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Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce
Lawrence H. Summers
Cambridge, Mass.
January 14, 2005
I asked Richard, when he invited me to come here and speak, whether he wanted an
institutional talk about Harvard's policies toward diversity or whether he wanted some
questions asked and some attempts at provocation, because I was willing to do the second
and didn't feel like doing the first. And so we have agreed that I am speaking
unofficially and not using this as an occasion to lay out the many things we're doing at
Harvard to promote the crucial objective of diversity. There are many aspects of the
problems you're discussing and it seems to me they're all very important from a national
point of view. I'm going to confine myself to addressing one portion of the problem, or of
the challenge we're discussing, which is the issue of women's representation in tenured
positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions, not
because that's necessarily the most important problem or the most interesting problem, but
because it's the only one of these problems that I've made an effort to think in a very
serious way about. The other prefatory comment that I would make is that I am going to,
until most of the way through, attempt to adopt an entirely positive, rather than
normative approach, and just try to think about and offer some hypotheses as to why we
observe what we observe without seeing this through the kind of judgmental tendency that
inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality. 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.
There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities
that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the
presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll
explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the
first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call
different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call
different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view,
their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.
Maybe it would be helpful to just, for a moment, broaden the problem, or the issue,
beyond science and engineering. I've had the opportunity to discuss questions like this
with chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large law
firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders of other
prominent professional service organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher
education. In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or
twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women
who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to graduate school when
that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our
activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it
was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being
female, twenty or twenty-five years ago. 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. And that is a reality that is
present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered
profession. What does one make of that? I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking
completely descriptively and non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and
many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who
are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their
work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of
schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life
cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is
always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place.
And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher
fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women.
That's not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should
expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the
conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is
contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe. One can put it differently. Of
a class, 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. Another way to put the point is to say, what fraction of
young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don't want to have a job that
they think about eighty hours a week. What fraction of young men make a decision that
they're unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week, and to observe
what the difference is. And that has got to be a large part of what is observed. Now that
begs entirely the normative questions-which I'll get to a little later-of, is our society
right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our
society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice
and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to
have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that
I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern
and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am
describing has to be of significant importance. To buttress conviction and theory with
anecdote, a young woman who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has
subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard
Business School. She reports that of her first year section, there were twenty-two women,
of whom three are working full time at this point. That may, the dean of the Business
School reports to me, that that is not an implausible observation given their experience
with their alumnae. So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very
important reality is just what I would call the, who wants to do high-powered intense
work?
The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the
combination of, and here, I'm focusing on something that would seek to answer the question
of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation
even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And
here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple
hypothesis. 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 that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there
is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female
population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly,
culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking
about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people
who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about
somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people
who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one
in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very
large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation,
which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. 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. So
my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else,
because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something
else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the
differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.
There may also be elements, by the way, of differing, there is some, particularly in
some attributes, that bear on engineering, there is reasonably strong evidence of taste
differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to
socialization. I just returned from Israel, where we had the opportunity to visit a
kibbutz, and to spend some time talking about the history of the kibbutz movement, and it
is really very striking to hear how the movement started with an absolute commitment, of a
kind one doesn't encounter in other places, that everybody was going to do the same jobs.
Sometimes the women were going to fix the tractors, and the men were going to work in the
nurseries, sometimes the men were going to fix the tractors and the women were going to
work in the nurseries, and just under the pressure of what everyone wanted, in a hundred
different kibbutzes, each one of which evolved, it all moved in the same direction. So, I
think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a
half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found
themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me
something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize. There are
two other hypotheses that are all over. One is socialization. Somehow little girls are all
socialized towards nursing and little boys are socialized towards building bridges. No
doubt there is some truth in that. I would be hesitant about assigning too much weight to
that hypothesis for two reasons. First, most of what we've learned from empirical
psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to
socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We've been astounded by
the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a
reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew
from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so, the human
mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it
often turns out not to be true. The second empirical problem is that girls are persisting
longer and longer. When there were no girls majoring in chemistry, when there were no
girls majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame parental socialization. Then, as we
are increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are twenty, or
when people are twenty-five, in terms of their patterns, with which they drop out. Again,
to the extent it can be addressed, it's a terrific thing to address.
