Harvard Wimps Out
Patricia Hausman, Virginia Association of Scholars

MIT professor Nancy Hopkins walked out of an academic event last week, claiming she could not bear to hear Harvard president Lawrence Summers suggest that differences in aptitude may explain female underrepresentation in science and engineering. At first Summers defended himself. Now, he has predictably apologized. In a statement on Harvard's website, Summers says, "I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully."

What happened? Well, for one thing, Summers heard from Harvard's Standing Committee on Women. It admonished him that his mild presentation of what most people readily accept as true did not "serve our institution well."

This is all that seems necessary these days to send male administrators into immediate submission. They ignore scientific evidence. They ignore logic. They have no comment on the real issue here: how appalling it is that a scientist would walk out of a meeting over the mere mention of an idea. Kowtowing to the political agenda of academic feminists is paramount.

I have had my share of experiences with this phenomenon. For example, a few years ago I was invited to speak at a symposium of the National Academy of Engineering. The topic was Why Don't More Women Go Into Science and Engineering? MIT professor Sheila Widnall argued that social factors are the reason. I represented the other point of view -- the apparently taboo notion that the relative dearth of females in certain sciences is a consequence of biology. Specifically, I addressed sex differences in aptitude and interests -- and the evidence that these are the result of hormonal influences on the brain.

NAE published Sheila Widnall's comments in its journal, The Bridge. But it declined to publish mine. I leave it to the reader to decide if my presentation was so unscholarly by comparison as to merit this decision, or whether this was censorship at the behest of NAE's feminists.

I know that others who share my view of the scientific evidence can cite similar experiences. But rather than regale you with more stories, I would like to suggest that we focus some attention on the students. Does anyone think about them anymore?

What is it like right now to be a student of Nancy Hopkins? To see your dissertation advisor as so fragile that she walks out of an academic meeting because she can't stand hearing an idea? What are students to do if they reach conclusions at odds with her thinking? What is it like to attend a university where the committee on the status of women feels free to chastise the president for discussing a legitimate topic supported by decades of peer-reviewed scientific research? What does his willingness to back off when confronted with their pressure say to students who want to pursue research on that topic? Or to students who want to pursue research on any controversial subject?

Invariably, many will argue that Summers upset female students by broaching the issue of whether males, as a group, have an edge in the cognitive abilities needed to succeed in science and engineering. Granted, this sounds like concern for the students, and perhaps it is. Regardless, it is wrongheaded. A university does not educate its students by insulating them from well-documented facts that some may find disturbing. Moreover, the notion that discussing group differences will affect the choices made by individuals is purely speculative. I have yet to see evidence that a woman with the ability and interest to pursue a career in physics will be deterred upon learning that such a pattern is relatively rare.

Of course, the conventional wisdom has long been that female students have not chosen science as a career because they have lacked female scientists as role models. Actually, what male and female students alike need as role models are people who act like real scientists.

Nancy Hopkins, Lawrence Summers, and members of Harvard's Standing Committee on Women have let them down. Bigtime.

NAS3:37 PM

The Weaker Sex
John Staddon, Duke University

Harvard President Lawrence Summers is in trouble. At a recent conference on economics, Summers apparently made comments that deeply offended some women in the audience. "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," said Dr. Nancy Hopkins, MIT biology professor. In an earlier and less enlightened age, such a reaction by a lady to a provocative suggestion from a man might have been dismissed as "hysterical." Fortunately, we have moved beyond such stereotyping today.

Apparently what really upset Dr. Hopkins was Summers's story that when that his infant daughter was presented with two trucks she immediately treated them as dolls: One she called "daddy truck" and the other "baby truck." My own experience with little boys is that most of them would have at once crashed one truck into the other, all accompanied by giggles of delight. What is really amazing is not Summers's example, but the fact that even a suggestion that some differences between little girls and boys are built-in is shocking to some female academics.

