Asymmetrical Information

Is anyone else struck by the fact that the woman who stormed out of Summers' talk, claiming it made her sick, was a biology professor? I know very little about the state of the science concerining the inherent sex differences Summers was postulating. (Perhaps I should ask my neuroscientist wife.) But shouldn't a biologist know, or at least know how to find out, the state of scientific knowledge on the subject of sex differences and be able to address the merits of his hypothesis without getting the vapors?

I haven't been following this story until now but I'll add that everything Jane writes can be equally applied to the accusation that academia discriminates against conservatives based solely on population averages.

Yes and no, Boonton. Theoretically, it's of course possible. On the other hand, we have neither a plausible mechanism nor empirical evidence for variation between conservatives and liberals in terms of academic aptitude. On the other hand, we have a very plausible mechanism in the case of male/female variation--sex genes have remarkable effects on all sorts of unlikely things, from height to heart disease--and we've got a pretty solid body of evidence showing that men on average perform better on visuo-spatial tests, which are correlated with math ability, and that the standard deviation of their intelligence distribution is considerably larger than that of women. Come back to me showing that conservatives don't do as well in school, or that they have the kinds of wide phenotypal differences from liberals that women display from men, and I'll be glad to agree that the question merits investigation.

It's important to note that the outrage among those who _actually heard_ Summer's remarks was far from universal, even among women. For example, according to the Washington Post:

"I left with a sense of elation at his ideas," said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economics professor who attended the speech. "I was proud that the president of my university retains the inquisitiveness of an academic."

Yes and no, Boonton. Theoretically, it's of course possible. On the other hand, we have neither a plausible mechanism nor empirical evidence for variation between conservatives and liberals in terms of academic aptitude.

Where did anyone prove differences in distribution could only happen due to genetics? I can see a poly sci depart discriminating against conservatives, even a literature department but a physics department? math? How are those doing the hiring even determining political orientations?

Here's a few plausible sceneros:

Smart liberals but shinning star conservatives - Suppose liberals as a group have higher average intelligence than conservatives. That would account for higher representation of them in graduate programs and eventually among tenured academics. But suppose their distribution is narrow. They tend to be smarter than average but not too far from their own average. Conservatives on the other hand tend to be a bit dumber but have a wider distribution. So not many conservatives end up in academics but the few that do tend to be shining stars...much smarter than your typical liberal academic.

Access to Power Conservatives have access to power in both business, think tanks and the gov't which heavily tilts Republican at the moment. That leaves academia as a refuge for a kind of 'shadow gov't'...a place for those with ideologies that cannot be reconciled.

Thinking Different Perhaps academia is simply not the style of conservatives. Perhaps conservatives find the environment too cozy. Perhaps they prefer using a few simple rules & balk at complex analysis (which is not a bad thing, in physics and many hard sciences the simple theory is always preferred tothe complicated one if there's a choice).

Network Effects Thomas Schilling demonstrated quite nicely in Micromotives and Macrobehavior how even very minor variations could lead to dramatically polarized results. Take a very minor preference...say an inclination of conservatives towards business and liberals towards grants & charities. Starting with an 'even field' of a 50-50 split in both business and academia the system will pull towards to anchors. Conservatives will find themselves recruited away from academia and liberals the reverse by those older than themselves. No actual discrimination is taking place, only two demographic groups finding a niche.

Geographically there are many ethnic communities in the US. For example, in NJ there's a large Arab community in Paterson and a Spanish community in Dover. This isn't because Arabs or Hispanics are being discriminated against in the housing markets outside those towns.

On the other hand, we have neither a plausible mechanism nor empirical evidence for variation between conservatives and liberals in terms of academic aptitude.

While this comes down to how one chooses to define conservative and liberal (and what part of academic aptitude you choose to focus on), if you define conservatism as "change is likely to be for the worse - exercise caution!" and liberalism in the "progressive" sense of "things are horribly broken, we need radical change and we need it now", that could easily translate into liberalism being more conducive to academia and various sorts of blue-sky (or navel-gazing) activities.

Note that this is not "liberals are smarter" - you'd probably prefer a conservative as a CFO, and it's not at all clear that a liberal outlook helps with incredibly difficult math or theoretical physics, but saying that there's no plausible mechanism seems blatantly incorrect.

None of the liberal blogs in my bookmarks suggested any such thing. In fact, only Kevin Drum even mentioned the incident.

A random thought from one who had a fair degree of scientific training and was a mechanical engineering major as an undergraduate: Isn't it strange that there is so much fuss about the dearth of women in science, and so little about the dearth of men in the humanities? Women outnumber men among college students, and if men are overrepresented in the hard sciences, math, and engineering, obviously women are even more overrepresented everywhere else. But somehow that doesn't constitute a crisis. I wonder why not.

Heresy is exactly the correct word to use, you must write for a living.

Without going into the whole big long story that though much of what 'everybody knows' about the Galileo affair is at best grossly exagerrated to make Galileo look like a saint and the Church look bad, the Church obviously didn't cover itself with glory during it. But comparing Churchmen of any time or place with Ivy League liberal arts professors as to their ability to tolerate dissent and in general get on with people who don't think exactly the same way as they do, is a real low blow and quite uncalled for. Recant that! :)

Years ago I attended a presentation on the different communication styles of men and women -- the whole men are from Mars and women are from Venus thing. The professor discussed the differences between the average male and female brains and then speculated that these differences might help account for the differences in communication styles. For example, women have, on average, about 50% more connective tissue between the brain hemispheres than do men. Since the part of the brain where feelings are "felt" is in a different hemisphere than the part of the brain where feelings find their "voice", it may be more difficult for men then women to express how they feel about something. It's not that most men cannot learn how to get in touch with their feelings, it's just more difficult, on average, for them than it is for women. The professor went through several such examples of differences in brain structure and what might be the related behavioral difference.

One of the things he mentioned is that, on average, men have more brain mass in the areas where "logic" (a/k/a math) and "reason" are processed. Because we don't use most of our brain's capacity, more brain matter does not necessarily mean more "production". But is it bigotry to even ask the question? The average man has larger biceps than the average women, but that does not mean that the average man can beat ANY women in an arm wrestle. Nor does it mean the average women would lose to EVERY man. But, the average man should beat a majority of women -- that's all averages tell us. So, if brain mass is related to output, it should not surprise us to learn that more men than women excel at math anymore than it should surprise us that more women than men excel at writing.

Bit of a contradiction in your post, Jane.

"I find it interesting that Matthew Yglesias, who was in honors track science at a highly selective prep school in the late nineties, says that there was definitely bias against women in his classes. I find it interesting because I was in honors track science at a highly selective prep school a decade earlier, and noticed no such thing."

and...

