February 21, 2005

Summers Lovin'

Posted by Kieran

A correspondent writes that my complaints about the Summers controversy are unfair to Larry Summers. If you’re interested, his case and my reply are below the fold.

My correspondent says,

To pick just one relevant passage:
Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I’ll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of significant importance.

Maybe I’m just imagining things, but Summers appears to be doing the opposite of reducing “entrenched” social expectations to “a more-or-less simple result of the expression of individual preference.”  Summers asks here:  “Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men?”  This appears to suggest that the socially structured “familial arrangements” are the key factor.  All through this passage, the way Summers begins each point is to ask “is our society right to expect …. Is our society right to have familial arrangements … Is our society right to ask … ?”

     Now, it’s also true that Summers didn’t put all his suggestions, speculations, and reflections in precisely this form.  At other times, he’s asking whether factors other than social arrangements might also play some role, including marginal differences between categories of people due to socialization or (a tricky point) genetics.  But that’s really the point. Whatever might be said for or against his social graces in other situations, in this particular context Summers was not handing down hard-and-fast conclusions but trying to frame open questions and alternative possibilities in thought-provoking (and sometimes provocative) ways.  One can certainly criticize a lot of his points on various grounds—and I agree that some of them provided reasons for people to get upset (though not hysterical)—but (in my humble opinion) there is just no way that the thrust of his remarks fits your characterization.

I see the point here, and there is something to it. Over the past few days, having re-read the transcript, I’ve thought myself that 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. But in his talk he failed to show that he knew what he was talking about, and he presented himself in a way that invited criticism that he deserved. (And the bulk of it wasn’t “hysterical”, either.) Take his main conclusion:

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

Now, Summers might have said something like, “It seems the main reason for the under-representation of women in academia is that we have these expectations for work built in to the system that assume, in all kinds of ways, that you have someone taking care of you and the kids, if you have kids. Those expectations tend to disadvantage women.” And then he might have said “You know, there’s a been a lot of work by researchers in this area looking into just how this happens, and some proposals for how it might be fixed. Obviously, just one school can’t change the world, but here’s what could be done …” Instead, though, he frames the problem like this: “the first very important reality is just … who wants to do high-powered intense work?” (Emphasis added.) He then launches into his discussion of differences in IQ, differences in socialization (which are dismissed with the “mommy truck, daddy truck” story) and the role of explicit discrimination, which he thinks relatively unimportant.

These remarks are not focused on understanding the social context he gestures towards, notwithstanding his mention of very broad questions like “Is our society right to expect …” and so on. These ideas aren’t developed in the talk. Maybe if you knew Summers personally (I don’t) you could add that his heart is in the right place. But it’s obvious that the thrust of his remarks is that, for good or bad, our system presents people in general with a choice about working hard and (a) women tend to choose not to work hard, because they prefer to have kids, (b) sometimes they’re just not smart enough anyway, and © discrimination on the ground isn’t really as important as women’s initial choices or their mathematical limitations. This view is presented by shuttling back and forth between his own speculations and some anecdotes. It’s obvious from the content and tone that he neither knows nor cares about the relevant research literature. Work in this area makes it clear that the three mechanisms he mentions interact and reinforce each other: e.g., negative expectations negatively affect performance; broad expectations about careers lead to people making specific decisions for you (by not offering an opportunity, say); and small differences in initial advantage — I mean a bit of time off here, a nicer research budget there — can accumulate into large differences in outcomes. This means that the role for discrimination may be greater than Summers imagines, because discrimination isn’t just running into some guy who really believes women don’t want to or just can’t cut it in high-powered research jobs. Fine-grained features of the career path can accumulate into bad outcomes. This is what the MIT Gender Equity Project found:

Marginalization increases as women progress through their careers at MIT, and was often accompanied by differences in salary, space, awards, resources, and response to outside offers; women receiving less despite professional accomplishments equal to those of their male colleagues.

