"The Woman Question"
As it used to be called in the suffragette days.
Larry Summers, president of Harvard, spoke at a conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research on Jan. 14, on the subject of women in science and engineering. (At a "workshop" with about 50 people present). The overall theme of the conference was “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities and Their S&E Careers”.
Summers famously suggested that some differences between men and women that might appear to be socialized are actually innate. He prefaced his remarks by saying he was being provocative, and it was very clear that he was not speaking as an expert--he spoke discursively, and gave one example about the behaviour of his own daughter.
Two contentious claims: women might not be appearing in greater numbers in high-profile careers because they "choose" not to take on the responsibilities and hours. They might, in particular, want to make room for family time more than men do.
Secondly, there is evidence that men's and women's brains are different. Apparently there is some evidence that men outnumber women both at the bottom of the performance scale for many activities, and at the top. More male morons, more male geniuses, I guess. (About half corresponding to a passage in Plato's Republic).
Much of the debate is not only about right and wrong, but who has behaved worse. Some of Summers' defenders have said some of his remarks were questionable, but people shouldn't be so easily offended, political correctness keeps running amok, etc. A biology prof from MIT walked out in a huff, so some people (including women) have teased her for apparently suffering from the vapours when supposed gentlemen misbehave.
UPDATE: Oops! the "vapors" meme may have started with George Will.
But there are critics who say that even with the transcript available, Summers should not have said what he said. I am certainly sympathetic to the notion that the president of a university has to stay on message more than a professor does--part of his responsibility is that he is not just free-associating reminiscences, recent reading, and impressions whether intelligent or not, in a never-ending seminar. Maybe this is just the boomers again.
Meghan O'Rourke has a piece on Slate which is serious, yet troubling. She says Summers shouldn't have indicated so clearly that "the latest research" is on the side of innate vs. socialized differences. When people see a baby startle at a noise, and then they are told the baby's gender, many people say a female baby was frightened, but a male baby was angry. O'Rourke: "Consider what a difference it makes if, from the age of 9 months, you treat one group of people as fearful and another as aggressive."
O'Rourke doubts that the "choices" women make are "free": there are all kinds of supports and expectations that will help a man pursue a high-powered career, and they are spotty or absent for women. Somehow we have to come to grips with "culture-wide conditioning."
Summers himself has apparently said, in one of his many apologies, "My January remarks substantially understated the impact of socialization and discrimination, including implicit attitudes—patterns of thought to which all of us are unconsciously subject."
Now I'm beginning to get it. These influences are everywhere, and all-pervasive--so much so that we are all unconscious of them. But wait: not everyone is unconscious: a few enlightened people know the truth, and will share it with us. All we have to do is accept their analysis and recommendations, even though we are completely "unconscious" of the problem they are identifying as a priority. It's like the image of the cave in the Republic, except we don't really know if the puppets that are used to cast shadows are based (to some degree) on reality or not: we are "unconscious." It's like the priests in the middle ages; they know, we don't, we should just keep our mouths shut and obey.
Or maybe the enlightened ones are just as unconscious as the rest of us, and they are asking us to accept what everyone knows is a pure guess, or an arbitrary decision to say and do certain things as far as women are concerned. There is no truth, or we are too unconscious to grasp any, so we might as well just give ambitious women what they want.
A male baby who startles is (perhaps) taken to be angry; a female is taken to be fearful. Do a lot of people in our society think girls and women are fearful creatures, constantly in need of reassurance and help? Does anyone who actually lives with girls and women think so? Isn't it a cliche among parents that girls are just as aggressive as boys--only less physical? Isn't it largely a matter of choosing different weapons--and discovering at an early age that both tears and laughter are powerful weapons?
There is obviously a concern that any talk about innate differences will be used as an excuse not to hire and promote women. Again, is there any basis for this fear in our world? Aren't elite instituions knocking themselves out to train and hire women? Many people agree with Summers' point out that if many schools were discriminating against talented women, a few schools would surely react by hiring this neglected talent, and creating a female powerhouse. The evidence is rather that the pool of talented females is fished extremely heavily, all the time.
Supports for careers: Anecdotes again. We met a female pediatric neurologist in the States. She must have done about 9 years of post-grad study. She confirmed Summers' point that in general, high-pressure careers seem crazy from a point of view of family, or well-rounded life, or anything like that. She said you can see marriages dissolve all the time affecting doctors in a teaching hospital--and the worse things get at home, the more time they spend at the hospital, where they are more or less gods. She was about to move to the country, for the sake of her family. She would not be able to practice neurology out there--it would be either family practice or pediatrics, using only part of her training.
No one is going to suggest that we deliberately train fewer women if they are less likely than men to stay with a high-powered career. But many of us are bothered by a modern development: since 1960, women have stopped staying at home to the same extent, and they are pursuing careers. This has not meant that men stay home in anywhere near the same numbers--on the contrary, it means kids are in the care of strangers, or home alone.
O'Rourke says France is doing better than the U.S. at attracting and keeping women in the sciences. No doubt we do have a lot to learn.
Somehow this is all related to the Susan Estrich/Michael Kinsley controversy. Estrich's complaints seem to be a more obvious case of a highly successful woman complaining that she is not even more successful: her column is not running in the LA Times, despite the fact that she has been friends with Kinsley; yet women she has never heard of , and doesn't agree with, are published there. (Via
Kevin Drum).
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