Good to see that Israel is finally taking a stand against it's own religious extremists.


I don't know any other way to describe this than awesome.


As to be expected, the controversy over the problem of innate sex differences rages on. I don't want to get involved in the nitty-gritty details of the data, or arguing over what people ought to be concluding from it, nor am I qualified to. As all reasonable people are (should be) saying, let the scientists do their work. After all the data are collected, we can draw our conclusions as we wish. In his blog, respected academic Tim Burke provisionally agrees that conclusions for either side are premature

Let’s ignore the large body of research that casts doubt on or hugely complicates the working hypothesis that men are somehow adaptively better at science and mathematics. Let’s assume that Summers’ hypothesis is valid.

However, he then goes on suggest something incredibly naive.

Even in the best case scenario for this kind of conjecture, we’re only talking about tendencies, not gender-based absolutes. Meaning that even if Summers’ hypothesis actually is the best explanation for the imbalance in the sciences, this imbalance should pose no difficulty for Harvard should Harvard judge it desirable to have more women on its science faculty.
...Even if genetic or innate differences mean that no more than 15% of the top scientists and mathematicians are women, Harvard could pay whatever was necessary to recruit from that 15% and achieve a faculty which had a 50-50 balance of men and women.
...Even if you wanted to be generous to the argument that affirmative action goals result in declining standards, it only applies to the average institution, to institutions which are presumed to lack the clout or financial power to compete for scarce goods and which therefore are presumed to have to lower their standards in order to achieve diversity.

This is so embarassingly wrong. In fact, it seems to me the reverse is true. The top 15% of scientists is not a meaningful grouping. Yes, of course there is a statistical percentile of the top 15%, but this is not a monolithic group. The variance within the extreme percentiles is much higher. As anyone who has ever looked at a bell curve should notice, this is true for ANY reasonably natural distribution. However, in particular it is empirically true with respect to the measurement of intellectual abilities between sexes; look up the data yourself if you don't believe me. The top scientist in any given field can very easily be worth ten of the next best scientists put together; one Einstein is worth 50,000 R and D departments.

The flaw I see in the argument comes from the comparison of top research scientists to scarce goods. In economics, we assume that goods of any given type are identical, and can vary only in their quantity. The approximation may be ok when used to represent pools of unskilled labor. But this is simply not the case with matters of human talent: the closer approximation would be that each scientist is his or her own scarce good. No school has the liberty of being able to make choices on the basis of arbitrary or politically correct or playfully whimsical criteria without sacrificing quality in the process. But in fact, the top institutions have the most to lose by this process, since in their human resource pool, variance is greatest.

What's most offensive about this whole argument is the presumption that institutions of research ought to achieve "diversity." What is called for here is a 50-50 balance, and I assume this contention is not uncommon. Now, of course institutions ought to cultivate discrimination-free environments, and work to eliminate all structural inequalities for women working in academia. Yet, unless there is some a priori reason why we should have absolute numerical parity between genders in academia - and I can't think of one - this suggestion is just as offensive as suggesting a restrictive quota system for one particular gender. Both are completely arbitrary.
Of course, socially progressive readers will remark that setting up concrete, numerical criteria is a practical though crude way to change the social conditions responsible for the problem. Well, there are equal numbers of each sex, so why don't we just choose 50/50 as the goal? This is all very sensible, except this isn't at all the way reasonable people have settled these matters in the past. When social engineering is used to remedy historical discrimination, it very rarely takes the form of enforced numerical parity, or isomorphism or whatever. Imagine if various European countries that had been the sites of civil and professional anti-semitic discrimination for hundreds of years decided to remedy the situation by appointing Jews to government and professional posts according to the exact proportion of Jews living in those countries... As common knowledge has it, there would be far fewer Jews working in these positions than there are today, given a fairly discrimination-free environment. In another case, consider how our most socially conscious institutions of higher learning have responded to the injustices dealt to african americans throughout American history. In its most socially activist form, this means the awarding of extra admissions points for students from historically underepresented (read: discriminated against) ethnic groups. No one is suggesting we provision spots in colleges, jobs, government and baseball leagues according to the numerical representation of african americans in the population. What if someone complained there weren't enough white people in basketball (a valid observation), and proposed an enforced numerical quota to remedy the problem. I can tell you definitively that the quality of professional basketball would go way down. In all these cases, the inherent wisdom of competitive selection is thwarted.
Research science or private sector business is a competitive endeavor. We are not building a polity here. Equal representation in the usual democratic sense, so important for running governments, is effective and necessary because it ensures the will of all the people is represented in the decisions of the governing body. Research and jobs are not government, they do not make decisions for other people, they are selfish, utility maximizing endeavors. There is no moral or civil argument that equal representation as a goal is necessary. Many people may be confusing private and public ventures here, but the ways they are run are very different.
It seems to me a lot of feminists are trying to preempt the debate under the auspices of political offensiveness. The truth cannot be offensive! Ok, so maybe I can think of some cases where it can be. But we have to know the objective truth first, independently, before addressing the normative issue of what should be done. To my understanding, there is research out there addressing these very issues of the relative contributions of all kinds of factors to the current gender gap in natural sciences and engineering. However, the research is incredibly contradictory. No one knows what to make out of it. Worse yet, some of it appears to be clearly political propoganda masquerading as scientific research. The unspoken irony in the whole debate is that this is the natural sciences afterall....people are supposed to agree on things! Clearly the debate would benefit from more research.
Most of the Summers' critics take his remarks completely out of context. As his various detractors have it, he was explaining his own tenure decisions; he was speaking about women and men in general; he was stating his personal belief. Ok, Larry Summers is not the most tactful guy. This is a given. The first two suggestions don't make any sense, though. The conference where the infamous remarks were made was attended by representatives of a few elite science and engineering institutions to address the issue of the gender gap in their faculties. The relevant community here is a freak group of statistical deviants, not men and women in general. The comment itself, on innate gender differences, is a purely scientific question, and has nothing to do with what people ought to or will be doing about this issue. The professor who walked out of the talk explained she did so because Summers was stating his personal belief. He clearly wasn't, and the intention was to goad people to keep an open mind to all angles. Yet, even if that does represent his personal belief, who cares? Maybe that concerns the Harvard administration and tenure committees. Moreover, the issue addressed is scientific. No one's belief really matters. If Summers' was the head of a research group pledging scientific objectivity I would be concerned, but he's not: he's trying to get people to DO research.
From now on, I'm not going to say "I do (or don't) support Summers and what he said." For one, I don't care about what his personal beliefs are or what ramifications they have for his job. I also don't want to argue about a comment that wsn't delivered very tactfully, that was probably ill-advised, and then was distorted by some of its critics. What matters to me is how we adjust our institutions, whatever the finding is. Originally published 4/15/05