The Circle Game

The best defense of Bush v. Gore was written by Richard Posner. It was still strikingly unpersuasive, but since Posner is a pragmatist it did have the advantage of not trying to pretend that the decision was principled or could be reconciled with the past jurisprudence of the majority. Posner argued that Bush was going to win one way or the other (and on that, he is correct), so the Court was right to break the statistical tie and allow a stable succession. The problem with this argument, of course, is that it assumes that a president elected (at best) in a statistical tie should have the same legitimacy as a president who was actually elected by a majority. Anyway, as a punchline, Posner argued that as the deadlock dragged on, the country was faced with the distinct possibility of President Larry Summers, something the Court was right to prevent. Well, that part of Posner’s argument is certainly looking better.

I wasn’t surprised to learn from Atrios that Charles Murray was conscripted by the New York Times to opine about Summer’s attempts to justify his dismal record on female faculty retention and hiring. In particular, the defense of Summers by Lord Saletan uses almost every move in the Charles Murray playbook, particularly his emphasis on individualism; the fact that he’s saying that women as a class aren’t quite as cut out to be math professors because they may not be able to overcome their “handicap” doesn’t mean we should prevent the outliers from working, people should be judged as individuals, etc. The “show trial” bit is a nice touch; yes, the president of the most powerful academic institution in the country facing some criticism is worthy of an invocation of Stalin. Despite Saletan’s claim that he’s just “respecting the facts,” needless to say he’s just repeating the flimsy tautologies that have been used to justify gender hierarchies since Aristotle. P.Z. Myers makes the crucial point; the higher incidence of extreme scores by males on standardized tests of math skills adduced by people like Saletan and Pinker are equally consistent with cultural and genetic explanations, so they get you exactly nowhere. Triumphantly citing standardized test scores is just begging the question. Nobody is denying the existence of this data; the debate is about what explains the data.

Now, is it theoretically possible that the higher incidence of extreme scores on math tests by males is partially explained by genetic factors? Yes. But I also think we need to be clear about where the burden of proof lies here. Consider, for example, the Stanford Law Class of 1951. #1 in that class was one William Hobbs Rehnquist. He used his achievement to get a good job in Phoenix, and as some may recall, went on to be an appellate justice. #3 in that class was a woman named Sandra Day. Day was offered only secretarial jobs, because of the widespread perception (not only embedded in social norms but inscribed in American law) that women were unsuited to practice law. Again, you may recall that Day went on to a career of some renown. And, as we speak, there are more women than men being admitted to law schools, and it is fairly clear that women are no less able to become good lawyers than men. And, historically, this is par for the course. Assumptions that hierarchies result from immutable characteristics have a dismal history; they have almost always been wrong. The arguments made by Summers and Saletan and Pinker have been used to denigrate women’s abilities in all academic and professional fields, and before that were used (and are still being used by people by people like
Murray) to justify racial hierarchies before that. And, as Yglesias points out, women are underrepresented on virtually all professional fields, not jus ones that place a high premiumum on math, making the persistence of discrimination fairly clear. Is it possible that, despite having failed to pan out in so many cases before, that the circular arguments used to claim that women are less suited to be math and science academics will prove right? I guess. But I know which way I’m betting. And the desperation of people like Saletan to convince themselves that male privileges somehow must be based on merit is pretty pathetic.

A final point. With respect to Sandra Day O’Connor, Saletan and Pinker would say that they’re individualists; since she had proven she could succeed, she should be given the chance even if women as a group don’t really have the genetic makeup that would produce a good lawyer. Leaving aside the question of whether they would have said this at the time, it should be obvious that this solution won’t work. People who believe that women are inherently less suited to the profession are unlikely to evaluate individuals fairly either. (Particurlarly since employment and recruiting decisions are rarely clear-cut; as anyone who has served on a search committee knows, subtle changes in criteria and different readings of records make a huge difference.) The general perception that women can’t be lawyers on average will inevitably lead to discrimination against individuals. It is for this reason that having university professors casually mention dubious “empirical” arguments claiming to prove that males are better suited to a particular profession are so problematic. In the light of ambiguous data, the working assumption should be equality, not male superiority.