Harvard to Invest 50 Million in Diversification
Topic: The Summers Saga
So Larry's statements have "provoked" Harvard alright!

Yesterday, two committees that were set up to study ways to increase gender and racial diversity in Harvard's faculty, came out with reports.

They recommend:
-a new senior post will be created (the Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development) to oversee the hiring of more female and minority faculty
-open about 40 new faculty positions, where women and minorities have "priority"
-departments will be asked to increase the amount of "formal mentoring" to female and minority grad students and postdocs
-Harvard will assist spouses/partners of faculty in finding jobs
-and Harvard may do something about child care (well we'll see ... I won't hold my breath)

The cost? Unclear ... Harvard will set aside about 50 million ... which is nothing if you consider that this institution has a 2.5 billion dollar endowment.

To read up on it more see the articles in the Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Gazette.

Comments?

A female colleague told me this morning - "That's nice - if you want to work here."

Yes Harvard is still a brutal place for a junior faculty. As I've said before, due to Harvard's status, this institution doesn't feel the need to compete with other universities - and thus can get away with treating their junior faculty like untouchables.

But my favorite comment was by a junior at Harvard, Rosie Thede, in a in a NY Times article:

I think it's great. This is what [Larry Summers] intended to happen when he made those remarks. His idea was that we should study this more. Even if the reaction was harsh, this is where we're supposed to be.

Baby Steps at Harvard
Topic: The Summers Saga
So a couple of days ago, I received an interesting email from Harvard, with the heading Harvard's Family Care Survey. It would seem that Harvard is attempting to address criticism about Larry Summer's comments (right) regarding women and science. As mentioned previously, one of the biggest conflicts for many women (and many men) is between work and raising a family. Mighty Harvard, relying on it's reputation, has never felt the need to offer anything to little puny postdocs. Let's face the facts ... if Harvard mandated that all postdocs must be chained to their bench, and whipped at regular intervals, there would still be postdocs applying to Harvard labs.

But Larry's gaffe changed all that.

So now Harvard cares about puny postdocs. So much so, that there is a new Harvard sponsored Child Care scholarship. From another email I quote:

Harvard Medical School’s Child Care Scholarship Program provides assistance to HMS and HSDM employees to help offset the costs of childcare for working parents. Scholarships range from $1000.00 to $5000.00 and are awarded to eligible faculty, post docs, and staff ...

All this reminds me of my days at Columbia when the graduate student threatened to unionize. All of a sudden Columbia found a heart and started offering pay raises and scholarships, and with a wink declared we're so nice to you, why would you ever want to join some evil union?

In the end things move not through capitalistic competition, but through fluid dynamics (the higher the pressure, the more stuff you can squirt out.)

Previously:
Sigma Xi Postdoc Survey.
Women and Science stats1.
Women and Science stats2.

Summers Saga - The Vote
Topic: The Summers Saga
Well it seems like Larry Summers is in trouble now. Regardless of how you see the issues, it will be hard for him to be an effective president after Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted for two propositions aimed at Larry's presidency.

Harvard Crimson article.

Boston Globe article.

You may not agree with Larry Summers comments, and of course there are other issues, but unfortunately this whole episode is reminiscent of a witch-hunt.

Newspapers go bananas over Summers
Topic: The Summers Saga
Wow, Larry did provoke a lot of debate. And I'm glad that this "public conversation" is occurring.

Too often in the US, debates are ideological and not factual. Some examples are explored here in the NY Times. But now the facts are coming out ... and guess what ... it's more complicated than people first thought (including Larry).

So are family and academia incompatible?

From a column by Cathy Green in the Globe:

That is, quite simply, true. In a 2001 study by University of Vanderbilt psychologists David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow, nearly a third of talented female graduate students in math and science -- and only 9 percent of the men -- said it was important to work part-time for at least a part of their careers. More egalitarian family roles would solve the problem.

But here are more facts from another OpEd in the New York Times:

Until the last 30 or so years, few women studied the sciences, so there was little mystery about why most people in those professions were men. Over the past generation, however, our research shows, there has been a truly stunning change.

Women's share of the Bachelors, Master and Doctorate degrees has been rising ... if trends continue they should reach parity (or even surpass men says I). This can be seen in the chart on the left (also in today's NY Times).

So in the end I'm cheering for the facts, opinionists and pundits - "go to hell".

Degrees in Physics and Women
Topic: The Summers Saga
With regards to Larry Summers' comments about women in science (see previous entries), I just saw this article in the NYTimes Science section:

Women in Physics Match Men in Success

Very Interesting:

Dr. Ivie said the main reason fewer women made it to the top in physics was simply that fewer started at the bottom. At each job level, she said, the fraction of women matched what would be expected for women advancing at the same rate as men. And at top-tier universities, the percentage of female physics professors is low because many current professors earned their Ph.D.'s in the 1970's or earlier, when the field was almost entirely male, and have not yet retired.

Instead, the sex disparity arises earlier in the pipeline, between high school and college. Nearly half of students taking high school physics are girls, but fewer than a quarter of the bachelor's degrees in physics go to women.

