Summers and Old Media (#51542)
by Richard Henry Morgan on January 27, 2005 at 8:53 AM

For a taste on how some Old Media handled the Summers story, look no further than the current Time magazine. It has Summers saying that "innate differences might help explain why fewer women succeed in math and science ..." Actually, he said it might help explain why they are under-represented in leadership positions at the top of the sciences.

Time then goes on to quote Nancy Hopkins, a top biologist at MIT (Time doesn't mention she is a member of the NAS):"It's not appropriate for the man who holds in his hands the future of the brightest minds in America to say that 50% don't have the right aptitude".

A not very clever undergraduate could point out that not only has Time misconstrued his remarks, but Hopkins went one further. Fine. It's not the job of Time to ride herd on every quote, and show how it is wrong. But nowhere in the article is there a single quote in defense of Summers, as were provided by Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology there, or any number of female professors at Harvard.

There's no a priori reason why the extraordinary sex ratios at the upper end of math scores wouldn't have SOME effect on distribution of professors by sex in science institutions. If academic science (and other scientific) institutions are even a rough sorting mechanism by math aptitude, one would likely see precisely the pattern (but not precisely the numbers) put forward by Prof. Kemp: lesser and and lesser representation of females in sciences as you climb the scientific hierarchy.

The article does point to one other factor: Summers' decision to tenure "rising young scholars". As a group of female Harvard faculty put it, females tend to mature in their scholarship later, which puts them at a disadvantage with this change. Just what motivated the change isn't clear. Harvard had a rep for stingy tenure and high workloads for junior faculty, making it tougher and tougher to attract entry-level tenure track candidates at the highest level, again making it harder to grant tenure, etc., etc., in a vicious circle. Whatever the explanation, it seems rather implausible that Harvard, the red-hot center of PC in the Universe, engages in sexual discrimination at a level higher than a local community college.

I think if you compare coverage, you'll find more complete and better coverage of the issues at the Crimson and at volokh.com, then you'll find at such major institutions as the Boston Globe, the Times, and Time.