Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, talked semi-informally to a conference held at the university, offering three hypotheses about why women are under-represented in science and engineering: 1. They are less willing than men to work the long hours because they value family more than men do; 2. Women are inherently worse at science; 3. There are “different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search.”

The discrepancy between the transcript and the public statement

Before Summers released the transcript, I blogged that, from what he said and what others reported, I thought he wasn’t really just putting forward three hypotheses worth looking at. I thought he betrayed a subtle preference for one of them. Now that the transcript has been released, we know it wasn’t subtle. He was arguing explicitly for the first two hypotheses: Women choose not to succeed and most women cannot succeed in the sciences. Either way, it’s their fault. He said:

So my sense is that the unfortunate truth—I would far prefer to believe something else, … is that the combination of the high- powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

And:

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that 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.

But in Summers’ initial public statement on the controversy he says that in his remarks he was “offering some informal observations on possibly fruitful avenues for further research.” Now that we see the entire transcript, we know that’s not the whole truth. He wasn’t simply offering three hypotheses. He was arguing for two of them.

His initial public statement tries to put a gloss on matters. For example:

Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, and I do not believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science. As the careers of a great many distinguished women scientists make plain, the human potential to excel in science is not somehow the province of one gender or another.

If you read the public statement, you come away thinking that he sees no inherent differences in men and women when it comes to scientific aptitude. But, after reading the transcript, you realize his public statement fudges the issue by leaving out a modifier: The fact that some women become distinguished scientists doesn’t mean that women in general aren’t innately inferior in the sciences. From the transcript, we learn that Summers in fact does believe that women’s under-representation is caused by inherent inabilities, although, to be fair, he repeatedly admits he could be wrong.

So after the controversy broke, Summers put a better gloss on what he’d said. That’s a human thing to do. But it detracts from the claim of his supporters — especially the right wingers shouting that this is a case of PC-ness gone wild — that Summers was only engaging in the sort of open inquiry we should applaud. Yes, taking bold stands is a value we should cherish; being disingenous about them afterwards is not.

Summers’ view of discrimination

In the transcript Summers makes the odd argument (attributed to Gary Becker) that if discrimination were pervasive, an institution that wasn’t discriminatory should be able to gather up a whole bunch of worthy hires quite cheaply. So, we should see a few institutions with science and engineering faculties overloaded with incredibly talented women. But we don’t. Therefore, he concludes, there isn’t pervasive discrimination. and the first two hypotheses explain the situation.

Transpose this to major league baseball’s discrimination against African-Americans before the color barrier was broken. By Summers’ reasoning, the fact that teams were all white proved that there wasn’t pervasive discrimination, a peculiar argument to say the least. So, you have to add in the particularities of women’s situation. If you add in the real situation — schools are actively recruiting women — the argument doesn’t apply either. It only applies if one believes that discrimination means having a no “No Girls Allowed” sign on the recruitment office door, except at a handful of institutions that have realized they can scoop up brilliant faculty members at bargain prices if they end their discriminatory policies.

That’s not how discrimination works these days. It’s not something that occurs just at the moment of hiring. It happens in the socializing of men and women and in the structure of institutions that lead men and women in different directions. That encouragement need not be as explicit as being put on the Science Team in junior high. It can also result from the culture of science being hostile to women or how the scientific community is structured — It is telling that Summers doesn’t introduce the structure of institutions as a fourth hypothesis. That’s because, while he’s a brilliant intellectual, he has a ham-fisted view of discrimination. He sees it as a set of false beliefs through which a sufficiently enlightened person — or an enlightened recruitment committee — could see, rather than as a complex set of assumptions, behaviors and body language pervasive throughout a culture.

I believe that Larry Summers sincerely would like to make Harvard’s faculty more diverse. But I also think that his remarks are themselves evidence of the environment in which women struggle, one that assumes that reasons and policies can get over discrimination. Discrimination can come about not only through judgment but, more dangerously, through the environment that conditions judgment.

Larry: Stay or go?

Personally, open inquiry is under attack from so many quarters that I would vote against firing Summers. People need to be allowed to be bone- headed, self-interested, defensive, and imperfectly non-discriminatory. We need to be able to introduce hypotheses and examine them, even if our examinations are flawed. In this case, I think those needs outweigh the degree of insensitivity apparent in Summer’s statements and behavior…yes, even if he had made similar remarks about Jews or African- Americans. But it’s a hard judgment to make and, as Summers would say, I’m not confident I’m right.

[Disclosure: I’m a Fellow at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center. I’ve never met Summers. I am not a member of the faculty and have no voice in such issues.] [Technorati tags: harvard LawrenceSummers ]

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