No, he went far beyond ’summarizing’ and ‘drawing conclusions’; he went deep into stretching, twisting, or misrepresenting a tiny fraction of the research. His presentation was not scientific; it was a biased personal opinion, full of logical fallacies, presented in a cloak of academia by virtue of his professional position.

I take issue not only because his comments were sexist, but because they showed a real lack of scholarly thought, not to mention a clumsy, cherry-picking hand.

I am a currently dissertating in engineering at a top research university. I have a background in mathematics. I have worked in places where I was the first and only woman to work there. I am married. I am a mother of a young child. He was very much talking about me and my future. I think it can be difficult to understand how ridiculous some of his statements were if you haven’t lived it, or if you haven’t sat in on a number of similar seminars that managed to raise very provocative questions and challenge all sorts of assumptions in less ridiculous, more rigorous ways.

I find it especially irksome that he offers an incredibly weak excuse, (paraphrasing) “Well, you know, I could be totally wrong.” (Oh, OK then, I guess I won’t get totally annoyed.) That might be fine if you’re a grad student with little authority, holding forth on your own pet theory among colleagues. It is not fine in his position of authority, speaking on such an important topic over which he actually has a certain amount of direct control.

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0728hm.html

It presents the same study findings in a slightly but meaningfully different light.

I’ll also add that I frequently teach some or all of David Sadker’s Failing at Fairness, in which he outlines how teachers unknowingly exhibit gender bias in their classrooms. This book is a bit dated, but it followed and developed the groundbreaking AAUW study that started this conversation and the many conversations that came after it, including Summers’s. In fact, Sadker details the precise types of behavior Linda is talking about. (It’s my understanding that Sadker is currently updating the book now that teachers have been working to address this inequality for a decade.)

As a teacher of writing and an amateur researcher of gender bias, I’ve come to believe that this subject is more complicated than I originally suspected. I used to think that only the girls were getting a raw deal in schools. Now I think we’re shortchanging all of our students in one way or another. Certainly a host of differences–genetic, biological, cultural, social, and learned–come together to create the reasons why boys and girls *appear* to have different strengths. And just when I think I’ve figured out how to correct for it in my teaching, some new experience or bit of scholarship will twist me around again.

Thanks for writing about it, Linda. It’s wonderful to know that so many people are still thinking about these kinds of topics. I began to fear that the babies of celebrities are all that matter.

I’m happy to say that that has *not* been my experience. I’m an attorney at a large law firm, and it has always been my experience that the most junior person at the meeting takes notes, and if there is a male and female associate who are equally junior, I have not observed a pattern (and I have certainly looked for it) that the female is more likely to be asked to take notes.

I’m sure many, many people have experienced what you described, of course. I would not have bothered with my anecdote if not for the “I don’t think that there’s any woman that doesn’t…” intro. I just couldn’t leave that sitting out there.

That said, I’m proud to say that no one – no one who coached us, no one who judged us ever made us feel like we were less because we were girls (both of our coaches were men). We were good at what we did and treated as tough competitors. We had many guys who would walk into a room, see it was us and know that they were about to get beaten up on. But they didn’t make us feel less female and didn’t resent us for our gender – only for pounding on them!

I wish that I could say that translated into the real world of business… I don’t think that there’s any woman that doesn’t share this experience – no matter what your position, if you’re the girl, you’re the one that is expected to take the meeting notes or order lunch.

I think Summers’ speech is perfectly fine, scientifically speaking. He observed something in nature, did some reading, had some theories, and presented them to a forum of his peers. He didn’t publish these findings in a journal, and even goes on to state (and this might be my favorite part of the speech,) “They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said.” I mean, he sounds like a woman with all those qualifiers! And I think it’s great. I for one would love to see of this stuff nailed down, to understand what made me the confident, sarcastic, analytical woman that I am.

