I work as a heretic within my field, public administration, because I have criticized affirmative
action while the Code of Ethics of the American Society for Public Administration commits members
to quote, promote affirmative action.
Larry Summers too criticized affirmative action, yet it was a greater heresy along with a pocketful
of peccadillos that got him, after a year of confessing his error, fired from the presidency
of Harvard University.
He suggested the possibility of a biological basis for the under-representation of women
in high-end scientific professions.
Let's be clear from the start about what he did not say.
He did not say that in general women are less intelligent than men, though that is what
even my brightest undergraduates give as the answer on the first day of class.
Neither did he say, as a large body of psychological research suggests, that women are less talented
in the kinds of cognitive skills that are especially relevant to science and engineering,
abstract reasoning, spatial visualization and other non-computational forms of mathematics.
What he did say, and I'll simply quote it so that you've got it here, it does appear
that on many, many different human attributes, height, weight, propensity for criminality,
overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability, there is relatively clear evidence
There is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and a female population.
If one is talking about physicists at a top 25 research university, one is talking about
people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one out of
1 out of 5,000 or 1 out of 10,000 class. That's the picture we have here. That is the normal
distribution of 73 different cognitive abilities tests that ETS put together. The national
random sample of all 12th graders, boys and girls have the same mean, median and mode,
but the girls are clustered at the middle and the boys are running off to either end.
Males run to extremes is the general proposition.
The hypothesis of greater male variability carries a long pedigree beginning with Darwin
and encapsulated by Dr. Helena Cronin of the Darwin Center at the London School of Economics
with the comment that the male population produces, quote, more dumbbells and more nobels.
Darwin's statement of a hypothesis in the descent of man and selection in relation to
sex was played upon by Galton.
It stimulated a debate between Havelock Ellis, the sexologist, and Carl Pearson, the statistician,
and rattled around for about half a century among psychologists in the US until systematic
testing of national random samples appeared to establish it within the canon of contemporary
psychology, only for it to be tossed again by controversy in the wake of the summer's
heresy.
So here's the picture in which we see that males and females have the same average, and
There's a surplus. Females are black, males are white, the gray area is where you put it together.
Surplus females in the middle, surplus males at either end.
And know what happens as you move across from the top 10%, when you take the top 5%, you take the top 1%.
The farther you go out, the greater the disproportion, the greater the male surplus.
That's what Larry Summers got fired for saying.
His mistake was to apologize for a whole year, that wiped him out as a scientist, but then that left him free so he can go and fix our economy, which he's doing in Washington now.
The context for the contemporary concern with the summer's heresy has been the surge of women into the labor force, particularly the rise in their participation rate in a variety of professions.
Access to elite positions in American society is currently filtered through an array of
gatekeeping examinations.
The early entrants through these gates were pioneers of exceptional tastes and talents.
While the later cohorts bore a more plebeian character, the pioneers had to be exceptional
in order to overcome the headwinds of convention.
One such pioneer, Justice Shirley Abrahamson, a woman who graduated first in her class at
at the Indiana University Law School, and went on to be the first woman on the Wisconsin
Supreme Court put with understandable hyperbole that, quote, in this male world, a woman has
to be twice as good and work twice as hard to get the same place a man does.
And that was true.
Maybe not twice, but that was true when women were less than five percent.
Such exceptions in a few women obscured the underlying reality of greater male variability.
This reality, however, came to the fore when a more representative supply of talent approached
the gatekeeper examinations under the more equal opportunity that became available with
the movement from what I call the pioneer stage to the plebeian stage.
And for that, I hand out, oh, I can turn it over here.
If you look at the other side, there's this focus, it's in focus, okay.
So what we see here is, these are the king of the cream. These are women in law school
who win the Order of the Coif. They graduate in the top tenth of their class. And here
at the bottom we have just the percent of women who are graduating in law. So we see
this movement from the pioneer period when these pioneers observed that they were, well
In 1951-55, only about 3.7% of law students at elite schools were women, but there were
4.7% of those who graduated in the top of their class, and there's some evidence that
they had higher LSAT scores.
There's a shift, however, in the middle from the pioneer phase to what I call the plebeian
stage.
So, now that we see women are 48% or about 50% of law students, there are also 48% of
of Law Students in the elite law schools, but there are only 44% or 45% of those who
graduate in the top 10. So this is the shift that I'm talking about, which underlines here
the summer's heresy was obscured, but here when women are more participant, it comes to
the fore, and that's what raises the problem. So then I talk about, Tim's here, isn't he?
And he read everything I wrote, but I talk about a lot of things that I hope Tim understood
with lots of statistics.
And let me simply come quickly to where we begin to conclude that I find this is true
not only in law, we know more about it with law, with law school, we've done a lot of
research on law students in law school and I find that the LSAT is a good predictor of
who gets to be an appellate court judge rather than a district judge, so that this difference
This is an important difference. I find that there is supporting evidence if we look at
the GMAT. With the GMAT, we find that women are about 40% of the takers of the GMAT, but
if you take the top third of people on the GMAT, women are only about 30%, and if you
take the top 1% of the scores on the GMAT, women are about 20%. So we see this tapering
The more extreme you go, the greater the proportion of ales, at both ends, but at the top end is where it's crucial when we're talking about the recruitment of elites.
To conclude then, Larry Summers utters his heresy at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference on, quote, diversifying the science and engineering workforce.
He suggested that the problem, and presumably his explanation for it, extended beyond science
and engineering into major corporations, large law firms, prominent teaching hospitals, prominent
professional service organizations, as well as higher education.
Let's take a quick look at government today.
30 years ago, at the end of the pioneer period in law school, women were about one-third
of the top graduates in top law schools.
The Obama administration has brought in a set of cabinet and cabinet-level officials that is about one-third female.
This is higher than the level of the immediately previous administration, but not quite up
to the level of the second Clinton administration, which the Center for American Women and Politics
claims reached 47% for cabinet and cabinet-level females.
Now, the Center has assembled – I just got this off the web on the last day of writing
has assembled a file of 15, quote, women named to cabinet, cabinet level and other top positions in the Obama administration and they fit our findings neatly for that period.
Half of them can be identified as lawyers with a median age of 52, which puts their graduation a year about before the transition from pioneer to plebeian status.
and D.R.'s Select Lot. Two graduated from Yale Law School, two from Michigan, which is in the top ten, one from Harvard, one from Virginia, only one from the outside of the fold from Florida.
I hope there's nobody from the University of Florida here. I don't want to be unkind.
There will be lots of room at the very top in the political appointments to the sub-cabinet and to the courts, but change will be slower below in the senior civil service and over in the legislature,
Legislature, where even the incoming members of recent congresses have been less than one-fifth
female.
So when the demand is made for moving closer to parity between the sexes, an interesting
question is, will Larry Summers, who now has what is known in the theater as, quote, a
thinking part on the national stage, think about the supply side restraints implicit
in His Heresy.