"6) There are also social factors to consider, and here I think conservatives also fail to acknowlege real issues. I went to a fairly sexist high school, one that was 2/3 male (it had only gone co-ed a couple of decades ago). There was absolutely pressure on women to appear dumber, more interested in "soft subjects" than in math or science. I've no doubt that this influenced my decision, at least somewhat, to drop AP science in favour of more English classes."

Which one is it?

j mct, you're far too kind to the critics of the Church in re Galileo. If you judge the incident by the standards of the time, they were exceedingly lenient to him.

If old saws still work, and "them as can, does; them as can't, teach," then it would be natural for those that can, to be out somewhere doing, while those of lesser practical ability cluster in academia. A cluster of people who know that they cannot prosper on their own merits would natually be inclined to favor collective policies (for the purpose of redistribution in a useful direction) and sorting out hierarchical issues through social means. Perhaps academic institutions are naturally predisposed toward "liberalism."

"studies show that interviews have absolutely no predictive value as to how well a candidate will do."

Are any of these online with free access?

Seriously: yes or no on the prep school science discrimination? I have no idea where this post comes down on that.
In my school, the hard sciences were all taught by women, the soft ones by both and engineering by men.

In the graduate program in chemistry that I am studying in right now, the faculty is constantly panicked (and rightly so) that a great number of women leave with their masters' degree than continue on with a Ph.D. As a matter of fact, I'd argue that most of these women who leave are actually better than the average male graduate student.

Why? I'd argue that there are two kinds of graduate students: "I want to be happy" or "I want to win/graduate/triumph over my evil adviser." I think women tend to fall in the former category and they are willing to 'lose' for some happiness.* (vast generalization, I know.) I'd argue that societal priorities (child-rearing, mainly) are the main reason that women are less willing to enter academic science.

*Yes, I am also arguing that a higher percentage of male Ph.D. graduates at my institution are those who maybe were not very good, but had the stubborness to keep hitting themselves in the head with a hammer.

The peer atmosphere was sexist, and there was overt discrimination in the athletics department, but my professors were as liberal as they come, and I detected no differences in their treatment of boys and girls.

Boonton, your response is silly. Positing that there is some difference in the distribution of intelligence is all very well, but the empirical data doesn't back you up; conservatives are, on average, more educated than liberals. The access to power argument doesn't work because the liberal domination of academica preceded the think tanks, which were created in response to the domination. "Thinking different" oozes self-congratulation, but doesn't track with any observed empirical data, nor the rather monolithic ideological slant on many issues. And the "network effects" explanation is otherwise known as "subtle discrimination" when applied to, say, minorities and women; it's one of the chief reasons that liberals argue for affirmative action.

Jake, again, I'm sure that explanation fills liberals hearts with a swell of pride at how gosh-darn modern they are, but doesn't really apply very well to today's political environment, where on many, possibly most, issues, it is the liberals who are arguing for stasis, and the conservatives who are arguing for change.

I can imagine all sorts of explanations for phenomena like this if I don't have to actually, y'know, come up with any proof. But none of the explanations put forward tracks even casually observed data, much less tested hypotheses. On the other hand the data indicating that women may have, on average, less mathematical ability than men tracks both empirical data and theoretical models pretty well.

Positing that there is some difference in the distribution of intelligence is all very well, but the empirical data doesn't back you up; conservatives are, on average, more educated than liberals.

Odd, what of the often quoted studies showing college grads and post-grads are more likely to vote Democratic? The bigger problem with this type of analysis is that we are equating years of formal education with intelligence.

And the "network effects" explanation is otherwise known as "subtle discrimination" when applied to, say, minorities and women; it's one of the chief reasons that liberals argue for affirmative action.

Subtle discrimination would be something like the peer pressure you felt to take 'soft classes'. Network effects are different, IMO.

What you've failed to show is consistent accross the board discrimination against conservatives. For example, where are the physics journals who refused to publish an article on quantum mechanics because the author was known to be conservative? If there are none then what is the mechanism that is causing conservatives who are great at physics to be excluded from physics departments????

BTW, please end it with the 'liberals argue' line. I never appointed myself a defender of all sterotypical liberal positions so the fact that some liberals have used 'network effects' to argue for affirmative action doesn't impress me. At this point even most left wingers acknowledge that some attempts to force integration 'by any means necessary' are not good long term policies even though they might have been good at one point.

I could easily ask you what conservatives want if there is no overt discrimination. Affirmative action for Professors who claim they voted for Bush??? Even in the math department?

Boonton, in 2004, Bush peaked among "some college education", did slightly better than average with high-school only and college-only, and bombed among those with a post-graduate-education. Bush and Kerry split the 4% of the voting public with less than a high school education but that's too trivial to count.

It makes sense if you think of people who are motivated to go to college and get a degree as a point of entry into a job that pays well and enables a nice suburban/exurban lifestyle. This is why the percentage of people with "college education" is not a good marker for correlating political leanings with the capacity for success in academia. To be blunt, there are plenty of intelligent business management, marketing, and even economics majors who never had any interest in wasting their lives looking for an academic job but were looking for the best preparation for a comfortable life.

So we shouldn't look at college graduation as a marker for "potential academic."

It's not that liberals are more modern - the existing state of affairs has come about through centuries of trial and error, and most changes from it are likely to be bad. Conservatism makes sense. Utopianism and refusal to acknowledge sticky realities, when applied to large political organizations, can pretty easily get you into a situations where you end up killing millions to advance the obviously just cause of the revolution.

But if you're in a position where it's hard to do that kind of harm (say, a humanities department at a largeish state university), utopianism and disregard for unpleasant realities can be a good thing.

As for conservatives advocating change and liberals advocating stasis; that's why I said it depended on your definition of conservative and liberal. In the US political arena, conservatism seems to be ascendant which not only allows them to push for change to the way things used to be before the country went off the trracks, but also forces liberals to try to defend the territory that they have.

Another possibility is that it's just a social effect. Imagine a workplace where everyone is a Yankees fan if they bother to follow baseball at all. Newcomers are likely to feel pulled toward becoming Yankees fans but the company itself doesn't discriminate against non-fans. It just happens that way because it doesn't matter.

Academia, I would imagine, is a much more social environment than many workplaces. Many people enter it because they are already friends with their Professors and why not work with people you like? Well if a dept. is 60% liberal it wouldn't be shocking if 80% of those it recruits into academia careers are liberal as well. Why? Because people with like interests find it easier to make friends with each other. Pretty soon you can end up with a 90% liberal department even though no one has ever discriminated against a conservative who wanted in.

