Larry Summers - His Questions Are Unanswered

Remember when Larry Summers, the former President of Harvard University, found himself in the middle of an uproar where he was being attacked by faculty at Harvard?

The speech which was the causation of the unwarranted turmoil can be read in it’s entirety at Underrepresented.


Wikpedia has included this in their information on Larry Summers:

Sex and Intelligence Controversy
In January 2005, Summers suggested at an economic conference that one of the causes of the fewer women than men in science and engineering professorships might be that fewer women than men had the very high levels of "intrinsic aptitude" that such jobs required.

Pressure from faculty and the media continued to where Larry Summers chose to step down from his post at the university.

This post is designed to provoke critical thought, and hopefully for opinions to be drawn, conclusions to be made.

Once the speech is read, below are excerpts which may be the most important parts of the speech which detail the dialogue and which lead to pressure by others on Summers and his eventually resignation.

“…It is after all not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for others who are considering being in that group. To take a set of diverse examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it's important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation….

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search….

…And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates….


Below are pieces taken from the Q&A after the speech.

LHS: ...My point was simply that the field of behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last fifteen years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization weren't, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature, and that set of discoveries, it seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where there was a perception of the importance of socialization. I wasn't at all trying to connect those studies to the particular experiences of women and minorities who were thinking about academic careers.

Q: Raising that particular issue, as a biologist, I neither believe in all genetic or all environment, that in fact behavior in any other country actually develops [unintelligible] interaction of those aspects. And I agree with you, in fact, that it is wrong-headed to just dismiss the biology. But to put too much weight to it is also incredibly wrong-headed, given the fact that had people actually had different kinds of opportunities, and different opportunities for socialization, there is good evidence to indicate in fact that it would have had different outcomes. I cite by way of research the [unintelligible] project in North Carolina, which essentially shows that, where every indicator with regard to mother's education, socioeconomic status, et cetera, would have left a kid in a particular place educationally, that, essentially, they are seeing totally different outcomes with regard to performance, being referred to special education, et cetera, so I think that there is some evidence on that particular side. The other issue is this whole question about objective versus subjective. I think that it is very difficult to have anything that is basically objective, and the work of [unintelligible] I think point out that in a case where you are actually trying to-this case from the Swedish Medical Council, where they were trying to identify very high-powered research opportunities for, I guess it was post-docs by that point, that indicated that essentially that it ended up with larger numbers of men than women. Two of the women who were basically in the affected group were able to utilize the transparency rules that were in place in Sweden, get access to the data, get access to the issues, and in fact, discovered that it was not as objective as everyone claimed, and that in fact, different standards were actually being used for the women as well as for the men, including the men's presence in sort of a central network, the kinds of journals that they had to publish in to be considered at the same level, so I think that there are pieces of research that begin to actually relate to this-yes, there is the need to look more carefully at a lot of these areas. I would-in addition looking at this whole question of the quality of marginal hires-I would also like to look at the quality of class one hires, in terms of seeing who disappoints, and what it was that they happened to be looking at and making judgments on, and then what the people could not deliver. So I think that there is a real great need on both sides to begin to talk about whether or not we can predict. I hate to use a sports metaphor, but I will. This is drawn basically from an example from Claude Steele, where he says, he starts by using free throws as a way of actually determining, who should-you've got to field a basketball team, and you clearly want the people who make ten out of ten, and you say, "Well, I may not want the people who make zero out of ten," but what about the people who make four out of ten. If you use that as the measure, Shaq will be left on the sidelines.

LHS: I understand. I think you're obviously right that there's no absolute objectivity, and you're-there's no question about that. My own instincts actually are that you could go wrong in a number of respects fetishizing objectivity for exactly the reasons that you suggest. There is a very simple and straightforward methodology that was used many years ago in the case of baseball. Somebody wrote a very powerful article about baseball, probably in the seventies, in which they basically said, "Look, it is true that if you look at people's salaries, and you control for their batting averages and their fielding averages and whatnot, whites and blacks are in the same salary once you control. It is also true that there are no black .240 hitters in the major leagues, that the only blacks who are in the major leagues are people who bat over .300-I'm exaggerating-and that is exactly what you'd predict on a model of discrimination, that because there's a natural bias against. And there's an absolute and clear prediction. The prediction is that if there's a discriminated-against group, that if you measure subsequent performance, their subsequent performance will be stronger than that of the non-discriminated-against group. And that's a simple prediction of a theory of discrimination. And it's a testable prediction of a theory of discrimination, and it would be a revolution, and it would be an enormously powerful finding in this field, to demonstrate, and I suspect there are contexts in which that can be demonstrated, but there's a straightforward methodology, it seems to me, for testing exactly that idea. I'm going to run out of time. But, let me take-if people ask very short questions, I will give very short answers.

It is important to point out, this reader believes the ideas presented by Larry Summers were designed solely for provoking critical thinking and then dialogue. The Q&A portion of the speech was fulfilling this, however based on the subsequent attacks by faculty and the media it brought an end to intelligent discussion.

When discussing the “Xie and Shauman paper”, Larry Summers invokes hard hitting questions and then proposes possible theories.

It is interesting to mention, while listening to the radio the last two weeks I was hearing radio commercials sponsored by the Girl Scouts. The first few times I heard these commercials I overlooked or more precisely did not overhear a related theme as to what Larry Summers had been proposing. Paraphrased, the Girl Scout commercial stated, “... by the 8th grade, girls lose interest in science...”

For argument sake and in defense of Mr Summers, this simple radio broadcast speaks volumes of the dialogue Mr Summers was attempting to begin and I feel the legitimacy of his ideas. For the question is still unanswered. Why are there fewer women than men in the top science positions?