The most controversial in a way, question, and the most difficult question to judge, is
what is the role of discrimination? To what extent is there overt discrimination? Surely
there is some. Much more tellingly, to what extent are there pervasive patterns of passive
discrimination and stereotyping in which people like to choose people like themselves, and
the people in the previous group are disproportionately white male, and so they choose
people who are like themselves, who are disproportionately white male. No one who's been
in a university department or who has been involved in personnel processes can deny that
this kind of taste does go on, and it is something that happens, and it is something that
absolutely, vigorously needs to be combated. On the other hand, I think before regarding
it as pervasive, and as the dominant explanation of the patterns we observe, there are two
points that should make one hesitate. The first is the fallacy of composition. No doubt it
is true that if any one institution makes a major effort to focus on reducing
stereotyping, on achieving diversity, on hiring more people, no doubt it can succeed in
hiring more. But each person it hires will come from a different institution, and so
everyone observes that when an institution works very hard at this, to some extent they
are able to produce better results. If I stand up at a football game and everybody else is
sitting down, I can see much better, but if everybody stands up, the views may get a
little better, but they don't get a lot better. And there's a real question as to how
plausible it is to believe that there is anything like half as many people who are
qualified to be scientists at top ten schools and who are now not at top ten schools, and
that's the argument that one has to make in thinking about this as a national problem
rather than an individual institutional problem. The second problem is the one that Gary
Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many years ago. If
it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial
opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to
assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply
by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that
was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on
increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a
pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of
high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive
academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded
substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence
of that. 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.
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.
What's to be done? And what further questions should one know the answers to? Let me
take a second, first to just remark on a few questions that it seems to me are ripe for
research, and for all I know, some of them have been researched. First, it would be very
useful to know, with hard data, what the quality of marginal hires are when major
diversity efforts are mounted. When major diversity efforts are mounted, and consciousness
is raised, and special efforts are made, and you look five years later at the quality of
the people who have been hired during that period, how many are there who have turned out
to be much better than the institutional norm who wouldn't have been found without a
greater search. And how many of them are plausible compromises that aren't unreasonable,
and how many of them are what the right-wing critics of all of this suppose represent
clear abandonments of quality standards. I don't know the answer, but I think if people
want to move the world on this question, they have to be willing to ask the question in
ways that could face any possible answer that came out. Second, and by the way, I think a
more systematic effort to look at citation records of male and female scholars in
disciplines where citations are relatively well-correlated with academic rank and with
people's judgments of quality would be very valuable. Of course, most of the critiques of
citations go to reasons why they should not be useful in judging an individual scholar.
Most of them are not reasons why they would not be useful in comparing two large groups of
scholars and so there is significant potential, it seems to me, for citation analysis in
this regard. Second, what about objective versus subjective factors in hiring? I've been
exposed, by those who want to see the university hiring practices changed to favor women
more and to assure more diversity, to two very different views. One group has urged that
we make the processes consistently more clear-cut and objective, based on papers, numbers
of papers published, numbers of articles cited, objectivity, measurement of performance,
no judgments of potential, no reference to other things, because if it's made more
objective, the subjectivity that is associated with discrimination and which invariably
works to the disadvantage of minority groups will not be present. I've also been exposed
to exactly the opposite view, that those criteria and those objective criteria
systematically bias the comparisons away from many attributes that those who contribute to
the diversity have: a greater sense of collegiality, a greater sense of institutional
responsibility. Somebody ought to be able to figure out the answer to the question of, if
you did it more objectively versus less objectively, what would happen. Then you can
debate whether you should or whether you shouldn't, if objective or subjective is better.
But that question ought to be a question that has an answer, that people can find. Third,
the third kind of question is, what do we know about search procedures in universities? Is
it the case that more systematic comprehensive search processes lead to minority group
members who otherwise would have not been noticed being noticed? Or does fetishizing the
search procedure make it very difficult to pursue the targets of opportunity that are
often available arising out of particular family situations or particular moments, and
does fetishizing and formalizing search procedures further actually work to the
disadvantage of minority group members. Again, everybody's got an opinion; I don't think
anybody actually has a clue as to what the answer is. Fourth, what do we actually know
about the incidence of financial incentives and other support for child care in terms of
what happens to people's career patterns. I've been struck at Harvard that there's
something unfortunate and ironic about the fact that if you're a faculty member and you
have a kid who's 18 who goes to college, we in effect, through an interest-free loan, give
you about $9,000. If you have a six-year-old, we give you nothing. And I don't think we're
very different from most other universities in this regard, but there is something odd
about that strategic choice, if the goal is to recruit people to come to the university.
