Interesting

[Guest guest]

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Remarks about the intelligence of women made by Harvard President L.H.

Summers that's stirring up a huge controvery

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Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering

Workforce

Lawrence H. Summers

Cambridge, Mass.

January 14, 2005

 

I asked Richard, when he invited me to come here and speak, whether he

wanted an institutional talk about Harvard's policies toward diversity or

whether he wanted some questions asked and some attempts at provocation,

because I was willing to do the second and didn't feel like doing the first.

And so we have agreed that I am speaking unofficially and not using this as

an occasion to lay out the many things we're doing at Harvard to promote the

crucial objective of diversity. There are many aspects of the problems

you're discussing and it seems to me they're all very important from a

national point of view. I'm going to confine myself to addressing one

portion of the problem, or of the challenge we're discussing, which is the

issue of women's representation in tenured positions in science and

engineering at top universities and research institutions, not because

that's necessarily the most important problem or the most interesting

problem, but because it's the only one of these problems that I've made an

effort to think in a very serious way about. The other prefatory comment

that I would make is that I am going to, until most of the way through,

attempt to adopt an entirely positive, rather than normative approach, and

just try to think about and offer some hypotheses as to why we observe what

we observe without seeing this through the kind of judgmental tendency that

inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality. It is after

all not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a

group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and

whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for

others who are considering being in that group. To take a set of diverse

examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are

substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously

high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially

underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are

very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are

all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it's

important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons

for underrepresentation.

 

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-I'll explain each of these in a

few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what

I 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.

 

Maybe it would be helpful to just, for a moment, broaden the problem, or the

issue, beyond science and engineering. I've had the opportunity to discuss

questions like this with chief executive officers at major corporations, the

managing partners of large law firms, the directors of prominent teaching

hospitals, and with the leaders of other prominent professional service

organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher education. In all of

those groups, the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or twenty-five

years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of

women who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to

graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If

you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like

fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started

having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female,

twenty or twenty-five years ago. And the relatively few women who are in the

highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without

children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And

that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same

conversation in almost any high-powered profession. What does one make of

that? I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking completely descriptively

and non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and many

activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of

people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near

total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the

office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency,

they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they

expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always

working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking

place. 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,

not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is

very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that

expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing

substantially to the outcomes that we observe. One can put it differently.

Of a class, and the work that Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz are doing will,

I'm sure, over time, contribute greatly to our understanding of these issues

and for all I know may prove my conjectures completely wrong. Another way to

put the point is to say, 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? Is our society right to ask of anybody to

have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all

questions that I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is

impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not

conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of

significant importance. To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a

young woman who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has

subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994

graduate of Harvard Business School. She reports that of her first year

section, there were twenty-two women, of whom three are working full time at

this point. That may, the dean of the Business School reports to me, that

that is not an implausible observation given their experience with their

alumnae. So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very

important reality is just what I would call the, who wants to do

high-powered intense work?

 

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. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable,

that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research

university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations

above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is

three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who

are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in

5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation

will translate into very large differences in the available pool

substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong

and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and

Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex

ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all

over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so

forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end

estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in

the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from

that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If

you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be

refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. 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.

 

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. I just returned

from Israel, where we had the opportunity to visit a kibbutz, and to spend

some time talking about the history of the kibbutz movement, and it is

really very striking to hear how the movement started with an absolute

commitment, of a kind one doesn't encounter in other places, that everybody

was going to do the same jobs. Sometimes the women were going to fix the

tractors, and the men were going to work in the nurseries, sometimes the men

were going to fix the tractors and the women were going to work in the

nurseries, and just under the pressure of what everyone wanted, in a hundred

different kibbutzes, each one of which evolved, it all moved in the same

direction. So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess

my experience with my two and a half 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

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. 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 twenty, or when people are

twenty-five, 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.

