High Tension
A couple of further thoughts on the Taboo question. There is a lot of tension in all this – because there are some rational, non-ostrich-like, non-fingers-in-ears, non-You Can’t Say That reasons for worry about, for instance, saying that a particular identifiable set of people may have, in however small a statistical sense, less of a given ability than another set or sets. One such reason is the self-fulfilling prophesy. The worry is that if you tell people – especially and all the more so if you tell them officially academically scientifically studies have shownically – that they are, or they belong to a group or subset of the population that is, statistically, however slightly and tail end effectly, innately less good at X, there is very often a strong tendency for the people in question to give up on X as a result. To relax their efforts, to decide it’s hopeless, to give themselves permission not to bang their heads against a wall.
A book on US education, The Learning Gap, by Harold Stevenson and James Stigler, discusses one aspect of this problem in chapter 5, Effort and Ability. They argue that Americans put more emphasis on innate ability while Chinese and Japanese people put more on persistent effort. ‘In sum, the relative importance people assign to factors beyond their control, like ability, compared to factors that they can control, like effort, can strongly influence the way they approach learning. Ability models subvert learning…’ I have a friend who teaches high school math, and she is apt to go off like a bomb when anyone says maybe girls and women find math more difficult than boys and men. She spends much of her working life trying to counter that idea in her girl students: she says they believe it, and the result is that they don’t try. I find that highly plausible, since that was my own attitude to math when I was in school – I decided very early that I hated it and was no good at it, so I never tried hard enough.
So you can see where such ideas can be disastrous. Group X is good at A. B, and C. I belong to group X: I’m good at A-C, less good at D-W. What follows is not only ‘I’ll do better at A-C, I might fail at D-W, A-C will be easier,’ and the like. There is also the even more insidious thought that ‘I won’t be an authentic X if I try to do D-W. Xs don’t do D-W, it’s not their scene, it’s a Y thing, a Z thing, not an X thing. I’m proud to be an X, I don’t want to imitate Ys or Zs – even or especially if Ys and Zs are above Xs in the social hierarchy. That’s all the more reason to be a loyal X, an authentic X. Ys and Zs are successful, rich, important, powerful, sure, but-therefore, they are wicked, heartless, selfish, materialistic, phony, money-mad, alienated, too clever by half. I will never desert my people – I will do X things.’
So…one can see why people would want everyone to just shut up about the possibility of a statistical tail end effect in women’s math ability, even if it is or may be true. But at the same time one can also see that that wanting everyone to shut up about something is generally incompatible with scholarship and inquiry. So there’s a tension. It makes my head hurt. Kind of the way algebra used to.
You nailed it in pointing out the, uh, fatalistic smell of the “ability model” in comparison with the extra-effort model…or the maybe-a-little-extra-help-too model. Not to mention the different-learning-styles idea. I am reminded of a book on aptitudes I checked out a while back by some people who just happened to run an aptitude-testing clinic back east–it was basically a 200-page ad for said clinic, and was all about finding strong and weak points, but not one word about how weak spots, in some people at least, could be strengthened or compensated for. If distribution of any aptitude follows a bell curve, there’d be a whole lot of people just on the low side of the middle that might be salvageable, at least for some jobs, and only a few “hopeless cases”.
And same thing for the high side–only a few super geniuses, and a lot of bright individuals. If the top 2% turned out to all be from one sector of the populace due to some genetic factor, the other sector(s) would still have a lot to hope for.
Terrible thing to waste, etc.
I’m not experiencing any tension or dissonance over Summers’ remarks for a number of reasons, which can be divided into the scientific and the personal.
Scientific: There is a clear and pervasive pattern and long history of anti-woman bias in science careers, which ranges from the “girls aren’t good at math” stuff in primary schools to difficulties experienced by women scientists in academic hiring, promition and tenure. There is also a pattern and history of bad science promoting sexist assumptions about women. And let me be clear about what I mean by “bad science.” Sex-difference research, especially psychology research into aptitude and ability, has been shown again and again to have the following problems: (1) poor experimental controls and hand-waving statistical chicanery in translating data into results, (2) inadequately theoretical foundations, most especially a complete lack of care in isolating causal factors, separating correlation from causation, and designing ways to even consider (let alone attempt to eliminate)alternate hypotheses, and (3) failure to acknowledge or publish null results, so that entire fields of research show a pervasive bias FOR sex differences when the great majority of studies (perhaps 80-90% according to some attempts to quantify) are simply not published because they fail to find the hypothesized sex difference.
These two general factors – lots of evidence for political/social/cultural factors being a powerful causal factor in the under-represenation of women in the sciences, and lots of evidence that most sex-difference research is crap – leads me to a simple conclusion: Summers is both wrong and wrong-headed. When discussing why there are so few women in some academic disciplines, maybe it would be better to look where the problem has been clearly shown to reside (culture, politics, sexism), rather than looking into exactly the kind of research that has previously, repeatedly, and notoriously proven to be shoddy. I’m not saying that it is or should be taboo to look for biological differences and such-like. I *AM* saying that Summers is an idiot for doing so in the context he did and for the reasons he gave. I don’t excoriate him because he said something that *ought not be said* in some taboo sense. I excoriate him because he has displayed a willful ignorance of legitimate scientific criticisms – exactly the charge which his defenders like Pinker try to turn around on his critics. But it just ain’t so, dammit.
