The other applicants just didn’t have as much promise to excel in the position we offered.
All that debate meant nothing in the end. Our university’s institutionalized discrimination gave the white male applicant a leg up, as did his advisor’s selection bias. We started off seeking to confront gender and racial discrimination and hoping to hire a woman or a person of color. We never even got to the point of cosidering remedies selection or systematic bias. Because the hiring committee and the department went for what they knew and understood best, and they weren’t going to take chances by hiring unknown quantities, like women or people of color.
That’s the point I wish to make. I concede that I was hasty in dismissing Robert’s suggestions of debating different types of biases. However, my own experience (and the experience of my colleagues at other institutions) indicate a different reality from Robert’s. Before we even compared and contrasted selection bias and systematic bias, our department had to admit that discrimination was a problem and actually hire different types of people. And, like I said before, my department still considers women and people of color too foreign to hire more than one every five to ten years. So, maybe Robert, you’re right. Our department doesn’t need a mentoring program for women and people of color, because we don’t have enough professors and students of color to establish a program. Still, our department uses this as the excuse, without actually looking at the structures of discrimination that got the department to that point in the first place.
Well, not to deflect your warm thoughts with my shield of cold prickliness, but I’m not presenting an argument for or against anything. This particular type of affirmative action is the technically appropriate approach to reducing selection bias in other people. Whether reducing selection bias through external means is a good idea or not is an entirely separate question.
Generally, I don’t think it is. I think it does more harm than good. Correcting for selection bias in this way is technically effective but it also perpetuates the stereotypes that were themselves the source of the discrimination that led to the situation where selection bias was predominant. It’s also not good for the minority group members who end up being perceived as tools of policy, rather than being perceived primarily as human individuals.
The way I would choose to counter selection bias is individual; individual people should struggle with their own bias and behave differently. Unfortunately, that’s hard, and unsatisfying, and it doesn’t make for a good slogan to chant outside the administration building while demanding more Hispanic professors.
Part of the point of chanting outside the faculty building is that it is part of a process in which those doing the chanting come to see themselves as agents of change, rather than merely passive objects.
Yeah, activist-ism; activism for the sake of the emotional glow it produces. A waste of time, IMO, but it’s not my lifespan to burn, so go nuts.
(“Our chant has inexplicably failed to stop the war machine. What should we do now?” “I know! Giant papier mache heads!”)
Can’t be an agent of change without giant papier mache heads.
“Individual people should struggle with their own bias and behave differently”. Yes, Robert, but without that outside impetus (like the chanting), what is going to motivate these people to do that? What is even going to give them the idea that there is a problem? To the white male professor mentoring a white male student, there is no problem; he’s mentoring, the student is learning–no problem! But if there are student groups agitating for a more structured and inclusive mentoring system, so that they are not reliant on the whims of individual professors, then perhaps they might have an a-ha moment and think, “you know, I wonder why I’ve never mentored a woman? or a person of color? How do I do that, without coming off like the Great White Father?” And if the university has an institutional structure for that white male professor to get involved with, he can do just that.
Activism isn’t just about feel-good activity, it is also about visibility. Those students chanting that you are so quick to dismiss, are finding out that they aren’t alone, and that they have allies. In the academy, white males have always had allies. Not so for women and others of color.
La Lubu, that is something conservatives grapple with in self-reflection.
We are not, by and large, the activists for social change. When we are activist, it is usually on a rearguard basis – trying to get abortion back into the political arena where it used to be, for example.
But in retrospect, we often see social change that we agree with, once it has happened. We wouldn’t be the ones who instigated it, usually. Although there were plenty of Republicans involved in the civil rights movement, for example, none of them were conservatives qua conservatives. The conservatives generally took a wait-and-see attitude, or worse.
So while we don’t think much of activism, and we don’t usually do it ourselves, we do see its value to society, at least sometimes. I suppose that means I shouldn’t be automatically dismissive of chanting-n-vigiling.
With that said, let me draw a line. Going out to march for civil rights was incredibly courageous. People were getting killed for standing up like that.
Going out to march on a campus these days, however, isn’t really the same thing. It’s an exercise in ego, or so it seems – “look how good we are!” I guess it’s possible for that experience to make someone think of themselves as a “change agent” – but my experience with such marches and the like is that people aren’t all that interested in change. They just like the feeling they get from being in a march, or from the press attention.
Maybe that’s the type of conservative you are Robert, but that’s just you. Other conservatives think quite differently about public activism, and are not content to determine the finer points of their principles in private. If African Americans had waited for all Americans, not just conservatives, to grapple personally with civil rights for people of color and women, this country would still have segregated schools, trains, buses, and other public facilities. And the country would be worse off for it. In fact, African Americans waited an entire century after the Civil War for Americans to recognize their civil rights. And for their waiting, they got racial segregation and discrimination.
Nah, conservatives during the civil rights era thought that civil rights marchers were bad people. Conservatives now think that activists are out of their mind. As Robert said, after the activists have made change, then conservatives pretend that they agreed all along. So I say ignore them.
So while we don’t think much of activism, and we don’t usually do it ourselves
Oh foo. What do you think those “Meet you at the Flag” get-togethers are? Were the anti-busing demonstrations not ‘activism’? Were the judges who rewrote forfeiture law from the bench in the 1990s (because it was The War On Drugs, see, so it’s OK) not activist judges? Was Operation Rescue a myth? Has the NRA stopped issuing postcards for its members to send en masse to their Congressman or Congresswoman?
I’ll buy that “Hey hey, ho ho, capital gains tax has got to go” is unlikely to be heard ringing out at the Heritage Foundation anytime soon, but still.
There’s more value to activism than Robert is admitting.
Part of the trouble with elections is that voting is the lowest possible form of political action, and elections are used to demobilize political activity. What’s the message of an election? None of us are political agents — only Kerry and Bush are.
Real change comes from below. It doesn’t matter who the president of the United States is, when your problem is that your boss is hitting on you. What matters is whether you’ve got any allies who will back you up in resisting your boss. Laws and politicians don’t make any difference if you don’t think you’ve got any way to change your own life.
Political demonstrations serve several purposes: they make it clear that there’s widespread support for a position; they make it clear to the participants that they are not alone in their beliefs; they teach people that they are, themselves, agents of change.
No, the big demonstrations against the Iraq war didn’t stop the war. It took *years* of demonstrations in the US, and a determined resistance by the Vietnamese, and resistance and even open rebellion in the US military, before the US ruling class had to back down.
But the demonstrations against the war in Iraq were not without effect. I’ve met lots of people who’d never protested in their lives before, who were in those demonstrations, whose views were shaped by what they saw and heard in those demonstrations. The presidential election, on the other hand, in which people were presented a choice between one pro-war candidate, and another pro-war candidate, had no effect whatsoever in ending the war — except dismantling most of that nascent antiwar movement.