Comments on: Minding the Kids, Again

By: cehwiedel

cehwiedel — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 22:08:23 +0000

At the risk of entering the debate a little late: the salient point for me is not whether President Summers, as an economist, is stepping out of his area of expertise to comment on the dearth of women at the highest levels of academia; it is the unprofessional response by Professor Hopkins. As an academic, as a professor at a prestigious research institute, she should have responded by citing technical reports, not by getting woozy; by listing studies in support of her position, not by stalking out like a teenager who can’t think up a stinging reply. The arguments on the merits of the questions raised by President Summers should have been made then and there, not tattled to the Boston Globe. Professor Hopkins does not polish her academic credentials by refusing to debate the issue; women academics are ill-served by her temper tantrum.

By: Tom Hudson

Tom Hudson — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 10:15:49 +0000

John Lederer asks if this is just “an obsession with group identities.” I’m facing the input side of the question that Summers was dealing with the output of, and I don’t think so. I teach computer science at a mid-sized public liberal arts university. The number of women in the major was always “low”, and has dropped even further since the dot-com crash. There’s a faction of the faculty that holds “we welcome any student, regardless of irrelevant factors of their identity,” but they seem to be missing something important. Why are so few young women in our major? Why do so many drop out? Why have those numbers gotten worse in recent years? I know from experience that there are plenty of women who can thrive in the kind of job that a computer science major prepare them for. Perhaps Summers would say that I found all my girlfriends (not to mention my wife) in the tail of the gene pool. More interesting to me is that all of them entered my field after taking all of their formal education in other disciplines. Posting to a blog that discusses economics so much, I should probably consider the possibility that women are not in my field as much any more because the percieved economic rewards are smaller since the dot-com crash, but then I’d have to explain why men aren’t leaving in the same proportions. (Although my program is small enough to be worried about sample size, the same phenomenon seems to be happening in similar proportions all across the US.)

By: Canadian

Canadian — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 01:14:45 +0000

Can Harvard be a kinder gentler workplace ? We pay attention to Harvard because of its academic excellence. Professors go there are smart and also driven. They are not like you or me. So I doubt that Harvard will lead the way to a kinder gentler workplace. It is not possible to stop academics from working exceptionally long hours because they can think and work at home if nothing else. Harvard will still hire the best and the best comes from working harder than most people . Olympic atheletes work just as hard. My guess is that they dont have balanced lives either. Both the Olympics and academia are tournaments. But academia works slighly differently. The tournament nature of academia comes from the fact that its free for any individual to read the very best article in the field. There is little need to read the fourth or fifth best article nor are we going to put those articles on our reading list. The academic community at large creates the tournament. As for comparing with other countries, the EU has a larger population and perhaps similar income to the US. But we dont look to many schools there for academic leadership in fields where local knowledge is not an advantage. Certainly Harvard can become a kinder and gentler place but it will not longer be Harvard and we will no longer care. Put another way, if a president at podunk U make the same remarks, it will be essentially ignored. Unless we stop paying attention to great scholarship, there will always be room for someone to be great. And being great will come at great sacrifice. If Summers’ unique policies remain in place, Harvard is taking an interesting gamble. Either the status quo is right and Harvard will decline or Harvard is right and the gap will increase.

By: John Lederer

John Lederer — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 00:03:26 +0000

Perhaps it is more an obsession with group identities? Seems to me Harvard, or any university, would be best served by trying to get the best faculty members it can—determined one by one on individual merit. If that results in a disproportion of men to women, Scientologists to Baptists, left handed to right handed, or ectomorphs to endomorphs, so be it. It seesm to me the best example one can make of not disciminating is to not discriminate. The best promise you can make to anyone that they will be evaluated on the merits is to evaluate them on the merits.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 23:01:43 +0000

The tempest in a teapot observation is an obvious one. But the determining factor is less an over-supply of time on hand than an excess of self-obsession. Still, I find the general form of the “problem” curious: that a potential must be subject to determination. A capacity to learn, the open-ended acquisition of new contents, must be reduced to prior causes. There is a level of encrusted metaphysical belief evinced here, reification. The acceptance of the contingincies of fate is subject to the false mastery of the activity of explanation. A hard moral problem is converted into a “solvable” technical one.

By: John Lederer

John Lederer — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 20:34:19 +0000

After looking at a bit of research (generally backing up Summers “hard” science comments), and carefully rereading the transcript, my conclusion is that this issue should be most interesting to micro-meteorologists. How did all that storm activity arise in that little bitty teacup? Academics have too much time on their hands.

