Harvard President on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce

Harvard President 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.