And I thought Bob Jones was nuts...
President of Harvard University, Laurence Summers made some interesting comments at the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce on January 14. Not any idiot can go to the college but apparently any idiot can run it.
I have quoted some of his statements and provided an interpretation of each statement below. The link to the speech has the transcript of the question and answer session at the end. It is well worth the read.
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "All my ideas come from white men."
Quote: "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?"
Interpretation: "This girl I was sleeping with once told me this story that basically made me come to the realization women are lazy."
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "I did some crazy math and worked out not only woman are lazy but dumb too."
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "Why don't women just give it up? What's with this persistence thing?"
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "White men are smart everyone else is stupid."
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "I just wanted to reinforce the point that if you leave work to have a baby you are screwed."
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "I just spent the last 30 minutes speaking out of my ass."
I have quoted some of his statements and provided an interpretation of each statement below. The link to the speech has the transcript of the question and answer session at the end. It is well worth the read.
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "All my ideas come from white men."
Quote: "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?"
Interpretation: "This girl I was sleeping with once told me this story that basically made me come to the realization women are lazy."
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "I did some crazy math and worked out not only woman are lazy but dumb too."
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "Why don't women just give it up? What's with this persistence thing?"
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "White men are smart everyone else is stupid."
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "I just wanted to reinforce the point that if you leave work to have a baby you are screwed."
Quote: "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."
Interpretation: "I just spent the last 30 minutes speaking out of my ass."
posted by mochi at 8:00 AM
2 Comments:
Hi Mochi!
Looking for a few good thinkers!
Would like to invite you to enter the essay contest at:
News Snipet-Jack
The responses to the transcript are wide ranging, as illustrated by this NY Times piece in today's issue 2/19/05. One of the more interesting points states clearly why his statements were meant to be a secret...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/18/education/18harvard.html?pagewanted=2&incamp=article_popular_1
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