The Summers Transcript

It's available here. Kevin Drum (from whom I found the link) doesn't pass judgement on Summers' remarks, but also misinterprets him in a subtle way, that I think needs to be quashed before it becomes a meme. He cites this as the key passage of the speech:

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. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.

And then Kevin writes:

Summers clearly says at various points that he's guessing, that he's provoking, that he's not an expert, that he hopes he's proved wrong, etc. At the same time, he also says very clearly (more than once) that of the three factors he discusses, he thinks socialization and discrimination are probably the least at fault for the low number of women in high-powered science and engineering positions.

I think the first half of this (about Summers hoping to be proved wrong, etc.) is more important than the second (about Summers' ranking of factors), for no other reason than that Summers disavows expertise. In other words, his expressed moral intent---amelioration of the disparity---trumps his limited empirical claim, which is easily subject to revision.

What's missing from the foregoing is looking at the third of the three factors that Summers identified as accounting for the underrepresentation of women in sciences:

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

So what Summers calls the "high-powered job hypothesis" in fact ranks above the two factors Kevin Drum highlights. This is crucial. Roughly speaking, the hypothesis is that the number of labor-hours required to attain advanced degrees in science and engineering, let alone professional practice in those fields, render female participation very difficult, on the grounds that mothers in our society continue to bear the majority responsibility for the raising of children. If this is what Summers thinks is the primary reason for female underrepresentation in the sciences---and I don't see how else to understand the paragraph I cited---then he plainly believes a social, not a biological factor to be the most important one. (And for the record, the reason for classifying academic discrimination as the tertiary cause among the three is that by the time women reach the point of choosing to attain advanced education---or choosing not to---the other factors have already played out. This is not minimizing the problem of discrimination. It's taking it absolutely seriously and realistically.)

So. With the text of Summers' speech in hand, I feel even more confident in the views I originally expressed on the matter. Some people need to get a life....