steelewhistlingvivaldi 20170406005608remarEMARKSatnberconferenceondiversifyingthescience
NEED GOOD GRAMMAR English 5 page Essay on Sterotype threat (Double Space)
Part I: Who is Steele? What’s he talking about? Why should readers care? What’s your point? For Part I, which can be one or more paragraphs in length, you will – • Hook the reader with an interesting opening observation or anecdote related to stereotype threat perhaps pulled from one of our readings or from your own experience. • Briefly introduce Claude Steele who studies the concept of stereotype threat. Indicate what gives him the qualifications to write on this subject. For example, you might write: “According to social psychologist known for his work in stereotype threat, …. [and then go on to paraphrase, summarize, or quote Steele]” (10). This way, we know he’s an authority on the subject. • Define Steele’s concept of stereotype threat in your own words. • Indicate why this concept is important to understand or should be disregarded. • State your claim (which doesn’t have to be in the first paragraph as long as you’re making a deliberate choice about where you put it). o Your claim should respond to this question: Is stereotype threat likely to be a significant reason for the lesser success of people who are underrepresented in given fields (for example, women in the sciences)? Or, as others suggest, are these disparities more likely Essay Two: Essay Assignment Sheet/ENGL 124-5364 Spring 2017 3 to relate to differences in aptitude, intelligence, and natural ability or desires? Note: You can find that both may be true, but to make a strong stand, you must also give you reader guidance in your claim as to where to strike the balance. Under what circumstances or for what purposes is stereotype threat probably relevant to success? When isn’t it relevant? Your readers need something that they can use to frame their thinking out there in the world. This is a harder approach to this assignment.
Part II Who is Summers? What is he arguing? How might stereotype threat account for the differences Summers sees in women’s success? Whose account is more likely to be true, Steele’s or Summers’? (This should agree with your main claim.) • For each paragraph in this section, create a logical transition to include a subclaim that supports your main claim. • Briefly introduce Lawrence Summers, as you did Steele. In contrast to Steele, what does Summers think accounts for the success differences in women and men in the sciences and engineering? • Summarize Summers’ position with at least two of his key points. • If you’re not considering women in the sciences, explain how Summers’ position might relate to beliefs about other stereotyped groups (yours or someone that you have strong knowledge of). • Explain how the concept of stereotype threat might account for OR probably doesn’t account for the disparities Summers sees between men and women’s success (and that might also relate to the success of other stereotyped groups if you’re looking at another group). • Use at least one quotation introduced by a signal phrase, that is properly cited, explained, and connected logically to the topic sentence. • Logically link this paragraph back to your main claim or position.
Part III What major stereotype threat have you or someone close to you experienced? How has it affected you or them? Does Steele get it right? Is stereotype threat a real thing? Or does Summers have the better explanation? • For each paragraph in this section, create a logical transition to include a subclaim that supports your main claim. • Identify a key stereotype threat you or someone you know well experiences. • Describe how this affects you or them. • Evaluate how Steele’s concept of stereotype threat supports your or their experiences, or how Steele’s interpretation contradict those experiences. o Question to think about: In your experience and judgment (having considered the evidence in the essays), does Steele, Summers, or some combination of both best describe the reasons for the challenges you’ve faced or that someone close to you has faced? • Use at least one quotation from any of our sources, to be introduced by a signal phrase, properly cited, explained, and connected logically to the topic sentence. • Logically link this paragraph back to your main claim or position.
Part IV What can you and/or we do with this information? • For each paragraph in this section, create a logical transition to include a subclaim that supports the main claim. • Explain how this new knowledge could benefit (or harm) you and/or others. Essay Two: Essay Assignment Sheet/ENGL 124-5364 Spring 2017 4 o For example: How does it help you or the culture as it wrestles with stereotypical thinking in a very divided way (regarding race, religion, economic status, size, ability, etc.,)? (Or, how does it lead us in the wrong direction?) • Explain how might you and/or others begin to overcome stereotype threat based on what you’ve learned. – or – What should we be thinking about instead (if you don’t find that stereotype threat is a relevant problem)
IMPORTANT NOTE.
- The personal examples on the essay can be football related if possible because my professor knows I played football at Grossmont college recently.
- Also can you make it not to complicated and educated. I am smart, but not a professional writer. My teacher knows that too. haha
1
This is a famous (or infamous) talk in which the president of Harvard argued that biological differences
may be a key contributing factor to women’s relative lack of success in the sciences and math.
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
2
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
3
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
4
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.
5
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
6
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
marshaling 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.