He has deigned to give a few carefully formed comments on the hullabaloo that ensued from the careless statements of Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, at a conference about how to get more women into the hard sciences. I blogged about this earlier if you are interested in the details. For now I want to talk to Professor Pinker, because he is an interesting man to talk to.
He’s a warrior on President Summer’s term, a warrior who wields his keyboard deftly and smartly. Listen to this:
Summers did not, of course, say that women are “natively inferior,” that “they just can’t cut it,” that they suffer “an inherent cognitive deficit in the sciences,” or that men have “a monopoly on basic math ability,” as many academics and journalists assumed. Only a madman could believe such things.
I remember hearing a radio interview with Pinker when his book The Blank Slate came out, and he used the same madman-argument to clear the deck of any accusation that he might be an essentialist. As few researchers would call themselves madmen, this clever trick means that we can now dispense with any exploration of Professor Pinker’s own possible biases, and can go on to study the biases of his opponents. Like this:
Conservative columnists have had a field day pointing to the Harvard hullabaloo as a sign of runaway political correctness at elite universities. Indeed, the quality of discussion among the nation’s leading scholars and pundits is not a pretty sight. Summers’s critics have repeatedly mangled his suggestion that innate differences might be one cause of gender disparities (a suggestion that he drew partly from a literature review in my book, The Blank Slate) into the claim that they must be the only cause. And they have converted his suggestion that the statistical distributions of men’s and women’s abilities are not identical to the claim that all men are talented and all women are not–as if someone heard that women typically live longer than men and concluded that every woman lives longer than every man. Just as depressing is an apparent unfamiliarity with the rationale behind political equality, as when Hopkins sarcastically remarked that, if Summers were right, Harvard should amend its admissions policy, presumably to accept fewer women. This is a classic confusion between the factual claim that men and women are not indistinguishable and the moral claim that we ought to judge people by their individual merits rather than the statistics of their group.
Conservative columnists always have a field day. If there is no reason for one, they invent it. But Pinker’s summary of the issues is partial: he fails to address all the reasoned responses from feminists and progressives, and he fails to mention the truly outrageous statements on many of the anti-feminist and conservative websites and blogs. This makes the unreasonableness appear solely something that takes place among the liberals and feminists, not something that might even infect careful researchers such as Professor Pinker.
In any case, our careful researcher then goes on to summarize various studies which demonstrate gender differences on the average. He doesn’t summarize the studies which don’t support these findings or the studies which address the whole question of what we are actually trying to measure with the various tests. All this reads “biased” in my book.
Pinker’s supporting examples of evidence are interesting. Take this one, for instance:
Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, “Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.”) To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.
Here we are to replace scientific evidence with anecdotes about what people talk about in parties or with one person’s confessions. I know of a six-year old girl who took the family iron apart to find out how it works, and then couldn’t put it back together. Who knows how many other things she had examined before she was caught in the act? But this is anecdotal evidence, and not to be admitted if it comes from my side of the aisle, the unreasonable one, the one which believes (despite all evidence to the contrary) that women and men are exactly identical at birth.
This is all rubbish, of course. There are no feminists who believe that women and men are biologically exactly the same, though there seem to be a very large number of anti-feminists who never see the most obvious difference between the two sexes which is the fact that women give birth. Anti-feminists want to have more science to find out what really distinguishes the sexes, all the while letting their eyes glide over the pregnant bellies of their coworkers or the countless young women pushing prams outside.
The reason for this bias is of course the political importance of gender differences. Anyone who believes that men and women should not be treated equally must base this belief on some form of innate differences. Feminists know this, and that is why the history of biased Victorian gender science is important to keep in mind. Pinker gives a nod to this argument, but then goes on glibly to place total trust in the newer generation of findings. Nobody, but nobody can be impartial in this field, and Pinker is not the sole exception here. He has an axe to grind, and that is to protect the views on which he has based his own research and writing. I also have an axe, of course, but you can see what it is and how sharply honed it always stays.
The differences that gender science may find are going to be put to political uses pretty fast. Even if the results are based on faulty methods and data, the harm the political applications will do is real. This is the reason why it is so important to insist on transparency and high methodical competency from all practitioners of gender science, and why it is very important not to have a value bias among this group towards one sex or the other. Currently there is such a general bias, as even a cursory reading of the studies reveals, and that is one of slight misogyny. In other words, not all science is somehow above politics or even above cheating, and all science should be approached with a very critical mind.
But Pinker is not too concerned about this. He does hint that he would love the world to be fairer and more equal if only facts would let that be the case, and he repeatedly reminds us how wrong discrimination is, before he goes on to tell us about the dangers of reverse discrimination if we ignore gender science.
