|
Tuesday, February 22, 2005Instapundit hasn't been able to get excited over the Larry Summers flap.Nor have I. It's been my experience that ordinarily academics are all for making provocative suggestions about things being other than we'd like them to be and sitting back to watch the bourgeois student body wrestle with having its assumptions challenged. If I had a dime for every time a prof in a literature or history - or, sadly, even science - department try to expose the shocking truth about the evil United States, the brutality of capitalism or the fundamental immorality of the Republican party, I'd... well, at least I'd have gotten paid to have my intelligence insulted. Curiously, those who were most feverish in their explanations about why my own cherished notions were flawed often were also unable to explain the subject matter they were teaching with any particular coherence. However, I have had some very good teachers, including one set that really shocked their bourgeois students. In a sociology course, we were given an article to read by the idiotic J. Philippe Rushton, one of the louder academics from the race differences movement. His article discussed the r/k ratio, which suggests that the higher the species, the fewer the offspring and the greater the care for the smaller number of offspring. We were all asked to write papers explaining the problems with his paper. Even though we students were all children of Ronald Reagan's supposedly vilely racist America, what the professors received was a collection of blasts at foul racism and inquiry into things best not talked about. I got the only A for arguing that environmental and public health factors in the Sahel were different from the United States, and that as such studying reproductive strategies in the two regions might tell you more about the realities of coping with the respective regions' challenges and opportunities than the inherent qualities of the races that predominated there. In other words, interesting if problematic hypothesis, lousy data, no conclusion possible at this time. It would be my guess that this is where we are with respect to Summers' question: we're still relatively close to a time when physical strength counted for a lot more, which affected the way the social systems worked, creating structural barriers for women's advancement. Those barriers are starting to fall, but it's too soon to tell if sex differences or lingering structural barriers are preventing greater female participation. Maybe both. Or maybe... Arnold Kling has some interesting thoughts not only on Summers' remarks, but on how "male dominance driven" organizations function. I think he is spot on in this. I remember my first semester of grad school. I had a paper to write on Rabelais and so I ambled over to the library about a month before it was due to do some research. One person in the class who just had to have his A had checked out 80% of the books on Rabelais, not, mind you, because he was going to use them all, but because if they had something useful he didn't want a different student getting the info first. This is too common practice, and fits in with exactly what Kling discusses - male dominance systems tend to emphasize who wins, not what can be accomplished. In this case, the student did get his A, but his achievement did not bring us further in our understanding of Rabelais and the Renaissance; he triumphed not by leading us as far as we could go but simply by assuring that no one could go further than he did. Academia, in my experience, is even worse than business for this sort of thing. Business does what business does; academia does what it likes to imagine business does, and with the way it views business, that means things can get pretty ugly. Which brings us back to Rushton... Rushton's paper had one critical flaw besides a lousy data set. There was not a completely solid link between its hypothesis and the factors it purported to use as a proof. One recalls Douglas Adams' musing that humans consider themselves superior to dolphins because they have cities and nations and buildings and businesses and competition and wars and dolphins just muck about in the water all day ... while the dolphins just might consider themselves superior for the very same reasons. It reminds me of Dick Gregory's remark: You gotta say this for the white race - its self-confidence knows no bounds. Who else could go to a small island in the South Pacific where there is no poverty, no crime, no unemployment, no war, and no worry - and call it a "primitive society."If women aren't succeeding in science departments, it's a result of the talents they bring, the choices they make and how these interact with the existing system. There are three possible problems here, then - the talent women bring, the choices they make, or the system. If Kling is right, the problem may not be one of discrimination against women, but that women, for whatever reason, are unwilling to make the sorts of choices that academia rewards. Could that be biology? Or conditioning? Both? Larry Summers deserves a little credit. He opened one hellua can of worms and has people talking about something they'd previously have dismissed with one of two pat remarks: "Science is tough" or "Science departments are sexist." Having been in science departments, and worked with female science students far superior to me, I suspect it's both and neither, with the academics at the top meaning well but not knowing how to let go of the system that brought them to the top, even if the lack of female participation gives them a sinking feeling that something's wrong with it. Refined hypothesis: What women are perceived to bring to the table is not congruent with what science departments perceive themselves as needing. What women really bring to the table and what science departments really need is not at present known. The relationship between the perceptions and the realities, likewise, is unknown. Whether women and/or science departments are being cheated by the current system is therefore also unknown. Given the scientist's tendancy to stick with methods he knows, things are unlikely to change other than gradually. As such, I suspect there will continue to be limited participation in science departments on the part of women. But what this all means is up in the air. Hopefully, Summers' firestorm will get us working toward understanding what's up a little more quickly. 
posted by gbarto at 3:20 AM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
