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.

Accomplice to a murder or potential date?

Imagine my suprise at turning to the arts section of the NYT today and discovering an article on a new installation at the Whitney. Not that interesting, you say? Well, the article opens with a lead-in on the composer of the music for the installation. It happens I know the guy. It happens that he is an accomplice to murder. It happens that the reason I know him is that my friend tried to hook me up with him the last time I was in Norway. Before telling me he was an accomplice to the second-most famous murder in Norway in the last 20 years (after "trippeldrapet"--a triple murder for inheritance). Thanks, darling. I've always wanted to date a death-metal musician. Or something.

I'd recommend visiting the installation, by the way, if for no other reason than that my friend's boyfriend (who is sweet and has never killed or assisted in killing anyone) plays on the musical soundtrack.

More seriously, the Times started a series that highlights the continuing importance of class in America. While I'm not too impressed with the level of analysis so far, that anyone is talking about the wholly taboo subject of class is encouraging to me. The Marxist dictum that "all that is solid melts into air" in the current world is given an interesting twist by the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek. He considers the presentation of the markets as rational places that reflect real-world considerations the premier example of ideology in the modern world. In other words, markets present themselves as responsive to material, on-the-ground facts. This stock went up for xyz reason, this currency fell for abc reason. Translation: although markets seem ephemeral and irrational, they really are about actual people and products--a classic ideological move to cover up the fact that markets really are ephemeral and irrational.

(Yes, I will blog about the Times. I'm retro that way--I also don't think blogging is the greatest advance in the history of journalism nor that globalization has completely voided all classical economic analyses nor that the rise of the religious right is unprecedented and inexplicable nor that religion is outdated or the opium of the people nor... well, more later.)