While there have been talks of former Harvard president Larry Summers (you know, the guy that said that women are naturally not good at math) being on Obama's shortlist for Treasury Secretary, folks are now saying it will be unlikely he'll be picked.
Of course Kathleen Parker (an author who contends that women who have sex are experiencing a "mental health crisis" and women raped in the military are responsible for the crime) had an op-ed in the Washington Post today about Summers and how we should give him a break for saying one dumb thing, that this shouldn't decide his fate.
Funny you say that Parker, when he's said plenty more than just one dumb thing. In fact, he defended his position as a "purely academic exploration of hypotheses" and then said in what he calls an apology: "I suppose I've done my part over these last several months to increase interest in these topics." And those are just the tip of the iceberg. Check out Jill's post for more enlightenment on Summers' record.
I thought Ian Welsh's comment today sums it up pretty well, "Brains aren't the same thing as good judgment, and while Summers may be smart, I am aware of no evidence that he is wise or even has any common sense."
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Forgive me, but what does the (justified) controversy over his remarks on female academic achievement have to do with his ability to be Secretary of the Treasury?
Furthermore, why all the controversy for thinking outloud and exploring a complicated topic? While I agree a blanket statement like "women are bad at math" is wrong, isn't there some possibility that women and men's brain are just wired differently? I suppose you should take that one step further and say that 'everyones' brain is wire differently, but isn't it a possibility that there are trends in one gender vs another?
Where would we be if controversial topics could not be explored academically?
In the past the opposite things would have been considered heresy - example "maybe women can enjoy sex just as much as men?" or "maybe a same-sex relationship isn't naturally evil". Other things like contraception, vaccinations, and political moves forwards for equality have come from forward thinkers in academia.
So he explored a contentious issue in a public forum...so what?
If women are bad at math, why were the great majority the original computers (as in people who compute things) female?.
This stance just doesn't explain people like the late admiral Grace Murray Hopper.
How does Yao Ming work in a world where Asians, Chinese in particular, are shorter than most Caucasians?
I'm not saying that women are bad at math, I'm just saying you can't cite one example of an exceptional human being as being emblematic of a general trend in that person's sub-group.
The problem with that comparison is that the perception of women as being less accomplished at math is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yao Ming couldn't just "give up" on being taller than his countrymen, and anyone who said, "Well, we won't hire him because he's East Asian and therefore short" would discover their mistake without having to see grades or a resume.
And that's the major problem with Summers' remarks: he's not inviting debate, he's perpetuating a stereotype.
I'm not making that argument, just pointing out that using one exceptional person does not contribute to a successful counter-argument. If anything it hinders the argument; there will always be exceptional people from any group who do not reflect, through their elite performance in a given subject or trait (height or mathematics, or what have you), the general traits of their given sub-group.
The issue at hand are not how his statements regard those special people who are better at mathematics than 99% of any population; but how his comments marginalized the abilities of the median performers.
Poor logic, even when used to propagate a good sentiment, ultimately does a disservice to those whom are on the side of said good idea; as those who wish to refute the entire concept will always point to that one poor use of logic to deny the entire concept.
As someone who wished that the centerpiece of the anti-Clarence Thomas forces would have been his lack of experience and complete unsuitability for the Supreme Court, my main objection to Summers flows from more job-related reasons.
Larry Summers should not hold a public position. There is no doubt in my mind about this. We need public officials that focus their attention on addressing sexism rather than justifying it.
However, as both a scientist and a feminist, I'm a little irked by reports claiming that he said women are naturally worse at math. He said no such thing. He actually said that more women were average. What he said may very well still be sexist, but putting words in his mouth reinforces negative stereotypes about feminists, and pushes those who value scientific integrity away from feminism.
You must be new here. What someone actually said or didn't say is completely irrelevant.
http://www.feministing.com/archives/012160.html#comments
Hey, i think i've seen you on FC.
But I concur, the bloggers here have grossly misconstrued things and the past.
They really need to slow down and read what is in question before writing in a knee-jerk outrage.
Samhita's blog entry about the PKK (a while back) was in terribly bad taste, and i think posts like that undermine the credibility of this blog.
