Back at the old blog we used to occasionally chat about the notorious speech by Harvard President Larry Summers, in which he suggested that intrinsic aptitude was a more important factor than discrimination or bias in explaining the dearth of women scientists. Examples here, here, here, here, here, and here. There was a lot of posturing and name-calling and oversimplification on either side of the debate, of course, which tended to obscure the basic fact that Summers was, as far the data goes, wildly wrong. Two favorite goalpost-moving maneuvers from his supporters were first to pretend that the argument was over the existence of innate differences, rather than whether they were more important than biases in explaining the present situation, and then to claim that Summers’ critics’ real motive was to prevent anyone from even talking about such differences, rather than simply trying to ensure that what was being said about them was correct rather than incorrect.
It was a touchstone moment, which will doubtless be returned to again and again to illustrate points about completely different issues. Here’s an example (thanks to Abby Vigneron for the pointer) from Andrew Sullivan:
DAILY KOS AND LARRY SUMMERS: It’s a small point but it helps illuminate some of the dumbness of the activist left. “Armando” of mega-blog/community board, Daily Kos, takes a dig at Larry Summers, and links to a new study on gender difference. I’m not getting into the new study here, but I will address Armando’s description of Larry Summers’ position. In a bid to be fair, Armando writes:
NOTE: Yeah I know Summers didn’t say men were smarter than women, he just said they had greater aptitude in math and the sciences than women. Huge difference.
This is one of those memes that, although demonstrably untrue, still survives. Read the transcript of Summers’ now infamous remarks. His point was not that men are better at math and the sciences than women, as Armando would have it. His point was that there is a difference not in the mean but in the standard deviation:
Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I’m sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper – looked at the book, rather – looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those – they’re all over the map, depends on which test, whether it’s math, or science, and so forth – but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation – and I have no reason to think that it couldn’t be refined in a hundred ways – you get five to one, at the high end. (My italics.)
Summers was addressing the discrete issue of why at the very high end of Ivy League math departments, there were too few women. His point, as the Harvard Crimson summarized it was that, in math and the sciences, “there are more men who are at the top and more men who are utter failures.” Armando is wrong; and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of leftist blog credibility. Will he correct? I’ll keep you posted.
Ah yes, the good old standard-deviation argument. It’s the absolute favorite of those in the intrinsic-differences camp, since (1) it sounds kind of mathematical and impressive, and (2) they get to insist that it’s only the width of the distribution, not the mean, that is different between men and women, so really the argument doesn’t privilege men at all, while it manages to explain why they have made all the important contributions in human history. In a debate with Elizabeth Spelke at Edge, Steven Pinker rehearses the argument somewhat pedantically.
But let’s look at what the argument actually says, both explicitly and implicitly.
- Standardized tests scores reflect innate ability.
- Boys’ scores on certain tests have a larger standard deviation than girls’ scores, leading to a larger fraction of boys at the high end.
- The dearth of women scientists is explained by their smaller numbers on the high end of these tests.
Now, everyone who is familiar with the data knows that point 1 is somewhere between highly dubious and completely ridiculous; Summers himself admits as much, but it would ruin his story to dwell on it, so he soldiers on. But point 3 is interesting, and deserves to be looked at. It’s a nice part of the argument, because it’s testable. Is this difference in test scores really what explains the relative numbers of men and women in science?
Summers’ data comes from the book Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes by Yu Xie and Kimberlee Shauman. Interviewed shortly after his remarks, both Xie and Shauman were quick to criticize them, using words like “uninformed” and “simplistic.” We were fortunate enough to have Kim Shauman herself as a speaker at our Women in Science Symposium back in May. She pointed out that the studies Summers refers to can indeed be found in her book, right there in Chapter Two. But if you wanted to know whether the standard-deviation differences were actually what accounted for the dearth of women in science, you would have to read all the way to Chapter Three.