Actually, I agree with Pinker on one of his arguments: that we should encourage good science on innate gender differences. The real question is how to do this. How would Pinker create a study which would tell us, for once and for all, what the real cognitive differences between men and women are? We actually don’t have the tools to do this today, and this is the main reason why I find Pinker’s elegant impartiality so insulting. He’s willing to settle for JustSo stories from evolutionary psychology in lieue of proper genetic biology:
Since most sex differences are small and many favor women, they don’t necessarily give an advantage to men in school or on the job. But Summers invoked yet another difference that may be more consequential. In many traits, men show greater variance than women, and are disproportionately found at both the low and high ends of the distribution. Boys are more likely to be learning disabled or retarded but also more likely to reach the top percentiles in assessments of mathematical ability, even though boys and girls are similar in the bulk of the bell curve. The pattern is readily explained by evolutionary biology. Since a male can have more offspring than a female–but also has a greater chance of being childless (the victims of other males who impregnate the available females)–natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males. That is because the advantage of an exceptional daughter (who still can have only as many children as a female can bear and nurse in a lifetime) would be canceled out by her unexceptional sisters, whereas an exceptional son who might sire several dozen grandchildren can more than make up for his dull childless brothers. One doesn’t have to accept the evolutionary explanation to appreciate how greater male variability could explain, in part, why more men end up with extreme levels of achievement.
I’m not an evolutionary psychologist, only a goddess, but I have trouble with this myth of our prehistory. It’s a very popular myth these days, this idea of the happy male who casts around buckets of high-quality sperm while the careful and coy females tend their one or two babies with great care. For one thing, a fertilized egg is not the same as a child brought to a point where that child can himself or herself breed further. Prehistory must not have been an easy life for pregnant women, and I find it very hard to believe that the buckets of sperm all took so easily as this myth explains. It’s at least worth considering whether the men who stuck around one or two women got a greater yield by providing food, protection, sex, childcare and friendship. They also would have kept some of the bucket brigade away.
For another thing, this myth doesn’t explain what Pinker seems to think it should. If indeed only the most technically minded men somehow managed to procreate, the men who do so poorly in mathematical tests that they are at the other end of the distribution should not exist. How come did their genes sneak in, too? No, for Pinker’s explanation to be correct we should not observe greater male variability at both tails of the distribution.
I could go on, but I hope that the gist of my complaints is visible by now. What angers me about Pinker’s approach is his “holier-than-thou” pretense combined with some very sneaky biases. At least I actually am holier than any of you thous out there and my biases are all goddess-sized.
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(This is a cross-posting from my blog. I am going to give you something more unique later this week.)
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“How would Pinker create a study which would tell us, for once and for all, what the real cognitive differences between men and women are? We actually don’t have the tools to do this today”
Well actually we do – http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W4M-4F49582-2/2/2c7774d70e1aab4b87558171641f3cbb
Cogntive differences bewteen the sexes are well estblished and have been for a number of decades now.
That gender differnces are partly the result of males producing many sperm and women producing relatively fewer eggs is accepted wisdom in biology.
As for the allegation that this field of study is tinged with mysogeny, for which you provide no evidence, that would come as a suprise to the many women who work in the field.
Your critique of Pinker is overall uninformed and reliant on ad hominem attacks.
FYI: sock thief
It’s misogyny, not “mysogeny.”
any of you thous
“You” is already the plural of “thou”.
Hey we all read the book “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus right” What’s the BIG deal here?
Cogntive differences bewteen the sexes are well estblished and have been for a number of decades now.
I am not sure who disputes this. We are looking for the causes, which you address with…
That gender differnces are partly the result of males producing many sperm and women producing relatively fewer eggs is accepted wisdom in biology.
I do not doubt that it is. And that gender differnces are partly the result of children being raised by mothers while the distant father goes off to work is accepted wisdom in psychology. And that gender differnces are partly the result of patriarchy and the status of women in society is accepted wisdom in sociology. And that gender differnces are partly the result of the cultural beliefs and mythology that grew up in primitive tribes because males could go out hunting while women needed to tend the fields so they could nurse their children is accepted wisdom in anthropology. In a few years I’ll guess the fact that gender differnces are partly the result of rational time and resourse decisions made by individuals who can have children versus those made by those who cannot have children will be accepted wisdom in ecconomics.
If SETI is successful, we should just pay some alien scientists to study us and tell us what causes our gender differences.
The ‘buckets of sperm’ argument always seemed counter-intuitive to me. A female of any species is guaranteed to have her genetics passed along if she reproduces. Her concern is going to be finding the mate with the best traits to give her offspring, so it’s in her best interests to mate with a number of males. A male’s genetics only get passed along if he can impregnate a female, so it’s in his best interests to pick one, stick with her, and try to run off any other males that come along. At least, that’s how the “passing on the genes” thing looks to me. Which would make it the male who should be stable and devoted to the home life and the female who roams.
Current gender differences seem to me to be far more about upbringing than genetics. As for engineering, so few girls are actively encouraged to play with toys that will develop spatial perception, and the “men fix things” stereotype is so well implanted in our culture, that it’s no wonder girls don’t develop an interest in the field.
Hmm, I don’t agree with sock thief (and I’ve been quietly appreciating Echidne’s many thoughtful posts on this topic), but I am intrigued by this part of your (Echidne’s) commentary on Pinker:
Summers made no shortage of idiotic points, but his remarks about the greater variability among male intelligence at both ends of the spectrum weren’t among them; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they went virtually unaddressed by his critics in favour of his more inflammatory remarks. Here’s my question: if we (for the most part) reject an essentialist explanation of the far larger number of male (mathematical and scientific) geniuses in favour of one based on socialization, sexism, and systemic discrimination; then what accounts for the far larger number of male (mathematical and scientific) “dummies”?