Well, it's all so freakin complicated, so just asking the question (if that is all he did) is no sin. How he asked it and what assumptions he made might be slightly sinful, but there are no transcripts on record, as far as I understand, so I can't say.

I am a female physician, in an area that used to be male dominated, but is now kinda 50-50, and in an academic center. At the end of the day, you have to write papers, get grants, etc, etc, etc. Are there some biases against women? Sure, but as a woman with no children I have advantages in my career life over a women with children. Is the system stacked toward the single? What about foreign trained doctors versus American in the academic medical environment? It is a multifactorial process, this becoming a scientist and getting promoted. Maybe I'm just too much in the thick of things to see clearly. I'm too busy 'making it', so to speak.

(On a related note, I'm Indian American and female and I always felt my parents attitudes toward math and science helped steer me in that direction. I was told by teachers I didn't have the 'natural' abilities to perform at the top of the class in math, to which my father replied, "Bull." And then he tutored me until I got into the top math groups in grade school. It's a seventies thing. We had groups based on your ability. If you were considered a dullard (well, that's how it seems to me), you got dullard homework).

Personally, I'd much rather see an honest discussion about how academic hiring occurs, how people are promoted, whether the 'teacher-clinician' track really will let you work up the ladder as much as the 'researcher' track, and how we can keep young physicians in an increasingly tough environment for practice and research.

Boonton,

Many people enter it because they are already friends with their Professors and why not work with people you like?

Um. You don't "enter academia" by being "already friends with your professors." And you don't, except in truly exceptional circumstances, get to work alongside the people you studied with. Most universities try not to hire their own students, though some do break that rule occasionally.

They don't have to. You become friends with a professor, have a beer with him, talk about economics (or literature, math, whatever the subject is). You tell him you like this, he tells you try school X for grad school or he'll tell you he knows the Dean at school Y...next thing a new person enteres academia.

No discrimination is happening here. In fact, many interesting friendships have been based around people who take entirely opposite views. But on average I think people gravitate towards others they have more in common with. Hence a slight advantage (say 60%) may be just the tipping point needed to set up a dynamic that leads you to end up with depts 90% liberal.

the same dynamic can work the other way. Conservatives who didn't get along so well with their liberal profs in the working world are friends with lowerclassmen. Next thing you know they land in a non-academic career. The concentration isn't anything like 90% because the universe of non-academic careers is much bigger than academic careers. One is like an ocean and the other a pond.

Then there's step 3, both liberals and conservatives come up with self serving theories as to why things are as they are:

Conservatives: We like the 'real world' while liberals like to be taken care of like babies.

Liberals: We can think so conservatives get jobs where they are only expected to grunt.

The preponderance of evidence supports the hypothesis that more males excel in the upper stratosphere of mathematics and the hard scientists because nature made more of them that way, than females. Biology does not care about political niceties. It just is.

Academic hiring, on the other hand, cares very much about political niceties. Step on the wrong person's toes and good-bye academia. And it is oh so easy to step on toes, believe me.

Summers just forgot for a moment that one must be delicate with the ladies.

I can believe that there's discrimination. I'm sure that there is. Surely, however, there's also traditionally been discrimination against women becoming lawyers (a man's field) and doctors (e.g., pressure to be a nurse instead.) Surely those are regarded as tough, hard careers. Yet current statistics show that 50% of entering law and medical students are female. Why the shift in those two fields but not the mathy fields? I think it's worth at least thinking about.

I don't deny discrimination, but is the discrimination against women going into math-related fields really so much worse than the discrimination against women becoming lawyers and doctors, that one situation would shift to parity but not the other?

Michelle Dulak Thomson, why do you think some universities have policies against hiring their own students? These policies are intended to cut down on cronyism. Even so I believe universities hire a disproportionate number of their own students. Being friends with your professors certainly helps with entering academia.

Boonton asks above how math departments (for example) would know a candidate's politics when hiring.

First the critical decision in academia is not the initial hire but the granting of tenure (or not) after a few years. It is widely suspected that factors other than academic excellence affect tenure decisions. And of course this suspicion (even if exaggerated) discourages people who feel non-academic factors might hinder them when it comes to tenure decisions from embarking on academic careers.

Second the initial hire depends on letters of recommendation and personal references either of which might mention a candidates politics particularly if unusual or problematic as outspoken conservative views might be considered.

James B. Shearer,

[W]hy do you think some universities have policies against hiring their own students? These policies are intended to cut down on cronyism. Even so I believe universities hire a disproportionate number of their own students. Being friends with your professors certainly helps with entering academia.

Sir, I'm an ex-academic-in-training, and you aren't telling me anything I don't already know.

Two points, though: It would surprise me very much if universities disproportionately hire their own students. The university department I know most about has hired one of its own students in the last twenty years, and that for an extremely specialized position.

And second, I thought Boonton's point was that people enter academia after becoming friends with their professors. Not, in other words, that they used their friendship to get into grad school, but that they liked the society of their professors. Now, as it happens, I owe my whole wacky life-trajectory to friendship with a professor: I took a class outside my major, I was enthusiastic about the subject, I kept running to the guy in question with things I had just discovered, like a kid to a parent. He encouraged me into graduate school in a field I'd had nothing at all to do with before that point, and his recommendation was sufficient to get me into Princeton and King's College, London, as well as Berkeley (where I did go).

"I went to a fairly sexist high school, one that was 2/3 male (it had only gone co-ed a couple of decades ago)."

Co-ed? What the hell kind of school was that?... Oh wait, you live in New York City. Going to THE county high school (comprised of anyone and everyone whose parents didn't send them to Christian school) is probably very different from your experience.

"There was absolutely pressure on women to appear dumber, more interested in "soft subjects" than in math or science. I've no doubt that this influenced my decision, at least somewhat, to drop AP science in favour of more English classes."

And where were your parents in all this? Their job is to break their collective foot off in the appropriate asses when their daughter's educational opportunities are being unduly winnowed. Sounds to me like mumma'n'daddy owe you an explanation.

Meanwhile, to the subject at hand: one thing I've noticed is that women usually have a hard time with abstract spatial manipulation for some reason, most likely some brain thing. That's not to say that women can't play Tetris, but if you're hiring for 3D CAD modelers the application pool will be thick with dick, so to speak.

"Isn't it strange that there is so much fuss about the dearth of women in science, and so little about the dearth of men in the humanities?"

If one were to be unkind, one could submit that the men already in the humanities like things the way they are, having less competition to nail a larger contingent of female undergrads.

