hervard

Harvard president Larry Summers recently came under fire for his comments during a public address. Summers dared to raise the question of whether the lack of representation of women compared to men in hard sciences might be due to some innate differences between women & men.

For a while, I couldn't find any actual quotes of what Summers said. All I could find in the news were angry quotes from angry feminists about what he said.

Well, I found the transcript of his talk, and it's here.

Reading Summers' address, one finds (and I'll use understatement), very little of the "misogyny," "bigotry" and other demonizing sorts of words attributed to Summers and his remarks. There are a number of things I wanted to try to comment on, but I find that Summers did a better job than I expected of anticipating and heading off the questions I would raise. So, please, just read it for yourself.

What I do find... annoying, and a bit depressing, is how his remarks have been received, and I wonder why people would get so upset over a series of questions that were raised with the goal of better understanding how it is that there are much fewer women than men in the upper eschelons of science. Presumably if you want to change the status quo, it helps to have a right understanding (as opposed to politically correct, agenda-based ideology) of the causes for the status quo...? (Am I off base here?)

The best way I'm able to understand the bad press is that Summers was in fact asking questions, which is a huge offense whenever you're in an environment with a rigorously enforced ideology... These were questions which different groups of people regard as dangerous. Dangerous how? Well, one group of people probably simply misunderstood his remarks entirely, and thought he was speaking normatively rather than descriptively (which he was very careful to deny repeatedly) --- i.e. that we was saying women "should" want to drop out of work to raise families, or some such. Another group may have misunderstood and thought he was primarily addressing innate abilities in science, which he said he wasn't. That would be offensive to...probably most of us. Another group missed the point entirely, thinking that the small number of women who have made great sacrifices for their careers to do "high-powered work" somehow refutes Summer's remarks about what most women seem to be likely to want to do. Truly, to dimish the great efforts of these achieving women would be to do them and all of us a great disservice.

Okay, all of these are sufficient excuses for public uproar (especially if "spun" properly), but I think there's more to it, like so:

He was speaking at the "NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce." People at such a conference are committed to finding ways to change the structure of the workplace to encourage diversity ("diversity" meaning people of various genders, sexual-orientations and ethnicities all espousing the same, approved, secular-humanist thought), and Summers was in a way attacking their whole program. I don't know that he realized this --- He may have just thought he was trying to help people have a proper perspective on the roles of "true descrimination" and other impediments to diversity vs. other factors which may not necessarily be bad or in need of changing (or indeed capable of being changed). ...and of course everybody at the conference knows that women and men are so equal (or no I'm sorry how politically incorrect, I mean to say that women are better than men but nevertheless deserve special dispensations because they're women) that descrimination is the only explanation for lack of representation... But by raising the question that maybe not as many women as men want to work 80 hours a week, etc., he may have been pointing out something that diversification efforts may be powerless to change, i.e. that the whole diversity-terraforming program may be limited in what it can achieve.

Yea, public uproar at that point. If I'm in the diversity-making business, then I'm thinking "this guy speaking is obviously a bigot or mysoginist or...gimme some other word...Nazi, whatever, because he's threating not just my job, but the goal that I'm devoting my life to. Get him out of here, and get him out of Harvard."

Sorry if you're offended by my questions and observations. But don't try to fire me from the blog.
-Scott
P.S.- Okay, I left out one other "dangerous" aspect of Summers' remarks, and it's the whole slippery-slope thing: What's to stop people from using a similar line of reasoning to "explain away" underrepresentation of ethnic groups? He does dare to point out that white males are "very substantially" underrepresented in the National Basketball Association...