Why John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, wasn’t lynched for having the audacity to make suggestions about the differences between the sexes is mystifying, given the intolerant fury that has been directed at Lawrence Summers recently. No one seems to mind when counsellors confirm certain stereotypes, such as that men are more competitive than women, more physically aggressive and have better spatial reasoning, or that women are more concerned about relationships, more adept at understanding body language and better with words. Yet what Summers, president of Harvard and former secretary to the US Treasury, said to a conference of economists last month has now been so mangled that one could be forgiven for thinking that he announced men were good at science while women were not because they were thick.
According to the transcript of his lecture, he compared the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the numbers of Catholics in investment banking, whites in the National Basketball Association and Jews in farming. All of which are statistical certainties, irrespective of why. After declaring that racial and sex discrimination needed to be ‘absolutely, vigorously’ combated, and conjecturing that bias might not entirely explain the lack of diversity in the sciences, he posited a set of possible reasons. Firstly, he said, women need to take career breaks to have children; secondly, women are ‘innately’ less scientifically minded; thirdly, and consequently, the pool of women to recruit into top-level scientific posts is smaller.
No prizes for guessing which one of those caused the kafuffle, but there’s something wrong when it’s a heresy even to suggest that biological differences might be worth considering. What’s curious is not that a politicising press should fan the flames of controversy, but that the halls of academia – putative heartland of intellectual advancement and dispassionate debate – should field reactions like that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins who, upon hearing Summers’ words, told reporters that her ‘heart was pounding’, her ‘breath was shallow’ and she was going to be sick. Evidently, she hardly demonstrated her rationalism by spitting her dummy like that, but there is a bigger problem. The great illiberal trick is to discredit contrary opinions by declaring that their arguments are unfounded, whether or not they can actually be verified, and drown all salient opposition in torrents of indignation.
At one level, the debate has been encouragingly open, to the extent that dialogue has opened up even within single publications. Nevertheless, it’s fairly typical to see someone like Natasha Walter, for example, writing a sneering article about ‘sexual mumbo jumbo’ in The Guardian, and dismissing all countervailing cognitive research, even though Brenda Maddox had already provided counterevidence in the same paper, and Simon Baron Cohen¸ a Cambridge psychologist also writing for the same paper, had broadly concurred with the Harvard leader. Cohen is at pains to state that ‘you cannot tell what kind of brain a person has from that person’s sex’ but, he adds, ‘Summers may be right that biological factors are producing sex differences in the mind, which are further acted upon by the social environment.’
The suitability of women’s brains for scientific research is not in question, nor is the fact that the barriers against women in academic science have been incredibly high until very recently, nor that there have been numerous important female scientists and will undoubtedly be far many more. My point is not that Summers was right. It’s just that it can’t possibly be a bad thing to highlight existing inequalities in the sex ratio in science, and to encourage debate. What matters, for anyone who chooses to engage, is to accept that both sides can marshal evidence, and that it is on evidence, rather than opinion, that the battle should be waged. The evidence may show us that there are cognitive, genetic, environmental, or no differences between the sexes, but we have to be able to consider it without recourse to moral and political shibboleths. Whether or not men are from Mars and women are from Venus, or both are from Earth, equality of opportunity should be the objective: an open and honest discussion is integral to that process.
Comments (2)
The claim that Simon Baron-Cohen "broadly concurred" with Mr. Summers is not substantiated, either by the link provided or his pronouncements in this issue. Dr. Baron-Cohen makes it clear in the article that while there are biological sex differences in mind, what has so far been uncovered has not strong enough to explain the under-representation of women in the top levels of science.
Posted by EK | February 26, 2005 7:54 PM
Posted on February 26, 2005 19:54
It is obvious that males and females tend to exhibit different characteristics which tend to make them suitable for different occupations. However, this is only a statistical phenomenon and does not make it true in any individual case. The problem comes when people are discriminated against on the basis of typical gender differences and are thus effectively prevented from following certain careers just because they are less common (or even rare) for their sex, even though they may individually be highly suited.
When this happens, it tends to exaggerate the gender differences. For example, in Russia about 30% of professional engineers are women - which is generally reckoned to be a far reflection on typical aptitudes. However, in many countries fewer than 10% are women which indicates that there is a cultural factor which discourages, or even prevents women from becoming engineers. This cultural factor has obviously grown out of typical aptitudes and it is important to recognise and resist this.
Posted by HJ | February 23, 2005 10:37 PM
Posted on February 23, 2005 22:37