As I surf the sites I seem to keep bumping into this same dead horse. Let me try to beat it again.
As I`ve said at other sites, he may be making a valid point. If one can dis-regard the way it was presented,and refrain the impulse to add an idelogical spin to it, then the point he makes becomes, "men are better at sciences than women".
I didn`t take it to mean he was saying,"girls are dumb".
So the question is, are men better at the sciences than women? On average, probably not but what it boils down to is a matter of interests.
I think the reason more men know math and science than women is because men are attracted to careers that require some form of specialized education in far greater percentages than women.
Face it, men and women Are-Not-The-Same. That`s not to say one gender is smarter than the other, we have different opinions, ideas, likes and dis-likes.
In WWII it was discovered that women were far better at factory type work than men, because the tedium and monotony didn`t cause them to get as distracted as men. Go figure.
Anyway, I believe there are more men in specialized fields simply because as a whole men are more interested in those fields.
It`s a matter of personal interest and choice.
Now if it`s put in that context, then I think what these protesters should be doing is getting women more interested in those fields.
Simple.
It`s easy to jump to conclusions if a person has an agenda or bias, but then they overlook the whole point of the topic.
So he was un-PC about it, big deal, C`est la vie as the Phrench would say. It doesn`t make his point any less valid.

There is discrimnation in many professions, and in my experince it is frequently reverse discimination by lefties. Of course the problem is that if you hire someone for the wrong reason, you probably get the wrong person. So I expect that there is probably a little personal experince embeded in Summers observations. I expect at some time he hired some one for "affirmative" reasons and then got burnt.

Summers identified three possible reasons why women might be underrepresented in math and science:

1. Due to some genetic difference, they are less capable
2. For some reason (genetic, social, whatever) they are less likely to choose to enter math and science academia
3. They are discriminated against

All the discussion I've seen in the blogosphere focuses on 1 and 3. That's unfortunate. I think number 2 deserves more attention. I think it's the most plausible explanation for the gender disparity.

Xavier:
I believe that`s exactly the point I just made.

Speaking for myself...I was quite good at math, and scored extremely high on standardized tests in it. I did in fact participate in one of those studies of girls' math abilities, and was very perturbed when I found out what the results (other than mine) were supposed to show. (Actually, the man doing the study afterward claimed that, since I had been beat out by one point on the math by a boy, this also proved women were worse at math. It really only proved that my school didn't teach math that advanced to 7th graders and the boy's school did...but the guy wouldn't listen to me about it, either. Geez, that professor was a maroon.)

But from my perspective, math has always been rather mechanical. Oh, there was a sort of crossword puzzle satisfaction in working the problems and getting it right, but nothing really _happened_. So the further along I got in math, the more effort was required to produce an increasingly less interesting result. After a while, I just tuned out completely.

Languages, on the other hand, are endlessly different and interesting -- and you can _say_ things in them! You can learn a whole new set of rhymes! You can write songs in them! You can read deathless literature and bad jokes!

And music, which is of course much the same sort of thing as math, is also something you can _do_ things with. I'm a lot happier making up new harmonies on the fly than doing calculations on the fly, even though one is really much the same as the other, to the brain.

So yes, I can do all sorts of science and technical stuff...when I need to, or want to. But good God, a lot of that stuff is so very dry and tedious. Science facts are cool, but doing science is usually less fulfilling than working fast food.

I think that math classes should basically go a lot faster, so as to get through the boredom as quickly as possible. If they wouldn't spend so much time on proofs (I understood the concept after a day, thank you very much, so we didn't need to spend two interminable weeks on it) and such, girls could get all the way to calculus before they tuned out.

Joatmoaf: Sorry. I skipped your comment because the spacing was awkward. Reading it gives me a headache. Please put a full space between paragraphs. Your comment is otherwise well written and I basically agree with it.

I think you're not giving Summers enough credit though. He explicitly presented "women aren't good at science" and "women don't want to do science" as separate possible explanations. It sounds like you're saying that Summers said something that could be interpreted as meaning either. He was actually much clearer than that.

See here: http://news.com.com/Harvard+chief+defends+talk+on+women,+science/2100-7337_3-5540130.html

"He discussed several factors that could help explain the underrepresentation of women. The first factor, he said, according to several participants, was that 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."

This doesn't seem to be a clearcut left-right issue. Much to their credit, I've noted that a fair number of liberal commenters on the sites where I've seen this addressed seem to be rather uneasy with the violent reaction from the PC crowd on this, particularly with regards to that professor storming out in a snit in the middle of Summers' presentation. It reminds me of the uproar at a prominent law school a few years back when the situation for the moot court presentation was announced as a controversy over two lesbians adopting a baby, and the student body had a collective conniption fit over the concept that anyone would *dare* argue the "no" side, requiring the administration to issue a statement gently reminding the student body (and some sympathetic faculty members) exactly what field they had chosen to enter, and its attendant obligations.

Xavier -

#2 is frequently assumed by some to be a subset of #3, and by others a subset of #1, and most explanations of #2 do boil down to #1 or #3.

However, there's another possibility. Immigrant groups in the US have a tendency to bail out of academia for work later and later in life the longer the group has been in the US - presumably people's time horizons are longer when their parental (and social) resources are greater.

Women in the US are moderately new to much of academia, and are less likely to have traditions of becoming academic "lifers". So proportionally more women will choose to bail out for the generally more lucrative rewards of a non-academic career than will men.

Ok - it's a strained analogy, but I think that something like it may provide a possible choice mechanism that does not depend on current discrimination or inherent differences in ability distributions.

On the other hand, I believe that both 1 and 3 operate - men in general do have a higher variation in intelligence than do women - thus more men in the rarefied reaches of academia and hanging out in front of liquor stores in the ghetto.

oops - didn't finish before hitting "post".

I've heard enough stories of academic discrimination, often operating at early stages in school careers, to know that discrimination does exist, even if hiring committees aren't the agents of discrimination.

"If they wouldn't spend so much time on proofs". Maureen are you saying you understand proofs v. quickly & wish they weren't presented so slowly? Or are you saying that maths should be presented without proofs? Maths without proof is a strange concept, notwithstanding Hardy's famous remark.

I note that there has AFAIK _never_ been a female Fields Medalist, nor one of recent African ancestry. I do not pretend to know why.

[Wicked schadenfreuede] Interesting, isn't it, how many of the liberals proclaiming that it's utterly ridiculous to think that a department running 95% leftists might be, consciously or unconsciously, discriminating against those of a more right wing persuasion, find it completely obvious that if a physics department is 80% male, that must be because they're discriminating.[/wicked schadenfreude]

This really isn't at all similar, since it's entirely possible to hide the fact of your politics but usually not possible to hide your sex. There are courses where politics don't come up at all, but if your sex is usually quite obvious all the time. Thus it is possible for there to be gender discrimination in much greater qualities that political discrimination. Also, gender predetermined for most us absent extreme measures while you choose your political affiliations/leanings. So even if there is discrimination of both types, clearly one is far worse than the other.