Here’s the point. By the time students are in twelfth grade, there is a substantial gap in the fraction of boys vs. girls who plan to study science in college. So it’s easy enough to ask: how much of that gap is explained by differing scores on standardized tests? Answer: none of it. Girls are much less likely than boys to plan on going into science, and Xie and Shauman find that the difference is independent of their scores on the standardized tests. In other words, even if we limit ourselves to only those students who have absolutely top-notch scores on these math/science tests, girls are much less likely than boys to be contemplating science as a career. Something is dissuading high-school girls from choosing to become scientists, and scores on standardized tests have nothing to do with it.
Now, looking at Sullivan’s post above, there’s nothing he says that is strictly incorrect. He is simply characterizing (accurately) what Summers said, not actually endorsing it. Still, he is certainly giving the wrong impression to his readers, by repeating a well-known allegation without mentioning that it is demonstrably false. It’s a small point, but it helps illustrate some of the disingenuity of the activist right. Sullivan is misleading, and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of quasi-right-wing blog credibility. Will he correct? We’ll keep you posted.
Having read through the comments on this thread I’m just amazed by the broad, blanket statements made by the “evolutionary psychology” proponents. Men are like this, women are like that, and its all because of how the cavemen may or may not have lived. There is no mention of any subtleties or gradations; all is explained (in just a few paragraphs, with few citations to actual studies) by the Grand Unified Theory of Gender Differences. Maybe this is just what happens on blogs, but to me this all seems so…, well… un-scientific.
In the world I live in, men and women exhibit a range of behaviors. I’ve known plenty of women who are “more typically” male than most men, and vice versa. I’ve known plenty of (gay) men who aren’t very interested in “acquiring females”, as it was so charmingly put. I’ve known plenty of women who are kick-ass scientists and plenty of men who write poetry or stay home with their kids. I’m sure this is obvious to most people, but I think it needs to be mentioned in this conversation; people are complicated. In fact, I would say, given any random two people their gender might very well say less about their personalities than does their cultural background, or education level, or family dynamics, or whatever. Reducing human complexity to nothing more than a very simplistic picture of gender is a tad dehumanizing.
And yes, I know, proponents will claim to be talking statistically and not about particular individuals, but by only talking about “evolution” they are putting forth the notion that these differences are somehow genetic and therefore immutable. The implication is that attempting to actually do something about under-representation of women (or even the problem of rape) is just so much futile social engineering.
As a man, I’m always pretty offended when I’m told by the popular science press that I should be acting more aggressive or domineering, thanks to my evolutionary history. Some commentators go so far as to condone rape, war, etc. because, hey, that’s what men have always done and we’re foolish to think we can just change now. It’s a nice story for the press because it reinforces our current prejudices. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, that’s just the way it is. Saw it on daytime TV.
And the worst part is that it pretty much ignores the other side of the science. If you ask a social psychologist or a cultural anthropologist or a sociologist the reasons behind “male aggression” or other gender differences I suspect you’ll get an entirely different story. I’m a physicist and certainly no expert in these fields, but I would be very surprised if environmental factors (everything from gene expression all the way through culture, socialization and outright discrimination) weren’t much more important than this argument from the hunter-gatherers.
Nojoy, there’s a problem with this statement:
“Evolutionary psychology tells some great “just so stories”. I loved the Pinker books. But unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it does not (yet) tend to make falsifiable predictions, and hence is not (yet) a mature science. ”
Coming up with falsifiable predictions is often difficult in the life sciences. In the physical sciences, it’s easy: derive an equation from the theory, run an experiment on two of the variables in the equation, fit the data to from the experiment to the curve predicted by the equation, and then ask if the fit comes within a 5% confidence level. Voila! proof or disproof!
But where do we get an equation in the life sciences? Sure, it can be done with biochemistry, genetics, and with a lot of ecology. But what about plain old natural selection? Could the theory presented in The Origin of Species be falsifiable? It doesn’t offer a single equation. How Could we go about falsifying the basic theory? The creationists have gone to enormous lengths coming up with little oddments that don’t seem to fit, but invariably those objections evaporate when we gather more data or look at the situation more carefully.