 

The most controversial in a way, question, and the most difficult question

to judge, is what is the role of discrimination? To what extent is there

overt discrimination? Surely there is some. Much more tellingly, to what

extent are there pervasive patterns of passive discrimination and

stereotyping in which people like to choose people like themselves, and the

people in the previous group are disproportionately white male, and so they

choose people who are like themselves, who are disproportionately white

male. No one who's been in a university department or who has been involved

in personnel processes can deny that this kind of taste does go on, and it

is something that happens, and it is something that absolutely, vigorously

needs to be combated. On the other hand, I think before regarding it as

pervasive, and as the dominant explanation of the patterns we observe, there

are two points that should make one hesitate. The first is the fallacy of

composition. No doubt it is true that if any one institution makes a major

effort to focus on reducing stereotyping, on achieving diversity, on hiring

more people, no doubt it can succeed in hiring more. But each person it

hires will come from a different institution, and so everyone observes that

when an institution works very hard at this, to some extent they are able to

produce better results. If I stand up at a football game and everybody else

is sitting down, I can see much better, but if everybody stands up, the

views may get a little better, but they don't get a lot better. And there's

a real question as to how plausible it is to believe that there is anything

like half as many people who are qualified to be scientists at top ten

schools and who are now not at top ten schools, and that's the argument that

one has to make in thinking about this as a national problem rather than an

individual institutional problem. The second problem is the one that Gary

Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many

years ago. 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. 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.

 

What's to be done? And what further questions should one know the answers

to? Let me take a second, first to just remark on a few questions that it

seems to me are ripe for research, and for all I know, some of them have

been researched. First, it would be very useful to know, with hard data,

what the quality of marginal hires are when major diversity efforts are

mounted. When major diversity efforts are mounted, and consciousness is

raised, and special efforts are made, and you look five years later at the

quality of the people who have been hired during that period, how many are

there who have turned out to be much better than the institutional norm who

wouldn't have been found without a greater search. And how many of them are

plausible compromises that aren't unreasonable, and how many of them are

what the right-wing critics of all of this suppose represent clear

abandonments of quality standards. I don't know the answer, but I think if

people want to move the world on this question, they have to be willing to

ask the question in ways that could face any possible answer that came out.

Second, and by the way, I think a more systematic effort to look at citation

records of male and female scholars in disciplines where citations are

relatively well-correlated with academic rank and with people's judgments of

quality would be very valuable. Of course, most of the critiques of

citations go to reasons why they should not be useful in judging an

individual scholar. Most of them are not reasons why they would not be

useful in comparing two large groups of scholars and so there is significant

potential, it seems to me, for citation analysis in this regard. Second,

what about objective versus subjective factors in hiring? I've been exposed,

by those who want to see the university hiring practices changed to favor

women more and to assure more diversity, to two very different views. One

group has urged that we make the processes consistently more clear-cut and

objective, based on papers, numbers of papers published, numbers of articles

cited, objectivity, measurement of performance, no judgments of potential,

no reference to other things, because if it's made more objective, the

subjectivity that is associated with discrimination and which invariably

works to the disadvantage of minority groups will not be present. I've also

been exposed to exactly the opposite view, that those criteria and those

objective criteria systematically bias the comparisons away from many

attributes that those who contribute to the diversity have: a greater sense

of collegiality, a greater sense of institutional responsibility. Somebody

ought to be able to figure out the answer to the question of, if you did it

more objectively versus less objectively, what would happen. Then you can

debate whether you should or whether you shouldn't, if objective or

subjective is better. But that question ought to be a question that has an

answer, that people can find. Third, the third kind of question is, what do

we know about search procedures in universities? Is it the case that more

systematic comprehensive search processes lead to minority group members who

otherwise would have not been noticed being noticed? Or does fetishizing the

search procedure make it very difficult to pursue the targets of opportunity

that are often available arising out of particular family situations or

particular moments, and does fetishizing and formalizing search procedures

further actually work to the disadvantage of minority group members. Again,

everybody's got an opinion; I don't think anybody actually has a clue as to

what the answer is. Fourth, what do we actually know about the incidence of

financial incentives and other support for child care in terms of what

happens to people's career patterns. I've been struck at Harvard that

there's something unfortunate and ironic about the fact that if you're a

faculty member and you have a kid who's 18 who goes to college, we in

effect, through an interest-free loan, give you about $9,000. If you have a

six-year-old, we give you nothing. And I don't think we're very different

from most other universities in this regard, but there is something odd

about that strategic choice, if the goal is to recruit people to come to the

university. But I don't think we know much about the child care issue. The

fifth question-which it seems to me would be useful to study and to actually

learn the answer to-is what do we know, or what can we learn, about the

costs of career interruptions. There is something we would like to believe.

