Battle of the sexes?
Posted by Joshua Claybourn on 18 January 2005 | 12 responses
Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, suggested that innate differences in sex may explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. I don’t have much to add to the snafu but I thought it would be worth noting the statement and some follow-up posts from these various bloggers: The Last Renaissance Man, Michelle Malkin, Balloon Juice, David Limbaugh, and Blogcritics.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/18/1317200&threshold=-1&tid=146&tid=14
Slashdot also has a lengthy discussion on the topic.
News flash! There are many, many differences between the sexes.
Matt Yglesias has put a fair amount of discussion into this topic today as well.
Would there have been as much outrage and commentary had Mr. Summers stated innate differences are why fewer men succeed in languages than women?
I doubt any outrage would have occured, but scientists have demostrated that women are better linguists. Of course those same scientists have demonstrated that women perform worse in spacial orientation exercises like reading a map.
Get a grip people! Differences exist between the sexes. No one is better than the other just different.
For centuries, it was confidently affirmed that men had an innate advantage over women in areas like language, pedagogy, and the humanities. I would not be surprised to see the current (yet politically incorrect) conventional wisdom regarding women’s inferiority at math and science also be struck down.
Also, Malkin suggests that if men and women were equal, then there would be a huge comparative advantage for a university that scooped up all the underutilized female engineering professors. But this isn’t necessarily so: If a sexist majority exists, a university with too many females would not be favorably received.
In other words, I don’t claim to know. But if I absolutely had to bet on one side or the other, I would say that there is basically no innate difference in mental capacity for any field at all.
“Of course those same scientists have demonstrated that women perform worse in spacial orientation exercises like reading a map.”
Yes–women perform, on average, 10% worse. Now compare that slight inequality on an unnatural, isolated cognitive task to the vast inequality in the number of men versus women in leadership fields in certain sciences, and ask yourself which is more plausible: that they’re caused by that 10% average difference in spacial orientation ability, or that they’re caused by discrimination?
Reminds me of that line from Anchorman:
“I’m a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and braun. That’s what kind of man I am. Your just a woman with a brain a third the size of us men. It’s science.”
Incidentally, for the perspective of an actual biologist, go here:
http://tinyurl.com/43dzj
ask yourself which is more plausible: that they’re caused by that 10% average difference in spacial orientation ability, or that they’re caused by discrimination?
Of course, it might be neither innate ability per se nor discrimination, but rather a preference (either innate or cultural) against pursuing science as a career–either because of inherent aspects of science or the culture of scientific academia.
Frankly, I find it hard to believe that discrimination is taking place in academic circles, since it is so anathema (and rightly so, of course) in that world of liberalism.
“Frankly, I find it hard to believe that discrimination is taking place in academic circles, since it is so anathema (and rightly so, of course) in that world of liberalism.”
Perhaps “discrimination” was the wrong word. Nevertheless, the science departments are, sadly, largely behind the humanities departments in that respect. I know anecdotes don’t prove anything, but I’ve talked to women who dropped out of majoring in physics or computer science because they were singled out and given s*** by their exclusively male, sexist professors. It happens; I don’t know how often, but it happens. This, of course, keeps the field consisting of all men, which ensures that computer science professors will hardly ever interact with women, which encourages the continuation of prejudice, which in turn of course keeps women from majoring in computer science…
which ensures that computer science professors will hardly ever interact with women
LOL! So obviously Darwinian principles are not in play here, in the biological sense.
“LOL! So obviously Darwinian principles are not in play here, in the biological sense.”
In the strictest biological sense, perhaps, but given that the various memes of computer science have carved out an enduring niche for themselves, selection of replicators is alive and well.