Lawrence H. Summers, on filling the gap "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.
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"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."
Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce
Lawrence H. Summers
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Rather than the simplistic non-issue - the what: whether girls can do things boys can do just as well boys can - the idea I'd have liked to see explored somewhere is the how, and the why of it. The easiest place to begin that pretty much taboo exploration is at the crux of a lot of these contemporary questions, the place where they all reveal a similar lacuna, a blank place on the page.
You can train a dog to do a lot of things. Some dogs are more trainable than others, but most dogs share that malleable quality to some degree. Working stock dogs, some of them, have a telepathic ability - or what seems like a telepathic ability - to follow the simplest commands into complex activities. But there must have been a time when the trainableness of dogs wasn't a general trait, when they were still close to the original wild canids they came from. So that the dogs who did have that quality were recognizable. And what happened was we selected the trainable, valued them, rewarded them, and in most cases, killed the untrainable.
We also learned to breed the prized examples of one desired trait with others, and to cross-breed for other traits, intelligence, height etc.
The obvious connection is for some reason so taboo it's dangerously groundbreaking to mention it.
I'm suggesting that's so people don't realize that they're being selected, bred, their genetic features shaped and molded, and have been for some time. That the Darwinian process never stopped, not even to this day, it just slowly shifted away from the "natural" world, to the control, conscious or otherwise, of human institutions and human environments.
And I'm suggesting that at some point, after you've raised generations of women to subservience and indirection, to believe they're incapable of certain "masculine" activities, and all the other varying attributes women have been raised to believe about themselves, and men with them, at some point you start breeding for those qualities, bogus as they were to start with.
When Summers says
"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..."
how old is that society? Where are its roots? What are its founding documents? Because I'm convinced those things become like a set of plans, a template, a standard to which consciously or not the breed is aimed.
So is "our society" this one, now? And what's that?
An aunt I spent childhood time with was a teenager before there were cars on the road as a matter of course. My family didn't have a televison in the house until I was 7. Those are two different societies right there, though they overlap linguistically and geographically. And both are different than the one Summers addresses as "our".
So I think that "our society" business needs particular attention, and definition. The little bit I know about the Iroqouis Confederacy has left me with the impression that at least some of the Eastern indigenous tribes had strong female leadership, not in the celebrity sense of politics and heroic action figures, but in the actual directing of the course of events. Wisdom that was backed up with power and traditions of honor and respect. Certainly that's not "our society".
Maybe President Summers needs to be reminded of the imprisoned women who were force-fed gruel through rubber tubes shoved down their throats, when they went into hunger strikes - after they'd been imprisoned for demanding the right to vote. Is that "our society"? Not as easy to answer, that one.
Because if that's not "our society" when did it change? Where on the timeline did "we" stop being a society that would do that to women who demanded the right to vote?
World War 2 perhaps. Though really it was a slow movement over time from that moment to this. 100 years ago women couldn't vote in "our society".
Things are better now, in some ways. But I think Summers needs to clarify what he means; not because his argument will be clearer and more precise, but so that the fallacy underneath it, and the bias that created it, will be too obvious to need describing, and we can get down to fighting about what's really going on.
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When Summers says
"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..."
it gets clearer that rather than a good-faith argument what we're looking at is cultural bias trying to preserve itself. Exceptionalism is the current meme for what that is.
True on the face of it, what's deeper in is so obviously not what Summers is saying that you have to start translating. It's as though there's a planet where all the colleges are, and they draw their faculties out of a kind of reincarnation/rebirth process from other nebulous worlds about which we know nothing.
His diagram posits an undescribed but necessary pool of value-neutral cultural nurseries, where the institutions that aren't discriminating can recruit their minority candidates. It's a lot like a more genteel affable version of the reasonable arguments against school integration itself, back in the 50's. Less than 50 years ago there were public arguments, in reasonable tones from men of influence, as to the unnecessary disruption school integration would bring. And those who argued against them were on the margins, getting beaten, and harrassed, and in more than a few cases, murdered. Less than 50 years ago in "our society".
And then there's the petulant shallow aggravation of the anti-affirmative-action champions of more recent times.
The trouble is there's this unspoken concept of "jubilee" - a day where all debts are canceled and the whole cultural group just "moves on". Only it only seems to apply to the powerful.
Slavery, and its less-legislated sisters unjust wages and intolerable working conditions, created fortunes that still exist in "our society", whose returns still support the heirs of the men who made them, and that's seen as well and good. But these social crimes were finally seen as immoral, and legislated against, and condemned legally, and stopped - for the most part. But the harm they caused, the disruption and damage, the altered lives and the who-can-calculate-them effects that made them outlawable, persist. And there you have the largest crack in Summer's edifice of "we're just built that way".
Things are like they are because of how they were, and that was not good how they were, that way was not a good way. He reduces the terms of the argument to things he can safely espouse, and leaves out the context entirely, achieving a calm reasoned tone to run the con, like the professional bureaucrat he is.
He does that with gender issues overall, talking about his daughters playing house with their toy trucks as though all there was in his world at that time was him, his wife, his daughters, and the trucks.
I've worked in daycare, I've seen kid-memes spread faster than you could write them down - among 4 and 5 year olds, ripples of like and/or dislike spreading around the break table like a change of direction in a flock of birds.
And television is what most of those kids went home to, not the cultural heart and arteries of a grandparent's stories.
It's too plain that Summers doesn't want to acknowledge the feedback loop of commercial television's pandering to audience demand while it sculpts that demand toward its own well-being, at the expense of everything else - including the well-being of the children it now raises.
Any discussion of gender differences, innate or cultural, elective or instinctual, that doesn't include the cultural presence of television as a third, and more culturally representative, parent; and, at this point, doesn't place it higher on the scale of influence than working parents in most children's lives, is either wishful thinking or an outright lie.
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The short versions: Cultural selection over time becomes genetic selection.
Arguments against altering provably harmful cultural norms that proceed from a premise of genetic inalterability are defensive posturing.
