Liz's Bloglet - Monday 11 April 2005

A conservative from the days when that word actually had meaning takes the Christianist(I love that word) Right to task. _
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09:50:13 AM, Monday 11 April 2005

I went to Huntersville Elementary School, John McKnitt Alexander Junior High School, and North Mecklenburg High School (the top school is the junior high and the bottom school is the high school. In the middle is an elementary school, but back when I was there it was a cornfield which we frequently ran through for cross country training.) Then I went to St. John's College (briefly to NCSU) , then to UGA (sorry, pictures not available), and now, finally, at Duke University. _
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08:40:52 PM, Wednesday 6 April 2005

If you haven't seen this Advance Directive, you really should. Thanks to my mom and Uncle Jim for forwarding it to me. _
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03:16:28 PM, Monday 4 April 2005

Thanks to Bush doctrine, Middle East trees convert carbon dioxide to oxygen
by Charles "The Hammer" Krauthammer _
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11:06:55 AM, Friday 1 April 2005

Sexism, which is what we are discussing here, often justifies itself by assuming that women don't want the thing that is being denied them. _
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03:41:14 PM, Thursday 24 March 2005

[this is good] _
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11:14:09 AM, Thursday 24 March 2005

I'm so glad that there's not a war going on in Iraq, the Taliban isn't regaining power in Afghanistan, all of our citizens have health insurance, and none of our kids live in poverty, so our Congress has time to hold hearings about steroid use in professional sports and intervene in the private affairs of one family in Florida. _
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08:04:34 AM, Sunday 20 March 2005

A Sumatran tiger responded to a hidden camera exactly the way Tuxedo would: sniff, hit with paw, bite, walk away. There's even a great picture of the inside of his mouth. _
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10:10:31 AM, Friday 18 March 2005

As Thurgood Marshall wrote, "Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together" America's public schools still not integrated 50 years after Brown v Board. _
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03:21:38 PM, Wednesday 16 March 2005

Mission Accomplished. It's "magnesium", very shiny, drives like a race car, the engine cuts off at stop lights, and we got 43 mpg on the way home.

Now on to Phase 2: Dispose of the Deceased Taurus. I'm trying to give it to Habitat, but they don't seem to take dead cars. A coworker recommended Kidney Cars. _
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08:39:51 PM, Thursday 10 March 2005

I'm a johnny-come-lately, but this is a really cool tutorial page for webdesign. _
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03:19:07 PM, Tuesday 8 March 2005

If any of you htmlheads could look at this webpage and tell me why the sidebar changes size on the different pages, I would worship you always. _
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12:55:47 PM, Thursday 3 March 2005

One of those days when I really miss the Institute of Ecology where today the resident icthyologist is giving a talk today entitled "Losing Nemo: Fish Conservation In A Crowded World". _
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12:52:28 PM, Thursday 3 March 2005

I just got a charming email that basically said international students better be really darn careful if they leave the country for Spring Break because there is no guarantee they'll be allowed back in. They should make sure all their documents are correct and up to date, and the university can give them a certificate saying they are enrolled students in good standing, but each individual fatherland security agent has the discretion to give anyone a hard time. Don't you love the freedom. _
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02:07:07 PM, Wednesday 2 March 2005

Hey, look, there are terrorists active in the US _
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09:45:16 AM, Wednesday 2 March 2005

My mom leaves tomorrow for a Habitat work trip to Guatemala. I'm really proud and excited that she's doing this and I hope that she has fun playing with concrete. _
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02:50:49 PM, Friday 25 February 2005

I got paid. Finally. That is all. _
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02:48:30 PM, Friday 25 February 2005

I, too, have signed up for an account on Audioscrobbler for those who want to know what I'm listening to while playing with databases. If my musical taste impresses you, rest assured that it is Remi, not me, who is cool and he buys for me or shares stuff with me that he thinks I'll like (and he's always right). _
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04:50:08 PM, Wednesday 23 February 2005

The Onion has been staying away from the really mean political commentary, lately, but you've got to love I Support The Occupation Of Iraq, But I Don't Support Our Troops. _
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09:25:36 AM, Wednesday 23 February 2005

AskMeFiJohnnies: Anybody want to help Keith Ellis define the Western Cannon? That poor person didn't know what she was in for when she asked the question. _
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12:52:28 PM, Tuesday 22 February 2005

Oh, and I was officially offered and officially accepted admission to Duke yesterday. They're fedexing me the admission packet, which is sort of silly. _
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08:39:03 AM, Tuesday 22 February 2005

Try Moral-Politics.com, a morality-based political test.

