However, given an ideal of a free society where people choose freely what kind of work they choose to support themselves, the most important remarks was, indeed, a subjective one.

“Interestingly, in Iceland and everywhere else, girls participating in the survey expressed far more negative attitudes toward math.”

…the point is that you made the leap that because he is an ‘alpha male’ that he is really a jerk…

No, I said that “alpha male” was an sometimes-employed euphemism for “jerk”. (Actually, I was going to say “asshole”, but I thought that since this was a high-class blog I should keep it clean.)

Your experience provides nothing…
anectodal “everyone I know” types of claims are HUGE warning signs…”DANGER: subjective bullshit ahead”

Great. Let’s see some statistics on how many women are “bitches” vs simply “assertive”. Let’s have the numbers on how assertive a woman has to be before she’s a “bitch”, and compare these numbers to their equivalents to men. Oh, wait, there aren’t any such numbers, are there? In fact, this whole discussion is based on anecdote, wasn’t it? It’s all pretty much subjective bullshit, isn’t it?

But you go right on ahead playing the persecuted victim…

No, no, you’re doing a much better job.

Lindenen:
No, you missed the point. They’re afraid of sex and men…

I understood your point, I just thought it was nonsense. I’ve spent my adult life in a field overwhelmingly dominated by men, so perhaps I’ve just not come across any of the women you describe. Or perhaps it’s just a tendency among certain sexes (which chivalry forbids me to name) to think that anyone who has problems with them must, down deep, be boiling over with repressed lust.

Chel:
And I especially have a problem with the president of Harvard presenting it as a useful evidence-based theory or even fact.

Er, but he didn’t, really. Since there was no transcript, it’s hard to know what he actually said, but he apparently just mentioned the possibility of women’s differing abilities being a factor.

I have to agree with Ginny on this part — whatever you might think about Summers’s suggestion, little Miss Wilting Lilly’s performance (”Oh mah god Ah dew believe Ah have the vapuhs!”) did credit to, well, no one.

I thought this article below was a nice, balanced review of some of the science behind (and also not behind) Summers comment.

Link

As for the SAT/PSAT business, it’s hard for me to comment since I that test is just so unfair in so many ways.

Thanks for the link to the fourth generation warfare sight. I really had no idea what that term referred to — never heard it. Reading Chicagoboyz has been very educational!

As for your first two points, sure I’ll grant you that the Left is rather entrenched in academia and also that feminist are feeling pretty anti-Summers these days. Your fourth point I’d have to disagree on. According to the National Science Foundation, the number of men and women holding faculty positions in science and engineering may be becoming more equal, but women are more likely to be assistant professors and men are more likely to be full professors or tenured. This is why I was saying that “old boy” systems tend to still be powerful today. In academia the tenured folks and the full professors can be very entrenched and powerful in comparison to junior faculty.

As for your third point you mentioned, “Except that if there is discrimination it’s so consistent that similar patterns show up in disparate occupations.” Well this is actually what I would expect if there was institutionalized discrimination in our society.

Chel
It is you who jump to the conclusion that we “have less aptitude or ability” — I don’t think the argument is that we are stupid. It is that we are less likely to be gifted at math. Maybe that is wrong – but a lot of studies say it isn’t. That doesn’t mean we have “less ability” in any real sense. Your definitioin of aptitude and ability is narrow and I suspect defined by skills that men are better at. Women don’t have much upper body strength, either. Does that mean our bodies are inferior?