In nearly all cases, Department chairs or other decision-makers could give plausible particularistic reasons why a decision was made in a specific case, but the outcome was always gender-specific. Similar things happen even further back in the pipeline: if women get encouraged to pursue lower-status specialties, for example, or are not called for an interview because someone thinks they wouldn’t accept a job because they have a husband who works elsewhere. And that’s not even going further back to college or high-school. Of course, it should go without saying that if there are people who really believe women generally can’t or don’t want to manage a job at an elite school, and those people are in the happy position of having the power to help make their beliefs true — well, then discrimination can have a bigger role than we imagine. Summers’ convictions about women’s work choices and his anecdotes about Mommy and Daddy trucks rather put him in this position. The burden is on him to show that it’s not a problem.

So, I just don’t buy the defence that Summers wanted to understand what’s happening, and forthrightly put forward some challenging hypotheses about it, but was beaten up by the evil PC witches because he mentioned biology. Instead, I see someone who believes he already knows the answer, and frames it in a completely conventional rhetoric of work-family choices, with a bit of biology thrown in. Because he’s very smart, he came up with some decent, but half-formed, ideas about the structure of careers in academia. But they were presented in an empirically uninformed way. Listening to some of his defenders, you’d think no-one had ever raised the issue of career paths, or the role of gender differences in math ability or what have you, when in fact they have been the subject of research for years. In particular, the speech shows an impoverished understanding about the relationship between careers and discrimination. He sees the latter as overcome and the former as framing a perhaps tragic individual choice. There’s what employers want, and there’s what women choose. This is not a provocative analysis. It’s just Sunday-Supplement stuff. Combined with the obnoxious tone, and the record of tenuring and senior hires of women at Harvard under Summers’ administration, it’s no wonder his audience didn’t feel especially sympathetic. Frankly, when you’re the President of Harvard, you should do a lot better on a topic like this. And by “better” I don’t mean “you should be nicer”, or “you should deliver the usual bromides.” I mean, “you should know what you’re talking about.”

In summary, I agree that there were positive elements in the talk. That’s partly why it’s been such a disaster for him: a little more work and he could really have impressed people. But given what he said, it’s no surprise that he angered a lot of people in the audience, and I think he deserved to be criticized for it. As I said before, I really don’t think he should lose his job over this: if the Harvard Corporation removes him, it’ll be because this incident provided a focus for more widespread dissatisfaction with his Presidency and allowed his enemies, motivated by all kinds of grievances, to move against him.

February 19, 2005

Minding the Kids, Again

Posted by Kieran

Now that Larry Summers has begun to live up to his putative commitment to open, freewheeling inquiry by finally releasing a transcript of his infamous remarks, various people are commenting on it. Matt Yglesias says

I don’t think you can reasonably expect any given university (or corporation, or person) to singlehandedly shoulder the burden of changing a set of social expectations that’s become very well entrenched over a very long period of time. At the same time, you can’t just do nothing about it, either.

Bitch, PhD addresses this issue pretty well, as does a correspondent of Mark Kleiman’s. The main point is the first step toward addressing what Matt properly calls “a set of social expectations that’s become very well entrenched over a very long period” is — contrary to what Summers did in his remarks — to stop treating it as a more-or-less simple result of the expression of individual preferences. Now, in other social-policy contexts, economists will jump all over you for not properly considering the incentives that shape people’s choices and smugly wheel out one-liners like “People respond to incentives, all else is commentary.” There’s a lot to that observation. But in contexts like gender and the labor market, the emphasis instead gets put on individual preferences as the mainspring of choice, rather than considering the social origins of the incentive structure.

