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I find the case of Larry Summers and Harvard very interesting, given a conversation I had with a Harvard researcher a few years back: I mentioned that at my uni

I find the case of Larry Summers and Harvard very interesting, given a conversation I had with a Harvard researcher a few years back: I mentioned that at my university, females comprised 55% of the student population but had received 65% of the major entrance scholarships, and was immediately told "that makes sense; girls are smarter than boys". The fact that she had spent her life fighting against people who made exactly the same argument to justify women receiving fewer university places and fewer scholarships didn't seem to occur to her. (Incidentally, last year we still had a 55% female student population, but 85% of major entrance scholarships went to women. I suppose the argument would now be that girls have gotten that much smarter in the past three years...)

jacobolus 10y ago
I was a Harvard undergraduate at the time, and talked to numerous people involved in Faculty politics. Absolutely nobody who was even tangentially involved thought Summers was forced out primarily for his comments (though many were offended by them, as many were offended by his similarly inartful comments earlier in his career along the lines of “maybe some countries have too little pollution”). Summers was forced out because he made a long list of enemies picking political fights with numerous people at the university, without first doing the work to understand the status quo, the stakes, or other people’s positions. He fired popular staff members, unilaterally drove big shifts in budget, issued weird ultimatums, rudely disparaged people in public, interjected himself into academic departments’ internal decisions, and so on. In short, Summers lacked the patience, discretion, empathy, humility, and good judgment to be an effective leader in a context like the Harvard Faculty where everyone is at the top of their field and big egos abound. The comments about women in science were just a convenient public excuse to dump him. The narrative that Harvard Faculty just couldn’t handle Summers speaking truth to feminist power, or whatever, is a caricature.
ploxiln 10y ago
That's not a bad anecdote to point to as a counter-example of men being "unfairly favored", but it might not actually be "unfair" the other way either. I was top ranked in elementary and middle school, and in the top in math and science in high school, but (as you can tell from the trend) didn't care much about grades when I got to college. I was also done with applications and writing essays. I had been doing that stuff for a decade. I just wanted to focus on computer and software engineering, and it worked out pretty well for me. I even made good money doing interesting work in summer internships. I knew some other guys who treated college similarly (not a surprise we got along), and I also knew girls who were smart, and put in a lot more effort studying, in both high school and college. So, these statistics you present are rather believable. There are gender skews to what people are really motivated to work on, even when there doesn't seem to me to be really significant pressure either way. In addition to that, the "college admissions" game is an arms race that has advanced in sophistication over the years. You need leadership positions, an instrument, a sport, a foreign aid trip, a good sob story, advanced classes, grades, art, everything to get above the thousands of competitors there are for your slot in the Ivy League. There are a lot more girls putting in the effort to hit all those notes. Guys tend to focus on just a couple of them. More guys think "parents/colleges/society want me to do all this shit? fuck it, I'll just do my stuff". The result is a different path which can go similar distances in the end.

jacobolus 10y ago

I was a Harvard undergraduate at the time, and talked to numerous people involved in Faculty politics. Absolutely nobody who was even tangentially involved thought Summers was forced out primarily for his comments (though many were offended by them, as many were offended by his similarly inartful comments earlier in his career along the lines of “maybe some countries have too little pollution”). Summers was forced out because he made a long list of enemies picking political fights with numerous people at the university, without first doing the work to understand the status quo, the stakes, or other people’s positions. He fired popular staff members, unilaterally drove big shifts in budget, issued weird ultimatums, rudely disparaged people in public, interjected himself into academic departments’ internal decisions, and so on. In short, Summers lacked the patience, discretion, empathy, humility, and good judgment to be an effective leader in a context like the Harvard Faculty where everyone is at the top of their field and big egos abound. The comments about women in science were just a convenient public excuse to dump him. The narrative that Harvard Faculty just couldn’t handle Summers speaking truth to feminist power, or whatever, is a caricature.

ploxiln 10y ago

That's not a bad anecdote to point to as a counter-example of men being "unfairly favored", but it might not actually be "unfair" the other way either. I was top ranked in elementary and middle school, and in the top in math and science in high school, but (as you can tell from the trend) didn't care much about grades when I got to college. I was also done with applications and writing essays. I had been doing that stuff for a decade. I just wanted to focus on computer and software engineering, and it worked out pretty well for me. I even made good money doing interesting work in summer internships. I knew some other guys who treated college similarly (not a surprise we got along), and I also knew girls who were smart, and put in a lot more effort studying, in both high school and college. So, these statistics you present are rather believable. There are gender skews to what people are really motivated to work on, even when there doesn't seem to me to be really significant pressure either way. In addition to that, the "college admissions" game is an arms race that has advanced in sophistication over the years. You need leadership positions, an instrument, a sport, a foreign aid trip, a good sob story, advanced classes, grades, art, everything to get above the thousands of competitors there are for your slot in the Ivy League. There are a lot more girls putting in the effort to hit all those notes. Guys tend to focus on just a couple of them. More guys think "parents/colleges/society want me to do all this shit? fuck it, I'll just do my stuff". The result is a different path which can go similar distances in the end.