Seeing differences as 'unfortunate truth'
Excerpts of Lawrence Summers's remarks at a Jan. 14 meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research. The full text may be found at http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html
There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call . . . the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.
The most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their 40s near-total commitments to their work. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That's not a judgment about how it should be.
If my reading of the data is right -- it's something people can argue about -- that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations, as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth -- I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true -- is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.
There may also be elements, by the way, of differing -- there is some, particularly in some attributes that bear on engineering -- there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization. . . . So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with 2½-year-old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks and found themselves saying to each other, ''Look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck," tells me something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize. There are two other hypotheses that are all over. One is socialization. Somehow little girls are all socialized towards nursing, and little boys are socialized towards building bridges. No doubt there is some truth in that. I would be hesitant about assigning too much weight to that hypothesis for two reasons. First, most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last 15 years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We've been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so the human mind has a tendency to grab on to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true. The second empirical problem is that girls are persisting longer and longer. When there were no girls majoring in chemistry, when there were no girls majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame parental socialization. Then, as we are increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are 20 or when people are 25, in terms of their patterns, with which they drop out. Again, to the extent it can be addressed, it's a terrific thing to address . . .
I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can. That's why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable. 