Here is an old post of mine, written in response to something Jane Galt (aka Megan McArdle) wrote. It addresses this issue a bit, with some pointers to accessible and practical discussions of it by specialists — some of the literature that Summers just baldly ignored, or was inexcusably ignorant of. As I said back then,

Jane’s initial question — “Should we [women] stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women” — effectively concedes the case as lost from the get-go. It frames the problem as wholly belonging to the prospective mother. Dad has no responsibility towards his potential offspring, is not required to make any work/family tradeoffs, and indeed has so much autonomy that a woman who chooses kids over career is “taking a huge financial bet on her husband’s fidelity.” … The institutions that structure people’s career paths may have deep roots, but that’s not because they spring naturally out of the earth. Cross-national comparison shows both that there’s considerable variation in the institutionalization of child care, and that this variation can have odd origins. … [They] aren’t immutable, either. In fact, in the U.S. they’ve changed a great deal since the early 1980s … Looking at the problem this way makes one less likely to fatalism about tragic choices, wanting to have it all, and the inevitable clash of work and family. … It also has the virtue — as C. Wright Mills put it forty years ago — of letting us “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society,” rather than forever being stuck at the level of individual women facing insoluble work-family tradeoffs.

None of that is particularly original, by the way. It’s a well-developed perspective with plenty of empirical evidence and theoretical elaboration, and even a little bit of reading in this area would make that evident. That’s why Summers’ audience was so ticked off. In fairness to the guy, at this stage his perilous position has little to do with the remarks themselves anymore, and has become an ouster by opponents dissatisfied with his Presidency in general.

January 23, 2005

Durkheim and Desperate Housewives

Posted by Chris

The latest Prospect has a nice piece on Durkheim by Michael Prowse, arguing that we should take him seriously as a critic of free-market capitalism. I was, however, struck by this paragraph concerning Durkheim’s views on the advantages of marriage for men:

Durkheim used the example of marriage to illustrate the problem of anomie or inadequate social regulation. You might think that men would be happiest if able to pursue their sexual desires without restraint. But it is not so, Durkheim argued: all the evidence (including relative suicide rates) suggests that men do better when marriage closes their horizons. As bachelors they can chase every woman they find attractive but they are rarely contented because the potential objects of desires are so numerous. Nor do they enjoy any security because they may lose the woman they are currently involved with. By contrast, Durkheim argued, the married man is generally happier: he must now restrict himself to one woman (at least most of the time) but there is a quid pro quo. The marriage rules require the woman to give herself to him: hence his one permitted object of desire is guaranteed. Marriage thus promotes the long-term happiness of men (Durkheim was less certain that it helped women) because it imposes a sometimes irksome constraint on their passions.

No comment from me, except that it reminded me of a dialogue between Gabrielle and her boy-gardener lover during a recent episode of Desperate Housewives . It went something like this:

He: So why did you marry Carlos?

She: Because he promised to give me everything I desired.

He: And did he?

She: Yes.

He: So why aren’t you happy?

She: It turns out I desired the wrong things.

Cue Aristotle stage left?

December 01, 2004

International AIDS day

Posted by Chris

I’ve been looking through the headlines on international AIDS day. The BBC discusses the disproportionate impact on women in Africa . India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV , and nobody really knows how many victims there are in China (CNN). “HIV and Aids are expected to kill 16 million farm workers in Southern Africa by 2010” reports the South African Independent Online . In Britain the Guardian tells us that a fifth of respondents to a poll blame the victims. In Lebanon , only a quarter of victims receive any kind of treatment. In Uganda a government minister warns the UN not to give advice to gays on safe sex because homosexuality is illegal. Please add more links in comments throughout the day.

November 25, 2004

Voting dogs

Posted by Chris

Via Butterflies & Wheels I came across the following ludicrous and offensive argument against gay marriage from Keith Burgess-Jackson, the self-styled AnalPhilosopher :

I have said in this blog many times that the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent, which is why I put the word “marriage” in quotation marks. I do the same for dog “voting.” If we took our dogs to the polls and got them to push levers with their paws, they would not be voting. They would be going through the motions of voting. It would be a charade. Voting is not made for dogs. They lack the capacity to participate in the institution. The same is true of homosexuals and marriage.