Here’s a simple example: altruism, now referred to as “kin selection”. There are lots of examples of creatures sacrificing their well-being for the well-being of their kin. The heartwarming case of the male quail sacrificing himself to protect the hatchlings at first glance seemed to violate simple natural selection rules. But then we realized that the goal is not to survive, but to advance the position of the one’s genes in the gene pool, so this objection vanished. In fact, this led to one of the few numeric predictions in evolutionary theory: that a creature would sacrifice his own life to save the life of two children (but not one), two siblings (but not one), four grandchildren, and so forth. These predictions have in fact been borne out — although I’m not sure if anything as rigorous as a statistical correlation coefficient has been calculated.
Another explanatory shift came with the “selfish gene” approach, which helped explain a number of phenomena that just didn’t make sense in conventional evolutionary theory. I can’t recall the details, but there was a wonderful case of an insect in Brazil that had a tendency to make suicidal attacks on another, larger insect. It made no sense and could, I suppose, have been used as a falsifier of evolutionary theory — until somebody demonstrated in a roundabout way that the little guy did in fact have a tiny chance of success, and the genetic benefit of that tiny chance just matched the obvious cost of getting killed. The point of this anecdote is that there are so many variables to consider that almost any apparent source of falsifiability could plausibly be dismissed as arising from some variable that has not yet been considered. So how can we take ANY case of falsifiability seriously with so many variables to consider?
Or take the “punctuated equilibrium” hypothesis. How could we go about falsifying that? It cannot be subjected to experiment, as it concerns entire ecosystems and their behavior over geological periods. Its purpose is to address an observation that could be taken as falsification of basic Darwinism: the relatively low quantity of transitional forms in the fossil record. Transitional forms are indeed there, but they don’t show up as frequently as we would expect — although there’s no way to quantify the expectation frequency. Punctuated equilibrium explains the low frequency of transitional forms. But what would falsify punctuated equilibrium? Lots of transitional forms? How many?
So let’s be careful when we dismiss the work of theorists in the life sciences as mere “just so stories”. Sure, that can happen — but the kind of rock-solid quantifiable results that we enjoy in the physical sciences is much harder to come by in the life sciences. That doesn’t make the life sciences immature — it means that they are more complicated.
Tim D, I think you are hindered by a misunderstanding of genetics and its role in behavior. This statement of yours best reveals the problem:
“And yes, I know, proponents will claim to be talking statistically and not about particular individuals, but by only talking about “evolution” they are putting forth the notion that these differences are somehow genetic and therefore immutable.”
The nub of the error is in the statement “these differences are somehow genetic and are therefore immutable”. Yes, there are definitely genetic behavioral differences, and those genetic factors are immutable — but you overlook my many warnings that behavior is the consequence of BOTH genetic factors and cultural factors. Cultural factors can readily overrule genetic factors. I’ll put it in a mathematical form (greatly simplified) that you can immediately appreciate:
P(X) = a * GP(X) + b * CP(X)
where P is the probability of a person committing behavior X, GP is the “genetic proclivity” for that behavior (whatever *that* means!), and CP is the “cultural proclivity” for that behavior. Basically, you’re declaring that a = 1 and b = 0, where everybody in evolutionary psychology maintains that b is often larger than a.
Let me also point out something about this statement of yours:
“The implication is that attempting to actually do something about under-representation of women (or even the problem of rape) is just so much futile social engineering.”
No, that’s not an implication, it’s an inference that YOU draw, not an implication that evolutionary psychologists make. Please don’t impute your own bad inferences onto other people.
Lastly, please recognize the inherant limitations of this medium. I have offered some quickie explanations of some very complicated ideas. I could have simply dumped the text of several books onto this blog, but that would be inappropriate to the medium. The limitations of the medium demand a certain flexibility from its readers. If an idea seems objectionable, then ASK ABOUT IT. Don’t leap into accusatory mode — take advantage of the interactive nature of the medium to follow up on ideas that bother you with questions. Assume that you don’t understand, not that the other person is an evil asshole. In other words, ask questions first, shoot later. And if you really want to know more, I presented an extensive bibliography; check it out.
