Want to know something about a day in the life of a physics grad student? After struggling with a problem a while, my friend Hugh decided that it was time to go to the blackboard. Then 3 grad students, 1 entire blackboard, and at least an hour and a half later, we emerged victorious with the answer.
We considered handing in this photo as our solution, but after figuring that it would take more time to grab my camera and print this out, we all just copied it down onto paper…
then I decided to grab my camera anyway
Lawrence Summers’ remarks have been released. I haven’t had time yet to read them myself, but it sounds like this issue isn’t going to die anytime soon among the Harvard faculty.
UPDATE
I’ve read through Summers’ remarks and they say almost precisely what I expected them to. Which is, that in referring to women’s innate aptitude in science, Summers based his argument on differences in the variability of aptitude between men and women.
Various news stories this morning (e.g. NYTimes) suggested that upon the release of Summers’ remarks, some Harvard professors felt vindicated in claiming that Summers thinks women aren’t as good at science as men. Summers never makes this claim, and I don’t think he ever would. Summers is claiming that due to the larger variance in aptitude for men than for women, if you limit yourself to only selecting people at the very top end of the aptitude distribution, you will find more men than women.
Maybe more Harvard professors need to enroll in a basic statistics class.
And to add to my belief that by stirring the pot, Summers has done more for women in science than by not saying anything, look at this quote from the end of his remarks:
Let me just conclude by saying that 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.
I found yet another article responding to Summer’s remarks: The New Republic Online: Body of Evidence. I really liked the concluding paragraph:
Summers’s “problem” is that he submits every argument with a grain of evidence behind it to serious and scrupulous scrutiny. And this scares our supposedly daring academic culture, which lives in fear of what it refuses to know. As yet another of Curie’s biographers suggested, “She had survived because she had made men believe that they were not just dealing with an equal, but with an insensitive equal.” Summers knows that the age of such painful self-denial is gone, and good riddance. Still, the academy is the academy; it is not a community center. Students ought to know more than they do, and it is on Summers’s agenda that they will. No American university has yet truly grasped how the revelations of science touch on history and art, philosophy and poetry, and it is on Summers’s agenda that at least Harvard will try. In all this, he imperils the unexamined orthodoxies of the ensconced. And now, his enemies see a chance to counterattack. Let’s hope they fail and he succeeds.
Harvard Professor Steven Pinker weighed in on the woman in science “scandal” created by Larry Summers. His response to the issue is classic Pinker:
when it comes to this issue, ordinarily intelligent scientists suddenly lose their ability to think quantitatively and warp statistical hypotheses into crude dichotomies.
My response: yes.
There are two opinion pieces in the times today regarding Lawrence Summers’ remarks on women and science: Op-Ed Contributor: Sex Ed at Harvard and Different but (Probably) Equal. I am glad to see that both articles stress the importance and ground breaking nature of current studies into the innate differences between men and women.