Comments on: Girls and the hard stuff

By: PSri

PSri — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 13:23:54 +0000

Agree with you, Ravi…exactly the problem I had with Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’: the smugness of the writer who says ‘hey I’m liberal and not judgmental in the least, but the numbers don’t lie.’ They do, and so do the writer.
Lets substitute ‘women’ with…I dont know, Arkansans? Polynesians? Buddhists? Children of unwed mothers? People with olive eyes and brown hair? People who work in the Indian software industry? People who drive Fords? People who can wiggle their ears?
Each of these is a segment in the population. Most of these segments are not likely to be proportionally represented in the upper echelons of the scientific hierarchy, any more than they are likely to be proportionally represented in the CEO community of Corporate America – or in Major League Baseball. Corporate, sporting or scientific achievers are not random sample subsets. They are spikes. Spikes are special cases – cases of highly driven individuals willing to trade in a lot of things in order to monomanically achieve a single goal, combined with favorable environmental factors. If a large percentage of the spikes are from a single segment (over a significant amount of time), we need to see why that segment should see more spikes than other segments. The fact that more spikes arise in one segment than others is a statistical fact about the SPIKES, not about the SEGMENTS. Most human beings who dont want to think about work 80 hours a week. A large majority of us are discriminated against and belittled and told every day that we are inferior. A VAST majority of us have other interests than sitting in a room and churning out abstract papers. An overwhelming majority of us are not -ever – going to occupy the stratospheres of scientific, artistic, sporting, commercial or political leadership. Therefore, Summers could have made the same remark, without loss of generality, about Indians, Chinese, Africans and people from Houston, Texas.

By: ravi

ravi — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:29:19 +0000

Another thing that bothers me is that Summers starts off by saying that we should think “systematically and clinically” but then that is exactly what he proceeds not to do, speculating idly, generalising from anecdote, and so on. What he really means is to lecture fellow liberals thus: just because we are committed to women’s equality we should not overlook what the data tells us. That’s the defence (of Summers) offered by Steve Pinker, also. This is at best patronising. The criticism of Summers’ comments is exactly that the data and analysis do not compel us to his conclusion/conjecture. If anything, it is his conjecture that is driven by psychological factors (“we must not look ideological”).

By: ravi

ravi — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:17:34 +0000

Bappa,

I think the issue remains unresolved: the results from the latest research demonstrate a 2:1 ratio in male:female at the 99th percentile. Perhaps, as the conservatives claim, this is due to innate abilities. But given the weight of the evidence of discrimination, I think the burden of proving that rests heavily on the “innate” theorists. Especially since the ratio has (I believe) decreased. Such a decrease validates the notion of environmental contribution. Conservatives are left arguing that we have no nullified those contributions and the residue is entirely due to innate differences. This is a tall claim, indeed!

My problem with Larry Summers is that someone of his prominence, as a self-proclaimed liberal, would feed into the stereotype threat so blatantly, especially by explicitly ranking innate over environment (as he did in his speech), when he has (or offers) no justification for such a ranking.

Then there is also the value of 99th percentile genius and to what extent the output of a person in this class is entirely individual. As the mathematician and women’s studies scholar Moon Duchin says:

“Lots of people think this is a non-social field—would math come out differently in a society with a different social organization?” While she’s not trying to debunk the existence of genius (“there really are people you meet in math and you learn about who just synthesize things in ways that other people don’t have access to with any investment of time”), the Great Man theory “definitely stilts the narrative. A real intellectual history is harder to do but it illuminates the math very differently.”

By: Bappa

Bappa — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:06:55 +0000

Good eye opening article. I categorize myself as a liberal and generally skeptical about broad generalizations. But even I had pretty much accepted these studies when they were splashed on the newspapers a few years back. Partly because of the people who were making the claims and also because of anecdotal evidence about the other half of the claim in the newspaper articles. They had mentioned then that girls inherently have better linguistic skills while boys had better analytical/mathematical skills. And at least looking around in my immediate circle, baby girls do start talking earlier and with more clarity than baby boys. Off course, its anecdotal evidence and moreover doesnt address the mathematical skills part at all. But guess, your article taught me to be even more vigilant and skeptical than I have been all along.

As you have pointed out, the dangers of such studies (and conclusions) is real since I have two daughters. So, maybe my subconscious preconceptions would have affected them in some way.