I recently came across a reference to the infamous commentary of Harvard President Lawrence Summers. I remember it was a big deal for bloggers a while back and I seem to have some vaguely negative feeling surrounding the man, but having never actually read
the remarks myself, I decided to go check it out.
After reading them, I'm completely shocked by the hysteria, which I recall participating in myself. I suppose it's an important lesson in the value of thinking for oneself. Below, some personal experience on why I think Summers is alright.
First, I was a graduate student (electrical engineering) for a couple years and I've seen women doing the "high power" academic jobs Summers talks about. I think what he says about the need to devote oneself almost entirely to one's work to advance to the highest levels of academia are pretty much right on the money. It's important to note that he isn't talking about your middle of the road state school professor. He's talking about Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and probably the tier below that as well. The example I had in mind was a particular professor of mine who had a daughter. Taking care of this daughter -- getting her to school, picking her up, dealing with various nanny-related crises -- took up a lot of her time. She was a very sharp tack and was definitely well-known and respected in her field, but her vita was not quite what you would expect from a man or single woman of her ability. This is, in my view, is very much a case in point of what Summers is talking about. For one reason or another, it is certainly the case that more women opt to commit time to their families over their job than do men.
As for his talk about variance of aptitude -- i.e. that the distribution of ability in mathematics and science amongst men is wider, hence that there are more men at the extremes than women -- is not entirely without statistical evidence and does seem to square with my own experience. Usually, the best and worst students in my classes have been male, while usually female students were better on average. But I don't really see anything to object to there. I mean, there's no doubt that there are some women who are extremely smart and I don't see how statistics about women in general would detract from that. For example, my elder sister is one of these high power academic types (astrophysics). She's a lot smarter than me or any guy I've ever met. Nothing Summers says in any way negates or detracts from that. As just a graduate student, I didn't really have the opportunity to see how tenure and hiring of faculty works, so I can't comment from personal experience, but my sister seems to think the discrimination line is a bunch of crap.
I've been trying to think of what prompted such a vitriolic reaction to this whole thing and I think I know the answer: Summers gives a criterion by which one could, once and for all, test the discrimination hypothesis. Somewhere in there he talks about the effects of a pattern of discrimination. His example is black athletes in the seventies. Only the very best could get into the major leagues at all, so you would see much higher batting averages and so on compared to white athletes simply because black players couldn't get in unless they were truly exceptional, so much so as to overcome the barrier of discrimination. Summers suggests that one should be able to see such a pattern in academia as well, if there is truly discrimination at work.
Of course, this is very problematic to people invested in the idea that discrimination is mainly responsible, since almost anyone would have to agree that that is not the picture of academia in the sciences. Indeed, there are plenty of women in middling positions (though less than there are men in middling positions, but that's just because fewer women go into the sciences in the first place and some do the family thing after obtaining advanced degrees) and women in the higher positions, though they certainly hold their own amongst their male colleagues, do not seem to be significantly above the average level of performance when one restricts attention to this highest level. I.e. in aggregate, women at the highest level of scientific academia aren't showing the "higher batting average" phenomenon Summers suggests as a metric of whether discrimination actually occurs. And of course, that is highly problematic! He shouldn't be saying stuff like that!
For my part, I don't believe anything unjust is going on where academic hiring and tenure are concerned. I just think it's an area where perhaps other social issues are showing up, not because of any wrong doing on the part of science departments and universities, but simply because of the nature of those institutions and the issues involved. Frankly, I just don't believe that exceptionally talented women who make a decision to devote themselves to their work entirely, as opposed to family, as male academics of this calibre usually do, are facing any resistance from the academic establishment where advancement is concerned. If anything, I think the establishment wants to help them along.