Richard Chappell at Philosophy etc says nearly all that needs to be said about Burgess-Jackson’s “argument”, so I wouldn’t even have bothered mentioning it if I hadn’t been in conversation on Tuesday with the LSE’s Christian List whose article “Democracy in Animal Groups: A Political Science Perspective” is forthcoming in Trends in Ecology and Evolution . List draws on Condorcet’s jury theorem (previously discussed on CT here ) to shed more light on research by Conradt and Roper in their paper Group decision-making in animals , from Nature 421 (155—8) in 2003. Conradt and Roper have this to say about animal voting:

Many authors have assumed despotism without testing, because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans. However, empirical examples of ‘voting’ behaviours include the use of specific body postures, ritualized movements, and specific vocalizations, whereas ‘counting of votes’ includes adding-up to a majority of cast votes, integration of voting signals until an intensity threshold is reached, and averaging over all votes. Thus, democracy may exist in a range of taxa and does not require advanced cognitive capacity.

[Tiresome, humourless and literal-minded quasi-Wittgensteinian comments, putting inverted commas around “voting” etc. are hereby pre-emptively banned from the comments thread.]

November 05, 2004

We have met the enemy and he is gay

Posted by Henry

David Frum sinks even deeper into the Mariana trench.

Speaking of media bias, here’s a question you won’t hear in our big papers or on network TV: Does Yasser Arafat have AIDS?

We know he has a blood disease that is depressing his immune system. We know that he has suddenly dropped considerable weight – possibly as much as 1/3 of all his body weight. We know that he is suffering intermittent mental dysfunction. What does this sound like?

Former Romanian intelligence chief Ion Pacepa tells in his very interesting memoirs that the Ceaucescu regime taped Arafat’s orgies with his body guards. If true, Arafat would a great deal to conceal from his people and his murderously anti-homosexual supporters in the Islamic world.

via Bookslut.

September 27, 2004

I Want the World to Know

Posted by Belle Waring

Did you hate high school? I suggest putting it all into perspective by reading a series of articles on being a 17-year-old gay boy in rural Oklahoma (Part I, Part II; Part III is forthcoming). On the one hand, I know that his life is much better than it would have been even in the recent past, and that American culture is changing in many ways that will make similar journeys for younger boys and girls easier in the future. He has uncles who are openly gay, and his father is apparently resigned to his sexual orientation. On the other hand, ponder the exquisite, hellish torment:

Michael tried sending his mom a clue about his sexuality early on. He took her to a Cher concert in Tulsa, but she failed to make the connection.

“Apparently a lot of people don’t know she has a gay following,” Janice says, defensively. “The guys at work said how neat it was that I was going.”

She pauses, thinking back. “I have to say, it was a fantastic concert.”

A Cher concert, people. I have to stop thinking about the ride back from the Cher concert now. His mother, Janice, wants to cure him:

She felt as though the mental health industry was against her until someone gave her the book “Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth,” which asserts that gay activists successfully pressured the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality as a mental illness from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Suddenly, Janice realized why she’d hit so many roadblocks. “The gay movement had gone into the politics and changed everything,” she says. “Now it’s not even a disease or sickness.”

No one seemed to understand that Michael’s eternal life was at stake. Janice feared that Michael would go to hell and be apart from her in the afterlife. “I’m afraid I won’t see him again,” she says, her voice breaking.

Whatever agony you may have experienced at that 8th grade dance, could it really compare to this?:

One night at the mall he sees a clerk at Abercrombie & Fitch who he thinks might be gay. Heart pounding, Michael decides to go for it.

He asks the clerk: Are you fruity?

The answer is no.