Falsifiability is not at all hard to come across in the life sciences. It is hard to come across in speculative hard sciences (like Super String Theory) and in speculative soft sciences. It is not scientific if it is not falsifiable.
I was just reading Imbrie and Imbrie : Ice Ages, Solving the Mystery, and there is almost an entire chapter there of extremely plausible theories of what physically causes Ice Ages, but which are not scientific at present or were not scientific at some point in time, because there was no way to make the measurements or observations to falsify or confirm them. Emerging technology sometimes makes a theory that is in suspended animation reemerge.
Just-so stories do not make up science, no matter how plausible they seem. And this is true of Superstring Theory as well.
Chris,
To clarify (just a bit) what I meant, I am quite aware that behavior is the result of both genetic and environmental factors. What I was objecting to was the lack of recognition of the importance of environmental factors in much of what you have posted. You seemed to be arguing (quite flamboyantly at times) for the opposite case, i.e. a=0, b=1. Like I said, I’m not an expert, but based on what I have read in these fields, it seems likely to me that a > b, even if b does not equal 0. This is, of course, an enormous and wide-ranging debate that seems unlikely to be resolved right here, right now. I think it is likely that people’s opinions about the relative importances of a and b are highly correlated with what their particular field of study is. Maybe those who study the social grounding of behavior are likely to have the opinion that social conditions trump genetics. Ditto for geneticists. Maybe the different fields should talk to one another more often.
I come to this simply as an interested outsider. I apologize if my comment was a little hot-headed, but I do want to point out that these ideas do have political and social consequences. For example, you said:
— “The implication is that attempting to actually do something about under-representation of women (or even the problem of rape) is just so much futile social engineering.” No, that’s not an implication, it’s an inference that YOU draw, not an implication that evolutionary psychologists make. Please don’t impute your own bad inferences onto other people. —
Unfortunately, some people (perhaps not you) do imply this, and even state it explicitly. A notorious example is “The Bell Curve” where the authors argue directly from the immutability of intelligence to the futility of a general public education. They argue (if I recall correctly) that funding for remedial and special education should be scrapped and the funds given to students identified (by IQ tests) as being innately talented. A few years ago, some evolutionary psychology researchers made headlines by claiming that rape was indeed “natural” in some sense.
My purpose was not to tar you specifically with the worst aspects of evolutionary psychology, its just that I have read a little into this field and do find some objectionable conclusions being drawn in some quarters based on an incomplete view of the science involved. So if you’ll forgive me the rhetorical excesses of my previous post, I’m happy to forgive you the tone of condescension you seem to adopt here.
cheers, Tim
Arun, if you reject anything that is not falsifiable as unscientific, then do you reject punctutated equilibrium? The aquatic ape hypothesis? One of its competitors, the creeping savannah hypothesis? Do you deny these hypotheses any scientific status?
Tim D, I certainly have not made any statements implying that a > b, but I will concede that there are those who misunderstand the situation (on BOTH sides of the issue) who misrepresent the significance of these subtleties. Yes, there will always be idiots who claim that rape is natural and that women belong in the home. There will also be idiots who impute these assertions to legitimate scientists. There are a zillion ways to distort the truth, and nobody can take responsibility for the distortions of others. All we can do is state the truth as clearly as possible and accept responsibility for our own statements — NOT the statements of others.
And yes, I apologize for that “really” in the last sentence of my previous posting. I meant it as an intensifier, but immediately after hitting the “submit” button I realized that it could also be read as an assault on your good faith. Oops. Sorry about that.
