Speaking of Freaks

Let's continue to talk about people who make controversial statements in public!

Larry H. Summers, research economist and Harvard University president, made a little speech (you can read it yourself at http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html) to a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research in January which got a few feminists more than a little angry, and now they want him to lose his job, or, failing that, be gently dismembered.

Ha! I was just kidding about the dismembered part. But they ARE ticked off, mainly because Summers said that he thought that one reason why women are under-represented in science professions is the "different availability of aptitude at the high end… " What he said sounds awfully close to "different aptitudes" and that sounds like saying women are dumb, but actually what he's saying is that men are statistically more likely to be freaks.

This theory isn't new. It was even discussed when I was teaching college math back in the olden days when the internet existed mainly to pass raw data around colleges and nobody ever dreamed it could someday help make your penis bigger. The theory is based on the true observation that for a large number of measurable attributes, women's measurements tend to be less extreme than men's. So in any large random population most of the freaks will be men. This applies to all kinds of freakdom. In a large random population, for example, it will be the men who will exhibit most of the freakishly high IQs. It will also be the men who will exhibit most of the freakishly low IQs. So the same theory used by Summers to explain women's under-representation in the sciences also has been used to explain why it's mostly men who win Darwin Awards for dying stupidly.

The important thing to me is not what reasons Summers could come up with in a relatively short speech about the under-representation of women in the sciences. The important thing is that he had the nerve to talk about it at all, and now because of that people are thinking about it more. Maybe the discussion will result in better ideas coming out than Larry's, and maybe he'd welcome them.

I think I have a better idea. I got my idea in 1980 when I was teaching basic algebra to a community college class that was three-quarters female.

I had a problem. I was explaining algebra the way the book explained it, which generally introduced new ideas by relating them spatially. Most of the class wasn't getting it. It occurred to me that it might make more sense to just say what algebra really is and leave the geometry out of it. So I explained how algebra is just talking about numbers. Equations are sentences, x's and y's are names, etc.

I had an amazing turn-around in the class. Before, most of the boys understood the geometric approach and only a couple of the girls. Now, it was most of the girls who got it, and only one of the boys! I started using both approaches to try to get through to everyone.

Now the bad news: a senior professor with control over my job found out what I was doing and told me to stop. His objection was, "The girls don't need to know math. They're just going to either get married, or be nurses." Worse, the senior professor had co-written the book, and he was going to get me fired if I didn't follow it word for word.

So here's my idea. I think that for about 25 centuries, math and science education has been deliberately geared to the interests and learning styles of boys, even at the cost, at times, of distorting content.

I think it's time to find out what science would look like if women did it. It could be an experiment.