The level of women in physics differs from country to country, hinting that societal influences may have a great effect.

In France and Turkey, women account for more than a quarter of physics Ph.D. degrees, as against only a tenth of physics Ph.D.'s in Germany and Switzerland.

In the US it's 18% according to the article.

Also the number of women in physics has been rising steadily over the last 3 decades. Are the innate differences disappearing?

Original data from the American Institute of Physics

Larry Releases Transcript
Topic: The Summers Saga
Well here is the transcript!

This was part of a speech on gender ratio imbalance in Math and Engineering. What is the ratio of men to women in other fields? High up, it's not much better.

Well he starts off with a strange comment:

It is after all not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for others who are considering being in that group. To take a set of diverse examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it's important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation.

What a bizarre mix of things to say!

And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to.

I agree! A career in the Sciences (or most professions) is not compatible with raising a family. But I think that this is also true for fathers. Larry may have a point in that usually women bare the brunt of the child rearing. However I believe that it's easier for husbands to dump this responsibility on their wives and this maybe facilitated by the type of society we live in.

... and the work that Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz are doing will, I'm sure, over time, contribute greatly to our understanding of these issues and for all I know may prove my conjectures completely wrong.

I'll have to look in to these studies ... Now on to IQ ...

I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right-it's something people can argue about-that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well.

Well it's hard to say whether these 5th graders are already "socialized". Also why are there more women (than men) enrolling in college. Does US society affect this? In Canada medical school is dominated by WOMEN!

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

Well that's still up for debate. My own opinion is that the clash between family and career, and socialization (the two of which ARE related) are probably the main cause. The lack of support from institutions (such as Harvard which due to its prestige can get away with throwing scraps to it's professors) is also a big problem. Here at the Medical campus the "new research building" was recently completed. I was told that when asked what facilities should be included, most faculty and staff replied "daycare facilities". What did they build? A gym!

I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.

Cute Larry... Well if anything this episode will be good in the longterm. These are issues that need to be discussed.

The only other question is: Will Larry survive?

Topic: The Summers Saga
Well Larry Summers is hot water now.

From the Harvard Crimson:

One of those senior faculty members said that in order to stay on as president, Summers must have the support of a critical mass of the most important faculty members.

The speeches and strong applause at the meeting, the professor said, indicate that Summers does not have the support of that critical mass.

I think that what people outside of Harvard have to understand is that this crisis has been brewing for a while. People have criticized his style (often said to be overbearing).

From a second Crimson article:

They said Summers' tenure has been marked by a style of leadership more akin to a for-profit corporation or governmental bureaucracy than an academic institution.

And the latest incident (his comments on sexual differences) just added oil to the fire. Unfortunately Larry has been criticized for stifling debate and now his latest comments have been criticized, not in the spirit of open academic debate, but in the name of political correctness.

Boys, Girls and Larry Summers
Topic: The Summers Saga
Hi folks,

OK it's my turn to rant about good old Larry. Well if you didn't know, I'm a postdoc at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Cell Biology in Tom Rapoport's Lab.

Is Larry right or wrong? Well some have accused him of being insensitive, others a bigot ... but ... the guy was raising some important issues, and should not be dismissed or cheered ... these issues should BE INVESTIGATED ... well actually they are by many people. Are there differences in the sexes? Yes, even anatomically the female and male brains are different. How about mental processes? Again yes, but not exactly in the ways portrayed by those on the political right or left. Apparently if you plot the male population on a curve of intelligence you have more smart ones and more morons as compared to females. But do you trust these IQ tests??? I don't ... those social sciences are full of ... In contrast, lets look at college enrollment where women outnumber men in most universities! However I don't think you can easily say that women are smarter than men (or vice versa) or that it's it's in their genes. Many studies point to men as taking more risks than women (thus making women better drivers).

So from a sociobiology perspective what might we predict about the intellect of men & women? The basic line (in most species) is that have a daughter ensures grandkids while having a son is a risk (many grandkids to no grandkids). Because women have all the important reproductive equipment (i.e. uterus, mammary glands etc ...) while men have almost nothing (hey, we provide genetic information and little else) women are valuable and men are not worth much (i.e. women are the equivalent of groceries while men are lotto tickets). Women could probably have a sustainable population without men.So as a guy, should I feel like crap? Maybe, but fortunately raising a human child is a lot of work and requires a heavy investment from both partners in a relationship (well at least back in the days before daycare and ). So this fact alone tends to buffer the evolutionarily pressures on sex based differences seen in other species.

So is there any difference? Obviously there are differences, but instead of claiming to know what they are, people should go and study this fascinating problem.

Is that why there are less men than women getting tenure at Harvard (and the ratio is getting worse of late)? I doubt that it's the full story. I'm sure its a mix of many things. Maybe arrogant profs are more likely to get tenure at Harvard and this is linked to testosterone? Who knows.

Stay tuned for part 2 ... what can be done at Harvard to help reverse this trend (and help others too) ...