On the other hand, maybe if more men started playing a supporting role for more women, we would see new and interesting things from women who are five standard deviations above the norm. But I agree that no one should be expected to always “play sidekick”.

But I really appreciate the point about there being a need for a mix of skills. For a long time, my sister dated a certified math genius, a Ph.D. whose colleagues all appreciated his brilliance, and gave him job opportunities that most could only dream about because of it — but he simply was unable to articulate or verbalize (on paper, in particuluar) without enormous assistance from someone like my sister (a math and science high school teacher), who got tired of his dependence. He now crunches numbers on Wall Street, where they provide you with alot of support.

As more women get tired of playing a supporting role it will be interesting to see how many males are unable to provide the full skill set required for a tenured faculty position, in spite of their five standard deviations above the norm mathematical intellect.

I figure that if I’m going to write something that’s so long, I might as well share it.

First:
The US should be concerned that there is a disproportionate amount of our future in the hands of foreign graduate students — specifically in the high tech fields — we need to encourage both females and males to strive to become top scientists and engineers

Second:
All science and engineering is a cumbersome basket — there is much diversity between the skills required for various engineering and science disciplines — most are cognitive, some are social and some may be physical

Third:
Dismissing our prehistory and assuming everything that matters has happened since we have books about it is simplistic — our ancestors that first made the leap from being Zoo-type Apes to the beginnings of humans weren’t called Homo Habilis {toolmaker} for nothing

Fourth and most controversial:
In my unscientific sample of practicing physicists and several types of other “hard” scientists and several types of engineers — It was all about wrenches — pick a field where there are lots of wrenches (to a lesser extent screwdrivers) and you don’t find many women — is it inherent sense of handedness, social training, or bias toward physical strength that is responsible?

Fifth:
Someone noted that in Hungary there are now more women studying architecture than men and more men studying structural engineering and construction than women — they then posited that the two classes of disciplines needed the same skills and hence it must be overt discrimination — perhaps its wrenches — most architects don’t need to pick up a wrench

Sixth:
I’ve been called a lot of things — but the most enduring was that — you’re a plumber because I worked with experiments that required vacuum systems — and Lot’s of bolts and wrenches ““ few wenches :}>

So, because (theoretically) women talk more about houses than men, and not just the interior design angle, women should be more fitted to pounding nails into 2×4s?

Gee, I must tell that one to my best friend: a chemical engineer who’s bringing up a 1 1/2 year old while being pregnant with her second while simultaneously working at a very science-oriented job.

Yeah, all that nurturing has *really* taken a toll on her abilities as a scientist……………………not.

She should get a good laugh out of this theory.

Neither did Summers discuss any of the many empirical studies which show that discrimination against women in the labor market is real. So if what we are told is true, he seems to have gone into this meeting with minimal preparation and with some possibly biased arguments.

And to answer the point about my buckets-of-sperm theory (sorry about the name, actually), Pinker does use this theory in the article I address. He may have been more careful elsewhere but not in this particular case.

Mythago, it freaks me out when I see my nephews and my niece playing, and my other relatives obsessively point out each instance of stereotypically gender-appropriate behavior, and ignore anything else. Well, except apparently my brother-in-law freaked out once when he saw his oldest son trying on his mother’s shoes.

Other person: Well, of course there are differences between men and women. Anybody who has boys and girls knows that!

Me: Hm, I have a boy and two girls, and I think that’s a load of crap, based on my observations. In fact, the one thing that I’ve noticed is how badly people react when my kids act outside of their ‘gender norms.’

Other person: Gosh, look at the time! I have to be somewhere else now.

Actually, Echidne, I think in your case it’s called a “labrys”…

[d&rlh]

{..It’s a very popular myth these days, this idea of the happy male who casts around buckets of high-quality sperm while the careful and coy females tend their one or two babies with great care. For one thing, a fertilized egg is not the same as a child … It’s at least worth considering whether the men who stuck around one or two women got a greater yield by providing food, protection, sex, childcare and friendship..}

There’s more than enough to criticize in this latest missive of Pinker (flat-screen televisions, hello?) without bringing up this “myth”, which is not popular, but something of a straw man. In How the Mind Works, Pinker not only finds your idea “worth considering” but discusses at great length the tradeoffs between the male mating strategies of maximizing impregnations versus maximizing the care given to offspring. He explains very well IMO why we should not expect a “bucket brigade”.
Just to clear up, for me if not for anyone else, I think that the precise place where Pinker and Summers mis-step is in their leap from “biological differences exist” to “the effect of these differences is great enough to be observed in occupational statistics”. This is where they leave the realm of data.

Ampersand’s last comment neatly undercuts that argument, as do the comments here and elsewhere by women in technical fields. The selection process continues to be biased at every stage. Since it isn’t possible to make it sex- and color-blind (as orchestras can by having performers audition behind a screen), academic institutions probably need to make a special effort to compensate.

I’m not confident that places like Harvard have a permanent advantage. In the book A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar describes how Princeton made itself into a major center of science by hiring Jewish refugees that Harvard and Yale disdained. She also reminds us that M.I.T. was considered a much lesser institution at the time.

I read Sommers as saying that the real issue is the size of the pool, as opposed to discrimination in who gets hired. That certainly fits in with my contention that he was dismissing discrimination as an important factor.

However, Sommers’ argument against discrimination is weak. It’s in theory true that in a perfect market, in which everyone has perfect information, and in which all other factors are held even, discrimination will not be sustainable because non-discriminators will have a market advantage over discriminators.

However, in the real world, all else is not held equal. For instance, some colleges - such as Harvard - have market advantages, such as a great reputation and the largest endowment of any university in the entire world. Given those advantages, it will not significantly harm Harvard’s ability to compete if Harvard discriminates and therefore has to pay somewhat more per professor.

Long before the Sommers flap, I wrote a post describing what’s mistaken about the general sort of logic Sommers’ uses to dismiss discrimination.

Second of all, there is fairly solid evidence that discrimination in academia does exist and has an effect on women in the sciences. For example (quoting from an earlier post of mine:

It’s long been believed by feminists that women often need to accomplish more than men in their field to be given the same credit. A recent study of scientific credit, published in the journal Nature, seems to prove the feminists right.[6]

What the Nature study did was examine productivity (measured in terms of publications in scientific journals, how many times a person was a “lead author”? of an article, and how often the articles were cited in scientific journals) and sex. Publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals is often considered to be the most objective and “concrete”? sign of accomplishment in the sciences. These factors were then compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding which applicants would receive research grants. Receiving grants like these are essential to the careers of scientific researchers.

The results? Female scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to be given equal credit. For example, women with over 60 “impact points”? - the measure the researchers constructed of scientific productivity - received an average score of 2.25 “competence points”? from the peer reviewers. In contrast, men with less than 20 impact points also received 2.25 competence points. In fact, only the most accomplished women were ever considered to be more accomplished than men - and even then, they were only seen as more accomplished than the men with the very fewest accomplishments.

Other studies have found similar results.

His actual words as quoted are “…it’s less clear how much the size of the pool was held down by discrimination.”? That is a valid observation to make. He suggests that more research be carried out order to varify the factors involved. That does not amount to saying “he argued that discrimination was probably irrelevant”?. Perhaps childcare isues will turn out to be a more significant factor, but then that is in itself a form of discrimnation if not addressed.

He may well have been better advised to qualify his statements regarding genetic influence more fully but to jump from that to allegations of sexism is going a little too far.