But Summers went beyond developmental psychology into the forbidden zone of interest and ability differences:

• Top positions on university math and engineering faculties require extraordinary commitments of time and energy, with many professors working 80-hour weeks in the same punishing schedules pursued by top lawyers, bankers and business executives. Few married women with children are willing to accept such sacrifices, he said.
• In citing a second factor, Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes.

So, women may be generally less willing than men to devote their whole lives to academic competition. And there may be fewer women at the high end of ability in math and science. Just how controversial are these ideas?

Well, women academics themselves make the first observation; and the second is a well established fact from the much-quantified area of ability testing:

In a December 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education report (Subscription Required) on women in higher education, a leading woman professor is quoted as saying "Women are scared away because they don't see how they can put together a life that satisfies their personal and professional goals . . . . They see that the best jobs are obtained by people who want to only do science and give it 100 percent."

And later in the same article "Many would-be female scholars, particularly in the sciences, seem to believe that children and a hard-charging research career don't mix," and "[population biologist Anna Sears] surveyed 258 male and female graduate students at Davis in 2002 and learned that women were much more likely than men to abandon their plans for an academic career."

And as for the relative dearth of women at the high end of math and science ability, the definitive article is Sex Differences in Mental Test Scores, Variability, and Number of High Scoring Individuals, the abstract of which says: "Sex differences in central tendency [average], variability, and numbers of high scores on mental tests have been extensively studied . . . although average sex differences have been generally small and stable over time, the test scores of males consistently have larger variance. Except in tests of reading comprehension, perceptual speed, and associative memory, males typically outnumber females substantially among high-scoring individuals."

In other words, although men and women are equal on average in their math and science abilities, there are more very able men than very able women. (It may be some comfort to feminists that there are also more male than female idiots!) Whether these differences are cultural or innate is of course a very large question -- but it is a question that is utterly irrelevant to the general issue of why women are underrepresented in the hard sciences at elite universi ties. If universities hire according to ability, and if elite universities hire preferentially from the higher end of abilities, then males will predominate.

The same conclusion follows if universities prefer to hire faculty who are totally committed to their jobs. Thus, they will prefer Joe, with no side interests, to Fred, who likes to play golf three afternoons a week. They will also prefer Joe to Mary, who spends a substantial amount of time with her family.

There are only two ways to resolve this impasse. Either we have to get used to the underrepresentation of women in some disciplines; or we have to give up the idea that our best universities should compete for excellence. It's by no means clear which view will predominate in today's America.

NAS2:08 PM

Oh Diversity!
D. Rayner (the pen name of a professor at a Southern university)

At a recent meeting of our academic senate a proposal for a new program in a physics-related subject was being presented. After some preliminaries, a woman faculty member raised a question: "Physics is a male-dominated field. This is a new program. What plans do you have to increase the representation of women in physics?"

It is interesting to speculate on what replies might reasonably be made to this question. Here are a few:

1. As far as I am aware, madam, this university has never discriminated against female applicants in our graduate physics programs. We plan to continue our gender-blind policy for the new program.
2. I'm afraid that in the past we may have been guilty of favoring male over female graduate applicants. We absolutely reject that practice now.
3. Could the questioner please explain what possible interest the university should have in matching the proportion of women in physics to their proportion in the population? In short, why should we care that physics is a male-dominated field (or, for that matter, that developmental psychology is a female-dominated one)?

It will not surprise NAS members to hear that the physics representative made none of these responses. Instead his reaction was along the following lines. "That's a great point. It is unfortunate that physics is a male-oriented profession. We have done better in recent years, but much remains to be done . . ."

In a recent news item, The Edge publisher, literary agent John Brockman asked a number of visible scientists if there was anything they believed to be true that they could not prove. None came up with "diversity" -- perhaps because almost every contemporary academic believes in it. Like fish unaware of the water in which they swim, even these deep thinkers were unaware of the almost universal, unquestioning, and unproved adherence to a belief in diversity as an absolute good. Perhaps for the same reason, no one is willing to offer a principled defense of it. "Diversity," as a major goal of the modern university, is now accepted as the 11th academic commandment.

It is long past time for a few more voices to ask "Why?"

NAS5:58 PM