In 2005 then-Harvard president started a firestorm when he suggested that women were underrepresented in STEM fields because of genetic differences in academic ability. Pinker argued that people were being too politically correct, and suggested that the (true) fact of genetic differences between men implies that there could be a genetic difference in cognitive ability.
But the assumed “fact” that women were statistically less skilled than men in STEM fields was already starting to disintegrate in 2005, as boys were falling behind academically and girls were accelerating, a trend continuing in to 2021. It is ridiculous to think that women somehow got better STEM genes in the space of 40 years. Sociological and political/economic factors are clearly responsible for the change and current discrepancy.
So the idea that the difference is “genetic” is horseshit and has been horseshit since long before 2005. Specifically, it is a bold scientific claim that contradicted current and 2005-era understanding of human biology, and requires far more evidence than some economist’s musing. Summers was wrong (factually and morally) to suggest otherwise and Pinker was wrong to defend it.
Note that Pinker didn’t merely defend Summers’s right to make unfactual remarks. Pinker defended Summers on the merits. I think he continued to defend these views as recently as 2014. In my view this (along with Pinker’s general reactionary tendencies) gives people a good reason to suspect that he’s a sexist jerk who can’t be trusted to engage with “cancel culture” issues honestly.
>But the assumed “fact” that women were statistically less skilled than men in STEM fields was already starting to disintegrate in 2005, as boys were falling behind academically and girls were accelerating, a trend continuing in to 2021.
Summers' claim is not incompatible with this observation. Not only disagreeing with Summers/Pinker but questioning their fundamental standing as "good faith actors" on these grounds is sad, but unfortunately pretty common. Your assertions about the grounding or lack thereof of these ideas in 2005 are simply false, and there's a reason why Summers is still remembered as an egregiously noteworthy case of incipient cancel culture.
This seems to be the standard middlebrow recourse for having to deal with uncomfortable ideas - find a shoddy, overconfident "debunking" of the inconvenient expert view from a trusted source (this will often rely on obvious misconstruals of the claims that the expert actually made), then call the experts "bad faith actors" when they continue to espouse said views.
> why Summers is still remembered as an egregiously noteworthy case of incipient cancel culture.
Come on, man. If you’re the president of an organization and you get yourself into a situation where the majority of your women employees think you’re a reactionary bigoted jerk, then it doesn’t really matter if you actually deserved it or if you merely made a PR mistake. It doesn’t even matter if it’s due to an unfair media feeding frenzy! You are the president and you badly failed in your mission to lead that organization.
Summers absolutely deserved to lose his job as president (which was a voluntary resignation). Even if you give him the greatest possible benefit of the doubt, his actions were profoundly irresponsible leadership. And he didn’t lose tenure, he just lost a cushy side gig. Other university/corporate presidents have lost their job for far less.
>If you’re the president of an organization and you get yourself into a situation where the majority of your women employees think you’re a reactionary bigoted jerk
If Summers' comments trigger this sentiment then I think it's fair to label this as "egregiously noteworthy." It's similar to the exaggerated claims we see with regularity nowadays that those with unpopular views must be punished because they're making their peers "feel unsafe" - there was in fact an (undoubtedly less-enlightened) time when this sort of teeth-gnashing was seen as unprofessional.
> Specifically, [the “variability hypothesis”] is a bold scientific claim that contradicted current and 2005-era understanding of human biology, and requires far more evidence than some economist’s musing. Summers was wrong (factually and morally) to suggest otherwise and Pinker was wrong to defend it.
It is very much a Flying Spaghetti Monster problem: at this point the preponderance of evidence is that there is no inherent difference in the reasoning abilities of men and women, and that any measured difference is much more easily explained by societal factors than genetics. The default hypothesis is that there is no difference and I have not seen any convincing evidence otherwise - evidence which purports to show a difference is always tainted beyond usefulness.
Your argument is equivalent to the observation that I haven’t personally mapped out all of Earth’s orbit so how can I prove there’s no Flying Spaghetti Monster? It is not very convincing!
Everyone already agrees that there aren't meaningful mean-level differences between the sexes, aside from in a small handful of personality traits or irrelevant physical traits.
You still haven't addressed why different variances (for which there is a lot of evidence) in one or more of interests/traits/skills are a nonstarter as an explanation for an outcome gap at extreme percentiles.
I'd be the first to agree that the burden of proof is on Pinker and Summers as far as advancing it from hypothesis to theory goes. But that's distinct from claiming the hypothesis itself is a nonstarter.
Summers did, read his exact words. He's not only talking about gender balance in science but about top performers specifically.
Also now that you mention it, there are mean level differences at a young age in interests (people vs things), which is also a plausible explanation for gender disparity in STEM, whether that difference is genetic or cultural or both.
The documented median and variability differences are modest. They're enough to explain 20% women at the +4 SD level if I recall correctly. But there are too many people in STEM fields for them to be so selective.
That seems to be in line with what Summers said. Pinker talked about gender balance specifically though.
> They're enough to explain 20% women at the +4 SD level if I recall correctly
That's right if we're looking at univariable distributions.
> But there are too many people in STEM fields for them to be so selective.
Actually I agree now that the variability hypothesis is insufficient to explain why there's so many more men than women that self-select into STEM.
I think a more plausible explanation is mean differences in interests (which may or may not be genetic).
The variability hypothesis can possibly help to explain things like why most chess champions are men, but it can't explain why most people that play chess in the first place are men.
In 2005 then-Harvard president started a firestorm when he suggested that women were underrepresented in STEM fields because of genetic differences in academic ability. Pinker argued that people were being too politically correct, and suggested that the (true) fact of genetic differences between men implies that there could be a genetic difference in cognitive ability.
But the assumed “fact” that women were statistically less skilled than men in STEM fields was already starting to disintegrate in 2005, as boys were falling behind academically and girls were accelerating, a trend continuing in to 2021. It is ridiculous to think that women somehow got better STEM genes in the space of 40 years. Sociological and political/economic factors are clearly responsible for the change and current discrepancy.
So the idea that the difference is “genetic” is horseshit and has been horseshit since long before 2005. Specifically, it is a bold scientific claim that contradicted current and 2005-era understanding of human biology, and requires far more evidence than some economist’s musing. Summers was wrong (factually and morally) to suggest otherwise and Pinker was wrong to defend it.
Note that Pinker didn’t merely defend Summers’s right to make unfactual remarks. Pinker defended Summers on the merits. I think he continued to defend these views as recently as 2014. In my view this (along with Pinker’s general reactionary tendencies) gives people a good reason to suspect that he’s a sexist jerk who can’t be trusted to engage with “cancel culture” issues honestly.