You have, of course, touched on something that has been irritating me for several years. And I have daughters (who complain about sexism – and they mean against guys). I can’t imagine what men or women who have sons feel. For instance, there was a general uproar in the country because more males than females were getting Natl. Merit scholarships. Somehow (God knows how) I got on a feminist mailing list for a newsletter that proudly proclaimed they had forced the Natl. Merit people to a higher level of “fairness.” They now count verbal skills twice and math once on that test, even though college boards returns to a more even distribution. Now, I have good reason to be thankful for this change (it came in time to help my middle daughter, who has a rather healthy scholarship because she got 800s in those areas – an avid reader, she had skills that few boys would have developed in their more bumptious adolescence. On the other hand, her math score was not that great.) However, I am somewhat embarrassed when I talk to my Asian colleague; clearly, the family speaks Chinese at home. His son did well enough on the verbal section but didn’t set any records; his math score, of course, was spectacular. He didn’t get a Natl. Merit. That particular case may not be an injustice and he probably did get money because he went into engineering and my daughter, majoring in Czech & religious studies (”girly” subjects) wasn’t going to get those kind of scholarships. Still, I did notice that among the 10-15 Natl Merits at their high school the pre-double-verbal tests usually included mostly Asians and more boys than girls. After the change, fewer Asians – sometimes none – were in the group and there were more girls. Maybe that is fair in the feminist’s book. Maybe that is fair because verbal skills are more important than math ones (I don’t know). But you notice that that change was wrought by organizations that ended up with winners that looked a lot more like them – and “them” were not people working against the disadvantage of speaking a different language at home. And the arguments in the feminist’s newsletter were not that verbal skills are more important but that the test hadn’t been “fair.”

No, you missed the point. They’re afraid of sex and men, so when they sense themselves being sexually attracted to some guy, they react with feelings of hostility toward that man. They’re like the proverbial homophobe who hates gays only because he’s attracted to them and directs the fury he feels toward himself at the poor gay guy who happens to wander into his path. Many of these women simply dislike being female. They strike me as the ultimate misogynists.

You could learn more about it by googling. For example.

-Who besides academic feminists led the organized opposition to Summers?

-Do you think academia isn’t dominated by the entrenched Left?

-It IS a useful, evidence based theory. How else do you explain the sexual sorting that occurs in many occupations? Oh yeah, discrimination. Except that if there is discrimination it’s so consistent that similar patterns show up in disparate occupations — which begs the question whether there are systematic average differences between the sexes.

-”Power structure” arguments for the existence of anti-female discrimination ignore the obvious, namely that somebody who talks like your stereotype of an “old boy” cannot get an academic job in the modern U.S., whereas somebody who talks like my stereotype of a feminist academic would have little difficulty. If there’s any power structure here it appears to be run by girls, or at least by leftist feminists. (If it were otherwise, Summers would not have gotten into trouble.)

Okay I give up. What do you mean by “fourth-generation” is the sense of “fourth-generation academic warfare”? Is there some sort of Chicagoboyz glossary I can order on Amazon…

There may well be a difference in how men’s and women’s brains work. There is certainly evidence that the brains of men and women are structured slightly differently. It’s the jump to the conclusion that women have less aptitude or innate ability that I have a problem with. And I especially have a problem with the president of Harvard presenting it as a useful evidence-based theory or even fact. Now I could be totally wrong here and could be misinterpretting the context. I wasn’t at this talk and there was no transcript or recording made of it, so all I (or most anyone else) can go on to secondhand accounts. But my impression was that he was presenting it as an important hypothesis.

It sounds like your husband has some pretty unpleasant colleagues. It’s a major bummer that there are still cultures in academia or anywhere that encourage behavior like that. My reference to the “old boys club” was in response to Jonathan’s comment about the “feminsts” and the “entrenched left” dominating academia… I just wanted to raise the point that there’s an older, very entrenched power structure was not in the best interest of advancing knowledge and is not entirely gone.

No..you miss the point Angie…the point is that you made the leap that because he is an ‘alpha male’ that he is really a jerk…so I raise the question of whether you think that there can be no truly assertive women..but rather only ones that we CALL “assertive” but who are really a bitch? My guess is a big no on that one…

“..but in my experience the level of assertiveness required to become a “bitch”…”

Your experience provides nothing…
anectodal “everyone I know” types of claims are HUGE warning signs…”DANGER: subjective bullshit ahead”

But you go right on ahead playing the persecuted victim…it goes perfectly with your self-admitted timidity…

The fact that Summers is an economist seems to me neither here nor there; he was asked to appear as an administrator–the kind of person who would be pressured to establish a “fair” and a “diverse” work place.