A disproportionate number of mathematicians have Asperger's Syndrome -- and this syndrome overwhelmingly occurs in males.

The question to be asked is where has anything been done to even up the differential, whatever the origin, and what might those efforts tell us about the mutability of the difference-in-participation-rates-as-problem.

The place perhaps to look is the Republic of Ireland and the outcomes of the Leaving Cert examinations in Mathematics,a universal test given at the end of secondary school education across all of the state; the test taken in west Clare is the same as that taken in the Dublin area.

The test results in the early Nineties reflected the experience in the United States. A substantially higher percentage of males took the Mathematics examination as part of their six Leaving Cert examinations, more males took the advanced test ( the higher level),and males scored higher on each test type. If you look at the results in 2003 and 2004, the reverse is true. Now a higher percentage of females take the test, a higher percentage of females taken the Maths at the higher level, and females are achieving as a group higher test scores than the males.

It is very clear from the outcomes measured in Ireland that either Irish teen age females in the Nineties were some how radically different genetically than their predecessors ( and the reverse true for Irish teen age males) or the Irish educational managers made changes in the Nineties in the national curriculum and in the focus placed on maths that encouraged more females to study maths and to succeed in those studies. Absent any scientific support for the first proposition, credit has to be given to the Irish educational managers.

It would be worth the study of what they did in Ireland and its replicatability in the United States. Most secondary schools in Ireland in the Nineties were single-sex schools and it may be the focus issues were different. But the results are clear. And, at the end of the Nineties, there were the beginnings of a shift to co education in many parts of Ireland,as new school facilities building programs were coupled with the consolidation of two or more single-sex schools together.

It would not be very difficult to follow the pattern of maths education and Leaving Cert outcomes in , for example, south Sligo, where two single-sex schools were consolidated into one co-ed facilities. I am sure that the Irish educational authorities are watching closely as well to assure themselves that the achievement problems associated with co-ed education in the United States are not occurring in Ireland.

Boonton asks above how math departments (for example) would know a candidate's politics when hiring.

I don't doubt that a math department could overtly discriminate against conservatives (or other ideologies)...I'm just saying its far fetched. Are there really a group of mathematicians who have been blacklisted because they give money to the GOP or because they supported Bush???

kept running to the guy in question with things I had just discovered, like a kid to a parent. He encouraged me into graduate school in a field...

Michelle, do you think this is somewhat unique to academia? From my personal experience in the business world forming such relationships with your first boss or manager is somewhat rare. Academia and politics are two fields where mentoring and close relationships are a big deal IMO.

However, there's another possibility. Immigrant groups in the US have a tendency to bail out of academia for work later and later in life the longer the group has been in the US - presumably people's time horizons are longer when their parental (and social) resources are greater.

Immigrants, though, often put a lot of emphasis and prestige on their children earning a degree. Something else, they often view 'hard subjects' like science as more real than a 'soft subject' like the humanities. One family I knew in HS had two daughters and one son. One daughter became an engineer like her parents, the other couldn't hack it so she became a pharmacists (which her parents viewed as sort of a cop out...believe it or not)...the son wanted to go into music but the father insisted he too become an engineer.

6'2"! What are you wearing?

That's not funny I know, but it represents reality I think. Most men put every encounter with a woman through a sexual test first. Only then do they apply professional standards.

We don't use that procedure with men. (Well, maybe gay men do, but that doesn't change the idea here, which is that if you don't deploy all of your assets in a competitive market like academic science--including sexual assets--you are placing yourself at a disadvantage, so long as men are setting the standards in the acadmic apprenticeship relationship.)

Many, perhaps most, smart women find that kind of sexual harassment uncomfortable when they encounter it as young scholars. They understandably turn away from the intimate and lengthy apprentice relationships with such bosses.

Or, once they're credentialed, they quickly slip out of academic institutions into industry--where standards of behavior are more easily enforced.

Duncan-- But that completely ignores that *some* fields, where presumably originally the same discrimination occurred, have had great increases in the number of female faculty. In addition, the problem in the hard sciences is also at the level of people who major in them as well, not just people who stay in academia. That's the problem with lots of these comments; I don't doubt discrimination of the sort you mention and others, but one has to explain why some of the previously male-dominated fields have changed but others haven't.

Boonton - I don't disagree that mentoring and friendships are important in academia, I just don't see why you'd think that they are less important in business. I've mentored several people and have been helpful in finding them jobs with other firms when they left my employ. Much of business is, still, conducted based on relationships -- it's just to difficult to research every detail each time you are about to make a purchase. Far easier to be able to do business with someone you trust or hire someone you know.

Asperger's Syndrome -- and this syndrome overwhelmingly occurs in males.

Dude you said AssBurger! heheheh

There are a couple of issues. One is, what is the pool? Two is, do women who are just as good as men (of 6'2", if youlike) have the same opportunities as the men whom they are just as good as, even if they are outnumbered?

From my decades in The Biz: In biological sciences, PhD classes even at the very best places have been close to 50:50 gender wise for 20 years. However, those women are not equally represented in the pool for faculty positions. Say only about 30% of the pool of applicants is female. That is, a number of women have self-selected out. Their option. Okay.

Given that these women have achieved PhDs in the same programs as men, and have done similar postdocs, there is reason to believe that they have similar talents.

With the pool be about 30%, we would therefore expect that in faculty hires, about 30% should be women. some places, particular public universities and enlightedn private ones, this is the case.

However, many institutions do not achieve this, even today. I fyou look at the lists, they are NOT hiring proportionally to the pool of talent they review. Some of them don't hire women at all (but as long as they put a token on the shortlist, it's "okay"). I have been on search committees that have explicitly removed women because "not strong enough personality" (!) or "what if she gets divorced?" Illegal as hell, of course, but that's what really happens.

Another case: two studies that I know of argue the audition-effect. In one, an identical CV of a junior professor was sent out under two names: Doug and Dorothy, say. Reviewers were much more likely to say that Doug was a tiger ready for tenure but Dorothy needed more time. Let us note that Harvard's rate of tenuring women has declined notably of late. Second, a study in Europe about a very prestigious fellowship found that women candidates had to publish MORE papers in prominent journals than male candidates to have equal chance of award.

It's the old "women have to be twice as good" model. Put another way, exceptional women can succeed--about as well as the average man, even if E. W. has outpublished, out performed, out funded A.M.