I teach math, and I’ve observed that it’s my female students, far far more than my male students, who are under the impression that it is socially acceptable to remain completely ignorant about math. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this, and indeed it’s well-documented that girls, more than boys, are given permission from parents, teachers, and guidance counselors to avoid math classes and mathematical pursuits in general entirely. Why doesn’t this translate into large numbers of abysmal female scores on the math/science portion of standardized tests? Seems that the socialization explanation should result in a lower AVERAGE female scores, not just a higher standard deviation. At the same time, though, I can’t imagine a socialization explanation that applies to the high male scores but not to the low male scores that is anything other than politically motivated. (Replace “socialization explanation” with “genetic explanation” in that previous paragraph, and my point still stands.)
[Pinker:] Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers.
Jeez, if we’re playing stereotypes, how about this: no man would voluntarily listen to a conversation among housewives about cooking techniques (applying heat to organic substances to produce a desired result), which cleansers work best on which problems, or how to sew a garment so as to make sure it’s constructed soundly. And that proves that men will never be interested in engineering. (The difference being that the group of women in this example will actually have done the stuff I’m describing, whereas the men in Pinker’s example are explaining stuff to each other that they’ve read on Slashdot.)
Sock thief, what I meant by the comment you reacted to is that we currently have no way of attributing average gender differences to purely biological causes. If such things exist in this field. It may be that the genes and the environment interact in all sorts of ways.
The sperm argument may be accepted wisdom but it is still a myth. There is no way to test this with evidence as we can’t go back in time, and there is no way of really falsifying it, either. In that it is similar to some of Freud’s theories which are non-falsifiable, too. When theories can’t be falsified in theory, they are not really science.
And I’m really good at ad hominem attacks. That’s why I won the most polite political blogger competition. :)
Moebius, my point referred to applying the buckets-of-sperm theory to the larger male variation in tests. This theory does not predict a larger percentage of low-scoring males if it does otherwise what Pinker suggests. I’m not really addressing the greater variability of the male scores in itself, although I do have a few ideas about it. One of them is that it may be a consequence of greater risk-taking in tests: if you’re lucky you do really well and if you’re unlucky you do very poorly, or of something else that might be biological or societal in cause.
Another one is something I read recently, which is that girls and boys may mature at very different ages in verbal and mathematical talents. If the tests are done all at the same age, we might find patterns that reflect the maturation stage differences.
I’m very curious about the essay tests. In these girls score higher than boys and the top performers are overwhelmingly girls. But I have been unable to find out if girls have a higher variance in these tests than boys. This would be an interesting piece of evidence for the question you posed.
Girls tend to be more studious at school which may explain why they might not perform as poorly as some of the boys. Though I was really lazy and rebellious and otherwise not very goddessy. Which serves to remind us all of the danger of assuming averages apply to all.
What is the article that sock thief linked to supposed to prove? The abstract says that its a study about how levels of testosterone in the womb can affect cognitive development, and indeed the idea that natal steroid levels can effect cognitive development is not a far-fetched one, nor is it a misogynist one (natal hormone levels have been hypothesized to affect pretty much everything at some point). But this study doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what we’re talking about. It mentions that they found that men tend to do better on spatial tests (I don’t think anyone on this board disputes what the tests show, only why, so hopefully that wasn’t the reason for posting this paper), and it also said that women with high natal levels of testosterone perform better on these tests than women without (of course, they assume levels of testosterone in the womb by comparing the length of the ring finger and index finger…which is not a direct measurement, but also I don’t see what this conclusion has to do with anything we’re talking about) but nowhere is anything relating to “…gender differnces are partly the result of males producing many sperm and women producing relatively fewer eggs…” And I can’t read the rest of the article because you need to have a paid account.
Anyway, though I’m certainly not working in the field yet, evolutionary biology is where I hope to end up, and I’ve never heard this as accepted fact, nor can I think of anything that I know about the development of humans as a species, nor can I think of anything I know about the function of the human body that would lead me to the conclusion that different sex cell production methods would affect cognitive ability. I’m only a second year bio student, so its fairly likely something like that could have slipped past me, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. I’m certainly not opposed to the idea that men and women might have differing cognitive abilites as we’ve had very different social roles to play throughout our evolution. Different cognitive traits may have been selected for just like different physical traits have due to differing selective pressures based on gender. If what sock thief meant by his/her statement was that differening sex cell production led to different social roles and thus to different traits selected for, then I suppose I might be accept that, though not go as far ‘accepted wisdom.’ Also, if that’s what he/she meant, that was weird phrasing. Just because it is logically possible, however, is not an excuse for shoddy science or ignoring the effects of socialization on cognitive development in our modern world.
One more thing…it kind of annoys me that sock thief was going on about ‘accepted wisdom in biology’ and then links to the very vauge abstract of a PSYCHOLOGY article. (okay, not going on, but mentioned anyway). Bio and Psych people don’t always agree with eachother. Psych people don’t always agree with eachother. One Psychology study does not accepted wisdom in Biology prove. It doesn’t even prove accepted wisdom in Psych. (also minorly annoyed that they would link to an article we can’t even read, because abstracts aren’t always very complete)
Oh, and also, to the poster (I think it was LS) who was talking about ‘why aren’t females the promiscuous ones?’ we did some really cool reading about female promiscuity in other species of primate in one of my classes and how it effects sperm production. It turns out if you compare human sperm production capacity to those of other male primates, the results would indicate a fair amount of promiscuity in human females as compared to other primates. Which is why I giggle a little bit when people try to say that women just naturally want to be with only one man forever. Because your testicles would indicate not.
