Anne Applebaum, You Gotta Be Putting Me On

In this week’s installment, she contributes to the Ridiculous Martyrdom of Larry Summers by backing up nonsense spoken by Christina Hoff Sommers :

How will we ever be able to talk about sex differences in an interesting way if we’re not allowed to study them? If the subject is an academic taboo, then the same old cliches will just live on for another generation. Or ten generations.

Of course, nobody criticized Summers for suggesting that academics should study sex differences. He was criticized for suggesting that the most likely reason that women were underrepresented in some academic fields was an innate lack of mental capacity although this is not supported by solid scientific evidence and Summers had no expertise in the field. As Brian Leiter put it:

Alas, it turns out that no one was objecting to research being done on the hypothesis. They objected, rather, to the chief administrator of a research university–a man with no scholarly expertise in the area (as in none)–floating an hypothesis potentially damaging to women for which there is, at present, no well-confirmed scientific support (as in none).

As I’ve said before, the context is also important. Summers was not a random academic reporting on his research (and, indeed, nobody is calling for Steven Pinker’s tenure to be revoked because of his male supremacist just-so stories.) He was the president of an elite university that, as it happens, had a poor record of attracting and retaining female faculty in the sciences under his tenure. Not alienating the remaining faculty by saying dumb things is part of his job. At any rate, the criticism of Summers’s remarks did not establish a taboo against conducting scientific research into sex differences. It may have reflected a taboo against university presidents justifying gender discrimination by engaging in the same kind of pseudo-scientific speculation that once caused women to be unfairly excluded from elite universities, the legal profession, etc. etc., but this is a different matter entirely (and a good thing.)

Relatedly, make sure to read this from Cosma Shalizi (via CT.)

..It’s not terribly important to my overall argument — what matters is that he considers it more important than discrimination — but in comments Ken C. is correct that Summers only placed a lack of aptitude as the second most important factor exonerating his horrible record with female faculty. First was the “high-powered job hypothesis,” his description of which was somewhat problematic in its own right for reasons I’ve discussed with respect to Supreme Court clerks; it’s bizarre to discuss the fact that women are expected to do far more of the domestic work as a category distinct from gender discrimination. (It’s also problematic given that gender discrimination remains durable at non-elite institutions where tenured professors don’t have to work 80 hour weeks.)