We would like to believe that you can take a year off, or two years off, or

three years off, or be half-time for five years, and it affects your

productivity during the time, but that it really doesn't have any

fundamental effect on the career path. And a whole set of conclusions would

follow from that in terms of flexible work arrangements and so forth. And

the question is, in what areas of academic life and in what ways is it

actually true. Somebody reported to me on a study that they found, I don't

remember who had told me about this-maybe it was you, Richard-that there was

a very clear correlation between the average length of time, from the time a

paper was cited. That is, in fields where the average papers cited had been

written nine months ago, women had a much harder time than in fields where

the average thing cited had been written ten years ago. And that is

suggestive in this regard. On the discouraging side of it, someone remarked

once that no economist who had gone to work at the President's Council of

Economic Advisors for two years had done highly important academic work

after they returned. Now, I'm sure there are counterexamples to that, and

I'm sure people are kind of processing that Tobin's Q is the best-known

counterexample to that proposition, and there are obviously different kinds

of effects that happen from working in Washington for two years. But it

would be useful to explore a variety of kinds of natural interruption

experiments, to see what actual difference it makes, and to see whether it's

actually true, and to see in what ways interruptions can be managed, and in

what fields it makes a difference. I think it's an area in which there's

conviction but where it doesn't seem to me there's an enormous amount of

evidence. What should we all do? I think the case is overwhelming for

employers trying to be the [unintelligible] employer who responds to

everybody else's discrimination by competing effectively to locate people

who others are discriminating against, or to provide different compensation

packages that will attract the people who would otherwise have enormous

difficulty with child care. I think a lot of discussion of issues around

child care, issues around extending tenure clocks, issues around providing

family benefits, are enormously important. I think there's a strong case for

monitoring and making sure that searches are done very carefully and that

there are enough people looking and watching that that pattern of choosing

people like yourself is not allowed to take insidious effect. But I think

it's something that has to be done with very great care because it slides

easily into pressure to achieve given fractions in given years, which runs

the enormous risk of people who were hired because they were terrific being

made to feel, or even if not made to feel, being seen by others as having

been hired for some other reason. And I think that's something we all need

to be enormously careful of as we approach these issues, and it's something

we need to do, but I think it's something that we need to do with great

care.

 

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. That's

why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable. Thank you.

Questions and Answers

 

Q: Well, I don't want to take up much time because I know other people have

questions, so, first of all I'd like to say thank you for your input. It's

very interesting-I noticed it's being recorded so I hope that we'll be able

to have a copy of it. That would be nice.

 

LHS: We'll see. (LAUGHTER)

 

Q: Secondly, you make a point, which I very much agree with, that this is a

wonderful opportunity for other universities to hire women and minorities,

and you said you didn't have an example of an instance in which that is

being done. The chemistry department at Rutgers is doing that, and they are

bragging about it and they are saying, "Any woman who is having problems in

her home department, send me your resume." They are now at twenty-five

percent women, which is double the national average-among the top fifty

universities-so I agree with you on that. I think it is a wonderful

opportunity and I hope others follow that example. One thing that I do sort

of disagree with is the use of identical twins that have been separated and

their environment followed. I think that the environments that a lot of

women and minorities experience would not be something that would be-that a

twin would be subjected to if the person knows that their environment is

being watched. Because a lot of the things that are done to women and

minorities are simply illegal, and so they'll never experience that.

 

LHS: I don't think that. I don't actually think that's the point at all. My

point was a very different one. My point was simply that the field of

behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last fifteen years, and the

principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of

things that people thought were due to socialization weren't, and were in

fact due to more intrinsic human nature, and that set of discoveries, it

seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where

there was a perception of the importance of socialization. I wasn't at all

trying to connect those studies to the particular experiences of women and

minorities who were thinking about academic careers.

