2005-03-17 - 12:17 p.m.
It’s ACADEMIC Freedom not Freedom to Spout Off Inane Thoughts
I know I’m late to the game, but I just have to comment on Lawrence Summers inane thoughts about women in the sciences. I say this now because there’s a great article in the Washington Post today about a family of scientists where the mother and daughter are both astronomers. Believe it or not I was a Psychobiology major in college so I know my science. And I really want to pick apart the SCIENCE of the idiotic statements that Summers makes.
So Harvard President Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and the youngest person to get tenure at Harvard (which should make him a thoughtful academic) comments in a speech about the dearth of women in “high end scientific professions.” Rather than talk about institutional sexism, lack of opportunities, and societal pressure, he attributes the lack of women in hard sciences to “intrinsic aptitude” and making tradeoffs to take care of their families. I find it totally hilarious that there are academics defending his right to say this hooey because these things are so totally baseless academically. And this guy is an ECONOMIST not a biologist, socioloigist, or anthropologist. He has not entered into any kind of academic study in the issue of gender and academic achievement.
Ten years removed from my puny Bachelors in Pyschobiology, even I can punch holes in his arguments.
1. Correlation does not mean causation. Just because two things are related doesn’t mean one is the cause of the other. Just because women do take time off from their careers for family matters doesn’t mean that taking time off CAUSES women to drop out of the sciences. First of all, the decision to take time off work doesn’t work in a vacuum. The implication there is that family-loving women can’t hack it in academia and retreat to their families. He isn’t bringing up the possibility that what’s broken is the expectations for 80 hour workweeks. He also isn’t bringing up the societal pressures on women to be the primary caretakers. If stay-at-home parenthood is seriously such a PREFERABLE option, why aren’t men taking this? Are we a society that values parents or only values WOMEN as parents? How much social support do stay-at-home dads get and how does that affect their decision to become the primary caretakers of their children. These are important RESEARCH questions that need to be answers before spout off the hypothesis that someone opts out of a career simply because of preference. If you were going to study this shouldn’t you also set up a control group of women who chose not to have children to see if parenthood is the determining factor in the smaller numbers of women in academia? And of course, noone’s talking about the discrimination women experience in academia. The active discouragement women go through when they express and interest in the hard sciences of chemistry, physics and mathematics. I had a friend in college (who moonlighted as a pole dancer) who was a math major who was continually told she was too pretty to be in mathematics. There is a whole universe of factors that go into whether a woman decides to go into the hard sciences. It’s simply bad science to focus on one of them a cause.
2. Variation within a group is more significant than variations between groups. While there might be trends in a group, when you look as what is happening in that group, you see a lot of variation. That is why using averages as a way to talk about tax cuts is silly. If many people get a tax cut of $0 and a few get a tax cut of $1 million, the numbers will end up looking like people get a tax cut of $50,000. Looking at overall trends often can mask important variations happening within a particular group. Another example is disaggregating data for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. In issues of poverty and educational attainment, APIs overall have higher incomes and graduation rates than the mainstream. But when you break it down by ethnicity, several groups such as Hmong, Native Hawai’ians lag behind even Latinos and African Americans. This is where it gets personal for me because I am an outlier on the gender scale for so many things. I am someone who prefers group interaction and consensus. I loved the “soft” science of biology over chemistry and physics. To the point where I get A’s in biology and C’s in physics. Mr. Activision is also a man who is much more interested in the humanities than the sciences. When you look at gender, what about the statistical outliers that are composed of many GLBT folks that defy gender stereotypes and trends. How can you look at issues of gender WITHOUT taking us into account? And if that is the case, should you qualify your statements as only applying to heterosexuals? The thing is, there are so many women with natural aptitudes for the hard sciences and so many men without, even if the overall numbers show OVERALL aptitudes being different between genders. Once again, it’s bad science to make these generalizations without explain outliers.
I am for academic freedom. I want scientists who take risks and follow what their research is telling them, even when the prevailing thought is different. What I don’t want is people spouting off about blah blah blah without anything to back it up. It’s bad science.
