I don't get why it's controversial to acknowledge that men and women are different. "Different" implies that some people are better at some things than others, and some types of people are better at some things as well. What's wrong with that? Welcome to reality. Lots of people are better at lots of things than I am, and I don't sweat it.
The president of Harvard University prompted criticism for suggesting that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.Lawrence H. Summers, speaking Friday at an economic conference, also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities. ...
"It's possible I made some reference to innate differences," he said. He said people "would prefer to believe" that the differences in performance between the sexes are due to social factors, "but these are things that need to be studied."
He also cited as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Yet he said she named them "daddy truck" and "baby truck," as if they were dolls.
Gender and race don't define individuals. There are women who are better at math and engineering than I am, I'm certain of it, but on average men tend to be better at such things. Now, you may disagree and think that's simply not true, but there's no reason to get offended over it... unless, I suppose, you base your sense of self-worth on how good your group is at math. But isn't that a stupid thing to be concerned about? At most be concerned with your own personal ability.
Update:
The comments below are really excellent! Meep makes a good point that I'd forgotten:
But back to the stats: what's interesting is that it's not exactly true on average, either, if you consider the samples. When you look at distributions of math test scores (for tests everyone is forced to take), for example, you'll find lots more guys than gals sitting at the high end of the distribution... but that's also true at the low end. There are fatter tails in the male distribution on most things, which I do find interesting. Look at any special education class, and you'll find far more boys than girls there (and it's not totally due to behavior, aka 'boys being boys'.. more boys are autistic, more are dyslexic, etc.) When SAT time comes, you're not going to find the kids in the lower tail taking the test, generally, so that skews averages upward. Likewise, at math competitions, most of the top-scorers are male.Still, is it right to say that males are more likely to score better than females in math, when it's also true that they're more likely to score worse? Summers, being at Harvard, is going to see only the upper tail, which probably skews his thinking. What makes males both better and worse than females at math?
I made this handy graphic to illustrate the bell curve she's talking about.
(HT: Marie Gryphon for the basic graph.)
The problem with such a bias is that when it comes to choosing between two candidates for a position, one is a man and the other is a woman, despite everything on the CVs there is always some reading between the lines to detect who has slightly more of the human quality of genius and when you harbor the bias that men are more innately appropriate for math then that is going to come into play, putting the woman, and the university in question, at a disadvantage.
It does get annoying when you've got to be better than everyone else to get a position... but luckily, I was blessed with the inclination and ability to get ahead in math. Yes, I've met lots of guys much, much smarter than me in math, but they followed their egos into academia and I decided to jump into business... where that competition has gone away, because you need far more than math ability to get ahead.
But back to the stats: what's interesting is that it's not exactly true on average, either, if you consider the samples. When you look at distributions of math test scores (for tests everyone is forced to take), for example, you'll find lots more guys than gals sitting at the high end of the distribution... but that's also true at the low end. There are fatter tails in the male distribution on most things, which I do find interesting. Look at any special education class, and you'll find far more boys than girls there (and it's not totally due to behavior, aka 'boys being boys'.. more boys are autistic, more are dyslexic, etc.) When SAT time comes, you're not going to find the kids in the lower tail taking the test, generally, so that skews averages upward. Likewise, at math competitions, most of the top-scorers are male.
Still, is it right to say that males are more likely to score better than females in math, when it's also true that they're more likely to score worse? Summers, being at Harvard, is going to see only the upper tail, which probably skews his thinking. What makes males both better and worse than females at math?
And then, whenever this argument comes up, you've got to ask if American blacks and hispanics have something innate about them that makes them perform so much worse than white & asian males AND females. American black females score higher on math than black males... so is that biologically innate, too?
Some people really don't think these things through. Must be the lack of diversity at Harvard that deludes them.
I've noticed the same thing Meep has-- the female score distribution is much tighter than the male score distribution. Just in my own math classes, the top ten students are usually 50/50 or 60/40 male/female, but 9 out of the bottom 10 are male. Personally I think women are better students because they tend to see their homework as a social obligation. That can easily counteract any natural bias men may have toward mathematical ability.
While focusing on socres, I think its more a question of intrest and how we are wired differently. Then looking in generalizaions there are deffinetly trends in intrests and employment, now it doesn't imply they always exist or that a person of the opposite sex cannot succeed in a intrest that is preferred by the other sex. It just like among my friends the male ones are far mor elikely to think in the macro than women, while the women are far more likely to think in the micro.
In school Engineering was 3 to 1 male, in the Masters course its about even. It was just like heading over to the psychoogy department where it was female by a ratio for 10 to 1. But what does it mean, just that more women are intrested in psychology than men.
I think it was Prager who talked about raising his kid with out any toy guns. To which his son turned everything else into a gun, loaf of bread, stick, pillow, etc. There is something to be said about the wired in differences that exist between the sexes.
The president of Harvard really wasn't saying that women are inferior at math and science, just there are other factors that govern the intrest or desire to build a career in them. You'd think the president of Harvard could explain an idea clearly without putting his foot in his mouth.
I'm always struck by liberal contradiction between discussions of innate sex differences and discussions of evolution.
The liberal line on evolution is that no rational person could possibly dispute that human beings developed from lower organisms through some process similar to natural selection. But the consequences of that belief collide directly with the liberal belief that there are no meaningful sex differences.
If you believe in evolution, or even merely in nautural selection, then must should also believe in meaningful sex differences. You can't logically separate the two. The sexes of any sexual species have very different reproductive considerations, so assuming that they wouldn't naturally differ in their skills and inclinations would essentially deny the entire premise of natural selection.
But logic doesn't play much of a role on the left when the topic is sex differences. It's an article of faith for them, held just as zealously as the faith of young-earth creationists.
Wow, those are some good comments.
I should have mentioned the bell curve thing, and I updated the post to reflect meep's comments.
BB: Evolutionary psychology has a real tough time being accepted because it's conclusions are so politically-incorrect... but you can't escape them without throwing out a lot of mandatory scientific beliefs.
It is well understood that there are more male than female geniuses, but then there are more men than women with very low IQs.
So the mail/female "tail size" ratio doesn't just hold in math, but pretty much anything requiring great mental abilities. There are many female composers and virtuosos, but not nearly as many as men.
By the way, I want to give Summers the benefit of the doubt -- he also remarked on the fatter tails (I think the term he used was "greater dispersion") in the male distribution. He thought that the higher std. dev. among males might have biological reasons (I agree on that... but there needs to be research.)
He also made other remarks talking about the working conditions of those in tenure track academia, and how unfriendly it is to those who want any sort of life outside of that. But, of course, that's true in many of the academic fields, and you don't see women in that much smaller numbers in fields like psychology or sociology. So there may be something else at work here... like inclination. I was good at physics in undergrad, but I got put off by the field by the time I graduated. That happened to some of the guys, too, but when you're 1 of only 2 females among the graduating physics B.S.s, leaving has a greater impact on %ages later on than if you were 1 guy out of 20 who decided to go do something else.