But He Was Only Asking Questions…

Since some people persist in maintaining the transparent falsehood that Summers was merely “asking questions” and not offering any position, let’s go to the transcript:

• There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I’ll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

• And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.

• So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

• There may also be elements, by the way, of differing, there is some, particularly in some attributes, that bear on engineering, there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization.

• …most of what we’ve learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization.

• The second problem is the one that Gary Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many years ago. If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available.

• So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

Summers repeatedly asserts that innate abilities and the “choices” of women are far more important than other factors. In addition, notice how he urges skepiticism about evidence of discrimination, while using rather less skepticism with respect to evidence that supports his obvious a priori prejudices. The best example is his uncritical citing of Gary Becker’s thesis that discrimination cannot persist because it is irrational, a claim that has the unfortunate disadvantage of being transparently false. (Yes, Sandra Day O’Connor couldn’t get a job as a lawyer after graduating 3rd in the class of Stanford Law School, but that can’t be because “everyone was discriminating,” because obviously that could never happen. And as for the American South between between Reconstruction and 1965, we’ll just pretend it never existed.) If you want to defend Summers on the merits, OK, but let’s stop pretending that he didn’t say what he clearly said, shall we?