My educational experience may not be normal. I went through K-8 as one of a trio of girls who ruled the class. The boys didn’t stand at chance against us in every subject. I attended an all-girls high school, which put me at a slight disadvantage as it didn’t offer the harder math and science classes, but at least I had class time to figure out who I was academically without dealing with the wacko social boy stuff. And in my time in both undergrad and grad school, I have never once encountered sexism. I have never thought that a professor or an advisor has thought of me as a girl before thinking of me as a student. I have even cried in front of them, and I don’t think it made them consider me as weaker, or my lab work as less rigorous. I think it’s been a combination of being lucky to find that the people around me are cool, and working hard and making the right decisions about where to go and how to present myself.

So I think I was set to be successful in what I do from a young age, and for that reason I’m all for making sure that young girls feel encouraged to pursue math and science if they like it. But I’m also not convinced that biology doesn’t have something to do with it, and I’m worried that there might be a bit of a danger of lowering the bar and making things easier for everyone so more people (girls, minorities, etc) will stick with it longer. I know this is probably the most controversial feeling I have about the whole issue, but I want it to still be tough. I’ve been given many opportunities (and a lot of fellowship money) because I’m female and funding organizations and universities are trying to appear more diverse. I want to feel like I earned those because I’m a good engineer, not because I’m a girl.

Also, I think what he says about the high-powered job hypothesis is dead-on, again only based on personal experience. I’m good at what I do, and I’ve recently decided to pursue a career in academia when (if?) I finish my degree. The main deterrent has been thinking about the tenure process and the pressure. I’m 27 years old and single, what if I meet someone and want to start settling down, buying a house, and starting a family? The tenure process is intense, and will have to be a high priority for the first five years of my faculty job. Having babies will complicate things, even considering that maternity leave pushes back the process a bit and gives me more time. The guys in my department do NOT think like this. I’ve decided that it’s worth it for me anyway, but I understand completely those women who decide that it’s not for them, and why it seems more women make that decision than men.

Anyway, I think the point is that we don’t know what’s going on with it, but at least the discussion is valuable and will encourage further research. I think the vehement backlash at his comments is dangerous, because it will make other scientists (men and women) nervous to present other theories if they’re not in line with what’s politically correct.

Also, he has his facts wrong. He talks about unconscious discrimination stemming from people’s desire to favor and surround themselves with those who look like themselves. If that were true, then men would be biased in favor of men, women would be biased in favor of women, each ethnic group would be biased in favor of themselves, and so on. It sounds so harmless and neutral. But it’s not what happens. Instead, in subjective evaluations of a piece of scholarship with a male or female name attached, both men and women show bias in favor of men.

He says that bias can’t be that widespread of a problem, because if it were, a university could decide not to be biased, hire all the “high quality” women getting shut out by every place else, and beat the pants off of all the other universities. Setting aside whether it’s even possible for an institution to eliminate all bias by fiat (which, since people who are biased don’t usually realize that they’re biased, it’s probably not), the conclusion rests on the assumption I mentioned earlier, that someone’s performance in an academic setting depends only on her own innate ability, or “quality,” which could be objectively measured if only we knew how. It ignores bias on the part of journal editors, conference organizers, funding committees, colleagues, and students, all of whom are likely to judge a woman scientist’s work as just a little bit worse than it actually is, which means she’ll have a much harder road to travel if she’s to achieve the same level of greatness as a man of the same “quality.”

I still believe if you read the remarks in full (here: http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html), he’s so repeatedly clear about the fact that these are his observations based on the research he’s seen — he never, ever claims that there’s scientific consensus on the ranking — that it still qualifies as his opinion as one person who has reviewed a fair amount of research. And incidentally, “maybe, as a last factor, there are some social factors” is a misrepresentation of his description of that aspect as well. He does not say “maybe,” he says there is definitely discrimination and bias, and he says you see it in any academic setting, and he says you have to go after it every time you see it.

It’s not that I think the guy necessarily has it right; it’s that I think he was demonized for summarizing research that actually existed and drawing conclusions from that research, which is what people do. If he got it wrong, then he got it wrong, but I was deeply troubled by, and remain deeply troubled by, the way he was treated in response.