FYI, in addition to “The Bell Curve”, which has been dissected elsewhere, I mentioned the study on the “naturalness” of rape. The book in question is “A Natural History of Rape”, by Thornhill & Palmer. I haven’t read it and can’t draw any conclusions beyond the fact that it kicked up a lot of controversy a few years ago. Here’s a link to a fairly critical review in the NY Times.
As far as I understand, punctuated equilibrium can be falsified by the fossil record or the genetic record.
For instance,
http://www.skeptic.com/oldsite/01.3.prothero-punc-eq.html#debate
tells us that gradualism wins out over punctuated equilibrium for some:
and punctuated equilibrium wins out over gradualism for others:
Sounds to me like the theory is falsifiable, and has been falsified, too, for entire kingdoms. Punctuated equilibrium is a theory of science.
I do not know what the aquatic ape and the creeping savannah ideas are, so I’ll find out and get back to you.
Arun, the problem with falsifiability of punctuated equilibrium is that it is not presented as a replacement for gradualism, but an occasional alternative. For example, the link you provide includes this comment:
“As Gould and Eldredge (1977) pointed out in their five-year retrospective on the debate, it’s easy to pick one specific example of either gradualism or punctuation, but the important issue is one of generality. Which pattern is dominant among the species in the fossil record, since both are known to occur? If you sample all the members of a given fauna, which pattern is most common?”
How does one falsify generality? The common position now taken (as explained in that essay) is that punctuated equilibrium takes place in some cases, and does not take place in other cases. How does one falsify that? The only evidence you have is fossil evidence; typically this would take the form of a sudden transition in the fossil record from one type to another. But how would you know that this transition was intrinsic? How could you prove that the transition was not due to the migration of the newer species to the site of the sharp transition? How could you prove that Species A’ did not evolve gradually away from Species A in another location, and then migrated to Species A’s location and displaced them all, and then all the fossil evidence of the gradual transition in the original location was destroyed? These kinds of things just aren’t provable. (The essay you linked to discusses this problem.) As Gould and Eldredge point out, we just have to rely on gross generality, not absolute proof.
Oh, one other thing, Arun: you probably won’t find the phrase “creeping savannah”; it’s a rarely appearing condensation for a larger idea, namely, that simians were tree-dwellers who were forced by changing climatic conditions to come down from the trees and develop a new lifestyle based on the savannah. It is commonly believed that this led to bipedalism. Your best bet in finding it is to google “savannah” and “bipedalism” and possibly “heat loss”.
” Something is dissuading high-school girls from choosing to become scientists, and scores on standardized tests have nothing to do with it.”
You’re right, but what a lot of us Science-guys object to is the automatic assumption that the “something” is us being a bunch of elitist, sexist, jerks. As an undergrad Physics major I would have love to have had more than 1 female classmate. As a comp. sci grad student I would love to have more than 2 American female classmates (there are plenty of Chinese and Indian ones).
Here’s an interesting observation. It is completely socially acceptable to say “I’m no good at math, I’m more of a humanities person” – we hear “smart” and educated people say it all the time. OTOH, it is not socially acceptable to say something like “I’m no good at reading and writing, I’m more of a math person”. People are considered smart while being largely uneducated in math if they are skilled in some humanities (or if they can act, paint, play an instrument), but are not considered smart while being uneducated in the humanities no matter how good they are in math/science. And many liberal-arts “intellectuals” exhibit a downright arrogant attitude towards the maths and the sciences – when they are not too busy deconstructing the phallo-centric bias of the theory of gravity (for example).
The bias is not “science against girls” it is “society against science”. We were Nerds in High School and, to many, we are still Nerds now. Girls avoid science because they internalize this bias more. We are not rejecting them – they are rejecting us.
r4d20 points out something that I’ve asked about on this blog before, and that is the attitude towards math?
The problem with evolutionary psychology is not that it’s wrong, or that it’s not falsifiable. Rather, people who proffer explanations based in evolutionary psychology rarely bother to see if there’s any evidence to support those explanations. It’s easy to come up with ‘just so’ stories for almost any phenomenon, but many of them will be simply wrong. Generally, these stories just aren’t particularly useful.
