The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Re: Re: Speaking of XX, again

I agree that it’s foolish for UC Davis to rescind its invitation to Summers to speak—even if his comments were foolish and ill-informed, as I argued two years ago.

But the problem with Christina Hoff Sommers’ piece—and the reason I don’t find it all that interesting—is that it does what has become a by now familiar two-step: First, it paints those who criticize Summers as suppressors of free speech, and invites us to think, erroneously, that it’s somehow taboo to talk in the sciences about biological basis for difference. In fact, Simon Baron-Cohen is quite well-regarded. (And if I recall correctly, at least one of the original scientists criticizing Summers’ comments herself studied the biological basis for sex differences.) Second, Hoff Sommers goes on to invoke a common-sense look at the world around us as evidence that OF COURSE brain differences explain the fact that women are nurses and men are pilots. What could we have been thinking all this time!

In doing so, Hoff Sommers gives no credence to the fact that the project of disentangling nature and nurture is extremely complicated. What makes these issues so hard to sort out is that the project of gender socialization begins almost the day a baby is born. I don’t say that to whitewash any “deeper” truths; I completely believe in the reality of biological differences, and I acknowledge that there are different distribution curves by gender. I just think we don’t know all that much about how they work yet—and yet we’re awfully quick to point to hard-wired biology as the underlying reason for all sorts of social discrepancies that can also be explained, at least in part, by discrimination and how we construct gender. (Megan McArdle had a good post a while back on this.) And there is plenty of contradictory evidence about just what “innate” might mean. If biology explains why our world is the way it is, as Hoff Sommers suggests, then why are women almost six times as likely today to get PhDs in physics than they were in the 1970s? Is it just that now all discrimination is gone? France has more female physicists than America does; are French women more “innately” interested in physics?