But I don't think we know much about the child care issue. The fifth question-which it
seems to me would be useful to study and to actually learn the answer to-is what do we
know, or what can we learn, about the costs of career interruptions. There is something we
would like to believe. We would like to believe that you can take a year off, or two years
off, or three years off, or be half-time for five years, and it affects your productivity
during the time, but that it really doesn't have any fundamental effect on the career
path. And a whole set of conclusions would follow from that in terms of flexible work
arrangements and so forth. And the question is, in what areas of academic life and in what
ways is it actually true. Somebody reported to me on a study that they found, I don't
remember who had told me about this-maybe it was you, Richard-that there was a very clear
correlation between the average length of time, from the time a paper was cited. That is,
in fields where the average papers cited had been written nine months ago, women had a
much harder time than in fields where the average thing cited had been written ten years
ago. And that is suggestive in this regard. On the discouraging side of it, someone
remarked once that no economist who had gone to work at the President's Council of
Economic Advisors for two years had done highly important academic work after they
returned. Now, I'm sure there are counterexamples to that, and I'm sure people are kind of
processing that Tobin's Q is the best-known counterexample to that proposition, and there
are obviously different kinds of effects that happen from working in Washington for two
years. But it would be useful to explore a variety of kinds of natural interruption
experiments, to see what actual difference it makes, and to see whether it's actually
true, and to see in what ways interruptions can be managed, and in what fields it makes a
difference. I think it's an area in which there's conviction but where it doesn't seem to
me there's an enormous amount of evidence. What should we all do? I think the case is
overwhelming for employers trying to be the [unintelligible] employer who responds to
everybody else's discrimination by competing effectively to locate people who others are
discriminating against, or to provide different compensation packages that will attract
the people who would otherwise have enormous difficulty with child care. I think a lot of
discussion of issues around child care, issues around extending tenure clocks, issues
around providing family benefits, are enormously important. I think there's a strong case
for monitoring and making sure that searches are done very carefully and that there are
enough people looking and watching that that pattern of choosing people like yourself is
not allowed to take insidious effect. But I think it's something that has to be done with
very great care because it slides easily into pressure to achieve given fractions in given
years, which runs the enormous risk of people who were hired because they were terrific
being made to feel, or even if not made to feel, being seen by others as having been hired
for some other reason. And I think that's something we all need to be enormously careful
of as we approach these issues, and it's something we need to do, but I think it's
something that we need to do with great care.
Let me just conclude by saying that I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount
of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will
have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the
marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be
thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important
to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can.
That's why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable. Thank you.
Questions and Answers
Q: Well, I don't want to take up much time because I know other people have questions,
so, first of all I'd like to say thank you for your input. It's very interesting-I noticed
it's being recorded so I hope that we'll be able to have a copy of it. That would be nice.
LHS: We'll see. (LAUGHTER)
Q: Secondly, you make a point, which I very much agree with, that this is a wonderful
opportunity for other universities to hire women and minorities, and you said you didn't
have an example of an instance in which that is being done. The chemistry department at
Rutgers is doing that, and they are bragging about it and they are saying, "Any woman
who is having problems in her home department, send me your resume." They are now at
twenty-five percent women, which is double the national average-among the top fifty
universities-so I agree with you on that. I think it is a wonderful opportunity and I hope
others follow that example. One thing that I do sort of disagree with is the use of
identical twins that have been separated and their environment followed. I think that the
environments that a lot of women and minorities experience would not be something that
would be-that a twin would be subjected to if the person knows that their environment is
being watched. Because a lot of the things that are done to women and minorities are
simply illegal, and so they'll never experience that.
LHS: I don't think that. I don't actually think that's the point at all. My point was a
very different one. My point was simply that the field of behavioral genetics had a
revolution in the last fifteen years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the
discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization
weren't, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature, and that set of discoveries,
it seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where there was
a perception of the importance of socialization. I wasn't at all trying to connect those
studies to the particular experiences of women and minorities who were thinking about
academic careers.
