Late yesterday afternoon, Lawrence Summers posted on his website the transcript of his January 14 remarks at the Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, together with the transcript of his Opening Remarks at Tuesday’s Harvard FAS Faculty meeting.
The January 14 transcript is worth reading in its entirety — both for its discussion of the issues involved in explaining a troublesome phenomenon regarding women in the sciences and for understanding the even more troublesome phenomenon we witnessed at Harvard this week.
Summers’ January 14 presentation is very lengthy, but the following excerpts will give a fair flavor of the discussion.
Summers began by stating that "[t]here are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions."
One is what I would call the — I’ll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are — the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis.
The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search.
And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.
With respect to his second “hypothesis” — the lower availability of aptitude at the high end (not the innate inability at that end) — Summers said the following:
I’m focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields.
And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes — height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability –there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means — which can be debated — there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.
* * *
Because if my reading of the data is right — it’s something people can argue about — that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well.
So my sense is that the unfortunate truth — I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true — is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.
Summers ranked discrimination as the least most important reason of the three he was advancing, and here is his discussion of that factor:
To what extent is there overt discrimination? Surely there is some.
Much more tellingly, to what extent are there pervasive patterns of passive discrimination and stereotyping in which people like to choose people like themselves, and the people in the previous group are disproportionately white male, and so they choose people who are like themselves, who are disproportionately white male.
No one who’s been in a university department or who has been involved in personnel processes can deny that this kind of taste does go on, and it is something that happens, and it is something that absolutely, vigorously needs to be combated.
On the other hand, I think before regarding it as pervasive, and as the dominant explanation of the patterns we observe, there are two points that should make one hesitate.
The first is the fallacy of composition. . . . [T]here’s a real question as to how plausible it is to believe that there is anything like half as many people who are qualified to be scientists at top ten schools and who are now not at top ten schools . . . .
The second problem is . . . . [that] if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.
So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.
I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.
Summers concluded his lengthy discussion of all these issues as follows:
Let me just conclude by saying that I’ve given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong.
I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said.
But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can. That’s why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable. Thank you.
In the question and answer session that followed these remarks, there is an interesting and respectful back-and-forth, with agreement and disagreement articulately expressed, until one comes, near the end, to this:
Q: You know, in the spirit of speaking truth to power, I’m not an expert in this area but a lot of people in the room are, and they’ve written a lot of papers in here that address . . . .
LHS: I’ve read a lot of them.
Q: And, you know, a lot of us would disagree with your hypotheses and your premises. . .
LHS: Fair enough.
Q: So it’s not so clear.
LHS: It’s not clear at all. I think I said it wasn’t clear. I was giving you my best guess but I hope we could argue on the basis of as much evidence as we can marshal.
The events at Harvard the last week demonstrate that Summers’ hope that the argument could be based upon as much evidence as could be marshaled was overwhelmed by the “intellectual tsunami” that followed.
Many decades from now, when historians look back at this period, they will probably be amazed that, as a result of the above discussion, the faculty of America’s oldest and most prestigious college convened an "emergency meeting" to deal with the remarks.
Trying to understand the phenomenon, they will probably become physically ill and have to leave the room.