 

Q: 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. I cite by way of research the

[unintelligible] project in North Carolina, which essentially shows that,

where every indicator with regard to mother's education, socioeconomic

status, et cetera, would have left a kid in a particular place

educationally, that, essentially, they are seeing totally different outcomes

with regard to performance, being referred to special education, et cetera,

so I think that there is some evidence on that particular side. The other

issue is this whole question about objective versus subjective. I think that

it is very difficult to have anything that is basically objective, and the

work of [unintelligible] I think point out that in a case where you are

actually trying to-this case from the Swedish Medical Council, where they

were trying to identify very high-powered research opportunities for, I

guess it was post-docs by that point, that indicated that essentially that

it ended up with larger numbers of men than women. Two of the women who were

basically in the affected group were able to utilize the transparency rules

that were in place in Sweden, get access to the data, get access to the

issues, and in fact, discovered that it was not as objective as everyone

claimed, and that in fact, different standards were actually being used for

the women as well as for the men, including the men's presence in sort of a

central network, the kinds of journals that they had to publish in to be

considered at the same level, so I think that there are pieces of research

that begin to actually relate to this-yes, there is the need to look more

carefully at a lot of these areas. I would-in addition looking at this whole

question of the quality of marginal hires-I would also like to look at the

quality of class one hires, in terms of seeing who disappoints, and what it

was that they happened to be looking at and making judgments on, and then

what the people could not deliver. So I think that there is a real great

need on both sides to begin to talk about whether or not we can predict. I

hate to use a sports metaphor, but I will. This is drawn basically from an

example from Claude Steele, where he says, he starts by using free throws as

a way of actually determining, who should-you've got to field a basketball

team, and you clearly want the people who make ten out of ten, and you say,

"Well, I may not want the people who make zero out of ten," but what about

the people who make four out of ten. If you use that as the measure, Shaq

will be left on the sidelines.

 

LHS: 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. There is a very simple

and straightforward methodology that was used many years ago in the case of

baseball. Somebody wrote a very powerful article about baseball, probably in

the seventies, in which they basically said, "Look, it is true that if you

look at people's salaries, and you control for their batting averages and

their fielding averages and whatnot, whites and blacks are in the same

salary once you control. It is also true that there are no black .240

hitters in the major leagues, that the only blacks who are in the major

leagues are people who bat over .300-I'm exaggerating-and that is exactly

what you'd predict on a model of discrimination, that because there's a

natural bias against. And there's an absolute and clear prediction. The

prediction is that if there's a discriminated-against group, that if you

measure subsequent performance, their subsequent performance will be

stronger than that of the non-discriminated-against group. And that's a

simple prediction of a theory of discrimination. And it's a testable

prediction of a theory of discrimination, and it would be a revolution, and

it would be an enormously powerful finding in this field, to demonstrate,

and I suspect there are contexts in which that can be demonstrated, but

there's a straightforward methodology, it seems to me, for testing exactly

that idea. I'm going to run out of time. But, let me take-if people ask very

short questions, I will give very short answers.

 

Q: What about the rest of the world. Are we keeping up? Physics, France,

very high powered women in science in top positions. Same nature, same

hormones, same ambitions we have to assume. Different cultural, given.

 

LHS: Good question. Good question. I don't know much about it. My guess is

that you'll find that in most of those places, the pressure to be high

powered, to work eighty hours a week, is not the same as it is in the United

States. And therefore it is easier to balance on both sides. But I thought

about that, and I think that you'll find that's probably at least part of

the explanation.

 

Q: [unintelligible] because his book was referred to.

 

LHS: Right.

 

Q: I would like to make an on observation and then make a suggestion. The

observation is that of the three. 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. I'll give you another thing, a suggestion. The

suggestion is that one way to read your remarks is to say maybe those are

not the things we can solve immediately. Especially as leaders of higher

education because they are just so wide, so deep, and involves all aspects

of society, institution, education, a lot of things, parenting, marriages

are institutions, for example. We could have changed the institution of

those things a lot of things we cannot change. Rather, it's not nature and

nurture, it is really pre-college versus post-college. From your college

point of view maybe those are things too late and too little you can do but

a lot of things which are determined by sources outside the college you're

in. Is that...

 

LHS: I think...

 

Q: That's a different read on your set of remarks.

 

LHS: I think your observation goes much more to my second point about the

abilities and the variances than it does to the first point about what

married woman....

