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OK, I'll bite. Hard.

Saletan is asking us to be grateful that Summers delivered a light insult instead of a heavy one. Summers didn't come out and say women were less than or dumber than men, oh no. All he said was that women might be genetically less likely to succeed in the single type of work that is most universally understood to require high intellectual ability. That's all.

Whereas we are -- what -- perhaps genetically more likely to succeed at dishwashing, data entry, or seamstressing? We are perhaps more suited to being the lab assistant who develops the new cell strain than being the principal investigator who patents it? Meaning no disrespect of course to such lowlier professions, oh no, it just happens to be genetic "fact"...

..."fact," that is, as interpreted by a dismal economist who is himself an amateur in a genuine science like biology.

In a way I'd rather have back the Victorians, eminent or otherwise. When they wanted to call someone inferior they came out and said it bluntly in public so the absurdity of their prejudices could be demonstrated in public with equal clarity. They didn't hedge and weasel and deny in public but keep acting on bigoted assumptions in private.

Science is constantly finding out differences between men and women's brains. So, what if it turned out to be generally true that men's brains were more adept at spatial and mathematical science? Would you then reject scientific argument? If so that sounds suspiciously like the behaviour of the old sky-god loving, I-ain't-descended-from-no-ape sections of society that you cast withering glances at.
Any anyways, I thought universities were there to uncover truth? If not then what? To favour feeling over argument? The other side of it is that if *women's* brains were scientifically proved to better at certain tasks then you and every feminist from Berkeley to Westphalia would be employing the fact cheerfully.

Somebody help me out because I'm not sure I'm understanding. Test scores demonstrate that in math and science men are smarter and dumber than women?

I'm not finding a transcript and I'm thinking it would be nice to know what Summers actually said.

Saletan is asking us to be grateful that Summers delivered a light insult instead of a heavy one. Summers didn't come out and say women were less than or dumber than men, oh no. All he said was that women might be genetically less likely to succeed in the single type of work that is most universally understood to require high intellectual ability. That's all.

OK, this can be dealt with briefly: no he didn't. Read the article again. What he was speculating (NOT asserting) was that, while on average men and women may have more or less identical abilities in math and science, the statistical distribution of this ability may not and need not be identical. In other words, it's possible that there may be slightly more men in the highest and lowest brackets than women. This says nothing about intelligence in general. It doesn't even say anything about scientific ability in general. It doesn't deny the existence or role of environment or discrimination in the making of scientists. It certainly doesn't suggest any form of preferential treatment for men. All it says it ... what it says. It's a theory worth keeping in mind, is all.

Of course, if Summer had mentioned the parallel observation that women may have a different statistical distribution of ability when it comes to language and communication skills, it would have produced nary a whisper of dissent. His sin was not to suggest that there may be a slight gender imbalance, it was to suggest that there may be a slight gender imbalance which favors a handful of men. That would never do.

Somebody help me out because I'm not sure I'm understanding. Test scores demonstrate that in math and science men are smarter and dumber than women?

Sort of, but let's be clear: test scores demonstrate that in the majority of cases there is no significant difference at all between the sexes. The issue at stake is not the preponderant middle, where most of us reside; it's the two extremes. Most of the ire that Summers has experienced seems to derive from this simple misunderstanding, rather ironic really given that this is an issue of quantitative skills ...

This reminds me a bit of a conversation I had my freshman year of college. One of those giddy ones among eighteen-year-olds only a few days into school, swept up by each other's company and the new environment.

At any rate, at one point someone queried the table with: "If you did research that conclusively proved that one race had a substantially higher intelligence than another, would you publish it?"

A painful question. We went around the table, arguing for and against publishing, when we got to one person who had an answer that wasn't merely an elaboration on "yes" or "no". She answered that it depended on which race her results favored.

I've never forgotten that conversation. I don't really draw any conclusions from it, though, as we were each likely to believe precisely the opposite the following day. But something about that answer just stuck. I asked her about it when I saw her last fall, and she had no memory of the dinner. Funny how some things stick.

A few years later, I would discover cocktail onions at the bar of the same restaurant, for which I am very grateful.

Back on topic:

The Summers observation that gender imbalance was already visible in Harvard's applicant pool was an interesting one, and I think a true one. I saw this within Computer Science in college, and was made particularly aware of it by Sara's research into it as a CS/Women's Studies double-major.

