[extropy-chat] Harvard president criticized over comments

[Damien Broderick]

At 08:21 AM 1/19/2005 -0500, Keith wrote:

>For most purposes, the wider distribution doesn't have much effect.  But 
>when you are looking at the population of those out more than 6 standards 
>from the center (both directions) they are something like 80% plus male.

Suppose that at 6 sigmas--IQ circa 190 or 200--this is correct (assuming, 
implausibly perhaps, that cultural interaction with genetic variation has 
no bearing at all on the expression of those alleles). Here's how the NYT 
summarizes the offending remarks:

<At Friday's conference, Mr. Summers discussed possible reasons so few 
women were on the science and engineering faculties at research 
universities, and he said he would be provocative.

Among his hypotheses were that faculty positions at elite universities 
required more time and energy than married women with children were willing 
to accept, that innate sex differences might leave women less capable of 
succeeding at the most advanced mathematics and that discrimination may 
also play a role, participants said.>

It does seem simply true that mothers in our culture are less likely than 
father to be career monomaniacs. It seems very likely that 
`discrimination', an unwieldy catch-all term, does play a role (otherwise 
girls would not have caught up so easily with boys in school). The question 
then is whether innate sex differences *at the 5 or 6 sigma level*--of 
mental ability, concentration, creativity and motivation--could explain why 
`so few women were on the science and engineering faculties'.

Obviously, if the test of becoming a professor were whether a candidate is 
taller than 6 foor 5 inches, most profs would be men. But if the height 
test were less extreme, the excess of males might be sharply reduced. In 
the case of IQ and other salient abilities, even this analogy fails, since 
women and men have the same means.

How smart and driven are most professors at such universities? Most of 
those I've met have been quick and smart, but not spectacularly so. But 
then my experience with Ivy League universities is sadly limited.

Damien Broderick