The thing is, it is possibility to go beyond storytelling. Comparison across societies, twin studies, bigass regressions and all sorts of other things can be and are used to attempt to disentangle nature and nurture [1]. There are plenty of people out there making honest attempts to study these things. Those people are doing science. The people telling stories aren’t.
[1] And, needing to get this off my chest, this leads to Larry Summers’s major sin. The idea that he was persecuted for daring to propose that there were intrinsic differences between men and women is silly. Many of the researchers in the very room in which he was speaking worked on real, honest-to-science studies on that very thing. That Summers thought he was being ‘provocative’ was, in fact, simply condescension. He didn’t respect the researchers enough to think that they hadn’t already considered and worked on his deeply banal hypothesis.
The vote went against Larry Summers for two reasons. (1) The people who spoke in support of him were so self-righteous and annoying that people voted against Summers just so they wouldn’t be on the same side as his supporters. (2) In a world full of tremendously large egos, Larry Summers treated a lot of people like shit. The condescension with which he treated the NBER conference participants was just another example in a long line.
And just because I’m going off on Summers here, the first line of his speech was the following:
As best I can tell, this means that Larry Summers either finds it boring or doesn’t think it is important to talk about how Harvard approaches the diversity issue. For whatever value of intrinsic differences that you believe in, I hope no one believes that everything is completely peachy-keen for women in physics. There are things that can and need to be done. But Summers apparently didn’t feel like talking about that. Not a great beginning.
Aaron, you write:
” Rather, people who proffer explanations based in evolutionary psychology rarely bother to see if there’s any evidence to support those explanations. It’s easy to come up with ‘just so’ stories for almost any phenomenon, but many of them will be simply wrong. Generally, these stories just aren’t particularly useful.”
Would you care to offer an example of what you mean? No strawmen, please, but an example taken from the writings of any of the recognized experts in the field. Any of the books I list above would be fine.
I wasn’t referring to the experts in the field. I was referring to people in general who engage in these sorts of explanations. I specifically did not pass judgment on evolutionary psychology as a field.
Lots of good comments and discussion here, and also lots of comments that I find very disheartening (as there always are in such discussions).
r4d20, this is a valid point about how often “smart” people get away with saying they choose to be mathematically illiterate, and I understand your dislike of that “something” being you, or men in the field. I don’t think the primary, or even secondary problem is this. But sorry, it just ain’t the case that physics is a lovely hospitible place for women and they just happen to choose other things. There are many reasons girls don’t go into science in the first place. There are many others that they don’t stay. But as a women in a very male dominated subfield who has seen several brillant close female friends leave physics at various stages, I can tell you that a good part of this is because of issues that generally come under the rubric of “climate”. Yes, women are rejecting science. But that’s at least partially because the scientific culture so often rejects them.
Case in point is this amazing quote by Lubos, which disproves its own thesis in just two sentences.
While I would certainly agree that very few men in physics actively don’t want women in their ranks, and that most of the bias is subtle and comes from people of both genders, “no” is a pretty strong and almost certainly false statement. And then there’s this next thing, which is supposed to make us frail things feel better? In case you hadn’t noticed, theoretical physics is a pretty competitive field. If women can’t even be viewed as serious competitors, how are we to be viewed as serious scientists?
Dear NoJoy,
I am not claiming that it’s been proved that the Flynn effect is due to real changes in our biology (and my guess is that it will be more due to training once it’s finally attributed). But it is definitely a possibility that a serious scientist who wants to explain it must consider. There is definitely no way to exclude this possibility a priori; it is, in fact, one of the most natural explanations that one must start with.
Most people have some expectation about the appropriate social behavior – and I agree with you on this one. What I strongly disagree with is citrine’s idea that the physicists’ expectations should be changed in such a way that they will attract more women.
