Letter to President Summers
Dear Mr. Summers,
I was very disappointed with you after reading your remarks at the NBER Conference. You had come to conclusions about gender that are based on 'facts' that are themselves gendered. I wonder how much long deliberation and serious thought that you actually gave to the issue of women's under-representation in the fields of science and mathematics. For myself, after reading your arguments and the critique of Ann Fausto-Sterling, I tend to agree more with Ms. Sterling. She claims that the testing of intelligence is not so straightforward as you agree but you still used the results from a gendered and biased test in your conclusions. "these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with the respect to people's ability... and that's absolutely right." Immediately after you discredited this data to be an inaccurate measure of the actual population you still use it's characteristics to make statements that are supposed to reflect the population. In Fausto-Sterling's paper 'A Question of Genius", she shows that not all studies on sexual differences and their statistical support are valid. Many have flaws in the data collection or the handling and grouping of that data. She stresses the fact that many of the study conclusions are false when given the raw data that the researchers collected. "All the papers reviewed by Maccoby and Jacklin used what is called 'hypothesis testing' to the study of sex differences. Using this approach, a researcher hypothesizes the existence, for instance, of a difference in verbal ability between boys and girls." after this the tests are given, data presented and conclusions are made on that data. Sterling says in her article that this kind of testing is not always accurate because the researchers will almost always see the same results that they were looking for when they wrote their hypothesis. Given all of the articles that have been published about the IQ test and its gendered status I am surprised that your arguments included it and many other gendered tests in your conclusions about women and mathematics. I hope since these comments you have made an honest search for more viewpoints on this subject because your own observations are not sufficiently accurate to make conclusions upon.