Your Score

Your scored -4.5 on the Moral Order axis and 2 on the Moral Rules axis.

Matches

The following items best match your score:

1. System: Socialism
2. Variation: Moral Socialism
3. Ideologies: Social Democratism
4. US Parties: No match.
5. Presidents: Jimmy Carter (90.89%)
6. 2004 Election Candidates: Ralph Nader (92.03%), John Kerry (81.12%), George W. Bush (47.85%)

Statistics

Of the 42354 people who took the test:

1. 1% had the same score as you.
2. 10.7% were above you on the chart.
3. 77.2% were below you on the chart.
4. 80% were to your right on the chart.
5. 13.9% were to your left on the chart. _
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08:37:39 AM, Tuesday 22 February 2005

To summarize, here are the primary ways Larry Summers' speech was insulting:
1)Repeatedly separating desire to not have a "high powered" job and aptitude from socialization and discrimination, implying the former are innate differences between the genders.
2)Characterizing the forces of gender socialization and discrimination as minor.
3)Not knowing the literature about which he was speaking. This shows he doesn't value his audience or the work they do.
4)Declaring that certain areas of research had not been explored because of researchers' desire to be politically correct or not uncover unpleasant truths, when those areas had already been explored and answers had been found contrary to those unpleasant truths.

For those who are curious, I provide my own commentary below. I will be glad to provide citations to the literature for those who doubt anything I represent it as saying.

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.
It is good for him that he said this up front, because otherwise he probably would have been fired as soon as he left.

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.
It's good of him to admit these problems could be important.

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 coming paragraphs will not bear this out.

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.
When you get to the end, and realize that he basically says that women's lack of representation in science is primarily due to innate factors rather than socialization or discrimination, then read that again, a chill runs down your spine. Is he saying the same holds true for Jews and agriculture?

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.

This is the first mention of what is the primary insult of this whole insulting speech. Right here he has just separated his "high-powered job hypothessis" and aptitude differences from socialization, implying they are innate. This pattern will continue throughout the talk, and insults every hard working, brilliant woman as well as every woman who has been told to stay home and have babies or that she can't do math. He also is belittling women's experiences of gender socialization and discrimination, suggesting that if they exist at all they can't possibly be that important

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.
This suggests that this was a choice that married men and women were equally free to make and that socialization and discrimination played no role in those choices. One does not have to be a sociologist to know that has not been true in our culture.

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.
While the opportunity to choose is more free now, does anyone really doubt that men and women face different societal pressure in this regard, that women are still pressured to put having a family first at the expense of their career, possibly contrary to their own desires, or that men are still pressured to put having a high-powered job first at the expense of their family life, possibly contrary to their own desires?

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.
Yes, but what I think you're describing is socialization and discrimination and what you think you're describing is innate difference.

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?

Lots of people? Some of whom are male and some of whom are female? Some of whom have the opportunity to do so, and some of whom don't? Do we assume that everybody who didn't go to Harvard business school didn't do so because they didn't want to? Don't other factors contribute to these things besides choice? And don't other factors contribute to our choices besides our innate differences?

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.

Yeah, don't ask me what that first sentence meant.

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.
This is false. In fact the exact opposite of what he says is true. The means tend to be different, but the ranges of variation overlap almost completely.

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.

Here, his understanding of how statistics works is abominable, especially considering he's an economist.

