Are There Really More Male Geniuses? Or Are We Defining Intelligence Too Narrowly?

The Larry Summers debate is happening all over again (thanks to Helen Andrews) and I have thoughts

For those of you who haven’t kept up with the whole Helen Andrews “Great Feminization” thing, consider yourselves lucky. It’s the latest and greatest in a string of incendiary conservative thought-pieces that American journalists seem to be churning out faster than Starbucks can serve up Pumpkin Spice Lattes in November. The basic thrust of the piece is that Cancel Culture is women’s fault because we are more emotional and less logical than men. At some point in recent history, we arrived at a tipping point, where suddenly many professions that had previously been male-dominated became more fifty-fifty, or even majority female. The timing of this corresponded with the rise of Cancel Culture. Therefore, too much female representation in the workforce caused Cancel Culture, and the solution is to restore true meritocracy (i.e. get rid of all those dumb-ass women who only have jobs because of affirmative action programs) and “wokeness” will go away, which is obviously the number-one most important threat to contemporary society.

I am not actually going to engage in that debate here (I may choose to do so in a future newsletter, if that’s of interest to people, but in the meantime Ivana Greco wrote a very compelling counterargument here). Instead, I got dragged into the debate, against my better judgment, by this Jesse Singal piece, which is rehashing the whole Larry Summers “are women innately stupider?” debate all over again.

Wait, who is Larry Summers? And why are we talking about something that happened in 2005?

Larry Summers is a prominent American economist who was Chief Economist of the World Bank, served as United States Secretary of the Treasury and as the director of the National Economic Council, and as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. (He also helped launch the career of Sheryl Sandberg). In 2005, while he was president of Harvard University, he gave a talk at a conference on “Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce” in which he suggested that one of the reasons why women are less represented in top science and engineering positions could be due to differences in aptitude “not attributable to socialization.” Following these remarks, he was fired from his post as president of Harvard.

The reason we are rehashing this now is because Helen Andrews opened her piece by saying that this marked the beginning of the end. In her words, “The entire ‘woke’ era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.”

Now, let’s just start by stating the obvious (you don’t need to be one of those mythical male geniuses to understand this): if you go to a conference whose literal title is “Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce,” and you stand up in front of a room full of women who have spent their entire careers fighting to get more women into STEM positions, and you say something along the lines of, “sorry, ladies, we’ve really done everything that we can, but you’re just not smart enough,” what do you think the reaction is going to be? Honestly, Summers may be a brilliant economist, but he seems like he might have a screw loose when it comes to social intelligence.

As for Helen Andrews, who uses this particular event as a key example in her argument for why women are more likely to be “cancellers,” you kind of have to ask yourself, Well, did you think this speech was going to upset the MEN?

Just to be sure, we ought to run an apples-to-apples test and have a prominent woman (maybe a healthcare or education leader) show up at a conference dedicated to, I don’t know, getting more men into teaching and healthcare jobs, and claim that men are incapable of taking on such roles, unless they have very low testosterone and very small penises, because otherwise their biology gets in the way of their ability to perform in such professions (if you’re the kind of person willing to make gross over-generalizations about gender differences that ignores half the evidence, then you can absolutely find real peer-reviewed research to back these claims. If, on the other hand, you want to read a serious argument in favor of getting more men into these professions I recommend Richard V Reeves’ last article).

If our theoretical female leader said these things to a room full of men who aspired to work in teaching or healthcare, I strongly suspect there might be one or two who would be offended and that their reactions would be–dare I say–emotional. I also strongly suspect that the woman who made these remarks would be fired.

There’s a lesson in this: if you’re a president or CEO, you can go right ahead and say true but offensive things, but don’t expect to keep your job. You are free to speak. You are also free to be fired.

After Larry Summers’ speech was leaked to the press and the story blew up, several prominent academics, most notably Steven Pinker, rushed to his defense, claiming that his speech was “brilliant” and that these things needed to be said. I’ll admit that Summers’ argument was relatively well-supported by the available data at the time. Furthermore, the conference was supposed to be “off the record” and Summers was apparently asked to be controversial for the sake of sparking discussion. His arguments about aptitude were presented as a hypothesis (one of three) and not a certainty. It’s true that saying such things to a room full of women in STEM is bound to provoke backlash. On the other hand, if you cannot surface such questions at a conference which is specifically designed to address them, when can you?

I am fascinated by the Summers case. It has all of the elements necessary for endless debate on critical topics. What if there are biological differences in aptitude for certain things between the sexes? Should we be allowed to say so? Are there costs to saying it? Does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Are there costs to NOT saying it? Does it matter what our intentions are? How definitive is the data on this matter? Even if the data Summers used was solid, did he present it in a way that overstated its importance? Did he fail to add important nuance? Did he misunderstand what we know about the underlying causes? Did he deserve to be fired?

All of this happened a long time ago (2005) but it feels particularly relevant again, not only because everyone is writing about it, but because my newsletter is very much about this stuff. A lot of my arguments here hinge on the fact that there are innate, biological differences between men and women, not just in terms of who has boobs and who doesn’t, but in terms of the biological underpinnings of behavior. My feeling is that we cannot make sense of contemporary gender dynamics without first acknowledging the role that biology plays. These are messy, sticky, complicated questions where overgeneralization can do quite a lot of unnecessary harm. However, it is also my position that failing to reckon with these questions has its own costs. Truth matters, even when it hurts. And getting to the truth requires us to sometimes ask unpopular questions and acknowledge unpopular results. That’s how science works.

So in this article, I am going to ask all of the unpopular questions about potential differences in male and female aptitude in STEM–and male and female intelligence in general–and look at what the best data has to say.

Spoiler: of course I want women to be well-represented in STEM positions, because a huge portion of my work here is built on research done by brilliant women in STEM. I’ll argue that Larry Summers was probably right on some counts, but that his argument was unnecessarily offensive and beside the point. Finally, I’ll argue that in this era where saying true but offensive things is suddenly very popular, it’s important to consider the speaker (or writer’s) intent. Truth for the sake of truth may not always be a worthy pursuit, especially when the “truth” is a moving target, which it generally is.