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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (96564)	1/24/2005 12:33:41 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793706

This is the rest of the article from today's NY Times. It is written from a very soft science perspective. It is quoting mostly from psychologists and sociologists. And I guess that is where Dr. Summers is coming from - a very soft science perspective. Any real studies of innate difference have to come from biologists, physicists and geneticists. They would have to find something in the DNA. They would have to find something in the DNA that determines sex has something to do with the DNA that determines intelligence. Short of that, it is all soft, nurture stuff that will allow Dr. Summers to get away with his bs. And this remains true even though a given score on standardized math tests is less significant for women than for men. Dr. Valian, of Hunter, observes that among women and men taking the same advanced math courses in college, women with somewhat lower SAT scores often do better than men with higher scores. "The SAT's turn out to underpredict female and overpredict male performance," she said. Again, the reasons remain mysterious. Dr. Summers also proposed that perhaps women did not go into science because they found it too abstract and cold-blooded, offering as anecdotal evidence the fact that his young daughter, when given toy trucks, had treated them as dolls, naming them "Daddy truck" and "baby truck." But critics dryly observed that men had a longstanding tradition of naming their vehicles, and babying them as though they were humans. Yu Xie, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and a co-author with Dr. Shauman of "Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes" (2003), said he wished there was less emphasis on biological explanations for success or failure, and more on effort and hard work. Among Asians, he said, people rarely talk about having a gift or a knack or a gene for math or anything else. If a student comes home with a poor grade in math, he said, the parents push the child to work harder. "There is good survey data showing that this disbelief in innate ability, and the conviction that math achievement can be improved through practice," Dr. Xie said, "is a tremendous cultural asset in Asian society and among Asian-Americans." In many formerly male-dominated fields like medicine and law, women have already reached parity, at least at the entry levels. At the undergraduate level, women outnumber men in some sciences like biology. Thus, many argue that it is unnecessary to invoke "innate differences" to explain the gap that persists in fields like physics, engineering, mathematics and chemistry. Might scientists just be slower in letting go of baseless sexism? C. Megan Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale who led the American delegation to an international conference on women in physics in 2002, said there was clear evidence that societal and cultural factors still hindered women in science. Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people - half men, half women - rated mathematics papers on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was "John T. McKay" than when the author was "Joan T. McKay." There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave. Dr. Spelke, of Harvard, said, "It's hard for me to get excited about small differences in biology when the evidence shows that women in science are still discriminated against every stage of the way." A recent experiment showed that when Princeton students were asked to evaluate two highly qualified candidates for an engineering job - one with more education, the other with more work experience - they picked the more educated candidate 75 percent of the time. But when the candidates were designated as male or female, and the educated candidate bore a female name, suddenly she was preferred only 48 percent of the time. The debate is sure to go on. Sandra F. Witelson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said biology might yet be found to play some role in women's careers in the sciences. "People have to have an open mind," Dr. Witelson said.