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.
He is dismissing research, implying that his "back of the envelope calculations" are an equally valid analysis of the issue as a paper presented at the conference. Well, his reading of the data is not right. But besides that, of course there is no one set of a attributes that defines an aeronautical engineer at MIT or a chemist at Berkeley. Scientists are not identical machines. We have different strengths and weaknesses within our area of specialization, just like normal people, or even economists. We got into our fields for different reasons, and we love and hate different things about them.

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.
This may be the most insulting sentence in the whole speech, but he does it so backhandedly. His "sense"--derived from his "back of the envelope calculation"--just dismissed entirely the possibility of overt discrimination or more subtle yet insidious socialization factors as the primary determinant in the fact that women aren't being hired as professors in math and science. He's already done it in this speech, but by saying it so "regretfully" here it just grates more than any other line.

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.
Taste differences like little girls love pink and little boys love blue. This has nothing to do with the decorations in their rooms, the colors they're dressed in, or the disgust their parents express if they ever express a preference for the other color.

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.
This must be innate, because there's no reason to think that a group of people raised in a gendered society would grow up to fulfill gendered expectations. And of course it was true about every man and every woman in every kibbutz, because Larry Summers says so.

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.
Apparently, it tells him that since he is the perfect daddy who never stereotypes women, there's no chance that he had taught his daughters anything about his expectations for their gender in the first 2 1/2 years of their lives. Every female engineer who used to take their toy trucks apart to see how they worked was probably particularly flattered by the lessons Summers learned from watching his daughters play with trucks.

And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize.
Because daddy said so.

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.
This is false, and in fact the opposite is true.

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. Separated identical twin studies, or for that matter, studies of twins who grew up together, demonstrate the remarkable combination of nature and nurture that makes us all who we are. The previous autism claims were used to accuse women that they were bad mothers, many of them for doing things like having jobs. The fact that we still have identical twins where only one of the pair has autism combines Mr. Summers' two peculiar "facts" into one actual fact that suggests he has never read any of these studies.

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. Except for the human minds which apparently tend to reject the socialization hypothesis, even when a large body of accepted scientific work bears it out.

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.

I seriously don't know what he's trying to say in this paragraph. My closest interpretation is "When no women tried to go into science, that could have been due to socialization. But if women go into science and fail, that can only be due to innate differences." Yeah, I still don't know what he's trying to say. Most people I've known who dropped out of grad school ran out of money. Others had an unreconciliable difference with their advisor, which I suppose could somehow be an problem that innately affects women more, but I know of at least one instance where this was due to sexual harassment from the advisor. So we probably shouldn't blame women in that situation for the behaviour of men. There are large numbers of women receiving PhDs in science who didn't drop out when they were 20 or 25.

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.
He acknowledges the presence of discrimination, but you're just waiting for the 'but'.

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.
He seems to be assuming that accusations of discrimination are simply in hiring people for tenure-track positions. He assumes there is no discrimination in who takes upper level math classes in high school, in who gets into honors science programs in college, in who gets into grad school or who gets to work with which professor, in who gets which post docs, in where papers get published, in what order the authors' names go, in who gets the grants to do the research etc etc etc. He also assumes all discrimination is overt, when, in addition to rejecting women from a program, women can also be made to feel so isolated, so harassed, and so unwanted that they just leave on their own.

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.
I'm sorry, but if, to pick a place at random, Appalachian State University tomorrow made it a priority to absolutely recruit the best and brightest women and minorities to fill their physics department, even if they were the most brilliant place on the planet, they still wouldn't be able to raise their profile above that of Harvard. They still wouldn't have the endowment, the connections, or the damn name. At the same time, the argument could certainly be made that this has been tried to some success in the past at a place with which I am quite familiar: The Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia. Gene Odum tracked down some pretty amazing female up and coming scientists in the 70's and they certainly contributed to it becoming and remaining the most respected institute for the study of ecosystem science in the country. Outside of ecology, nobody knows or cares about that, and to them UGA is still a third rate cow college.