By: John Lederer

John Lederer — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 20:26:12 +0000

After looking at a bit of research (generally backing up Summers “hard” science comments), and carefully rereading the transcript, my conclusion is that academics have too much time on their hands. This issue should be most interesting to micro-meteorologists—how did all that storm activity arise in that little bitty teacup?

By: Dianne

Dianne — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:53:27 +0000

Below is a link to the reference for an amusing little study. The authors taught undergraduate women volunteers how to do a hockey wrist shot. They also collected data from the same women about their perception of their competence and the appropriateness of learning this maneuver. Quoting from the conclusions: “Gender appropriateness impacted the participants’ perceptions of competence and actual performance in the study,” In other words, if you tell people they shouldn’t be able to do something, they won’t be able to do it. Women are told throughout their lives that they shouldn’t be able to do math and science. Is it any wonder therefore that they are underrepresented in these diciplines? (reference: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=12848231)

By: Dianne

Dianne — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:31:43 +0000

A number of studies have demonstrated that men are treated differently from women from the time that they are infants, throughout their education, and into their working life. Given this huge amount of confounding data, how can one even reasonablly speculate as to whether there are genetic differences between women’s and men’s ability to succeed at science or academia?

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 12:55:05 +0000

Isn’t this 80 hours business a bit of a crock? A single person or a disengaged father probably would take 80 hours to do the work of a successful professor. But anyone who has learned how to be a parent has learned how to do things a lot more thoughtfully and efficiently than that.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 12:24:29 +0000

cm: I’m a bit perplexed. “Begging the question” means the fallacy of petitio preincipii, assuming in one’s premises what one claims to prove. The other fallacy was clearly named. The third fallacy goes by the name of irony. Oddly, the point of my comment was similar to that of Sebastian Holsclaw. But by “achievement”, I simply meant the long-run attainment of results of scientific significance. There are plenty of cases of that occurring from unlikely quarters. (Google, e.g., Barbara McClintock.) Now it may well be that there is a neurobiological basis for exceptional mathematical ability, just as with, e.g., musical ability. And there may be adventitiously a genetic component to that. But equally, there would be no evolutionary reason for them, since neither exists in nature. The deployment of an argument from a statistical tail to rationalize a status quo faces the problem that there are several statistical tails involved and that makes for a very intricate and floppy tail.

By: cm

cm — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 09:37:07 +0000

The statistical arguments put forward to motivate the genetic/socialization issue remind me of the mock story of a guy who “proved” that crickets hear with their legs by cutting them off and observing how that causes them not to run from sounds anymore. And john c. halasz, regarding “talent”, what about the aspect that it is ascribed based on socially defined categories? Or in other words, what is “achievement”, and who adjudicates it?

By: Ajax Bucky

Ajax Bucky — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 07:57:12 +0000

Cultural selection over time becomes genetic selection. Arguments against altering provably harmful cultural norms that proceed from a premise of genetic inalterability are defensive posturing by the enfranchised.

By: Bill Gardner

Bill Gardner — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 05:48:30 +0000

JR, You raise good questions. “Re the genetic argument: this is an important scientific debate to which an economist like Summers can make NO relevant ontribution.” I am sure we both recognize that he was not trying to make a scientific contribution with his remarks. My guess is that he was either a) making a sincere but extremely ill-advised effort to share his understanding of the research at the conference (that’s how he frames it); or b) as you suggest, rationalizing a policy based on indifference about gender equity. The latter reading requires that you attribute either bad faith or false consciousness to him. I don’t know the guy, so I will go with reading (a). But reading (b) has the following on its side. Bad faith and false consciousness on the part of Harvard administrators has a long, distinguished history. My senior year, the issue was getting the university to support Nelson Mandela and divest from companies doing business in South Afrika (ooops). We were told, with a straight face, that the administration wanted to keep the investments because they could do more good for South Africans that way. LHS was either a grad student or junior faculty member at that time, and it would be interesting to know where he stood. By the way, I disagree that an economist can make no relevant contribution to discussions of genetics & behavior. I’m not a practitioner, but to me it looks like behavior genetics is a discipline in the early stages of development: more data fitting than theory testing. Behavior genetics would benefit greatly from getting more economists (and anthropologists, and neuroscientists, and …) involved.

By: rilkefan

rilkefan — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 03:03:48 +0000

John Lederer, some useful links can be found at Gene Expression.