Harvard President Lawrence Summers has sparked another controversy in a speech at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As the Washington Post reports:
Summers laid out a series of possible explanations for the underrepresentation of women in the upper echelons of professional life, including upbringing, genetics and time spent on child-rearing.
Summers suggestion that genetics, specifically some sort of innate differences between men and women, may play a role sent some audience members over the edge. Again from the Post:
“I felt I was going to be sick,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who listened to part of Summers’s speech Friday at a session on the progress of women in academia organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. She walked out in what she described as a physical sense of disgust.
“My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” she said. “I was extremely upset.”
Wait, it gets worse. Summers is apparently a sexist parent too:
Some women who attended the meeting said they felt that Summers was implicitly endorsing the notion that there are genetic differences that inhibit girls from excelling in math and science. They cited a story Summers told about giving his daughter two trucks as an effort at gender-neutral parenting. The girl soon began referring to one of the trucks as “daddy truck” and the other as “baby truck.”
The point of the truck anecdote, said Hopkins, a Harvard graduate, seemed to be that girls have a genetic predisposition against math and engineering. “That’s the kind of insidious, destructive, un-thought-through attitude that causes a lot of harm,” she said. “It’s one thing for an ordinary person to shoot his mouth off like that, but quite another for a top educational leader.”
Now I’m no expert on gender differences, but unless there has been some blockbuster research breakthrough that I missed, there is substantial uncertainty as to why certain aspects of dominant gender roles are so stable over time, including male predominance in math science. Old-fashioned sexism almost certainly plays a role, but it may not explain everything. Indeed, I think most fair observers would suspect there is more to the story.
This is not a defense of such gender stereotypes — nor does it say anything about the specific capabilities of any individual man or woman. If it is the case that men are more predisposed to excel at math than women, this does not mean that all men are better at math that all women, that women cannot be successful mathematicians, that women should not pursue math-oriented careers, or that sexism and gender-bias are irrelevant. It would simply mean that statistical gender disparities in given fields are in part the result of genetic predispositions. Genetics provides but one possible explanation for the observed disparity in male and female participation and success in certain fields. But it may not be the whole story either. It is quite possible that certain genetic predispositions are magnified or reinforced by cultural stereotypes and bias.
In the end, the reason why more men than women excel in math and science is an empirical question, and one worthy of careful examination. If genetic differences play a role — and this is an “if” — this is something worth knowing. The political and cultural sensitivity of the question should not place it off-limits to scientific examination. At least some in attendance recognized this. One last time from the Post:
“I left with a sense of elation at his ideas,” said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economics professor who attended the speech. “I was proud that the president of my university retains the inquisitiveness of an academic.” . . .
What Summers said “is controversial and should be debated,” said David Goldston, chief of staff of the House Science Committee, who was also at the meeting. “But there ought to be some place in America where you can have a thoughtful, non-ideological private discussion.”
See also Kevin Drum’s thoughts here.
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