Like it or not, academic scientists are JUST AS PRONE to making assumptions based on gender as the muscians or anyone else. And frankly, my experience of many years in acaademic science is that there isn't much of the loony left in science departments--that's mostly over there in the humanties depts. I have heard comments that are positively Jurassic from male scientists about their female colleagues. And I am very confident at least half of them vote republican.

in conclusion, then, sure, there may be fewer women who want to do science at the same level as men. But if even THOSE women have trouble in academic careers, it isn't about innate abilities or desires, it's about a broken system. And Summer's remarks sounded very like he was saying women can't or won't do science. So go away and play, dears, because you don't belong at Harvard. that may not have been what he thought he was saying, but that's how it came out. I don't blame Hopkins for walking out.

Level of formal education is not the optimium parameter with which to distinguish liberal from conservative, but rather the level of contact with the real world. I thought I was still a fluffy bunny leftie when I dropped out of college, altho I had started thinking more like a libertarian. A few years of pulling myself up from poverty by dint of my own effort and I moved solidly to the right.

Regarding innate diferences between men and women, given that the cultures and attitudes of the sports are very similar it is worth noting that there have been women in the top ranks of drg racing since the '60s but even the most assertive could not succeed in corner turning events. Could the importance of spacial awareness in driving thru a pack on a track be a factor?

John Thanker writes:

"*Some* fields, where presumably originally the same discrimination occurred, have had great increases in the number of female faculty."

What fields are those?

The National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators report says that between 1990 and 2000 female student's bachelor's degrees in the meaty, math-heavy "natural sciences and engineering (NS&E) increased from 2.8% of the 24-year-old population to 4.5%. Male students with these degrees went from 6.3% to 6.8% of that population.

The female share of 24-year-olds receiving bachelors degrees in the "social and behavior sciences (SBE)" grew somewhat less, from 5.0% to 6.5%. The male share actually declined from 4.5% to 3.7%!

So female students overwhelmingly outnumber males in SBE bachelor's degrees in the SBE fields--by more than half (119,000 70,000)! But they still lag males in NS&E fields (82,000 female BSs to 128,000 for males).

What is going on?

Do SBE fields, with their "leftist" social engineering bents, make more room for changes in the power relationships of education?

Or do their spectrum of required skills accord with innately "female" skills?

I guess we should stay tuned. What do we know about the ratios of more advanced degrees?

include natural (physical, biological, earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences), agricultural, and computer sciences; mathematics; and engineering.

John Thanker writes:

"*Some* fields, where presumably originally the same discrimination occurred, have had great increases in the number of female faculty."

What fields are those?

The National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators report says that between 1990 and 2000 female student's bachelor's degrees in the meaty, math-heavy "natural sciences and engineering (NS&E) increased from 2.8% of the 24-year-old population to 4.5%. Male students with these degrees went from 6.3% to 6.8% of that population.

The female share of 24-year-olds receiving bachelors degrees in the "social and behavior sciences (SBE)" grew somewhat less, from 5.0% to 6.5%. The male share actually declined from 4.5% to 3.7%!

So female students overwhelmingly outnumber males in SBE bachelor's degrees in the SBE fields--by more than half (119,000 70,000)! But they still lag males in NS&E fields (82,000 female BSs to 128,000 for males).

What is going on?

Do SBE fields, with their "leftist" social engineering bents, make more room for changes in the power relationships of education?

Or do their spectrum of required skills accord with innately "female" skills?

I guess we should stay tuned. What do we know about the ratios of more advanced degrees?

include natural (physical, biological, earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences), agricultural, and computer sciences; mathematics; and engineering.

Defining liberalism and conservatisim in a consistent manner is a deep problem with this type of analysis triticale. A Pat Buchannan conservative might view you as more of a hedonist liberal because you don't support a strong state & because your positions trend toward libertarian.

Dude, Isn't "triticale" some kind of flour?

DB

This reminds me of a phenomenon that I became aware of some time back, in the relatively trivial area of the game of contract bridge. If one staged a tournament matching the top five million male bridge players against the top five million female bridge players (matching equal ranks against each other), the women would absolutely slaughter the men. On the other hand, if the top one hundred men faced the top one hundred women (both determined by official rankings), the opposite would be true--the men would win in a runaway. Unquestionably true based on observation and experience--but why?

Duncan Hines -- Don't ask him about the flour. Makes him nuts.

I believe that surveys have shown that physical science and engineering faculties are less prodominately Democrats than behavioral and social sciences faculties. I suspect that this is because it is rather harder to determine one's political opinions from a paper on the uses of Hermitian Field Operators than it is from a paper on the variation by gender of faculty appointments at top universities.

The low level of Republicans in the science and engineering faculties is likely explained by something once said to me a long time ago: "People aren't Repubilcans because they are rich, they are rich because they are Republicans". People who are generally in favor of more capitalist policies are also more likely to seek out better-paying jobs, and in science and engineering, the better-paying jobs are not in academia.

I suspect that the biological sciences have weird skews politically, as biologists are apparently more likely to be atheists than any other academic specialists, and most atheists are not likely to be Republican, even if they are generally pro-capitalist.

One of my favorite lines from Star Trek is "Who put the tribbles in the quadrotriticale?"

M Scott's reference to contract bridge reminds me that in the chess world the top players are virtually all men. There is one woman -- widely recognized as the best female player ever -- who is ranked number 9, but she is by far an outlier. The dominance of men is such that there are separate tournaments for women and a special "female grandmaster" title requiring a lower rating than that required of male grandmasters.

If there is any sport/game in which men and women should theoretically be equal, I would think it's chess. The fact that women are not really competitive at the highest levels might suggest that males are generally better at the spatial relationships and pattern recognition that chess requires. Or, it could be a result of the "distribution" argument that Jane advances.

Let's consider a bell-shaped distribution and the xx v xy chromosome situation. The xx leads to a greater clustering at the center of the situation. The xy, by virtue of its greater variance, leads to greater variation, i.e. the distribution is more broad.

The end result is that the brilliant (and the people who are less gifted) are found at the ends of the distributions -- the male ends.

This does not mean there are not Marie Curies, or 6-foot-four females at the high ends of the bell curve distributions. It does mean that they are more rare.

Colleges that discount women's potential damange only themselves.

Is there a similar imbalance at the other end of the scale? That is, are there more boys in remedial classes and more boys flunking or dropping out? I don't know where to find the stats, but I rather expect that to be the case.
Not that the politically-correct class is going to worry about that. By their logic, that could only happen because of discrimination - but discrimination against males isn't discrimination, so nothing to worry about...