My personal reason is simpler to explain. I’m a future career academic. I also hope to have a family some day. The fact that he casually cited women’s unwillingness to put in 80-hour weeks as a factor in their professorial under-representation is vile in several different ways. First, NO ONE – woman or man – should be expected, as the standard default no less, to make such ridiculous work commitments in order to have a successful career. I realize that a supply-and-demand factor influences how much work can be sucked out of someone in order to enter a particularly desirable career, but if we don’t temper these kinds of economics with decency and justice in academia then we’ll never manage it anywhere. Second, it smuggles in the assumption that fathers don’t matter, that it’s perfectly okay for men to sacrifice involvement in their children’s lives for the sake of their careers. Well dammit, I’m a man and I say it’s not okay! Third, he phrased the remark in a way that put the responsibility for that choice on women. That is, he pretty much directly said that women don’t establish careers because they *choose* not to make the sacrifices that men make – a paradigm case of blaming the victim if ever I saw one. The problem is the expectation that anyone should make such sacrifices (career or family, not both), and the assumption that women bear this particular burden voluntarily rather than having it thrust upon them.
I’ve been wanting to vent about this for a week now. Thanks for the soapbox, Ophelia.
“he pretty much directly said that women don’t establish careers because they *choose* not to make the sacrifices that men make – a paradigm case of blaming the victim if ever I saw one”
I would like to see some proof that he was blaming anyone. He was throwing out some ideas to explain a phenomenon, not justify it.
And thanks, G, for articulating several other things I could not quite fit into words.
Suggested reading, for those interested– Myths of Gender, by Anne Fausto-sterling; Mismeasure of Woman, by Carol Tavris; Same Difference, by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers; Sexing the Brain, by Leslie Rogers.
Whether Summers was blaming women or not, an 80-hour work-week is just inhuman, whether one has a family or not. And not just for the poor so and so doing it. I have twice had medical personnel screw up and forget to tell me stuff that could have been serious, and I wonder if this was because they had too much stuff to do. Also I have seen one of my friends disappear down the “too busy” vortex.
Getting back on topic, though, it might be that there are some slight differences at the extremes of the curve, but that shouldn’t be used against the rest of us who inhabit the middle. Seems to me that improved teaching methods could find a way to compensate for them, if there really is a problem.
Is it possible that math is actually a whole bunch of different abilities? There were some things I could just burn thru like anything, and others that totally flummoxed me. Like algebra [but I didn’t give up, and eventually won thru.]
I think the “effort” point is a good one. Like OB, I disliked math pretty intensely, and still consider myself “bad” at it (regular joke to students: “Please double-check your exam scores–I did my Ph.D. in English because I can’t count”). In reality, with considerable effort I was a B or even low-A student in math. I even pulled off a B+ on my final exam in college calculus, despite much swearing, pulling of hair, tutoring, etc. On my own campus, the affirmative action students I’ve seen tend to be far more invested in “effort” than the regular admits, with predictable results–they get better, the other kids don’t.
On the cultural programming issue: my male students in English have sometimes admitted to me that they think certain books are “too girly” for them, especially if the authors just happen to be women. Jane Eyre, for example–eewww, icky romance stuff! We’re not reading that! Then they read the books and say, “Wait, that was cool!”
“Second, it smuggles in the assumption that fathers don’t matter…Third, he phrased the remark in a way that put the responsibility for that choice on women”
Yup. And it cuts both ways, too. It not only assumes that men are content to ignore any children they may have, it also assumes that all women want to have and do have children. Both women and men are discussed as if they all want exactly the same thing. The usual kind of ‘all groups are monolithic and univocal’ that we’re always noticing here.
“with considerable effort I was a B or even low-A student in math”
I really wish I’d made that effort. On principle, as well as so that I would now be math-literate. But I just didn’t see it that way at the time. It wasn’t only the girly thing, it was also the artsy thing. I actually had myself convinced that math was kind of a grubby tacky nerdy anti-literature uncool subject. God I was such a dork.
The girly books: yeah! And again, it cuts both ways. What John said about physicists being cocky and women being repelled by that, for instance – I know what he means and it’s probably true, but at the same time, that kind of idea is another self-fulfiller. Women suppress their own tendencies to be cocky and arrogant, if they have any, because it seems wrong, off, peculiar, repulsive, for women to have them. Not rebellious and tough and strong but weird and loserish. So we’re always shaping ourselves and each other with all these background ideas and assumptions. We correct one only to see others sprout up in their place. It’s all rather sad, really.
(Never mind Jane Eyre, there was someone who wrote an article a few months ago who thought Alice was too girly!)
