Larry Summers

Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury and Harvard President, is being talked about for the Treasury position again. This has caused some consternation in the leftosphere. There may be good reasons for opposing him, but the most frequently cited one, his supposed misogyny, is nonsense. It his based on a speech he gave to a conference pondering the paucity of women in tenured positions in math, physics, and engineering. Here is a transcript of that speech.

First some facts: there are relatively few women in tenured positions in the above subjects, historically women in science have faced great discrimination, and in recent times women have overcome discrimination to become a strong presence in other fields from construction to law to medicine.

So why are physics and math so resistant? Discrimination, overt and other, is one plausible explanation. If Summers had stopped there his speech would have been forgotten. Instead he went on to suggest that differences between men and women in interest, career committment, and even aptitude might be factors. These notions may be correct or not, but they probably don't seem too preposterous to be considered by anybody except academic feminists. In any case, the outrage ultimately pushed him out of the Harvard presidency.

I can understand why women think that this kind of thinking is exactly what has justified centuries of discrimination and exclusion - and they are right. Nonetheless, Summers has some useful suggestions. Maybe the academic career training track has unneccessary minefields for women. Maybe discrimination is still a large factor. Those things need to be considered and attacked.

It certainly doesn't surprise me that physicists are male chauvinist pigs - physics is pretty testoserone drenched. So too are medicine, the law, and construction, so why have women done relatively well there?

In the end, however, equality of outcome is too blunt a test of discrimination and hanging Larry Summers for noting that is unreasonable.