 

Q: [unintelligible]

 

LHS: Yeah, look anything could be social, ultimately in all of that. I think

that if you look at the literature on behavioral genetics and you look at

the impact, the changed view as to what difference parenting makes, the

evidence is really quite striking and amazing. I mean, just read Judith Rich

Harris's book. It is just very striking that people's-and her book is

probably wrong and its probably more than she says it is, and I know there

are thirteen critiques and you can argue about it and I am not certainly a

leading expert on that-but there is a lot there. And I think what it surely

establishes is that human intuition tends to substantially overestimate the

role-just like teachers overestimate their impact on their students relative

to fellow students on other students-I think we all have a tendency with our

intuitions to do it. So, you may be right, but my guess is that there are

some very deep forces here that are going to be with us for a long time.

 

Q: You know, in the spirit of speaking truth to power, I'm not an expert in

this area but a lot of people in the room are, and they've written a lot of

papers in here that address ....

 

LHS: I've read a lot of them.

 

Q: And, you know, a lot of us would disagree with your hypotheses and your

premises...

 

LHS: Fair enough.

 

Q: So it's not so clear.

 

LHS: It's not clear at all. I think I said it wasn't clear. I was giving you

my best guess but I hope we could argue on the basis of as much evidence as

we can marshal.

 

Q: It's here.

 

LHS: No, no, no. Let me say. I have actually read that and I'm not saying

there aren't rooms to debate this in, but if somebody, but with the greatest

respect-I think there's an enormous amount one can learn from the papers in

this conference and from those two books-but if somebody thinks that there

is proof in these two books, that these phenomenon are caused by something

else, I guess I would very respectfully have to disagree very very strongly

with that. 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.

 

Q: Just one quick question in terms of the data. We saw this morning lots of

data showing the drop in white males entering science and engineering, and

I'm having trouble squaring that with your model of who wants to work eighty

hours a week. It's mostly people coming from other countries that have

filled that gap in terms of men versus women.

 

LHS: I think there are two different things, frankly, actually, is my

guess-I'm not an expert. Somebody reported to me that-someone who is

knowledgeable-said that it is surprisingly hard to get Americans rather than

immigrants or the children of immigrants to be cardiac surgeons. Cardiac

surgeon is about prestigious, certain kind of prestige as you can be, fact

is that people want control of their lifestyles, people want flexibility,

they don't want to do it, and it's disproportionately immigrants that want

to do some of the careers that are most demanding in terms of time and most

interfering with your lifestyle. So I think that's exactly right and I think

it's precisely the package of number of hours' work what it is, that's

leading more Americans to choose to have careers of one kind or another in

business that are less demanding of passionate thought all the time and that

includes white males as well.

 

Q: That's my point, that social-psychological in nature [unintelligible].

 

LHS: I would actually much rather stay-yes, and then I'm on my way out.

 

Q: I have no idea how you would evaluate the productivity of the marginal

hire if this person is coming into an environment where [unintelligible] is

marginal and there's [unintelligible].

 

LHS: You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. I used the term-I

realized I had not spoken carefully-I used the term marginal in the economic

sense to mean, only additional, to only mean...

 

Q: [unintelligible].

 

LHS: No, to mean only the additional [unintelligible]. Yeah, obviously

[unintelligible] going to identify X is the additional hire, is the marginal

hire, the question you can ask is, you know, here is a time when, as a

consequence of an effort, there was a very substantial increase in the

number of people who were hired in a given group, what was the observed ex

post quality? And what was the observed ex post performance? It's hard to

believe that that's not a useful thing to try to know. It may well be that

one will produce powerful evidence that the people are much better than the

people who were there and that the institutions went up in quality and that

made things much better. All I'm saying is one needs to ask the question.

And as for the groping in the kitchen, and whatnot, look, it's absolutely

important that in every university in America there be norms of civility and

proper treatment of colleagues that be absolutely established and that that

be true universally, and that's a hugely important part of this, and that's

why at Harvard we're doing a whole set of things that are making junior

faculty positions much more real faculty positions with real mentoring, real

feedback, serious searches before the people are hired, and much greater

prospects for tenure than there ever have been before because exactly that

kind of collegiality is absolutely central to the academic enterprise.

 

Thank you.

 

 

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2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College