Women, men, math, and genius

Larry Summers' comments in January about potential differential ability in men and women as an explanation for the dearth of women in science have been turned over in the media to the point of paralytic boredom. The debate over his comments seems to have centered around academic freedom, with Summers' partisans suggesting that the politically correct elite are stifling academic freedom by not permitting unfettered intellectual inquiry. Recently, however, there was a debate between people who actually know something about the topic.

Spending a semester in a course on the political economy of gender has made clear to me the extent to which data in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology continue to be open to a fair amount of interpretation. However, I am less interested in the question of whether men and women score differently on the SAT (obviously, they do) than what such a difference might mean.

Most women experience enough discouragement or simple lack of encouragement in math and science that that on its own might seem a sufficient explanation for their absence in the higher echelons of achievement. However, as Pinker points out, even a small difference in ability could have a large payoff at the outer regions of the bell curve. In that case, we would have to be able to measure difference in ability.

And that is where the real question lies, in my opinion. When we think we are measuring intrinsic aptitude, is that really what we are doing? Science involves a lot of different activities and skill-sets. Evolutionary biology and theoretical astrophysics are very different pursuits. The kinds of cognitive skills needed in the various sciences vary at least to a degree. Even if we stick to mathematics, an area where ability would seem most easily testable, it is not clear that we accurately manage to capture what makes someone a great mathematician. In part, this is because tests are not fine-meshed enough to capture outliers at the high end--on the GRE, an 800 math score is currently the 92nd percentile.

Further, however, even if we are able to accurately measure intelligence, we don't take seriously enough that the question of nature versus nurture has become passé. Whatever biological hardwiring we have never comes to expression in a manner unaffected by the environment. The class differences in performance on standardized tests and the fact that IQ scores are apparently increasing (although, I suspect, for other reasons than the article suggests) should be enough to demonstrate that fact.

Finally, Summers' suggestion that men and women simply have different preferences regarding how much they want to work is perhaps what one might expect from an economist who does not take Marxist analysis of social reproduction very seriously. That is, our society depends on someone making the choice to raise the children. The work of Gary Becker, among others, suggests that whoever ends up doing so will end up paying a high cost on the labor market. The way to combat the privatization of the cost of social reproduction is, of course, to socialize it, as the Scandinavian countries have to a degree done. The solution remains imperfect, as Shulamith Firestone pointed out, as long as women still have to bear the children. So ahoy the little pods that we'll be carrying around a hundred years from now with our fetuses inside.

Not quite ready to give up on the radical feminist idea that women can have it all, I still want to work for a fundamental restructuring of society. Perhaps what we need is fewer female math geniuses and more female political geniuses--people who are willing to fight and pay the price for future generations of women to be able to have fulfilling work and fulfilling family life. Separatism may be dead, but not necessarily because it was a bad solution. The price of radical political change is high, both personally and otherwise.