Apologies for the length here, and any possible spelling errors and my kind-of circuitous writing.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with the premise that there are differences between men and women as a broad population. Pinker once again puts up the straw man.
The question is whether these differences have anything to do with their ability to be faculty level scientists, whether these differences are sufficent to explain the poor representation of women on the faculty.
The error for both Summers and Pinker is to think that we are talking about the whole population distribution here. We’re not. We’re not talking even talking about the cultural biases that tell girls that it is unfeminine to like math or science, or that boys won’t like them if they do.
We’re talking about the people who are already at the tip of the distribution, for whom gender differences become irrelevant. That’s what the conference was about (the one where summers talked)–faculty issues for women who have passed every selection process already. It’s not that every woman and every man can become a physicist. It’s about making sure that those women who want to and are able to become physicists, have as fair a shot as the men to do it. Even if in physics they are 20% of the total. But in Biology, men and women are 50-50 in PhDs, have been for 20 years, yet <30% of new assistant professors of biology are women. So what's that about?
I'm a woman,as a student I routinely toasted all the other women AND men in my classes on those math and science tests. So what if I played with dolls or named my trucks? And you know what? I STILL had to deal with the "women can't be as good as men" and the "women aren't as committed to science as men" garbage. I can't say for sure that my decision not to marry, not to have children, was not affected by my desire to "show them!" I heard comments that a woman doing great research couldn't possibly have done it on her own, and had to be sleeping with someone.
Even after I became a tenured professor at one very famous university with my PhD from another very famous institution, the attitude was that male colleagues whom I by every measure beat with publications, students, and funding -- men who were much more average in background, training and accomplishment-- were more deserving simply by virtue of them being men. I had to exceed a higher standard to be treated the same. There are actually studies that have measured this effect. ( Even Harvard isn't tenuring as many women any more. )
Like many women, I decided this atmosphere was not worth enduring any longer. Yes, they succeeded in driving me out, becuase despite tenure, it was too unpleasant, and unfair an environment. I now work for a university that isn't quite so famous (though it would like to be). Interestingly, it's far less obsessed by gender, gives young women AND men with new families a break on the tenure clock, and doesn't care what gender or color its professors are--the attitude here is, we support everyone so show us what you can do. Of course, because historically things were not so enlightened, representation drops dramatically in higher (older) faculty ranks.
So the economists will say, well, that will sort the problem out, because the lesser university isn't as wasteful as talent and will overcome the more famous. Well, actually, no. The famous places are still hiring talented scientists, they just aren't women. So they will still do good science, and since they still have the cachet of their famous name, they will be disproprortionately rewarded for that. The dinosaurs who run the famous places will continue to sneer at the lsser.
It will be a bit like medicine in the Soviet Union, which being a woman-dominated profession, had less respect than medicine in the US, which is male dominated. Let enough women in, and a profession is no longer of high value. In academe, women tend to cluster at predominantly teaching colleges, those with little respect or cachet, while men are better represnted in the richer universities that can afford research. I wonder if the increasing ranks of young women faculty at my institution will be viewed as a negative by our colleagues in the famous ones.
So the problem will persist.
(Hmmm, cut off much of my post)
But in Biology, men and women are 50-50 in PhDs, have been for 20 years, yet <30% of new assistant professors of biology are women. So what's that about?
I'm a woman,as a student I routinely toasted all the other women AND men in my classes on those math and science tests. So what if I played with dolls or named my trucks? And you know what? I STILL had to deal with the "women can't be as good as men" and the "women aren't as committed to science as men" garbage. I can't say for sure that my decision not to marry, not to have children, was not affected by my desire to "show them!" I heard comments that a woman doing great research couldn't possibly have done it on her own, and had to be sleeping with someone.
Even after I became a tenured professor at one very famous university with my PhD from another very famous institution, the attitude was that male colleagues whom I by every measure beat with publications, students, and funding -- men who were much more average in background, training and accomplishment-- were more deserving simply by virtue of them being men. I had to exceed a higher standard to be treated the same. There are actually studies that have measured this effect. ( Even Harvard isn't tenuring as many women any more. )
Like many women, I decided this atmosphere was not worth enduring any longer. Yes, they succeeded in driving me out, becuase despite tenure, it was too unpleasant, and unfair an environment. I now work for a university that isn't quite so famous (though it would like to be). Interestingly, it's far less obsessed by gender, gives young women AND men with new families a break on the tenure clock, and doesn't care what gender or color its professors are--the attitude here is, we support everyone so show us what you can do. Of course, because historically things were not so enlightened, representation drops dramatically in higher (older) faculty ranks.
So the economists will say, well, that will sort the problem out, because the lesser university isn't as wasteful as talent and will overcome the more famous. Well, actually, no. The famous places are still hiring talented scientists, they just aren't women. So they will still do good science, and since they still have the cachet of their famous name, they will be disproprortionately rewarded for that. The dinosaurs who run the famous places will continue to sneer at the lsser.
