Comments on: Summers Lovin’

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 01:36:39 +0000

I can’t opine yea or nay, but I have heard it said that there is a much more extensive support network overall for women biologists versus say women physicists.

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:48:32 +0000

“I speak as a white male working in an industry where you could train a monkey to do most of the job…” I could say the same of my job as well, though I love it because, as one of those fabled lazy government employees, I get to have a life. (As an interesting but meaningless aside, my field- forensic DNA work- is increasingly female-dominated, perhaps in part because the salaries of most jobs in the industry are nothing to write home about.) But I tend to think replaceability by a monkey may be somewhat less true of world-class research physicists. ;)

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 23:27:48 +0000

Baa: I’m sorry. Those are not specific criticisms. They’re just dark allegations of “we don’t know this so it’s probably dodgy”. Steve: I count Portugal, France and Italy in the top half of that table, and nobody would say they didn’t have world-class physics departments (the number for the UK looks a bit low though). It can’t just be that the male tenured physicists who control hiring are so much more likely to be misogynistic dinosaurs than male tenured biolgists. There’s no reason why they couldn’t, and in any case, we’re not talking about misogynistic dinosaurs here; just perfectly decent, even (ye gods) liberal gentlemen who honestly believe themselves to be making the honest decision that the person most like themself is the right one for the job. I speak as a white male working in an industry where you could train a monkey to do most of the job, objectively, but where we have convinced ourselves that a) you need the very best and brightest graduates of the best universities and b) the very mark of intelligence is to be a chap almost exactly like me.

By: eudoxis

eudoxis — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 23:07:06 +0000

uncle kvetch, you link to an unreferenced drawing. For anyone seriously interested in looking at comprehensive reports on women in science, here's a start: European Commission She Figures 2003 AIP Women in Physics and Astronomy 2005

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 21:10:09 +0000

P.S. I could understand the anger at Summers if he had been arguing that we should throw up our hands and stop doing anything to try to increase the representation of women in fields where they are underrepresented. He’d deserve to be fired for that. But that is emphatically not what he was saying.

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 21:07:06 +0000

I’d be cautious in interpreting that chart- at the high end there is a preponderance of countries that are not especially known for world-class physics research, and/or that pay professors much worse, relative to alternative careers, than the US. The relevance to the question of women at top-tier universities is not immediately obvious. It is also true in the US that low-prestige institutions are likely to have a much higher proportion of tenured female physicists and mathematicians than the Harvards and MITs. Another point to consider is that- pace Nancy Hopkins- it has proven much easier to advance the representation of women in top-flight positions in the life sciences than in physics and math (I speak as a higher-math-challenged, though male, molecular biologist myself. ;) ) It can’t just be that the male tenured physicists who control hiring are so much more likely to be misogynistic dinosaurs than male tenured biolgists.

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 20:27:37 +0000

Eudoxis: Other countries show exactly the same trends as the US. No, they don't.

By: LizardBreath

LizardBreath — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 20:23:55 +0000

No. It was that he had stated that he, personally, had formed a belief that innate differences between men and women explained a portion of the underrepresentation of women in the hard sciences. Again—calling for research? Okay. Stating that the question remains open? Fine. Stating that his personal belief is that innate differences are important to the underrepresentation of women in the hard sciences, and falsely implying that research exists supporting this conclusion? That’s going to irritate people.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:42:41 +0000

Speaking of statements not justified by empirical data, what are we to do with “if Summers had pitched his remarks just a little bit differently, and demonstrated a just bit more knowledge of existing work on this issue, there would have been no controversy.” I grant it is hard to prove a counterfactual. But knowledge of North American academic battles of the last fifteen years suggests the opposite. It doesn’t matter how Summers “pitched” his remakrs, or how many citations he had included. The objection to Summers was precisely that he considered, as a topic to be calmly considered, an idea that undergraduates have been told for a decade and a half will get them disciplined.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:50:02 +0000

Since most readers of this blog are "across the pond", you may not be aware that there's additional context possibly motivating the Harvard faculty, which is not well-explained by the reporting. It's being presented as if Summers simply put his foot in his mouth, and some faculty are going after him for a gaffe. But Harvard has previously been embroiled in some very contentious tenure litigation, involving charges of gender discrimination. I suspect all the fallout from that litigation is part of the background here. See, e.g. the Clare Dalton saga.