Q: Raising that particular issue, as a biologist, I neither believe in all genetic or
all environment, that in fact behavior in any other country actually develops
[unintelligible] interaction of those aspects. And I agree with you, in fact, that it is
wrong-headed to just dismiss the biology. But to put too much weight to it is also
incredibly wrong-headed, given the fact that had people actually had different kinds of
opportunities, and different opportunities for socialization, there is good evidence to
indicate in fact that it would have had different outcomes. I cite by way of research the
[unintelligible] project in North Carolina, which essentially shows that, where every
indicator with regard to mother's education, socioeconomic status, et cetera, would have
left a kid in a particular place educationally, that, essentially, they are seeing totally
different outcomes with regard to performance, being referred to special education, et
cetera, so I think that there is some evidence on that particular side. The other issue is
this whole question about objective versus subjective. I think that it is very difficult
to have anything that is basically objective, and the work of [unintelligible] I think
point out that in a case where you are actually trying to-this case from the Swedish
Medical Council, where they were trying to identify very high-powered research
opportunities for, I guess it was post-docs by that point, that indicated that essentially
that it ended up with larger numbers of men than women. Two of the women who were
basically in the affected group were able to utilize the transparency rules that were in
place in Sweden, get access to the data, get access to the issues, and in fact, discovered
that it was not as objective as everyone claimed, and that in fact, different standards
were actually being used for the women as well as for the men, including the men's
presence in sort of a central network, the kinds of journals that they had to publish in
to be considered at the same level, so I think that there are pieces of research that
begin to actually relate to this-yes, there is the need to look more carefully at a lot of
these areas. I would-in addition looking at this whole question of the quality of marginal
hires-I would also like to look at the quality of class one hires, in terms of seeing who
disappoints, and what it was that they happened to be looking at and making judgments on,
and then what the people could not deliver. So I think that there is a real great need on
both sides to begin to talk about whether or not we can predict. I hate to use a sports
metaphor, but I will. This is drawn basically from an example from Claude Steele, where he
says, he starts by using free throws as a way of actually determining, who should-you've
got to field a basketball team, and you clearly want the people who make ten out of ten,
and you say, "Well, I may not want the people who make zero out of ten," but
what about the people who make four out of ten. If you use that as the measure, Shaq will
be left on the sidelines.
LHS: I understand. I think you're obviously right that there's no absolute objectivity,
and you're-there's no question about that. My own instincts actually are that you could go
wrong in a number of respects fetishizing objectivity for exactly the reasons that you
suggest. There is a very simple and straightforward methodology that was used many years
ago in the case of baseball. Somebody wrote a very powerful article about baseball,
probably in the seventies, in which they basically said, "Look, it is true that if
you look at people's salaries, and you control for their batting averages and their
fielding averages and whatnot, whites and blacks are in the same salary once you control.
It is also true that there are no black .240 hitters in the major leagues, that the only
blacks who are in the major leagues are people who bat over .300-I'm exaggerating-and that
is exactly what you'd predict on a model of discrimination, that because there's a natural
bias against. And there's an absolute and clear prediction. The prediction is that if
there's a discriminated-against group, that if you measure subsequent performance, their
subsequent performance will be stronger than that of the non-discriminated-against group.
And that's a simple prediction of a theory of discrimination. And it's a testable
prediction of a theory of discrimination, and it would be a revolution, and it would be an
enormously powerful finding in this field, to demonstrate, and I suspect there are
contexts in which that can be demonstrated, but there's a straightforward methodology, it
seems to me, for testing exactly that idea. I'm going to run out of time. But, let me
take-if people ask very short questions, I will give very short answers.
Q: What about the rest of the world. Are we keeping up? Physics, France, very high
powered women in science in top positions. Same nature, same hormones, same ambitions we
have to assume. Different cultural, given.
LHS: Good question. Good question. I don't know much about it. My guess is that you'll
find that in most of those places, the pressure to be high powered, to work eighty hours a
week, is not the same as it is in the United States. And therefore it is easier to balance
on both sides. But I thought about that, and I think that you'll find that's probably at
least part of the explanation.
Q: [unintelligible] because his book was referred to.
LHS: Right.
Q: I would like to make an on observation and then make a suggestion. The observation
is that of the three. There is a contradiction in your three major observations that is
the high-powered intensive need of scientific work-that's the first-and then the ability,
and then the socialization, the social process. Would it be possible the first two result
from the last one and that math ability could be a result of education, parenting, a lot
of things. We only observe what happens, we don't know the reason for why there's a
variance. I'll give you another thing, a suggestion. The suggestion is that one way to
read your remarks is to say maybe those are not the things we can solve immediately.
Especially as leaders of higher education because they are just so wide, so deep, and
involves all aspects of society, institution, education, a lot of things, parenting,
marriages are institutions, for example. We could have changed the institution of those
things a lot of things we cannot change. Rather, it's not nature and nurture, it is really
pre-college versus post-college. From your college point of view maybe those are things
too late and too little you can do but a lot of things which are determined by sources
outside the college you're in. Is that...