The really perplexing thing about the gender imbalance within the world of high-tech is that women have a much higher representation within industry than they do in academia (especially when measured as a percentage of undergraduate CS majors).

Alan -- I said he said "less likely," which is a non-fancy way of saying just what you said -- that the statistical distribution might not be the same.

Ben -- did she look at whether women have to face more bullshit and credit-stealing in academia than in industry maybe?

Alan -- I said he said "less likely," which is a non-fancy way of saying just what you said -- that the statistical distribution might not be the same.

It's not 'non-fancy', it's completely misleading - because it obscures the fact (which Summers did not) that men as a group are as much disadvantaged by this statistical spread as they are advantaged. In fact, you could present this whole argument another way, by saying that men are slightly more genetically destined to fail at science than women. Which I suspect would not have received quite the same reception.

But I'm genuinely curious - is your objection that you believe Summer's argument to be empirically false (i.e. you deny that the difference in distributions exists), or is it that you think even raising the possibility of a difference is so objectionable that the evidence ought to be suppressed or ignored?

Ben -- did she look at whether women have to face more bullshit and credit-stealing in academia than in industry maybe?

Since Summers was earlier condemned for being an amateur dabbling in things he couldn't possibly understand, is it appropriate for someone who isn't an academic (or in industry, for that matter) to raise such a loaded question?

Washington Post:

No transcript was made of Summers's remarks, which were extemporaneous but delivered from notes. There was disagreement about precisely what he said. Summers's remarks were first reported by the Boston Globe in Monday's editions.

...

In his remarks last week, Summers pointed to research showing that girls are less likely to score top marks than boys in standardized math and science tests, even though the median scores of both sexes are comparable. He said yesterday that he did not offer any conclusion for why this should be so but merely suggested a number of possible hypotheses.

I hope we do not get to the point where people have to fear professional or personal retribution for making such bland statements. Hm. Let me say, rather, I hope we are not there already.

Looking over the comments from Summer's detractors, I don't think I've seen one of them that does not misconstrue his comments based on what is being reported in the papers.

It's not uncommon, when someone approaches pieties brusquely, to get this kind of response. You didn't say this but we all know what you meant, to paraphrase Martha. More often people simply walk away with the firm impression that whatever-it-is was actually said, which appears to be the case with the professor who walked out.

This is all going on what has been reported, of course. But considering that an apparently fairly large number of people are on record saying they see nothing wrong with what he said, I don't feel like I'm out on much of a limb.

Did anyone read Summers' pathetic mea culpa, by the way? I'm surprised he didn't also confess to putting razor blades in swill buckets.

Did she look at whether women have to face more bullshit and credit-stealing in academia than in industry maybe?

I find it hard to imagine that anyone wouldn't have to face more bullshit and credit-stealing in academia than in industry.

Seriously though, except insofar as the composition of the professoriate influences the population of undergraduates, I don't think that that sort of thing would have been something she'd have studied.

I don't know if this will answer everyone's questions, but I think the cultural burdens imposed on girls in our society are so devastating that we've got no business blaming lower female status in the sciences on biology until we've actually got a control group of boys and girls to test who have grown up in a society that demonstrates equal faith in their abilities. That won't occur any time soon.

that we've got no business blaming lower female status in the sciences on biology until we've actually got a control group of boys and girls to test who have grown up in a society that demonstrates equal faith in their abilities.

By "blaming" you apparently mean publicly mentioning the possibility that it might be a factor.

And, of course, by the time we can perform that experiment (i.e., never), the whole question would have only historical intersest.

Well, almost. Corny as this may sound, it's still possible to hope for justice even if we won't ourselves live to see it.

You know, Martha, only you could take such a baldly dishonest argument as this and spin it into a romantic vision ("Corny as this may sound ..." - I love it).

Honestly, this is a compliment - when it suits you, you can be a sophist of rare and impressive acumen.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, as they say. I can't remember who it was, one of the professors at the conference, who complained that if the issue were race rather than gender the results would have been much worse for Summers (in such a way as to obviously suggest that this was a bad thing, possibly further evidence of discrimination). I would think anyone who remembers the whole thing over a DC official's use of the word "niggardly" would not be so envious.

That DC guy using a perfectly decent word and being misunderstood is entirely a different matter from this Summers business.