Of course, I know that on most measurements of ability, males have a far wider variance than females. That is, the male bell curve is wider - and so you'll find more males far out on both tails.

And I also am sure there are still cultural factors at work. The four girls in my high-school class who were in all the Honors courses throughout (English, Math, and Science), all had experiences with counselors trying to steer them away from "hard" subjects like math and the more mathematical sciences. This was the class of '71, and I'd certainly expect that things have changed as far as the school counselors go.

But you've also got the boys who'd rather date girls who are (or pretend to be) stupider than themselves, and the misogynists who are likely to try to take revenge on girls smarter than themselves. So I'd be really surprised if most intelligent girls don't feel some pressure to hide part of their intelligence. And the trouble with acting in real life is that eventually you aren't acting anymore...

Finally, something that I'm not sure if it's innate, social, or cultural. American men define themselves by their jobs. American women don't. So when the first day of engineering school gave me five different 3 hour homework assignments, I buckled down and got to work - because someday I'd take real pride in being able to do a real job that was just as tough. If women can't find equal motivation somewhere, they aren't going to stick to a program like that!

DRB, I think it is important to note more of the story of the chess player you cited.

Prior to having kids, her father determined that he would use his own children as an experiment, to show that with the proper education anybody could be made a genius. For obvious genetic reasons this doesn't make a very good "experiment," but it's all he had to work with. What he didn't know was that he and his wife would have all girls - three of them. With homeschooling that focused on mathematics and chess he produced the following results: Susan, the first-ever woman to achieve the men's Grandmaster title; Judith, the youngest person to earn the Grandmaster tile (beating Bobby Fischer's record) and one of the top 10 players in the world; Sofia, an International Master (the equivalent of a baseball minor leaguer), who achieved the highest per-tournament rating of all time, meaning she clobbered a field of the world's best men.

As I said, these are three sisters, so it doesn't prove much (plus who knows how many other parents have tried this same experiment and failed miserably, both with girls and boys), but it is an interesting case.

Markm,

If you browse our archives you'll find all sorts of papers that can answer your question. We've blogged on over 1,000 papers on genetics.

For some pretty pictures on the gender differences in brain structure look to this recent post.

One problem with acknowledging possible differences (regardless of whether there *is* a difference), is that people do force reality to conform to expectations - they always have, and they probably always will. This means that any inequality will probably be 10 times worse that simple reality would dictate.

If it is acknowledged that by pure ability (assuming you could magically measure it) men should occupy 10% of physician positions, we'd see men occupying maybe 1%. Humans takes trends and run with it, pushing them vastly farther than reality. A strongish correlation become law, and we don't allow reality to get in the way. (And no, I don't think we're being evil on purpose. Evolution has programmed us that way...)

Jane, as soon as (and as long as) society largely accepts that there are few women capable of succeeding at the high end of sciences, even proportionately fewer will be allowed to succeed. And that, in my opinion, is Dr. Summers crime.

Since there is a bit of a tangent going about my nickname, I will explain that I picked it on impulse when I started posting at Slashdot, where everyone has a silly handle, and was unaware of the Start Reck connection at the time. Triticale is a hybrid of wheat and rye which does an exceptional job of combining the best features of each.

Boonton is correct that I do not hold close to a paleo definition of conservative. I'm a hawkish very small "l" libertarian who aligns with conservatives on many issues. I'm not sure about that "hedonist" label. I've learned that moderation is the key to enjoyment. All of mankind can be divided into two categories, those who divide everybody into categories and those who don't. I've found that categories are a useful tool but spectra and Venn diagrams are ultimately more accurate.

In working for a Pharma company that had one of the best selling drugs on the market, I was "accidentally" included in a conversation in which an important and brilliant female scientist was being discussed. She was the natural one in line for a promotion to our research team....but these two senior executives were worried because she was a woman. However, her two immediate supervisors came form the "show me" crowd, and were only concerned with her abilities. She got the job.

I completely except that cognitive and physical differences will indeed influence how the stats play out. But so does prejudice. And we have not become so "clean" a society that prejudice has ceased being a consideration. Certainly we have come far in how this plays out, but to suggest there is only one aspect effecting this, is something more suited to Bizzaro world.

Are all statistical differences related to prejudice? OF COURSE NOT...are all statictical differences related to impartial behaviour...OF COURSE NOT....I have worked for companies that deliberately restricted advancement for certain individuals (mostly those of african discent, but I even once worked for a Catalog company that was prejudiced against males).

What to do about it may be the wrong question....there is nothing wrong with asking the questions that were at the base of Mr. S's comment, but as I read them...I found them to be incredibly odd. As if each societal effect has only one cause. If life were that simple, we would have had a unifying theory in physics centuries ago. His comment was bad science, just as many of the comment by the left and the cliterati are.

Some time ago, when I was in college, I had joined the student chapter of SWE (society for women engineers). Part of the mission of SWE was to encourage women to enter engineering. Research had shown that of women who entered engineering, about 90-95% had a family member or close family friend that was an engineer; and for men, that number was around 45-50%. The conclusions drawn by the researcher was that boys are steered towards engineering by guidance councillors and teachers (hey, you're smart, why not go into engineering). There wasn't discrimination per se, but rather a culture of discouraging young women from entering the field (math is hard), lack of other females present, combined with bad social sterotypes (nerds, calculators hanging from your belt, and nerd pouches).

It isn't really discrimination, but to some folks it looks like it. Like how folks can think that conservatives get discriminated against in (some departments of some) universities.

Nels,

Good points on the Polgar sisters, but I think yet more context is in order:

As mentioned, Judit Polgar is the #9 ranked player in the world, with a rating of 2728. She is the *only* woman among the world's top 100 players. The next highest ranked woman is in fact her sister, Zsuzsa Polgar, who is rated 2577 (the #100 male, Murtas Kazhgaleyev, is rated 2613).

Judit, at 15 years 4 months, was in fact the youngest person to achieve the GM title at the time she achieved it. She beat Fisher by 2 months. Since then (1991), eight males have bettered her time. The youngest, Sergey Kurjakiv, achieved his GM title at 12 years 7 months.

At Rome 1989, Sofia did score the highest tournament rating achieved up to that point, with a 2928. Since then a number of males have beaten her record, most recently Loek Van Wely (ranked #23 in the world) with a 2949 at Amsterdam 2002. Sofia has never come close to repeating her Rome performance -- she is currently rated 2460.

The Polgar sisters were essentially trained in chess the way Tiger Woods was trained in golf -- relentlessly schooled at it from a very early age. Despite that, only one of the sisters is reasonably competitive with top male players.