By: baa

baa — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:46:10 +0000

Specific comment about data: no data is presented that support the conclusions. The only data presented in anything like detail are the numbers of faculty by gender in the various MIT schools. Here’s the “results section”: What the Committee Learned From data Given the tiny number of women faculty in any department one might ask if it is possible to obtain significant data to support a claim of gender differences in terms of the distribution of resources and rewards to men vs women faculty. The answer to this question is unequivocally yes. The key to a meaningful review is twofold: 1) It is essential to review primary rather than processed data, and 2) It is essential that the review be done by senior women faculty who are deeply knowledgeable about the particular department, discipline and area of research. Data reviews revealed that in some departments men and women faculty appeared to share equally in material resources and rewards, in others they did not. Inequitable distributions were found involving space, amount of 9-month salary paid from individual research grants, teaching assignments, awards and distinctions, inclusion on important committees and assignments within the department. While primary salary data are confidential and were not provided to the committee, serious underpayment of senior women faculty in one department had already been discovered and corrected two years before the Committee formed. Further possible inequities in salary were flagged by the Committee from the limited data made available to it. The Committee sought data to try to determine whether the number of women faculty was increasing. The data, shown in Table 2 and Figure 2 for the six departments in the School of Science, reveal that there are very significant numbers of women students in the sciences at MIT, but, as has been found in studies of many academic institutions, the pipeline leaks at every stage of career. It was apparent that overall the percent of women faculty had not changed for at least 10, and probably 20, years and there was no indication that there would be any change in the foreseeable future. Specific comment about methodology: we do not know what methodology was used to generate the data we haven’t seen, or what analyses were performed on the data we haven’t seen. This makes it difficult to interpret or assess conclusions like “Inequitable distributions were found involving space, amount of 9-month salary paid from individual research grants, teaching assignments, awards and distinctions, inclusion on important committees and assignments within the department.” Here’s the methodology statement from the study, in full: Committee membership and how the Committee operated The Committee was composed of a single tenured woman from each of the six departments in Science (except Mathematics since there were and still are no tenured women faculty in math) plus three senior male faculty. The three men were or had been department Heads. This was important as their knowledge and administrative experience proved to be invaluable to the work of the Committee. To analyze the status and equitable treatment of women faculty the Committee collected two types of information – data and interviews with women faculty and department heads. Data Data were collected pertaining to the allocation of resources that impact the professional success of faculty, compensations and awards that reflect the administration’s valuation of faculty, and obligations that impact the professional quality of life of faculty. Although the Committee was not initially charged with addressing the question of the very small number of women faculty, the issue is so important that it could not be ignored so pipeline data were also studied. Thus, data for men vs women faculty were studied concerning salary, space, resources for research, named chairs, prizes, awards, amount of salary paid from individual grants, teaching obligations and assignments, committee assignments – departmental, Institute, outside professional activities and committees, and pipeline data: numbers of women/men students and faculty over time. Most data were obtained from the Dean’s office, some from the planning office at MIT. Interviews with women faculty and department heads All but one senior woman faculty in the School of Science either served on the Committee or was interviewed by the Committee. All department Heads in the School of Science either served on the Committee or were interviewed by the Committee. A difficult decision was whether to interview junior women faculty as the Committee did not wish to place them in a possibly awkward position. In the end interviews were conducted with most of the junior women faculty since these women considered the initiative important and wished to contribute. A particularly important aspect of how the Committee operated was that no substantive letter, memo, or report was written, and no important action taken without seeking the participation and advice of all the tenured women faculty in Science. As discussed below, exclusion and invisibility proved to be the common experience of most tenured women faculty. The Committee’s purpose was to be the voice and opinion of all the senior women faculty. A great value of the Committee also lay in sharing the data collected with all the tenured women faculty, since most women had been excluded from this type of information throughout their careers, often with negative consequences for their professional lives.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:25:27 +0000

As someone else noted, it’s not likely you would be so cavalier about a study on the effectiveness of a new drug authored by scientists with a major finacial stake in the drug’s success. If this were true, I would never take any drugs at all and would presumably be dead. You have to use common sense and be specific about these things. Please do so. I’m not going to go through the whole Lancet battle again, so I’m afraid that this time round I’m responding only to specific comments about data or methodology.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:41:28 +0000

“the authors of the study have has been unwilling to share any of the data that they allege support the study’s conclusions” This seems entirely innocent to me. The data is highly personal and could easily be reverse-engineered to identify individuals. Well, I wasn’t going to mention the unnamed inside source who privately informed Judith Kleinfeld that the MIT study never actually found any evidence of discrimination, but that the faculty administration went along with its unsubstantiated conclusions to appease a few discontented senior female faculty, and to avoid taking flak for some serious political problems in the biology department (still reeling from the Baltimore scandal). You see, I’d assumed that the august social scientists at Crooked Timber would consider any claims made by an interested party based on unverifiable confidential information to be laughably weak. But I guess I was wrong—and who am I to question their judgment? You can read all the inside dirt on the MIT study about halfway through this document—just search for “confidential source”.

By: eudoxis

eudoxis — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:21:06 +0000

lizardbreath, it is not correct to compare results from past, open discrimination, which is quite readily measurable and not on topic regarding Summers remarks or research in extant, ulterior discrimination. At issue is the subtle discrimination that supposedly keeps women out of tenured, hard science positions while they are actively recruited to such positions. Other countries show exactly the same trends as the US. There is no evidence that social tinkering changes the proportion of women in the hard sciences vs. other fields, even when social tinkering can change the variability across groups. In other words, there is absolutely no hard evidence that social factors present in different countries can change the relative composition of women in the hard sciences. Summers also reminds his listeners that achievements for women in the academy is crucial. Nobody denies the importance of removing prohibitive social barriers where they can be identified.

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:20:29 +0000

The mistake you’re still making, lizardbreath, is contained in that phrase “societal discrimination” – you’re confounding two separate factors separately discussed by Summers. One is discrimination in academic hiring. The other is differences in the way males and females are socialized in our society. It’s hiring discrimnation, per se, that Summers was perhaps ranking below genetics. And in this era of intensive recruitment of female candidates for hard-science positions, he’s probably right to do so.