Just for my $.02 worth, I’m not sure that there is a phenomenon here that requires explanation, as if scientific “success” were reducible to a simple skill set and the components of that set were measurable. (Well, there is that matter of creativity, which is usually greatly over-rated. But, IIRC, Richard Feynmann used to like to go about bragging that his I.Q. was 128. He was known early for his pictoral representations of quantum mechanics, which were so intuitively clear that they were adopted as the standard notation. Evidently, he thought in hieroglyphics, rather than the usual Sanskrit.) And the matter is too much put in terms of the ideology of competitive individualism, whereby all goods are portrayed as positional goods. But doesn’t that belie the universality that is supposed to be the core value of knowledge? I have no doubt that in the future the representation of women in the higher echelons of the “hard” and mathemetical sciences will increase from .001% of the general population to .002%. Perhaps patience is all. But the issue of the “economy” of knowledge is too interesting to be left to the likes of Larry Summers.
I might add that what determines real learning is neither “innate” ability, nor motivation, but interest, in both of the main senses of the word. It is to be regretted that prevailing instituitons of education define interest in such narrow terms.
“I excoriate him because he has displayed a willful ignorance of legitimate scientific criticisms – exactly the charge which his defenders like Pinker try to turn around on his critics. But it just ain’t so, dammit.”
You may be correct. But this seemed so apt I couldn’t help but supply this link. ;-).
Please take it as a joke, rather than a refutation.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/rhetoricprint.php?num=20
Ophelia, I do notice a certain tendency for you to be ambivalent about uncomfortable truths depending on how uncomfortable they make you feel. A few months ago you scoffed in a post here about someone who said denying the idea of multiple intelligences was a recipe for personal despair, telling people they can get no further in life without the g factor or whatever. You said the truth and those things that are comforting are entirely different questions, and the scientists’ duty is to the former. (I don’t want to go post-hunting, so you’ll accept I’m paraphrasin from memory.)
Further back, you seemed hopping mad on Crooked Timber at Charles Copeland when he said smarter women desire fewer children, and are in danger of being outbreeded by the underclass and jihadis, because the clear implication was smarter women needed to have a lot more babies or society would not be very liberal, productive or culturally enriched. This time you yourself were distraught at the implications, quite apart from whether the claim was actually true.
Now again you seem to be skirting between the two. I think which choice you make between hard-headed realism and lofty idealism is less important than being consistent about whether or not intellectual inquiry and factual truth trumps moral consequences. At the moment, you seem to swap and change depending on what you’re writing about.
Whoops. ‘Outbred’, obviously.
“but interest, in both of the main senses of the word.”
Absolutely. I’m intensely interested in interest. I think it’s a really central important human motivation and yet – as you say – it doesn’t get that much attention. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before at some point but I’ll mention it again. John Huston was once asked in an interview what he thought the most important thing in life was. He thought for awhile and then said ‘Interest.’ Bingo. And yet how many people would answer that way?
Peter,
“I do notice a certain tendency for you to be ambivalent about uncomfortable truths depending on how uncomfortable they make you feel.”
Well I wouldn’t put the matter in terms of comfort and discomfort (see onsite Fash. Dictionary definition of ‘comfortable’ for hint as to why), but otherwise, sure. That’s my point. I’m trying to be honest about it. I see a tension here; yes, no doubt I do see it here in particular because it’s a subject I’ve done some reading and thinking about over the years. It hooks onto ideas and background knowledge I already have.
Consistency is good, but if there is a tension, then there is a tension. Intellectual inquiry and factual truth require pointing out tensions if you think you see them, rather than ignoring them for the sake of consistency – wouldn’t you say?
I don’t think it was the substance of what Charles C said that pissed me off, it was the way he framed it – as if women were passive objects to be told what to do by the Charles Cs of the world. It was decidedly a political point rather than a factual one, if I remember accurately.
The “tails of the distribution” explanation may be correct but for individuals it is largely irrelevant. No-one can (yet) make reliable predictions of indvidual achievement. The only reliable way we have, at the moment, of working out who will be in that “upper tail” is by looking, after the event, at who is, in fact, in the upper tail.
IQ, Keith?
Ophelia, yes, acknowledged biases are better than unacknowledged biases. But I get the feeling that posts like this might soon be followed by others that say whether or not a viewpoint causes despair or sadness is quite irrelevant – what matters is whether it is true. I don’t think you can subordinate intellectual inquiry to prevention of despair *only* when that despair is your own!
Peter, I’m not talking about despair. Isn’t that obvious? I said there are rational, non-ostrich-like reasons to worry about all this. I’m making a distinction between saying ‘Don’t talk about that because it’s too depressing’ and saying ‘There could be problems with talking about that [with talking about it as opposed to doing research on it] for e.g. pedagogical reasons.’ Of course, that distinction may be a crap distinction, but then you should argue that it’s a crap distinction, not just ignore it.
Peter wrote:
“IQ, Keith?”
Hmmm…I am not sure whether this means. Is it a polite enquiry as to mine? (Unknown.) A not so polite inference about mine? (Probably not.)
Or are you suggesting that reliable predictions about individuals can be based on IQ? If so, then I disagree. Certainly, some predictions about individuals can be made, based on their measured IQ, but these are neither particularly specific or reliable. On the latter point, I think the correlations I’ve seen are about 0.6, meaning that less than half of the variation in predicted variable (e.g. income) is associated with variation in IQ.