Interesting News For Larry Summers, But Too Late

From the Tuesday NY Times:

Women in Physics Match Men in Success

By KENNETH CHANG

Only about one-eighth of the physics professors at Harvard are women, a statistic that might seem to support the recent assertion by its president, Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, that fewer women than men are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. He also suggested that a difference in "intrinsic  aptitude" between the sexes might help explain the disparity.

A report released Friday by the American Institute of Physics offers a contradictory conclusion: after they earn a bachelor's degree in physics, American women are just as successful as men at wending their way up the academic ladder.

...Dr. Ivie said the main reason fewer women made it to the top in physics was simply that fewer started at the bottom. At each job level, she said, the fraction of women matched what would be expected for women advancing at the same rate as men. And at top-tier universities, the percentage of female physics professors is low because many current professors earned their Ph.D.'s in the 1970's or earlier, when the field was almost entirely male, and have not yet retired.

Instead, the sex disparity arises earlier in the pipeline, between high school and college. Nearly half of students taking high school physics are girls, but fewer than a quarter of the bachelor's degrees in physics go to women.

"That's where the drop-off point in physics is," Dr. Ivie said. "That's where they need to look."

Whether that contradicts Larry Summers' suggestion that women are deterred by the grim career path, as the opening paragraphs suggest, is a matter of opinion.  One might presume that college women are able to assess their lifestyle choices before electing to pursue a B.S. in physics.

Regardless, critics of the Harvard President remain ascendant.  And I especially like Summers' new "More Mr. Nice Guy" policy:

He promised professors that they would no longer experience the intimidation, anger and hurt feelings that many of them have reported in his three-and-a-half-year tenure.

"To start, I pledge to you that I will seek to listen more and more carefully and to temper my words and actions in ways that convey respect and help us work together more harmoniously."

Golly, professors experiencing intimidation, anger, and hurt feelings in the workplace?  Welcome to our world.

More on Summers' initial comments here.

Comments

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

Women earn 18% of the physics Phds. Hey, that's about as well as they do on 'Jeopardy!'.

[Dave Schuler]

It may be worth mention that it's a pretty common practice for university physics departments to weed out of the total pool of prospective majors those that the faculty believed could succeed as professional physicists—the number of professional physicists is pretty small and isn't growing much. At my alma mater this used to be done by requiring a specific course for the major. 80% of those who enrolled for this class failed the course (disqualifying them for the major)—a gatekeeper functionality.

By the time a student has earned an undergraduate major in physics a lot of weeding out has already been done.

[papertiger]

TO me this is an issue of supposed freedom of speech among academics. How your given quite a wide lattitude as long as your subject matter is within the strictures of liberal orthodoxy("little Eichmans" in the WTC). And how it's quickly squelched when the subject is one of academia's pet causes (women's equality).

It seems some speech is more equal then others.

[Kevin Murphy]

As someone who actually has a Physics BS ('82), I can state that there weren't any women who graduated in my class, there were only two who started out Freshman year in the physics for physics majors sequence, both of whom opted for EE following that experience, and I can only remember one female physics grad student (not that there weren't more, but she was the only one who was a TA etc). I'm happy to see the number has increased.

On another note, there is a big difference between saying fewer women than men can hack it in the hard sciences and women can't hack it in the hard sciences.

[Bostonian]

As a woman with a BS in physics ('87), I have to say that the only "weeding out" I ever saw was the coursework itself.

Dave Schuler's comments notwithstanding, I don't think the physics department sat down to figure out how to get rid of people who can't do it. It just happens.

[BumperStickerist]

fwiw - the aspect that's been lost is that Summers is talking about the top-top end of the physics spectrum.

The arguments against Summers is that he's expressing a view about women in general, rather than what he's been expressing. Which is convenient.

Omar Shariff, noted actor and bridge expert, expressed a similar view when he said that women are generally better bridge players than men, but are not great bridge players.

To my knowledge, there's no intrinsic barrier to playing bridge.

A similar expression of the distinction Summers is talking about can be found in chess. Sure, the Polgar sisters have some serious chops, but they're an anomaly at the *top* level of chess play.

Admittedly, Omar Shariff is way better looking than Larry Summers, and his was more an observation than a hypothesis, but watching female *lawyers* get upset about what Summers didn't say, and then bringing Title IX into the mix, is just dog-piling.

Summers was talking about top flight physicists - let's leave the high school physics teachers and dept chairs of Podunk U. out of that equation.

[Jack Tanner]

'He promised professors that they would no longer experience the intimidation, anger and hurt feelings that many of them have reported in his three-and-a-half-year tenure.'

I don't believe that's possible. I believe there's a saying about faculty politics that the fighting is so fierce because the stakes are so small. I don't think all the Prozac in the world could keep any college faculty in a happy place. My Dad was a part time instructor at a number of colleges and one reason he never accepted a full time job is that he didn't like the environment. He was an ex-Marine and college football player and felt he didn't, like fit in. Obviously it's a generalization but one of the attractions of the Ivory Tower is that it protects both students and faculty from the outside world and as we all know that has a lot of negative consequences.

[Tom Grey - Liberty Dad]

Where is the data?
Like, specifically, how many men get 800 Math SAT scores, how many women?

I think the politically incorrect facts are that not too many women are scoring 800s in Math. An 800 math SAT is prolly among the best indicators of likely TOP physics success -- I wonder if there are better indicators for high school students. I doubt it; I'm almost certain high GPAs are not as good an indication.

Yet High Schools often report more women than men "doing well" in math. Yes, in normal math. Not necessarily at the top.

I'd guess it's less imbalanced in Verbal scores, but still with more men getting 800s.

By the way, aren't many of those protesting usually claiming that there DOES exist a "gay" gene, for sexual orientation?

[Forbes]

Tom Grey--Good point. The rebuttal to the questions raised by Summers is: socialization--improve the academic environment for women. Those are "nurture" arguments, while the gay sexual orientation claim is a "nature" argument. The logic escapes me.

Though, I find the nature vs nurture proposition a false dichotomy, as it's more likely to be nature and nurture that supply the various outcomes we observe.