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.
In calling socialization and discrimination "lesser factors" he minimizes the experiences of every single female scientist who know that they are committed to their research and who know that they can do their stuff but who've been told all their lives that they can't do math and they should go have kids and "by the way there's no women's room on this floor" and "you don't mind making the coffee, do you?". And that is the primary insult that he delivers repeatedly.

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.
Would it really have killed him to pop some keywords into Web of Science and see if they've 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.
When major efforts are made to broaden the search good candidates are found who are more diverse than if one used the good old boy network. That does not mean that every non-white male in a department is a "marginal hire" which he is (very carefully) implying.

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.
This has been done. I'll be glad to send anyone who's interested a pdf of the studies done for science on a large scale and for ecology more specifically. The analysis on the broad scale shows that citation is done to overwhelmingly favor men, Americans, women who tend to publish with their initials or have androgynous names, native English speakers, those with long lists of coauthors, those at big name universities, those who are big names in their field, those likely to review the paper, and those whose last names are towards the beginning of the alphabet.

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.
It seems to me ("back of the envelope calculation") that those objective criteria that are truly objective are probably better than those that only appear to be. It also seems to me that subjective criteria are hard to dismiss out of hand because we do work together and collegiality is pretty damn important. I have no idea how you would research this or if there really is one right answer.

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.
Despite having participated in several faculty searches, I still don't know if they're the best way to do it or if there is a best way. I would say here Summers may have valid point.

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.
Actually, a ton of research has been done about the "child care issue" and they've found that supporting good child care options is good for both men and women in every career field studied.

. 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.
Maybe he would like to believe that, but the research has already been done and it shows that taking time off can have pretty disastrous consequences for women in science. We're told to have babies as post-docs or after we get tenure, or we never will get it.

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.
Regardless of what seems to Mr. Summers, as I said, a lot of research has already been done.

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.
If those people weren't already made to feel and be seen that way before Mr. Summers started talking, they surely do now.

Let me just conclude by saying that I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature ha! and a lot of talking to people which ones exactly and why didn't they stop you?. They may be all wrong. indeed 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. It's already there. 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. You know how sentimental women get. That's why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable. Thank you.
He continues his belittling tone during the question period and manages to not answer the questions.

_
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09:43:48 PM, Sunday 20 February 2005

They finally released the transcript of Larry Summers' stupid speech. He's an economist attempting to summarize his vague understanding of complex research summarized for him in popular science magazines. He uses data about high school test scores to "prove" that socialization is not as important as nature. He lumps all socialization and discrimination together into one category which he says is far less important than women's desires to have families or abilities in science (in neither case allowing the likelihood of socialization effects). We can all see now that he really had no idea what he was talking about, and basically was just making excuses for that fact that female faculty hires at Harvard have decreased under his tenure, although the number of female PhDs has only increased.

Pardon me, while I go enjoy my fellowship in science at a top tier research university. I'm so flattered that Duke gave this to me in spite of my innate inferiority and lack of commitment to my work. _
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12:06:02 PM, Friday 18 February 2005

So, apparently, I just got admitted to Duke with some sort of fancy fellowship. _
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03:00:30 PM, Thursday 17 February 2005

This is the most beautiful webpage I've seen in awhile. _
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08:38:55 AM, Thursday 17 February 2005

Duke Library has an online exhibit of their new acquisition of old comics. _
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01:55:44 PM, Tuesday 15 February 2005

Amanda at Mousewords has a really nice post about overcoming the soup of sexism we all grew up in. _
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12:38:32 PM, Tuesday 15 February 2005

These people are insanely in love with cars like mine. I'm hoping maybe one of them will buy it, because otherwise it's destined for the scrap heap (stupid proprietary parts for fancy engines no longer made grrrr). _
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09:08:30 AM, Tuesday 15 February 2005

In addition to cutting funding for minor things like feeding hungry people and curing disease, our moron president's budget would also close one of the most important ecological laboratories in the world. _
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11:48:06 AM, Friday 11 February 2005

Rant of the day:
This guy I have to deal with a lot who annoys me frequently and generally treats me like slave labor sent out an email today. What I received was a blank message with an attachment in .ics format. I went online and found out it's some calendar software file and I don't have anything like that. So I emailed him back saying, "What kind of file is this? I can't open it."