It will be a bit like medicine in the Soviet Union, which being a woman-dominated profession, had less respect than medicine in the US, which is male dominated. Let enough women in, and a profession is no longer of high value. In academe, women tend to cluster at predominantly teaching colleges, those with little respect or cachet, while men are better represnted in the richer universities that can afford research. I wonder if the increasing ranks of young women faculty at my institution will be viewed as a negative by our colleagues in the famous ones.
So the problem will persist.
(Try again! Foolish me, the less than sign looked like a tag so it swallowed the rest. Amp, please forgive the multiple posts)
….yet less than 30% of new assistant professors of biology are women. So what’s that about?
I’m a woman,as a student I routinely toasted all the other women AND men in my classes on those math and science tests. So what if I played with dolls or named my trucks? And you know what? I STILL had to deal with the “women can’t be as good as men” and the “women aren’t as committed to science as men” garbage. I can’t say for sure that my decision not to marry, not to have children, was not affected by my desire to “show them!” I heard comments that a woman doing great research couldn’t possibly have done it on her own, and had to be sleeping with someone.
Even after I became a tenured professor at one very famous university with my PhD from another very famous institution, the attitude was that male colleagues whom I by every measure beat with publications, students, and funding — men who were much more average in background, training and accomplishment– were more deserving simply by virtue of them being men. I had to exceed a higher standard to be treated the same. There are actually studies that have measured this effect. ( Even Harvard isn’t tenuring as many women any more. )
Like many women, I decided this atmosphere was not worth enduring any longer. Yes, they succeeded in driving me out, becuase despite tenure, it was too unpleasant, and unfair an environment. I now work for a university that isn’t quite so famous (though it would like to be). Interestingly, it’s far less obsessed by gender, gives young women AND men with new families a break on the tenure clock, and doesn’t care what gender or color its professors are–the attitude here is, we support everyone so show us what you can do. Of course, because historically things were not so enlightened, representation drops dramatically in higher (older) faculty ranks.
So the economists will say, well, that will sort the problem out, because the lesser university isn’t as wasteful as talent and will overcome the more famous. Well, actually, no. The famous places are still hiring talented scientists, they just aren’t women. So they will still do good science, and since they still have the cachet of their famous name, they will be disproprortionately rewarded for that. The dinosaurs who run the famous places will continue to sneer at the lsser.
It will be a bit like medicine in the Soviet Union, which being a woman-dominated profession, had less respect than medicine in the US, which is male dominated. Let enough women in, and a profession is no longer of high value. In academe, women tend to cluster at predominantly teaching colleges, those with little respect or cachet, while men are better represnted in the richer universities that can afford research. I wonder if the increasing ranks of young women faculty at my institution will be viewed as a negative by our colleagues in the famous ones.
So the problem will persist.
Jeez. There’s no such thing as society for the evolutionary biology fanatics, is there?
No, it’s all down to how cavemen supposedly behaved ages and ages before the human activities began being recorded and passed on in time (a.k.a. history). Because we do have more detailed and direct experience of that, than of how our societies work today.
Academic success in the sciences has everything to do with skills, of course, and those skills have everything to do with cavemen and sperm. It is soo obvious. Why didn’t anyone think of it before.
Great posts Professor Female! Thanks.
Here’s my question: if we (for the most part) reject an essentialist explanation of the far larger number of male (mathematical and scientific) geniuses in favour of one based on socialization, sexism, and systemic discrimination; then what accounts for the far larger number of male (mathematical and scientific) “dummies”?
The most plausible explanation that I’ve heard is that women, being socialized to please people (especially authority figures), tend to (i) do their homework more often and (ii) not “act out” in class (and be diagnosed with ADD or a learning disability).
I’m not an evolutionary psychologist either, but I am trained as an evolutionary biologist, and the theory that natural selection favours the production of “exceptional males” only holds as long as the variance in males’ reproductive success is also high (as the section you quote points out). However, such high variance in male reproductive success typically occurs in polygamous species, like lions, or black grouse. Humans, being socially monogamous, are highly unlikely to have such a high variance in male reproductive success.
You’d need to model it mathematically to get a better idea (which I have no idea how to do – I’m stricly an empiricist!) but I strongly suspect that you just wouldn’t get the kind of selection pressure that could cause the kind of sexual dimorphism this bloke’s talking about in humans.
Charles Darwin thought that men were more intelligent than women in order to better attract a wife. His evidence? The fact that all the great artists, scientists and politicians of his time were men. So we shouldn’t be too hard on Pinker – even scientific geniuses have been fooled by the prevailing social conditions of their time in the past.
Echidne–very well done. The “just so stories” element of Pinker’s popular writing gives away the show.
Donboy–the cooking counterexample to that silly stereotype is as obvious as it is outstanding, and I’m irritated I hadn’t thought of it before. Thanks.
Great post!
Professor Female – “The question is whether these differences have anything to do with their ability to be faculty level scientists, whether these differences are sufficient to explain the poor representation of women on the faculty. ”
But neither Summers nor Pinker are arguing that. No one is arguing that genetic variation is sufficient to explain the under representation of women. Summers emphasized two other factors – discrimination and the pressure of childcare. If Summers had said that genetic factors were of primary significance then your argument would be valid. But he did not and no one is.