G'day from Down Under, Asym Americans -

Preamble. Despite Bush, Big Oil & the scary elements amongst the Blue-Staters, millions of people around the world admire your country, share its democratic ideals and benefit from the excellent dialogue to be found in journals and on the Net. Call us fellow-travellers . . .

In general, I reckon we should learn what we can from you, stay on the sidelines and fight our own battles at home. At election time, some of us were shocked rigid when the UK Guardian encouraged its readers to write directly to voters in a marginal consituency urging them to vote for Kerry. The backlash may well have lost Kerry votes. I'm sure if Ohio citizens were to conduct a mail-in campaign for someone here - Melbourne, Australia - it would have that effect.

However . . . We've had the spectacle now of the President of Harvard offering not one but *three* apologies to pressure groups. For doing what? Quoting empirical research findings which pointed to the *possibility* of *one part* of the explanation for 'under-representation' at the very highest level of some disciplines. OK: Summers as a politician needs to control public perceptions of the university fed by crass and unstoppable Press distortions; placate the outraged on campus; smoothtalk the benefactors.

Realpolitik it may be, but is it the right thing to do? Add another example. The Christian Right have come out against - wait for it - Spongebob Squarepoints. This cartoon sponge holds hand with his male friend: thus they are gay and the cartoon for small children is 'promoting the gay life-style'. Sure enough, the maker then feels it necessary to explain his intentions - to defend himself.

Is it time to stop? I would have liked the President of Harvard to make the kind of points Steven Pinker makes in the Crimson. No idea is off-limits in a university. The answer to ideas you consider bad is convincing criticism. It is not to turn on carefully controlled self-dramatising, self-righteous near-hysterical displays of 'outrage'. Anyone is welcome to believe in the blank slate notion. But anyone who wants it to remain the enlightened orthodoxy had better get busy defending it, because for twenty years the weight of evidence has been shifting. And those of us who believe in a complex mixed picture (as I believe Larry Summers does) have the right to take the offensive. Summers should have confronted the militant women with a question: do you or do you not support free enquiry? And Steven Hillenburg (Nickolodeon) should not have said what he thought about his characters; he should have told the Christian Right to go read up on child development and take a few beginners' lessons in how to interpret texts.

But whoops! here I am, posting to a site where I think these views might get a hearing . . . Any use talking to 'Focus on the Family' or the femocrats at Harvard? Guess not. So which forums should we enter, those of us who believe these things? Is there any open ground left, or are we approaching the polarisations of Weimar Germany?

The people we need to reach are those who currently see that when the Right goes on the rampage, Liberal thinkers and artists shuffle, retreat and - hell - apologise when fundamental values of a democratic culture are attacked. Let's give the waverers options. Let's show them that people who hold moderate opinions, and favour tolerance, can be just as passionate in their defence as monists and authoritarians.

I'm intrigued by the discussion concerning the distribution of political views in various departments. I got my PhD in acoustical engineering, but my research and my advisor were in the physics department. To be sure, the politics there were overwhelmingly left-of-center. How come? my sense of it is:

1) Not everyone has a strong feeling about politics, especially when they are young. By the time you've become a candidate for a faculty position, you've been steeped in the academic environment for many years, absorbing all sorts of attitudes. Unless you come in to graduate school (or even undergraduate school) with a definite political bent, you'll probably just go along to get along.

2) Different departments have political (and other) zeitgeists that reflect larger realities about how their disciplines interact with the greater world. Engineering and business faculty tend to be much more sympathetic to capitalism, for instance, because it has a lot of use for engineers and businessmen. Physicists are almost all on the dole, and it's really, really hard to live that way indefinitely if you don't believe in redistribution of wealth. In the physics department where i did my PhD work, you could even see distinct correlations _within_ the department between politics and the type of research an indiviual was involved in. The experimentalists working on things that could be (at least by some stretch of the imagination) considered "applied" were more likely to be libertarian or pro-market than their colleagues involved in astrophysics or the Supercollider.

3) As some have already pointed out, the distribution of people in academia is by nature slanted away from those who are entreprenurial or especially well suited to the business/industrial world. I'm a case in point; I turned down offers for faculty positions to work in industry largely because I didn't want to spend my career lying about the significance of my research in order to get another government grant. (Marketing hype is at least sporting. In grant writing, you're trying to convince someone to spend someone else's money).

--dB

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Boonton, is a math department discriminating on the basis of political views any more far-fetched than a math department discriminating on the basis of sex?

All right, I'm late to the discussion (as always).

Let's posit for a moment that science has proven there are no innate differences between the sexes' mental abilities. (Or that it has disproven there are; isn't that actually how the scientific method works? Whatever...).

OK, and let's say that in the face of this solid science, Summers stands at a conference and says innate mental differences account for gender disparities in science education.

Even in a scenario that black-and-white, why in the world would anybody be "offended"? Embarrassed for Summers and his poor grasp of facts, sure. But "offended"? Why would one be offended by something one believes -- nay, that one KNOWS -- to be untrue?

I know that I am 6 feet tall. I can use a measuring tape to determine that fact. It is not questionable. If somebody stood up and said, "Semolina Pilchard is 4 feet tall," I would (A) laugh, and (B) wonder how in the world that conclusion was reached in the face of the obvious facts.

These days, the whole notion of "taking offense" has very little to do with being genuinely offended -- as in, feeling real emotional pain -- and a lot to do with acting out for the sake of acting out. It's also the inevitable perversion of the whole personal-is-political mindset: that personal "offense" can be successfully employed as a repellent to opinions that threaten one's worldview. After all, who wants to be "offensive"?

Tell a person with an oversized nose, "Yo, dude, your nose is huge," and that's offensive. Tell a person with a pug nose, "Yo, dude, your nose is huge," and that's just ... I'm not sure what. Bad eyesight? A joke? Whatever it is, it's certainly not "offensive."

The bottom line: If Summer's protesters truly believe there are no innate differences ... then at what, exactly, are they taking offense?

"bottom line: If Summer's protesters truly believe there are no innate differences ... then at what, exactly, are they taking offense?"

Jews don't actually use babies blood to make matzoh, and yet they get really upset when people say they do....homosexuals aren't really pedophiles, and yet they get really upset when people say they are.

note: I do not, of course, think that Summer's argument is remotely comparable to the blood libel. That would be idiotic.

Also idiotic: not realizing that a charge could be both manifestly false, and very harmful, at the same time.

My wife: Neuroscience B.S. UCLA, Neuroscience M.S. UCSF and left to start a proteomics company, raised $6m and sold it for paper to others. Just an example of women in science.

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