The current financial crisis is a complete mess. Barack Obama was elected to turn this country around, and I believe that means he will be doing some things that may be viewed as unpopular if he sees it as in the best interest of the United States. Appointing Larry Summers to the Treasury would be one such move. Obama is trying to move beyond politics as usual, and this involves bringing the best people into his administration, no matter what.
Regardless of what people may think of Larry Summers as a person, the reality is he is a brilliant economist and arguably the most qualified man to be holding the position of Secretary of the Treasury. For some good reasons why, check out Brad DeLong's blog, "Grasping Reality with Both Hands." Prof. DeLong is an Economist at UC Berkeley, a die-hard progressive, and arguably the most outspoken critic of the Bush administration in the mainstream economics profession with the exception of maybe Paul Krugman. Summers has his vote, which I think is telling.
Every day global financial titans are falling by the wayside. The Middle class is being crushed. Our economy is killing itself. We need something done about this. Summers might be the biggest jerk in the world, but I honestly wouldn't care if it means he can get the economy back on solid footing. And I think this is what President-Elect Obama also sees.
Finally, one minor point: As FGJ noted above, Summers did not say anything sexist. If anyone reads the actual transcript of what he said, they will see this. (here's the link: http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html)
In his comments, Summers posited three reasons for the gap:
Women's family obligations, discrimination, and the controversial innate differences between the sexes. Never once did he say one of these was the actual cause, and he actually said he hoped intrinsic ability played no part because he would like to see the gender gap corrected. I take offense at the fact that Summers is being excoriated for putting forth an hypothesis. That is what academics do. If someone can be railroaded for asking questions we don't like, what does that say about us?
In his comments, Summers posited three reasons for the gap: Women's family obligations, discrimination, and the controversial innate differences between the sexes. Never once did he say one of these was the actual cause, and he actually said he hoped intrinsic ability played no part because he would like to see the gender gap corrected.
Actually, Summers ranked these three hypotheses in the following (descending) order of importance: 1) the "high-powered job hypothesis" (i.e., married women are not prepared to work long hours); 2) "different availability of aptitude at the high end"; 3) "different socialization and patterns of discrimination." He then went on to dismiss the notion of overt discrimination by arguing that it would probably not be possible in a "highly competitive academic marketplace." Therefore, he did essentially dismiss the role of discrimination and socialization, arguing that people tend to attribute too much weight to them.
Sure, academics are supposed to put forth difficult questions and to propose hypotheses. But Summers was not speaking about his area of expertise here; on the contrary, his remarks ignored all the studies that have been done in this area (there is plenty of evidence for discrimination against women in academia), in order to put forth hypotheses based on pure prejudice and anecdote (his daughters referred to daddy trucks and baby trucks!). There is nothing scientific about his argument. Furthermore, context is important: Summers made these remarks as the president of a major research institution, at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce." Clearly, this was supposed to be a forum for proposing concrete solutions to the problem of the lack of diversity. Arguing that discrimination is the least important factor in the under-representation of women in science simply has the function, in this context, of allowing him to downplay the possibility that concrete measures might improve the situation. And indeed, that is exactly what he went on to do in the rest of the speech. I would also argue that having the president of Harvard put forward such "hypotheses" is not a neutral speech act, it is one that actually hurts women in academia.
Waldoman and FJG are right. Summers never said women are naturally worse at math. It's an unfair characterization of his comments, and it keeps getting repeated.
Andrew Potter has a nice summary:
http://blog.macleans.ca/2008/11/13/summers-gone-yet-again/
And his comments (in a memo to a colleague) about Africa having too little pollution have been subject to more criticism than they deserve. They make perfect sense within the context of a certain kind of economic discussion. No one things pollution is good, but -- given the available alternatives -- sometimes you CAN have "too little" pollution, just the same as you can have "too little debt." If more pollution or more debt brings you benefits that outweigh the costs, they are arguably a good thing. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's neither silly nor evil.