I was surprised by someone’s remark that the article I linked to was not very relevant because it was from psychology rather than biology. At the university where I work the two subjects increasingly overlap. Psychology is after all often focused on biological processes – brain function.
The essential point of referring to the article was to show that there are very good scientific studies being carried out in this area.
My impression is that there is a tendency to call people reactionary and sexist without any evidence that that is the case. Critique Pinker’s work by all means but stick to the science and leave the personal attacks behind.
He didn’t “emphasize” discrimination – he argued that discrimination was probably irrelevant.
Indeed, Amp. The stew arose because Summers was suggesting that discrimination was not a significant cause of female under-representation, and instead suggested that socialization, childcare, and natural ability were at the root of the problem. That is, “there’s not much we can do about it because wimmin aren’t as good , they aren’t interested in numbers, and they all really just want babies anyway”.
If unmarried, childless women are having problems too, then building a daycare center isn’t going to solve it!
Could someone please show evidence of where Summers “argued that discrimination was probably irrelevant”. He never said anything approaching such ridiculousness. If you have to make things up in order to make your argument then your argument is pretty weak.
Female Professor, no one has said such things apart from you.
Again, no one is saying women “really just want babies anyway”. I would not have thought that the potential impact of having children on the career path of women was a rather uncontroversial observation these days. One which women have fought quite hard to have noticed and remedied.
There are some common X-linked mental retardation syndromes that disproportionately affect males (who have no backup X chromosome to help out the defective X chromosome). There is a commonsense explanation for the large low tail of the male “math ability” distribution.
Indeed, sock, but family issues affect men AND women. Although women are still disproportionately affected, I see many young men opt out of academic science because they don’t want to sacrifice time with their kids any more than their wives do. THis tends to enrich for men who have more “traditional” relationships who rely on their wives to do the majority of childcare, so they (men) can focus on their career.
Interestingly, there is a positive correlation for career success for men with children, and a negative correlation for women with children. I have often thought that we all need a traditional wife at home to make this career do-able.
My point was that putting everything down to kids does NOT explain the totality of women’s experiences on the faculty. THis is not to say that the faculty shouuldn’t be more family friendly. It is insane to expect young professors to accomplish teaching, service and research in an 80 hour a week job while being partners and parents. Of all places, academe should recognize the totality of the human experience and the value of healthy balance between family and profession. (It is also not clear that this sort of effort is required to identify the best and the brightest,, nor ever has been. But I digress.)
If Summers had spent any time with the extensive and growing literature on the subjecct, he would not have glibly suggested that girls aren’t as good as boys. Nor would he have suggested that women don’t like “cold hard numbers” as a reason, to an audience (this is what blows me away) of incredibly accomplished women! So what if women do better with people? That doesn’t mean they do less well with data. (IT does mean, however, that they may have better functioning research groups because they actually pay attention to the staff, students and postdocs working for them. Science is a very social endeavor.)
I went back to the news reports and did not find evidence that Summers addressed the issues of discrimination and subtle bias at all. (For an example of the effects of this bias, see Virginia Valian’s book “Why so slow?”) I was however reminded that he used the fact his daughter named her toy trucks as evidence that she and girls generally weren’t good with “cold hard facts”. If you can find other evidence that he did adedress this in his talk (for which there is no transcript), I will gladly stand corrected.
By the way, in a highly non-representative discussion with senior women professors of considerable scientific accomplishment, I find that nearly all of them played with dolls and named them. QED.
It’s rather odd to demand we all reference where Summers said a particular thing when Summers himself refused to release the text of his talk.
Also, sock theif, Echidne disagrees with Pinker and criticizes his logic. That doesn’t equal an adhom.
Professor Female said: So the economists will say, well, that will sort the problem out, because the lesser university isn’t as wasteful as talent and will overcome the more famous. Well, actually, no. The famous places are still hiring talented scientists, they just aren’t women. So they will still do good science, and since they still have the cachet of their famous name, they will be disproprortionately rewarded for that. The dinosaurs who run the famous places will continue to sneer at the lsser.
Yep. Let’s not forget that the alumni of these big-name institutions also tend to come from wealth, and draw large salaries at their high-level jobs (which they may have gotten thanks to their alumni connections). They have more money to give to the school, and they do. Foundations also give a lot of money to these schools.
Compare that with a not-so-famous school that hires extremely talented women. Said school doesn’t get nearly as much in financial support from alumni and foundations, and doesn’t have a huge endowment. This school, no matter how talented and innovative the professors are, is not going to garner the attention and prestige of a wealthy, well-known school. A wealthy, well-known school will get more media notice, and the professors and researchers from such a school will also get more notice and attention.
sock theif wrote:
Could someone please show evidence of where Summers “argued that discrimination was probably irrelevant”. He never said anything approaching such ridiculousness.
Er, can you give any evidence that he didn’t? I think that we all have to keep in mind here that none of us really know what he said. (Presuming, of course, that you weren’t there at his speech.) The fact that he won’t release tapes seems rather suspecious to me, though.
Sock thief wrote: Could someone please show evidence of where Summers “argued that discrimination was probably irrelevant”. He never said anything approaching such ridiculousness. If you have to make things up in order to make your argument then your argument is pretty weak.