What Summers did was to create a possible "anatomy is destiny" excuse for statistics that otherwise indicate discrimination. That's wrong for the same kinds of reasons that it's wrong to answer talk about the housing affordability crisis by saying that some homeless people prefer to live outdoors. It does happen to be true that a few people live outdoors because they find some aspect of living indoors to be emotionally daunting -- but the fact shouldn't be cited to blunt the imperative that everyone who wants to get indoors should be able to do so easily.

Martha, you're not a very generous person when it comes to these kind of critiques, but don't you think Summers deserves a soupcon of credit for engaging head on with exactly the kind of complaints you describe? The poor shmuck bent over backwards in his original remarks to say that he didn't think biology was the crucial factor in the gender gap, not that it did him any good.

What you and his other detractors seem to be doing is theorizing backwards: having decided that the gender gap must be the sole result of discrimination (because, well, all decent people know that), you appear to regard any competing explanation - even one that only offers to complement rather than overturn the established dogma - as a threat which needs to be suppressed as quickly as possible, not a hypothesis that at least deserves a chance to be heard. It is it I hope unnecessary to point out that this is the very opposite of the scientific method, and that folks such as yourself are doing science an enormous disservice by this kind of totemic furor. Christ, the Enlightenment Project is in a sorry enough state as it is without people who ought to believe in the pursuit of the liberal verities taking on such a narrow-minded attitude.

That DC guy using a perfectly decent word and being misunderstood is entirely a different matter from this Summers business.

Not at all, it's just more extreme. Which was the woman's point, after all. A lot of people thought someone said something which the person hadn't said, and proceeded to howl for said person's blood in the face of all objection, because someone had come close (in this case, phonetically) to saying something which is considered inappropriate.

If it were true, moreover, that the business in 2000 were just a matter of a misunderstanding, then as soon as someone pointed to a dictionary it would all have been over and done with, would it not? So why didn't that happen? Because decent people knew what he really meant, didn't they? Just like we all know what Summers really meant, don't we?

This is exactly the effect I was talking about above.

It does happen to be true that a few people live outdoors because they find some aspect of living indoors to be emotionally daunting

Well, at least you can still say that in public. Aren't you afraid of opening the floodgates with such an irresponsible statement?

About living outdoors, it's a fact I've observed personally.

On the other hand, these assumptions about women's abilities are essentially based on guesswork. Unfortunately, in the society we've got there is simply no way to find out how women would function without others' contempt or their own learned self-contempt.

On the other hand, these assumptions about women's abilities are essentially based on guesswork.

Woah, Nelly! So now you've moved in the space of one post from a condition of complete confidence (Everything Is About Discrimination, Case Closed) to a sort of fatalistic shrug (Nobody Knows Anything, So Why Even Bother Thinking About It)? And this is supposed to be an position in defence of science?

C'mon, I know you don't give in easily, and I admire you for it, but admit it: your argument is a flaming wreck, isn't it?

As I have been saying quite consistently, discrimination is so pervasive and influential that there is no point even trying to measure purported biological differences in scientific ability until we become civilized enough not to find them interesting -- in the same way that we no longer take an interest (I hope) in correlating intellectual ability with height of hairline, nor moral character with shape of ears.

As I have been saying quite consistently, discrimination is so pervasive and influential that there is no point even trying to measure purported biological differences in scientific ability until we become civilized enough not to find them interesting -- in the same way that we no longer take an interest (I hope) in correlating intellectual ability with height of hairline, nor moral character with shape of ears.

OK, closing remarks: (i) There is nothing uncivilized about wanting to understand more about the nature of biological difference - to imply that curiosity about the human condition must be an excuse for bigotry is, frankly, disgraceful in an argument about science of all things (and trying to smear geneticists by linking their work with the crude eugenics of previous eras is shoddy stuff); (ii) the 'we can't know at the moment' argument is sheer cop-out - let's be honest, you don't want to know because the possibility of a biological gender difference, however trivial, offends you for ideological reasons; (iii) we've come to a pretty pass when people on the Left are so afraid of a scientific hypothesis that they will indulge in the kind of grubby character-assassination that poor Summers has undergone. This kind of philistinism looks to become the Left's version of Creation Science, and pity the poor men and women who must have their work judged not on truth or falsity, the only tests of genuine knowledge, but on adherence to a pre-conceived credo.

...there is no point even trying to measure purported biological differences in scientific ability until...

