The New York Times reports that Harvard President Lawrence Summers has released a transcript of his remarks about women and aptitudes for high-level jobs and all that rot we have heard about over the past several weeks.

He wades in with some rather sensible questions:

what fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don't want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week. What fraction of young men make a decision that they're unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week, and to observe what the difference is. And that has got to be a large part of what is observed. Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I'll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men?

To me, these are valid questions. But then he manages to wade into a thicket of nonsense.

The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I'm focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.

He follows this argument up with his own "very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways," of data on how well girls perform on mathematics in twelfth grade.

Here is where I think he starts to get even more outrageous:

Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because 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.

Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't this read as a long way of saying, "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up?"

He goes on about how women in Kibbutzes in Israel each fell into traditional female roles, not fixing tractors, etc., and how his baby daughters reacted to dolls and toy trucks, which one would think could not be separated from cultural influences. Ah, but you're wrong, grasshopper.

First, most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen 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 to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true.

It sounds like he's saying that cultural influences are suspect because they've been proven not to cause autism. Maybe I'm just not Harvard material, but that reasoning would not fly in the colleges I attended. (To be fair, in the Q&A afterwards, he backpedals from his conclusions here, saying, "I wasn't at all trying to connect those studies to the particular experiences of women and minorities who were thinking about academic careers." But he made that statement only when challenged by an audience member over his apparent conclusions.)

Summers, from his perspective as an educated white male, then manages to dismiss any real effect of discrimination (of any kind) in academic society:

If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.

Could it be that he doesn't have the tools to measure those more diverse institutions? Could it be that he doesn't see any value in the actual benefits diversity might provide? To suggest that because diverse institutions aren't trouncing the competition, there is no real discrimination at work, again would not have passed the elementary logic class I took in my freshman year. It's especially ironic, isn't it, that just a few days ago Wired published, Where are All the Women?, which reported:

Companies with the most women in senior management had a 35 percent higher return on equity than those with the fewest, according to a study (.pdf) by Catalyst, a nonprofit group that studies women in business. It also found those companies paid their shareholders 34 percent more than companies with the fewest women in top management.

Those seem to be pretty concrete figures. Ah, but Summers is talking about academia, and that must be totally different. Right? I mean come on, we all know academics aren't supposed to actually pay attention to the real world. (A lot of them didn't seem to be when I was on campus.) He couldn't be expected to change his conclusions now, could he?

Going through Summers' remarks, I really cannot believe this is a highly educated fellow, let alone the head of what is commonly considered the premier higher education institution of arts and sciences in the land.

So where is all this leading? To this:

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. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them. [Emphasis added]

Would he like to be proven wrong? He's demonstrated in this very speech that he's quite ready and willing to dismiss any evidence contrary to his beliefs.

He goes on in this transcript -- which he first said did not exist, and then said did exist but he would not release it -- to talk about measures for promotion, taking breaks of two or three years from work for other pursuits, "fetishizing" search procedures, and other things that I leave to those with more current and more in-depth familiarity with the world of academia to evaluate.

According to the transcript, after Summers' remarks, someone asks a question:

Raising that particular issue, as a biologist, I neither believe in all genetic or all environment, that in fact behavior in any other country actually develops [unintelligible] interaction of those aspects. And I agree with you, in fact, that it is wrong-headed to just dismiss the biology. But to put too much weight to it is also incredibly wrong-headed, given the fact that had people actually had different kinds of opportunities, and different opportunities for socialization, there is good evidence to indicate in fact that it would have had different outcomes.

The questioner goes on to cite some evidence. Summers responds:

I understand. I think you're obviously right that there's no absolute objectivity, and you're-there's no question about that. My own instincts actually are that you could go wrong in a number of respects fetishizing objectivity for exactly the reasons that you suggest.

"Fetishizing objectivity"? That strikes me as an oxymoron. Isn't objectivity supposedly free of outside influence or restrictions in perspective? Isn't fetishizing a reference to compulsive, irrational behavior? Is "fetishizing" academic jargon with meaning contrary to the common usage? (Academics, help me here.)

Another questioner asks:

There is a contradiction in your three major observations that is the high-powered intensive need of scientific work-that's the first-and then the ability, and then the socialization, the social process. Would it be possible the first two result from the last one and that math ability could be a result of education, parenting, a lot of things. We only observe what happens, we don't know the reason for why there's a variance.

That seems quite sensible. In response, Summers suggests that people tend to over-estimate the influence of parenting on children, and cites a book that is "probably wrong" as authority.

Near the end of the Q&A, Summers finally says:

I don't presume to have proved any view that I expressed here, but if you think there is proof for an alternative theory, I'd want you to be hesitant about that.

Is this what he was doing? My reading of his remarks is that he's suggesting that the alternative theories are wrong, and that if there is any doubt, it's best to assume that women just lack the aptitude for mathematics and science.

In his letter to the faculty, Summers says:

Though my NBER remarks were explicitly speculative, and noted that "I may be all wrong," I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields. I especially regret the backlash directed against individuals who have taken issue with aspects of what I said.

Yes, anyone would regret backlash.

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