In the wake of the Larry Summers controversy, I decided to try to set up a panel here at the Law School about biological differences in cognition and temperament between men and women. I really don’t know what the science tells us about this — my extremely ill-informed lay sense is that there are some differences, but I have no idea how large they appear to be, or how confidently we can make assertions about them. But that will be the whole point of the panel: To bring in a couple of scientific experts, and have them give interested students and faculty a bit of an education on the subject.
I hope to get two knowledgeable and thoughtful people, one of whom takes the view that the differences are quite substantial, and may in fact influence men’s and women’s abilities and temperaments — naturally, looking at the population as a whole, and without denying that the bell curves may overlap considerably — and the other of whom takes the view that such differences are nonexistent or modest. Of course, I assume that both people would base their views in the existing body of evidence; but I take it that there are enough ambiguities and uncertainties in the evidence that serious scholars can reach contrary views here. The plan is to have it here some time in the Fall.
In any event, the reason for my post is to report on an interesting incident that happened during my search for possible panelists. To find people to invite, I’ve been asking people for recommendations, and following the chain of references. And one of the people who was recommended to me, an academic who’s not in the law school, responded in what struck me as an odd way: She pointed out that recent studies on “stereotype threat” conclude that people will perform worse on various tasks if they know that others think their race or gender is inferior at those tasks. Therefore, she suggested, I shouldn’t have the panel, because it could lead women to think they are worse at science and thus perform worse on scientific tasks. (To her credit, the person also did give me a name of a potential panelist, and her suggestion was framed as a suggestion and not as a command or as outraged insistence.)
Now I’ve heard of this stereotype threat phenomenon; I don’t know whether it’s real, but it may well be. Yet this is a university, a place of higher learning. Should we really be concealing important scientific evidence from our students (note that my correspondent didn’t say that sex differences don’t exist, only that discussing them might cause harm) because of a fear that they might react badly as a result? Seems to me that the answer has to be no.
Incidentally, I’d like more women to go into science and engineering — I’d like more people generally to go into those fields, and I suspect that many very capable women are steered away from them by a variety of social factors. That’s a loss for them, and a loss for society. As it happens, I doubt that many of the law students who will be attending the panel would go into technical fields in any event; but if somehow some other students show up and end up feeling discouraged from going into science (or patent law) as a result, I’ll feel some regret.
Yet surely the answer can’t be for university departments to deliberately keep quiet about these important scientific matters, thus allowing their students and graduates to fall into error for lack of knowledge.
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