The XX Factor: What women really think.

Re: Re: Speaking of XX, again

I agree that it’s foolish for UC Davis to rescind its invitation to Summers to speak—even if his comments were foolish and ill-informed, as I argued two years ago.

But the problem with Christina Hoff Sommers’ piece—and the reason I don’t find it all that interesting—is that it does what has become a by now familiar two-step: First, it paints those who criticize Summers as suppressors of free speech, and invites us to think, erroneously, that it’s somehow taboo to talk in the sciences about biological basis for difference. In fact, Simon Baron-Cohen is quite well-regarded. (And if I recall correctly, at least one of the original scientists criticizing Summers’ comments herself studied the biological basis for sex differences.) Second, Hoff Sommers goes on to invoke a common-sense look at the world around us as evidence that OF COURSE brain differences explain the fact that women are nurses and men are pilots. What could we have been thinking all this time!

In doing so, Hoff Sommers gives no credence to the fact that the project of disentangling nature and nurture is extremely complicated. What makes these issues so hard to sort out is that the project of gender socialization begins almost the day a baby is born. I don’t say that to whitewash any “deeper” truths; I completely believe in the reality of biological differences, and I acknowledge that there are different distribution curves by gender. I just think we don’t know all that much about how they work yet—and yet we’re awfully quick to point to hard-wired biology as the underlying reason for all sorts of social discrepancies that can also be explained, at least in part, by discrimination and how we construct gender. (Megan McArdle had a good post a while back on this.) And there is plenty of contradictory evidence about just what “innate” might mean. If biology explains why our world is the way it is, as Hoff Sommers suggests, then why are women almost six times as likely today to get PhDs in physics than they were in the 1970s? Is it just that now all discrimination is gone? France has more female physicists than America does; are French women more “innately” interested in physics?

Re: Speaking of XX, again

But surely this was Sommers' point: How will we ever be able to talk about sex differences in an interesting way if we're not allowed to study them? If the subject is an academic taboo, then the same old cliches will just live on for another generation. Or ten generations.

And the Ahmadinejad comparison is actually quite interesting. I hated the fact that Columbia invited him, hated the accompanying self-important blather about free speech in America - the real subject should have been free speech in Iran - hated the Iranian president's transparently political motives for being there. On the other hand, when he did actually speak, he sounded so utterly ridiculous - "there are no homosexuals in my country" - that he mortally damaged his own "I'm-the-real- democrat-here" propaganda.  

By the same token, open discussion of intellectual differences between men and women might well prevent the idea of a naturally scientific male brain from scaring off brilliant young female scientists. If any of them are actually scared, which I very much doubt.

Re: Speaking of xx

Yes, Larry Summers should be able to speak at Davis. He's done his time (and lost his job). But I'm not ready to says he's a hero for telling it like it is about women and the sciences, which is what Sommers implies. During the fracas over his remarks in 2005, Meghan O'Rourke wrote this good piece for Slate. Her point was that when a university president--with all the cachet that job entails--talks about biological sex differences, he better do it with intellectual rigor and tact. Summers had neither really.

Of course, he's not alone. We all tend to degenerate into generalization and flippancy when we talk about sex differences. This morning one of my co-workers was worrying about a conversation he'd had with a mother at his daughter's school, who'd tried to talk to him about rearranging a playdate for his kid and hers. He hadn't known anything about the arrangement in the first place, and I said that most moms would know not to try to talk playdate with a dad. Which didn't exactly give him credit for trying to sort it all out, or encourage him to try again next time. This is why when my husband chides me for referring to "my kitchen," I say I'm sorry. At least I think I do.

Speaking of XX

Christina Hoff Sommers has an interesting op-ed in the WSJ today
about the academic struggles ignited over former Harvard President Larry Summers remarks about why women are not better represented in the hard sciences. On one hand an invitation for Summers to speak at U.C.-Davis was rescinded because, a faculty petition said, he "has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice." (Can we agree it's outrageous that Ahmadinejad is allowed to speak at Columbia but Summers can't speak at Davis?) On the other, researchers in brain science are actively exploring how male and female brain differ.

The other day I was talking to my sixth-grade daughter about school and I asked her who the smartest kids in her class were. She listed a bunch of boys. "What about the girls?" I asked. "There are lots of smart girls, but they're not the smartest. But most of the kids who at the bottom are also boys."  This is exactly one of the observations -- males are over-represented at the lowest and highest ends  -- that got Summers in trouble. (Of course I told her she could forget becoming president of Harvard.) Discouragingly, she also told me that while the majority of candidates for class office were girls, the boys got more votes for class president. This is because, she explained, "Girls will vote for a boy. But boys would never vote for a girl." (I will not extrapolate from her class to the nation.)