Physicists’ average culture and expectations – or geekiness – differ from the average exactly in the way that is necessary for them to do physics with joy. I understand very well that citrine believes that the disagreement with some “social” responses in various situations is something different from “incompetence”. But it is not different. For example, judging an idea according to the smile or haircut of the person who proposes the idea is not just a different social behavior: it’s a behavior that is incompatible with a scientific viewpoint on the world.
Best
Lubos
Dear Tim D,
your crusade against the evolution – in this case against the evolutionary psychology – is a typical example that the ideas of ID and similar anti-scientific approaches are equally represented in the Right and the Left.
People are complicated but it does not prevent us from studying neuroscience, genetics, and other sciences, and produce very clear results and insights. People are ingenious and they usually find a way to circumvent a difficulty in the research. Evolutionary pressures have been acting for millions of years – compared to which our life is an irrelevant piece of dust, speaking about time – and they have brought us biological and cognitive differences that are easily measurable and provable. See e.g. here
http://schwinger.harvard.edu/~motl/cahill.pdf
Of course, you can say that you’re not interested in these well-defined observations and insights – and you prefer to say that the world is complicated and only God has the right to know the truth. But the scientific approach to reality is diametrically opposite to yours and your opinion has no inherent relevance for science. Science is about maing complicated things as crystal-clear as possible. And we’ve been very good at it for quite some time.
Best
Lubos
Dear Risa,
I am baffled what you misunderstand about my statement that the men don’t have any interest to eliminate women – and if we talk about competition, there is even an explanation because women are often not viewed as competitors because the competition is segregated to the individual sexes. This sentence expresses two basic phenomena.
There are many quotas around that make effectively men compete professionally against men and women against women. And I also meant the general competition in life in which men view women as potential partners, not as competitors. And vice versa.
If you think that these sentences are contradictory, then you must definitely misunderstand something about them.
I am convinced that your comments that the atmosphere is directed against women to be completely obvious lies. In reality, women are being helped at hundreds of places and they always have advantages – and not just “subtle” advantages. Honestly, I am partly doing these things myself. Not exactly because I always feel that they are the right thing to do but because it is sometimes better to avoid unnecessary problems.
Without these things, the “natural” representation of women in the field would probably be smaller than it is today.
I think that your statement that physics is “not a hospitable place for women” to be a hostile and untrue statement as long as you talk about women (and men) who like science. And your explanations that the pressures that make the life harder are “subtle” is an example of homeopathy, not rational thinking: it can’t be disproved. You know very well that subtle, homeopathic pressure is nearly irrelevant. And homeopathic drugs have no effect. Other people are facing real threats, not just homeopathic threats.
For example, yesterday we heard two women at the FAS faculty meeting who were speaking for 30 minutes or so about their “Women Task Force” – the same kind of “Task Force” that threatened Summers to fire him because he said something that the politically correct police did not like. This new “Task Force” has hired lots of managers, bureaucrats, officers. And as they were telling us for half an hour, they plan to spend millions of dollars and infiltrate virtually every decision made at Harvard. No one has ever asked whether this “Task Force” is a legitimate creature and whether its “recommendations” are acceptable.
Fortunately, there were at least 2+1 people who said that this docket item was outrageous (2) or potentially counterproductive (1), respectively.
These people from “Task Forces” are using the very same dirty methods of creating committes (Soviets) that don’t ask anyone about anything, that simply assumes that everyone must agree that their goals are good, and who goal is simply to force everyone else to follow their ideology and transport everyone who disagrees to Siberia. They want to create the atmosphere of fear in which people like me would be afraid to criticize them.
We’re witnessing a very brutal attack of a totalitarian ideology that tries to control the whole university and maybe beyond, and you are speaking about “subtle pressures”. Don’t you feel a bit painful? You should.
Best
Lubos
“Whether the anatomical divergence [between male and female brains] results in differences in cognitive ability is unknown”.
Has the Hines & Alexander work on the toy preferences of vervet monkeys been repeated and confirmed by anybody?