Martha, I wonder if you've read the introduction to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel? He makes a fairly persuasive case that the racial explanations for European dominance over the New World were actually buttressed by the whole topic becoming taboo after WWII. The prewar racist explanations removed the question from scholarly inquiry, which had the unexpected effect that those explanations remained the most persuasive ones to anyone who raised the question: the taboo prevented alternatives from being developed.

I don't entirely buy this, myself. The Holocaust wasn't as immediately transformative moral experience as we think, at least when you think of Eugenic policy continuing into the 1960's. I can imagine that all the population bomb hysteria could have reawakened those theories had the topic still been within the bounds of debate.

Incidentally, folks here might be interested in the Times article on the subject today. Particularly interesting (though not so relevant to the Martha-dogpile) was:

For one thing, said Kimberlee A. Shauman, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, getting a high score on a math aptitude test turns out to be a poor predictor of who opts for a scientific career, but it is an especially poor gauge for girls. Catherine Weinberger, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that top-scoring girls are only about 60 percent as likely as top-scoring boys to pursue science or engineering careers, for reasons that remain unclear.

Moreover, men seem perfectly capable of becoming scientists without a math board score of 790. Surveying a representative population of working scientists and engineers, Dr. Weinberger has discovered that the women were likelier than the men to have very high test scores. "Women are more cautious about entering these professions unless they have very high scores to begin with," she said.

This squares with some of what I've observed, as well as what I've absorbed from Sara. Apparently most of the efforts to increase female representation in SE fields is directed towards the "pipeline problem." Essentially, it matters very little how fair or affirmative Harvard's hiring practices in CS faculty are, if the professor looking at their classroom on the first day of Intro to Computer Science sees a room of 85 men and 15 women.

I gather that the percentages plummet in middle school, remain low throughout high school and college, and then creep back up during women's careers. It's perhaps lamentable that higher education doesn't draw more women back into SE fields (a hard prospect for anyone), but the really important question is why the numbers plummet in the first place.

Reserving comment on the rest for the moment, I'm interested to note you consider belief in women's equal abilities to be a characteristic of "the left." There was a brief moment, fortunately coinciding with my own earlier adulthood, when everyone was presumed to at least profess such beliefs reardless of their private opinions.

But we're sliding backwards now, and unfortunately you're not alone in making this kind of upside-down attack. Believe in human equality now and you get treated as though the decision to avoid prejudice were somehow itself a prejudice.

Sorry -- that last was addressed to Alan A.

Ben -- I think the key thing you just said was, "...had the topic still been within the bounds of debate."

It's bizarre having been born in the late 1960s. All the horrors and injustices and bigoted lunacies that we were at first led to think our society had outgrown are now being renovated as speakable sections of public debate and even as policy. I'm speaking generally now, of course, not talking about Summers -- Summers just said something unpleasant. He's not actually a war criminal, which by the standards of Harvard University is doing not so badly.

But we're sliding backwards now, and unfortunately you're not alone in making this kind of upside-down attack. Believe in human equality now and you get treated as though the decision to avoid prejudice were somehow itself a prejudice.

OK, I wasn't going to add anything more (and this is really, really it now), but the what-are-poor-egalitarians-like-me-to-do pose is too much to pass by. Let's get this clear: belief in gender equality in a moral sense does not necessarily require belief in gender identity. It is quite consistent to believe that men and women are of equal value and deserve equal opportunity while at the same time admitting the increasingly obvious truth that two genders, on aggregrate, are not the same in all aspects of physio-psychology. Could you drop this I'm-the-only-humanitarian-in-town crap? It's really beneath you.

As far as the left-right distinction goes, I don't consider either side has a monopoly of vice or virtue when it comes to gender; but given that it's the academic left that is in a sort of collective denial about the possibilities Summers raised, I think it's only fair to point this out.

speakable sections of public debate

Hmmm. I said I wasn't certain on this, but you seem to be ignoring the other half of the debate, and perhaps losing faith in free inquiry or free speech. I'm very sympathetic to the argument that the US is a more religious country because of the establishment clause, and has less support for Front National-style fascism because we don't ban Nazi imagery or the KKK.

As Jefferson said, truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

That said, it's very hard to convince myself that the free advance of error is necessary to finding truth when confronted with error face-to-face. Much easier to be tolerant when I'm not reading Ted Rall, Michelle Malkin, or Dan Brown. It requires a certain dogmatic insistence on principle in those cases, which I'm sorry to say I'm not always capable of.