If you have a pipe in your basement that is causing a flood and the plumber who is best able to fix it is also a creationist who thinks Iraq was involved with the 9/11 attacks do you find another plumber who may be less apt to fix the leak but at least hasn't made the mistake of having obviously poor judgment on completely unrelated matters?
If the guy was up for Secretary of Education I would be right there with you, but he isn't. Hell, he could believe in a flat-Earth, if he has the best shot at fixing the economy then who the shit cares?
I gotta' say if the stance you're supporting is that because person "a" is stupid on a subject unrelated to that which he or she is being considered and should therefore be passed over then this fella' isn't the only bonehead around.
On a related note Einstein was a bastard to his wife and kids, therefore I challenge relativity.
Plumbing is not a job requiring a lot of critical thinking skills. Politics is.
Politics is also a career that requires being able to work well with others and listen to their input, and as idyllicmollusk says below, Summers is atrocious at these.
Wow, that's kind of a harsh thing to say about plumbing. In fact a good plumber, just like a good auto mechanic or anyone who has to figure out problems in any system, uses very refined critical analysis if they are to do their job well. Fixing a problem in a system (the task most plumbers earn their living from) is often more difficult than actually installing the original system. Systems-thinking is not the exclusive province of the college educated. People who get their hands dirty for a living are not intellectually inferior to you just because they do manual work.
I hope that you don't actually have the kind of contempt for the true proletariat that your comment seems to convey.
Qualifier: plumbing does not require critical thinking about issues not involved with plumbing.
And no, I don't think that people who work with their hands are intellectually inferior. Kindly don't put words in my mouth. I think that everyone should understand why evolution is a valid theory, but I know that it is not necessary for a lot of jobs. Get it now?
You asked whether I would refuse the help of a Creationist plumber in the same way that I would refuse to vote for a Creationist politician. I gave you an answer. It was, frankly, pretty disingenuous of you to compare plumbers with politicians anyway -- I'm sure you know perfectly well that each job requires a different sort of judgment.
How is this person's opinions on median performance of women in mathematics any more relevant to his financial acumen than a plumber's beliefs on the origin of life on Earth in relation to the plumber's primary job of diagnosing and repairing leaks or what have you?
All people have blind spots, this guy's appear to be in a field not directly related to that for which he may be under consideration for appointment.
Your own qualifier makes it clear that you're able to differentiate between related and unrelated knowledge; so why can't you do so with this guy's thoughts on the unrelated field he foolishly expressed an opinion on?
Um, gee, because it makes him less likely to hire, or to listen to the opinions of, qualified people who happen to be women.
Of course, he was also a major supporter of bank deregulation, which is widely held to have been a factor in the current U.S. financial crisis. So putting him on the Treasury would be pretty stupid.
I know you're trying to play Devil's Advocate, but don't get so wrapped up in doing that that you forget the actual argument.
If Obama decides that Hillary is the best person for the job of digging us out of our diplomatic mess, I don't think her comments about hard working white people should disqualify her. Just saying.
I don't think he has qualifications so extraordinary that we need to go to great lengths to forgive him for being an ass. Other people can probably do this job better, and should.
Who do you have in mind?
The American Prospect profiled two possibilities: Sheila Bair, currently chair of the FDIC, and Timothy Geithner, the president of the NY Federal Reserve. Both of them come from a background more with commercial banking than Wall St., which I like. And Geithner was warning about the sub-prime mess *years* ago (prescience is always nice in a leader...). Summers wouldn't necessarily be a bad choice, but he's hardly the only choice. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being "meh" and 10 being abject relief, I'd give Summers about a 6.
I've heard Bair mentioned as a possibility, I'll have to look into Geithner. Honestly we could really do without the Summers headache right now, if Obama thinks someone else could do it better.
Sorry, but "more average" is just a fancy way to say "worse" in this context, as I'm sure he was aware -- the discussion was about elite academic science, where average, below-average or even somewhat above-average abilities are all equivalent in that they don't cut it. And he went way beyond just raising the possibility that one population might be worse on average at math than another. He gave an extremely insulting example about his daughter naming her trucks "Mommy Truck" and "Baby Truck," which at best was meant to imply that encouraging women's interest in science and math was some kind of cockeyed social engineering scheme.
Sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to FGJ.
I didn’t find Summers’s comments offensive, and have been far more troubled by the way many feminists have treated him – and the implications of an academy which declares certain ideas off-limits. Certainly, his comments were controversial, but that is okay. Many of us have a strong contrarian streak in our bones. Summers may have wanted to press some buttons at Harvard where extreme political correctness can sometimes go off the deep end. In that, I applaud him. I often felt in college that I couldn’t speak openly enough, and this made me feel really alienated from academia, as well as feminism. It would have been nice if a few more people would have been willing to challenge the status quo.
I will say I don’t think forcing political correctness down people’s throats turns them into better – or even more liberal – people. It had the opposite effect for me: I went into college as a socialist/feminist, but after I graduated, I began to feel a bit of a “rebellious” thrill in reading libertarian and conservative writings which I had been taught to think of as “the enemy” in college. I don't know where I fit now on the political spectrum, but I certainly don't want to think that if I were to ever return to academia, I would be forced to be quiet about my new ideas.
Oh my God, where have feministing's progressive commenters gone? The new breed of anti-feminist sock puppets is driving me away. I can't take it.
I find it obnoxious the Obama would even send the message that Larry would be considered for this slot given his past sexist comments.
Also per the military remark above, today Femisex.com has an excellent post on women in the Military and Obama's stance that he wants mandatory registration for women despite the significant risk of sexual assault.
Def worth a look:
http://www.femisex.com/content/obama-wants-mandatory-registration-women-a-military-where-female-sexual-assault-common-sexis
Mr. Summers' past treatment of people belonging to traditionally oppressed/marginalized groups in society is indeed important when considering whether he is the best candidate for the job. If sexism/racism and other forms of discrimination are institutionalized, and we value changing that, one way to deinstitutionalize them is to make sure that institutional leaders aren't oppressive.
Mr. Summers' has had poor working relations with many of his female and black colleagues. This is documented. He created a climate at Harvard where his female and black colleagues were resigning in order to get away from him.
We have no evidence that he would suddenly treat non-whites and non-males any better if he is rewarded with a powerful position. I can't advocate further institutionalizing bigotry by supporting his appointment.
Summers is an academic who is willing to pontificate about subjects that he has no expertise on, bringing up fairly discredited science (it turns out that in countries where they don't have a particular bias against women in science, they don't have a difference between men and women in math scores), in a way that was hurtful to a *huge* percent of the population.
To put this in perspective, a person who pontificates that maybe the reason blacks aren't high performers in academia is that slavery bred high levels of academic intelligence out of them would be making a nasty comment about the intelligence of 14% of the population of America. Women are 51%. The person who pontificated about black people being stupid would never be given a position of power even in a Republican administration, because people rightly understand that "scientific" studies "proving" that black people are stupid are in fact total bullshit. However, it still seems vaguely plausible to people that men could possibly have a genetic advantage over women in math... even though every study indicates that women have an advantage over men in every verbal capacity, and no one has ever opined that men just can't cut it as great writers.
But this is actually not the most offensive thing Summers has said. I'd have given him something of a pass on pissing off me and every other woman in science, except that he's also said that we should ship toxic waste to impoverished countries because it's better to make poor people sick than rich people. *Seriously*. He argued that because of the health outcomes it obviously made sense to send the toxic waste to the poorer nations.
And then there's the line about Africa not being polluted enough. Sure he *might* have meant that Africa doesn't have enough heavy industry... but this demonstrates a pattern of the guy saying things that might, from a certain perspective, have a point, but saying it in the most offensive way possible. This guy will be a magnet for scandals and brouhahas, and it will overshadow anything valuable he has to say.
He is a bad choice for Obama. He will draw much fire, from the wrong people, and appointing him sends a painful message to American women and the entire Third World that Obama doesn't really care about offending them, which is not the message that a man who's going to depend on women coming out to re-elect him in 2012 and who claims he wants to heal the rifts with the rest of the world and improve US standing in the eyes of the rest of the planet wants to send.