Dear Arun,
I find it fascinating how you prefer to choose one sentence that twists the results in the direction you like rather than reading, for example, the whole article in Scientific American that I linked above whose conclusion is mostly opposite.
Moreover, when they say that it is unknown whether the reason is anatomy (the geometry of the organism), it does not mean that they question that the reason is biology.
You can easily find many works that follow Hines and Alexander:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hines+alexander
They have found around 25 citations per article because Google’s database is incomplete. The fifth article is about toys and has 11 found citations. The experiment on children was done (or repeated, if you don’t wish to distinguish the species) by
Sex differences in 1-, 3-, and 5-year-olds’ toy-choice in a structured play-session
A Servin, G Bohlin, L Berlin – Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 1999 – ingentaconnect.com
as well as
Sex differences in 1-, 3-, and 5-year-olds’ toy-choice in a structured play-session
A Servin, G Bohlin, L Berlin – Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 1999 – ingentaconnect.com
as well as
Sex differences in response to children’s toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops …
GM Alexander, M Hines – Evolution and Human Behavior, 2002 – ingentaconnect.com
as well as
Sex differences in response to children’s toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops …
GM Alexander, M Hines – Evolution and Human Behavior, 2002 – ingentaconnect.com
I don’t want to fill the whole forum here by the titles because as you can easily do – by clicking at the link above – I have found 60 articles that show the very same thing (correlation of toys and sex and/or even hormones).
If you wanted to question that this was a repeatable and repeated thing, let me inform you that this is a battle that you simply cannot win.
Best
Lubos
OK, let me add a few more, just to be sure:
Prenatal androgens and gender-typed behavior: A study of girls with mild and severe forms of …
A Servin, A Nordenstrom, A Larsson, G Bohlin – Dev Psychol, 2003 – psych.umn.edu
Human sex differences in social and non-social looking preferences, at 12 months of age
S Lutchmaya, S Baron-Cohen – Infant Behavior & Development, 2002 – autismresearchcentre.com
Measurement of psychosexual differentiation
KJ Zucker – Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2005 – springerlink.com
Note that when you look at all citations, there will also be articles with more ambiguous conclusions towards the end, e.g.
Children’s Toy Collections in Sweden—A Less Gender-Typed Country?
A Nelson – Sex Roles, 2005 – springerlink.com
These articles typically have no citations at all. Science is speaking in a pretty clear way; the only question is whether someone wants to follow these experiments or whether she or he prefers some (untrue) dogmas.
Best
Lubos
There are lots of papers about experiments that have shown these things, but I personally find this one to be one of the most convincing ones:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/cdev/2005/00000076/00000001/art00018
It’s a typical breakthrough in science where they discover an anomaly that allows them to separate the signal from noise, in this case it was congenital adrenal hyperplasia. One can measure that the girls with CAH behave more like boys even though the parents obviously treat them in the same way as other girls. There is a real biological difference – it can’t be social – it’s a 20 sigma effect.
Aaron, your disparaging comments about people who quote evolutionary psychology, coupled with your reassurance that you have nothing against evolutionary psychology per se, reminds me of Linus’ classic comment: “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand.”
Lubos, I greatly appreciate your citations of all the toy studies; I was aware of a few but did not realize that they were so many and so varied. However, I do not appreciate your accusing other people of lying and twisting the facts. I disagree with your assessment that women in science have an overall advantage over men; my assessment is that they remain greatly handicapped by problems with child care, the constraints of relationships, insufficient self-confidence, the enormous damage done by the few remaining sexist assholes, the social incompetence of most males, and especially male scientists, and the remnants of sexist cultural mores. I concede, however, that my assessment is no less subjective than yours.
Although my inclination is to agree with Summers & Sullivan, I do have to say that culture probably does discourage women going into science, at least in some countries. FWIW I was in the top maths class at my school in Belfast Northern Ireland, a highly selective class at a highly selective school, where only a small minority of students in the top class were male. The school culture was such that girls were expected to be better than boys at maths, and they were.