HARVARD CHIEF'S COMMENTS UNPOPULAR BUT LIKELY TRUE

Date: Saturday, March 5, 2005

I started graduate work in mathematics at Northwestern University 45 years ago and can say with equanimity that Harvard President Larry Summers' comments about a possible role for intrinsic aptitude in the male/female ratio in math, science and engineering are likely true and certainly arguable. So why are so many people hysterical about what he said?

At a Jan. 14 conference devoted to the topic "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," Summers gave a long, thoughtful presentation outlining several possible reasons why women are underrepresented in technical fields -- math, computer science, physics, chemistry and engineering -- including, as he said, "some questions asked and some attempts at provocation."

You can say that again. One silly woman in the audience got the vapors and rushed out of the room to inform the media that she was physically unable to bear listening to his remarks. "I would've either blacked out or thrown up," MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins told The Boston Globe.

I don't know what sentence exceeded Hopkins' tolerance for listening to ideas she doesn't agree with, but here are a couple of possibilities from the transcript of Summers' talk (www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html, and you should read the whole thing).

"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 further, "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."

Many scientists who research these matters agree with Summers at least in part, though the storm of abuse that has broken over his head tends to make them reticent about saying so. The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article, "Those 'intrinsic' differences," accompanying their story about the campus reaction to his talk, and summarized it like this: "A growing body of research suggests that, as Harvard's president controversially stated, something in the brains of boys may indeed predispose them to perform better than girls on certain kinds of math tests" (unfortunately neither article is available online except to subscribers).

What exactly that something may be, or how much effect it has, is unknown. But something must account for the fact that when formal barriers to women's entry began to fall in the mid-1960s, women surged into law and medical schools but not into the hard sciences.

Don't misunderstand, discrimination was openly practiced in 1960. I applied to seven grad schools in math and was turned down by six of them because I was female or because I was married or because I was married to someone else who applied. (My husband got into all but one or two of them, and our grades and test scores were virtually identical.) But note that didn't keep me out of grad school; it just determined where I enrolled. And the reason Northwestern's math department didn't operate the way its peers did was that the chairman, Ralph Boas, was married to a physicist and was well aware of the problems women faced in graduate education, not least nepotism rules.

Where he was in charge, it wasn't going to happen. And once at Northwestern, I was never treated differently, or worse, by anyone.

Looking back, I think there were things the department could have done that would have improved students' chances of getting their degrees that wouldn't have treated men and women differently but would have helped women more. A mathematical colleague of mine used to call it "soft support."

Guidance about time management, for instance. My husband and I agreed that he was responsible for car and household repairs, and everything else was my job. It was 1960, remember. Trouble was, my domestic chores took maybe 20 hours a week and his, two or three. We might have chosen not to change that -- it was still true 30 years later -- but I might have realized that I couldn't afford to play as much bridge as he could.

Fostering social support helps, too. Not so much at the graduate level, because any woman who arrives at grad school either has female support or decided a long time ago that reproductive organs are not relevant in choosing peers or mentors. But in middle school or high school, it can matter a lot. Teens do notice if the top girls in math classes don't get asked to the prom, and maybe those girls could use some advice about why that will matter less to them in the future than how well they prepare themselves for a career.

Small differences in intrinsic ability (I take it that Summers meant differences existing at birth, before socialization has begun to affect behavior) are likely to be amplified by experience. People like to do what they're good at, and the more they practice, the better they get. And out on the top end of the bell curve, which is where most college professors come from, even tiny average differences are multiplied.

If academic freedom truly existed at universities, Summers could have said so without being pilloried for uttering the ideologically unspeakable. I wish he'd stuck to his principles instead of retreating abjectly, because if the president of Harvard can't say what he thinks, who in academia can?