Try to assume the best of other posters here, please, Sock Thief – including not jumping to the conclusion that anyone who has information you don’t is a liar.
From the Boston Globe:
So he lists three reasons in (according to him) declining order of significance; the third, and therefore least significant, of these is discrimination. And the only argument he provides about discrimination is an argument that discrimination probably isn’t a factor.
I think that reasonably well supports my statement that “he argued that discrimination was probably irrelevant.”
Thanks for the quote, now we can talk about what he actually said.
His actual words as quoted are “…it’s less clear how much the size of the pool was held down by discrimination.”? That is a valid observation to make. He suggests that more research be carried out order to varify the factors involved. That does not amount to saying “he argued that discrimination was probably irrelevant”?. Perhaps childcare isues will turn out to be a more significant factor, but then that is in itself a form of discrimnation if not addressed.
He may well have been better advised to qualify his statements regarding genetic influence more fully but to jump from that to allegations of sexism is going a little too far.
Actually, we don’t know what his actual words are, because he’s refused to allow the recording to be released. All we know is what the Globe says his words were, which I presume the Globe put together from various witness accounts.
I read Sommers as saying that the real issue is the size of the pool, as opposed to discrimination in who gets hired. That certainly fits in with my contention that he was dismissing discrimination as an important factor.
However, Sommers’ argument against discrimination is weak. It’s in theory true that in a perfect market, in which everyone has perfect information, and in which all other factors are held even, discrimination will not be sustainable because non-discriminators will have a market advantage over discriminators.
However, in the real world, all else is not held equal. For instance, some colleges – such as Harvard – have market advantages, such as a great reputation and the largest endowment of any university in the entire world. Given those advantages, it will not significantly harm Harvard’s ability to compete if Harvard discriminates and therefore has to pay somewhat more per professor.
Long before the Sommers flap, I wrote a post describing what’s mistaken about the general sort of logic Sommers’ uses to dismiss discrimination.
Second of all, there is fairly solid evidence that discrimination in academia does exist and has an effect on women in the sciences. For example (quoting from an earlier post of mine:
It could be argued, and perhaps this is what Summers had in mind, that an elite institution like Harvard has no choice but to take the best candidates available, and if these tend to be white males, whether the reasons are biological or social, that’s the way it is.
Ampersand’s last comment neatly undercuts that argument, as do the comments here and elsewhere by women in technical fields. The selection process continues to be biased at every stage. Since it isn’t possible to make it sex- and color-blind (as orchestras can by having performers audition behind a screen), academic institutions probably need to make a special effort to compensate.
I’m not confident that places like Harvard have a permanent advantage. In the book A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar describes how Princeton made itself into a major center of science by hiring Jewish refugees that Harvard and Yale disdained. She also reminds us that M.I.T. was considered a much lesser institution at the time.
I think these criticisms of Summers and Pinker’s implicature that discrimination is the least relevant factor in occupational disparity are worth making and mostly correct. Yes, they are right that statistics alone do not prove discrimination, but given the overwhelming evidence of discrimination in the very recent past, the burden of proof is on them to show that the contribution of biological difference is large enough to be worth considering. How big is the “innate” effect – could it lead to a 10% disparity or a .0001% disparity, or any at all? They don’t say, because they don’t know, but they irresponsibly give the impression that they do.
However, as an avid reader of Pinker I’ll have to take issue with one criticism-
There’s more than enough to criticize in this latest missive of Pinker (flat-screen televisions, hello?) without bringing up this “myth”, which is not popular, but something of a straw man. In How the Mind Works, Pinker not only finds your idea “worth considering” but discusses at great length the tradeoffs between the male mating strategies of maximizing impregnations versus maximizing the care given to offspring. He explains very well IMO why we should not expect a “bucket brigade”.
Just to clear up, for me if not for anyone else, I think that the precise place where Pinker and Summers mis-step is in their leap from “biological differences exist” to “the effect of these differences is great enough to be observed in occupational statistics”. This is where they leave the realm of data.
I also have an axe, of course, but you can see what it is and how sharply honed it always stays.
Actually, Echidne, I think in your case it’s called a “labrys”…
[d&rlh]
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I wish I had a buck for every time I’ve had a conversation along the lines of:
Other person: Well, of course there are differences between men and women. Anybody who has boys and girls knows that!
Me: Hm, I have a boy and two girls, and I think that’s a load of crap, based on my observations. In fact, the one thing that I’ve noticed is how badly people react when my kids act outside of their ‘gender norms.’
Other person: Gosh, look at the time! I have to be somewhere else now.
What gets me about the story about Summers’s daughter is that if his child was a boy, but behaved in exactly the same way, Summers would have seen it just as a boy playing with trucks, ignored the names, and cited it as evidence that masculine behavior is innate.
Mythago, it freaks me out when I see my nephews and my niece playing, and my other relatives obsessively point out each instance of stereotypically gender-appropriate behavior, and ignore anything else. Well, except apparently my brother-in-law freaked out once when he saw his oldest son trying on his mother’s shoes.
The anecdote about Summers’s daughter is particularly weird given that he offered it as proof that girls don’t like/aren’t much good at math and science and stuff. How does nurturing behavior, or seeing a large truck as parent to a small truck, related to math at all?