LHS: I think...
Q: That's a different read on your set of remarks.
LHS: I think your observation goes much more to my second point about the abilities and
the variances than it does to the first point about what married woman....
Q: [unintelligible]
LHS: Yeah, look anything could be social, ultimately in all of that. I think that if
you look at the literature on behavioral genetics and you look at the impact, the changed
view as to what difference parenting makes, the evidence is really quite striking and
amazing. I mean, just read Judith Rich Harris's book. It is just very striking that
people's-and her book is probably wrong and its probably more than she says it is, and I
know there are thirteen critiques and you can argue about it and I am not certainly a
leading expert on that-but there is a lot there. And I think what it surely establishes is
that human intuition tends to substantially overestimate the role-just like teachers
overestimate their impact on their students relative to fellow students on other
students-I think we all have a tendency with our intuitions to do it. So, you may be
right, but my guess is that there are some very deep forces here that are going to be with
us for a long time.
Q: You know, in the spirit of speaking truth to power, I'm not an expert in this area
but a lot of people in the room are, and they've written a lot of papers in here that
address ....
LHS: I've read a lot of them.
Q: And, you know, a lot of us would disagree with your hypotheses and your premises...
LHS: Fair enough.
Q: So it's not so clear.
LHS: It's not clear at all. I think I said it wasn't clear. I was giving you my best
guess but I hope we could argue on the basis of as much evidence as we can marshal.
Q: It's here.
LHS: No, no, no. Let me say. I have actually read that and I'm not saying there aren't
rooms to debate this in, but if somebody, but with the greatest respect-I think there's an
enormous amount one can learn from the papers in this conference and from those two
books-but if somebody thinks that there is proof in these two books, that these phenomenon
are caused by something else, I guess I would very respectfully have to disagree very very
strongly with that. I don't presume to have proved any view that I expressed here, but if
you think there is proof for an alternative theory, I'd want you to be hesitant about
that.
Q: Just one quick question in terms of the data. We saw this morning lots of data
showing the drop in white males entering science and engineering, and I'm having trouble
squaring that with your model of who wants to work eighty hours a week. It's mostly people
coming from other countries that have filled that gap in terms of men versus women.
LHS: I think there are two different things, frankly, actually, is my guess-I'm not an
expert. Somebody reported to me that-someone who is knowledgeable-said that it is
surprisingly hard to get Americans rather than immigrants or the children of immigrants to
be cardiac surgeons. Cardiac surgeon is about prestigious, certain kind of prestige as you
can be, fact is that people want control of their lifestyles, people want flexibility,
they don't want to do it, and it's disproportionately immigrants that want to do some of
the careers that are most demanding in terms of time and most interfering with your
lifestyle. So I think that's exactly right and I think it's precisely the package of
number of hours' work what it is, that's leading more Americans to choose to have careers
of one kind or another in business that are less demanding of passionate thought all the
time and that includes white males as well.
Q: That's my point, that social-psychological in nature [unintelligible].
LHS: I would actually much rather stay-yes, and then I'm on my way out.
Q: I have no idea how you would evaluate the productivity of the marginal hire if this
person is coming into an environment where [unintelligible] is marginal and there's
[unintelligible].
LHS: You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. I used the term-I realized I had
not spoken carefully-I used the term marginal in the economic sense to mean, only
additional, to only mean...
Q: [unintelligible].
LHS: No, to mean only the additional [unintelligible]. Yeah, obviously [unintelligible]
going to identify X is the additional hire, is the marginal hire, the question you can ask
is, you know, here is a time when, as a consequence of an effort, there was a very
substantial increase in the number of people who were hired in a given group, what was the
observed ex post quality? And what was the observed ex post performance? It's hard to
believe that that's not a useful thing to try to know. It may well be that one will
produce powerful evidence that the people are much better than the people who were there
and that the institutions went up in quality and that made things much better. All I'm
saying is one needs to ask the question. And as for the groping in the kitchen, and
whatnot, look, it's absolutely important that in every university in America there be
norms of civility and proper treatment of colleagues that be absolutely established and
that that be true universally, and that's a hugely important part of this, and that's why
at Harvard we're doing a whole set of things that are making junior faculty positions much
more real faculty positions with real mentoring, real feedback, serious searches before
the people are hired, and much greater prospects for tenure than there ever have been
before because exactly that kind of collegiality is absolutely central to the academic
enterprise.
Thank you.
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