He wrote me back immediately, saying "It's not a file, it's an Outlook Calendar message. There's nothing to open." Only in his reply to me, this time, the text of this alleged Outlook Calendar message appeared.

So I wrote back, explaining that I could see the text of the message in his reply but originally I saw no message, only a file that I couldn't open, probably because I don't use Outlook (because I'm not a moron and I don't wish my computer would die, but I didn't say that).

He wrote back saying, no, the text of the message was right there.

I hope he gets a horrible virus from using Outlook and it destroys his porn collection and then he feels bad. _
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03:53:49 PM, Thursday 10 February 2005

Expect to see an update here soon. _
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04:37:49 PM, Tuesday 8 February 2005

The other day I was asked in passing if I knew who Raymond Lindeman was. I admitted I did not and was told that he was someone I should know. I have now read his great (and I think only) paper "The trophic-dynamic aspect of ecology" and learned a little more from Google. Raymond Lindeman got his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1941 and started a post-doc with the great G. Evelyn Hutchinson (I already knew who he was and I leave the googling to those who don't) at Yale. He died in 1942, apparently after a long illness. His paper was published posthumously.

Among other things, he is credited with coining the term ecosystem (although in his paper he says he got the word from Tansley, who I guess I have to look up next). At the very least, he was the first person to publish a paper with the word 'ecosystem' in it, and certainly developed the concept farther than it had been previously.

He also developed, as the title suggests, the idea of trophic levels in an ecosystem, that is there are producers, and then there are consumers who eat the producers, and then there are secondary consumers who eat the first consumers. His dissertation in Cedar Bog Lake is considered one of the first works of ecosystem ecology in that he tried to study and consider all the organisms living there and the lake itself as a system rather than studying them as distinct organisms in a static environment. Among the tributes to him are an award given by the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography and a pond on the campus of Luther College _
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01:36:26 PM, Thursday 3 February 2005

"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else. That is one of the main differences between us and our enemies. They seek to impose and expand an empire of oppression, in which a tiny group of brutal, self-appointed rulers control every aspect of every life. Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations, with governments that answer to their citizens, and reflect their own cultures. And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace."

This paragraph is both a lie and nonsensical. _
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10:07:12 PM, Wednesday 2 February 2005

I just finished reading Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy Tyson. I picked it up because it was called the book of the year by so many people. I'm recommending it to everyone I know, because I think most of us know little more about the Civil Rights Movement than is taught in February every year. Something like this: America is a wonderful place. Things were bad for African-Americans down in the South until one day Rosa Parks' feet hurt. Then Martin Luther King got the federal government to change the laws and teach those dumb Southerners to act more like Northeners and then everything was good.

Timothy Tyson is a (white) professor of African-American history at the University of Wisconsin who grew up the son of a liberal Methodist minister in the tobacco town of Oxford, NC. In the summer of 1970, Oxford changed forever. He takes the story of his town and uses it to tell the story of our history, all of us. His story, surprisingly, turns out to intertwine with that of Ben Chavis, leader of the NAACP in the 90's. In passing, we get the story of the Fusion government of NC at the turn of the century, the Wilmington Coup/War, racial violence in Wisconsin in the 60's, the anger and frustration of returning African-American veterans after pretty much every war ever, and how the NC A&T football team had trouble recruiting players after the integration of Chapel Hill. This book was originally his master's thesis at Duke, but he discovered that by carefully removing himself and his family from the story he couldn't completely tell it. With his history credentials firmly established, we now have a chilling coming of age story and a history lesson that we all need. _
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11:20:56 AM, Sunday 30 January 2005

"Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes.' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.'" -Clare Boothe Luce _
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05:53:14 PM, Saturday 29 January 2005

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