Pinker Vs. Spelke
The Crimson covers the Science Center debate between Steve Pinker (i.e., Summers surrogate) and Elizabeth Spelke (speaking on behalf of Nancy Hopkins and women everywhere). According to the Crimson, Spelke seems to have gotten the better of the debate, at least as far as the audience was concerned. Still, it sounds to me like she conceded a few points that she needn't have. For example...
1) "Pinker later noted that women are not underrepresented everywhere, but only in the hard sciences."
Granted, I'm going on the Crimson's version of what was said here, but this is just nutty. As Nancy Hopkins pointed out in her essay in the MIT faculty newsletter (see below), science and math are far from the only fields where women are underrepresented. For example: business, law, medicine, op-ed pages—even the humanities. (At Harvard, men outnumber women in the humanities by about two to one, despite the fact that women are earning more Ph.D.s in the field than men are.)
2) “Spelke brought up some key points,” said Parvinder S. Thiara ’07, who sported a Che-Summers shirt for the event. “But she did admit, and I think it’s important, that at the highest level, there was no discrimination.”
It's unclear from this quote what highest level Thiara is referring to—whether it's the sciences, or the professions in general. But if it's the latter, all you have to do to refute it is to look at Harvard. Where are the women in the highest levels of the Summers administration? Why is there only one woman on the Harvard Corporation?
Maybe Spelke wanted to keep the issue as narrowly focused as possible...but the argument that there's discrimination against women in all fields certainly helps explain the lack of women in science, as opposed to the innate differences line of thinking.
3) "Pinker also noted that men and women tend to have different priorities in life; men seek status and money, while women look more for interpersonal relationships.
“'What this means is that there are slightly more men than women who don’t care whether or not they have a life,' Pinker said."
According to the Crimson, Pinker was positing a biology-is-destiny explanation for this phenomenon. That's curious. There are so many plausible sociological factors to explain the differing choices that men and women make, I'd love to hear Pinker make this case.
I'm no scientist or deep thinker like Steve Pinker is. But the more I hear of his thinking, the less convinced—and more unimpressed—I become.