Your complaints appear to me (and I have been around academic circles for forty years) to be rooted in another time. It is true that some of my husband’s colleagues are irritatingly sexist; some like to use the power of their classrooms to impress and sometimes seduce young women. That is the nature of men (and impressionable young women). I sometimes find their sexist jokes at women they fear in competition within their departments to be somewhat unattractive (not unlike the French’s attitude toward women who have attained political power).

Nonetheless, I can’t recognize any of the academic places I’ve been around in your description. Academic circles do not reinforce the power of the “old boys’ club” you describe. Those rather irritating sexist jokes come from men for whom I feel some pity, since they are the bitter jokes of people who are essentially impotent within their departments. A more mature response would be attractive, of course. And I am repelled by their nastiness. But it is an ineffective nastiness, I can assure you.

This thing is that knowing something is likely to be true doesn’t make it true. That’s one of the reasons we have science — it helps us with these issues. Throughout history, wrong ideas have held people back tragically. Some of our wrong ideas even seemed very commonsensical at the time. It wasn’t that long ago when many people thought blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. There was also a time when people thought the main cause of peptic ulcers was stress (I’m sure many folks ulcers are very glad we didn’t just continue assuming that what is likely to be true was a fact.) The list goes on. This is actually a big personal pet peeve of mine. Common sense, conventional wisdom, intuition are very useful and have their place. But they are not to be confused with or presented as fact.

Also, I know you might view academia as a place full of, “perqs and privileges of the entrenched Left” and therefore see Summers as a tell-it-like-it-is hero. But an important group that is traditionally very entrenched in academia and has felt threatened for some time by our changing society is the so-called “old-boys- club” who have held for ages that most women don’t make the cut. And when I read Summers comment, my first thought was “I feel I’ve heard this 100 times before.”

Well, here’s the thing. Lawrence Summers wasn’t presenting his reasearch. He wasn’t presenting new research that had been conducted recently by colleagues. He’s never done or been involved in any research into gender differences in cognition. He’s not even that kind of scientist — he’s an economist (and by the way certainly not a Chicagoboyz type of economist.) The outrage is not about politicizing his research, since he’s done no research here.

Lawrence Summers wasn’t even presenting a new idea when he brought up “innate ability” as a factor in the underrepresentation of women in science. That idea is as old as the day is long. People still have strong biases these days, even if they are better at not letting it show most of the time. It’s not about a “marketplace” when you are talking about concrete scientific findings. Just because something seems to make sense or appears to make sense because of how you see the world around you, it doesn’t make it a fact. Even if that idea is ingrained in our culture. Good scientists must be agnostic and should not present their hypotheses (or biases, or theories, or things that occured to them 5 minutes ago, or things that kinda made sense when talking to collegues over lunch) as fact.

And it would all be fine if he had said any myriad of other crazy things that he knows nothing about like maybe he could have said, “I think humans should work to be able to communicate with rabbits” or “I strongly believe that high fructose corn syrup causes cateracts.” But standards must be higher for the president of Harvard, the premier research institution in the US, to publicly muse that a persistent idea that has held people back for ages may actually be true.

“What good is a term if no one agrees on its meaning?”

Oh, a term with no agreed upon meaning is incrediably useful, just not for communication.

Polemists love vague terms. Were would most political writers, speakers and pundits be if terms like fair, just and power had concrete definitions?

Well, many women do fall for jerks. That’s well-documented.

So Angie, you think there is no such thing as an assertive woman…but rather only “bitches” that we apply a similiar euphamism for?

Who applies a euphemism? Yes, an assertive woman is often called a bitch, but in my experience the level of assertiveness required to become a “bitch” is far below that required to achieve the title of “jerk”.

Above, Ginny writes:
Just like not hiring someone because they are “girly” doesn’t mean that not hiring someone else because he is “masculine” is right.

I’m with you there. But the people who objected to my timidity didn’t do so because they wanted “their own kind”, they did it because they saw assertiveness as an essential part of the job. They may be wrong about that, but that was their belief.