All together now: Move. Out. Of. Oklahoma. Finally, I object to the series’ subtitle, “Young and Gay in Real America.” That tweaker I used to see at the EndUp in SF around 5 am on a Monday sometimes, wearing nothing but make-up and a plastic trash bag fashioned into a rude tunic, and smeared with human shit on the inside? He’s part of real America too. This isn’t widely known, but cornfields don’t actually attract extra realness to places in virtue of their special ontological properties.

August 20, 2004

Our gendered world

Posted by Eszter

A propos this very interesting discussion about gendered pronouns, and à propos all the babies being born in my social circles, I thought I’d post a note about the salience of gender the moment we are born. I became an aunt last week and so the following has come up a lot in the past few days. The first thing everybody wants to know about the baby is its (their?:) gender. At first I was not hiding this bit of information on purpose, but by now I consciously phrase announcements about the event in gender-neutral terms to see how long it takes for the other party to ask whether it is a boy or a girl. As you can imagine, it doesn’t take long. One may argue that this is because, grammatically speaking, people are unable to ask questions about the baby without knowing its gender. But I think it is more than that. Our world is so gender-based that it is hard for people to think about a person without knowing the person’s gender. But what is it exactly about a baby that makes it necessary for us to know its gender? In what ways is it going to be important? Is it so we can say whether the baby is beautiful versus handsome? Is it so we know what types of presents to get for it? If yes then we are off on the path of gendered socialization the moment the little person takes its first breath. All this shows the pressure parents must be under to choose between girl and boy when a child is born sex unknown.

UPDATE: I thought I should add a bit to this post drawing on some work by sociologists who actually study this stuff. Some people in the comments – and elsewhere as well, I am sure – argue that if you look at the behavior of girls and boys already at an early stage you will observe their different preferences for certain colors and activities. We should not forget, however, that it is not possible to raise children in an isolated manner and their social environments – as evidenced by the anecdote in this post – start differentiating them by gender from the start. So the fact that a girl may opt for a “girlie” toy or pink may simply be a reflection of what she has already picked up from her surroundings. It is interesting to note, however, that historically pink and blue were assigned to girls and boys in the exact reverse of today’s conventions. I quote from Padavic and Reskin, Women and Men at Work (p.4.):

Clothing for babies illustrates the creation of sex differences in appearance that have no natural basis. Disposable-diaper manufacturers, for example, market different designs for girls and boys. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, however, male and female infants were dressed alike—usually in white dresses. When Americans began to color code babies’ clothing, they dressed boys in pink and girls in blue. Not until amost 1950 did the convention reverse, with blue becoming defined as masculine and pink as feminine (Kidwell and Steele 1989:24-27). Such shifts demonstrate that what is critical for maintaining and justifying unequal treatment between the sexes is not how cultures set the sexes apart but the fact that they do it at all.

Also, for a very good look at children in their early years, read Barry Thorne’s book on Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School.

August 03, 2004

Then and now

Posted by Chris

I bought a copy of Transformer the other day. I was fourteen when it first came out in December 1972, and I probably paid about the same amount of money back then (£5), or maybe the year after. 1972 is a long time ago — thirty-two years — but Transformer is clearly an album that lives on this side of a temporal watershed. If a song with the lyrical content of “Walk on the Wild Side” had been made ten years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have received much exposure, and certainly wouldn’t have been in the record collections of fourteen-year-olds (invisibly shaping their perception of sexual possibility and acceptability). But if it is an album from now, rather than then, it is still stiking how close it was to then. In Britain the Sexual Offences Act had been passed only five years before. Five years . Not that the following years have been ones of seamless progress, what with Section 28 and that.

To check on some of the dates, I looked at this gay rights timeline . Shocking — so shocking — to read entries like the following

* 1945 - Upon the liberation of concentration camps by Allied forces, those interned for homosexuality are not freed, but required to serve out the full term of their sentences under Paragraph 175

Unimaginable. And yet closer in time to 1972 than we are. Remember that next time you hear a commentator deploring the influence of the 1960s.