The obvious answer is that math abilities take up the same place in the brain that nuturing ones do. So if you’re nuturing, you don’t have enough neurons left to be a really good scientist. Or, possibly, science is by definition evil, so nuturing people can’t be good scientists, because they can’t be evil. There are all sorts of explanations for why the two must be mutually exclusive.
I have known grown men who named the cars they drove: I wonder what Summers, Pinker, et al would have made of that.
Sock Thief, Ampersand already answered the point about discrimination and Summers, and I’d just like to chime in with this: There is a vast field of economic research into discrimination, and the only theory in that field which suggests that discrimination really won’t survive in the long-run is the Becker model which Summers mentions. To do this shows bias, because Becker’s model is based on two assumptions which are not met in reality: 1. that information on workers’ abilities is known to everybody and 2. that the only people who discriminate are the bosses who hire. If either of these conditions remains unmet (and unmet they are in reality), then the model no longer predicts what Summers states.
Neither did Summers discuss any of the many empirical studies which show that discrimination against women in the labor market is real. So if what we are told is true, he seems to have gone into this meeting with minimal preparation and with some possibly biased arguments.
And to answer the point about my buckets-of-sperm theory (sorry about the name, actually), Pinker does use this theory in the article I address. He may have been more careful elsewhere but not in this particular case.
“The obvious answer is that math abilities take up the same place in the brain that nuturing ones do. So if you’re nuturing, you don’t have enough neurons left to be a really good scientist. ”
Gee, I must tell that one to my best friend: a chemical engineer who’s bringing up a 1 1/2 year old while being pregnant with her second while simultaneously working at a very science-oriented job.
Yeah, all that nurturing has *really* taken a toll on her abilities as a scientist……………………not.
She should get a good laugh out of this theory.
Crys T: I’m pretty sure Wolfangel’s post was a joke.
Regarding Pinker’s comment on flat screen TVs… WTF does that have to do with engineering, anyway?
So, because (theoretically) women talk more about houses than men, and not just the interior design angle, women should be more fitted to pounding nails into 2x4s?
From the point of view of a lurker — this is an interesting but irrelevant discussion:
First:
The US should be concerned that there is a disproportionate amount of our future in the hands of foreign graduate students — specifically in the high tech fields — we need to encourage both females and males to strive to become top scientists and engineers
Second:
All science and engineering is a cumbersome basket — there is much diversity between the skills required for various engineering and science disciplines — most are cognitive, some are social and some may be physical
Third:
Dismissing our prehistory and assuming everything that matters has happened since we have books about it is simplistic — our ancestors that first made the leap from being Zoo-type Apes to the beginnings of humans weren’t called Homo Habilis {toolmaker} for nothing
Fourth and most controversial:
In my unscientific sample of practicing physicists and several types of other “hard” scientists and several types of engineers — It was all about wrenches — pick a field where there are lots of wrenches (to a lesser extent screwdrivers) and you don’t find many women — is it inherent sense of handedness, social training, or bias toward physical strength that is responsible?
Fifth:
Someone noted that in Hungary there are now more women studying architecture than men and more men studying structural engineering and construction than women — they then posited that the two classes of disciplines needed the same skills and hence it must be overt discrimination — perhaps its wrenches — most architects don’t need to pick up a wrench
Sixth:
I’ve been called a lot of things — but the most enduring was that — you’re a plumber because I worked with experiments that required vacuum systems — and Lot’s of bolts and wrenches ““ few wenches :}>
If anyone is interested, I recently wrote a really long post about this subject at http://heartmindsoul.blogspot.com/2005/02/thoughts-about-larry-summers-comments.html
I figure that if I’m going to write something that’s so long, I might as well share it.
Ted, those are interesting points. As someone who strives to keep my kids interested in math and science, I appreciate your point of view. I have two daughters and my husband, a person with a cerebral job who finds it relaxing to pick up wrenches, is always commanding them to help. So far, they have no problem. He is now designing an addition to the house and letting the little one contribute by working the design software. He did tell me that it’s true they don’t play with trucks (we’ve never bought them trucks, I pointed out) however, they do play with trains and blocks, and most of all, legos. They also don’t take toy soldiers down to the stream like he used to do and shoot bebe guns at them, but I can’t figure out how that contributes to advanced scientific reasoning.
But I really appreciate the point about there being a need for a mix of skills. For a long time, my sister dated a certified math genius, a Ph.D. whose colleagues all appreciated his brilliance, and gave him job opportunities that most could only dream about because of it — but he simply was unable to articulate or verbalize (on paper, in particuluar) without enormous assistance from someone like my sister (a math and science high school teacher), who got tired of his dependence. He now crunches numbers on Wall Street, where they provide you with alot of support.
As more women get tired of playing a supporting role it will be interesting to see how many males are unable to provide the full skill set required for a tenured faculty position, in spite of their five standard deviations above the norm mathematical intellect.
“As more women get tired of playing a supporting role it will be interesting to see how many males are unable to provide the full skill set required for a tenured faculty position, in spite of their five standard deviations above the norm mathematical intellect. ”
On the other hand, maybe if more men started playing a supporting role for more women, we would see new and interesting things from women who are five standard deviations above the norm. But I agree that no one should be expected to always “play sidekick”.
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