[SHIRLEY M. MALCOM, head of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources Programs, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences]: Raising that particular issue, as a biologist, I neither believe in all genetic or all environment, that in fact behavior in any other country actually develops [unintelligible] interaction of those aspects. And I agree with you, in fact, that it is wrong-headed to just dismiss the biology. But to put too much weight to it is also incredibly wrong-headed, given the fact that had people actually had different kinds of opportunities, and different opportunities for socialization, there is good evidence to indicate in fact that it would have had different outcomes. I cite by way of research the [unintelligible] project in North Carolina, which essentially shows that, where every indicator with regard to mother’s education, socioeconomic status, et cetera, would have left a kid in a particular place educationally, that, essentially, they are seeing totally different outcomes with regard to performance, being referred to special education, et cetera, so I think that there is some evidence on that particular side. The other issue is this whole question about objective versus subjective. I think that it is very difficult to have anything that is basically objective, and the work of [unintelligible] I think point out that in a case where you are actually trying to—this case from the Swedish Medical Council, where they were trying to identify very high-powered research opportunities for, I guess it was post-docs by that point, that indicated that essentially that it ended up with larger numbers of men than women. Two of the women who were basically in the affected group were able to utilize the transparency rules that were in place in Sweden, get access to the data, get access to the issues, and in fact, discovered that it was not as objective as everyone claimed, and that in fact, different standards were actually being used for the women as well as for the men, including the men’s presence in sort of a central network, the kinds of journals that they had to publish in to be considered at the same level, so I think that there are pieces of research that begin to actually relate to this—yes, there is the need to look more carefully at a lot of these areas. I would—in addition looking at this whole question of the quality of marginal hires—I would also like to look at the quality of class one hires, in terms of seeing who disappoints, and what it was that they happened to be looking at and making judgments on, and then what the people could not deliver. So I think that there is a real great need on both sides to begin to talk about whether or not we can predict. I hate to use a sports metaphor, but I will. This is drawn basically from an example from Claude Steele, where he says, he starts by using free throws as a way of actually determining, who should—you’ve got to field a basketball team, and you clearly want the people who make ten out of ten, and you say, “Well, I may not want the people who make zero out of ten,” but what about the people who make four out of ten. If you use that as the measure, Shaq will be left on the sidelines.

LHS: I understand. I think you’re obviously right that there’s no absolute objectivity, and you’re—there’s no question about that. My own instincts actually are that you could go wrong in a number of respects fetishizing objectivity for exactly the reasons that you suggest. There is a very simple and straightforward methodology that was used many years ago in the case of baseball. Somebody wrote a very powerful article about baseball, probably in the seventies, in which they basically said, “Look, it is true that if you look at people’s salaries, and you control for their batting averages and their fielding averages and whatnot, whites and blacks are in the same salary once you control. It is also true that there are no black .240 hitters in the major leagues, that the only blacks who are in the major leagues are people who bat over .300-I’m exaggerating-and that is exactly what you’d predict on a model of discrimination, that because there’s a natural bias against. And there’s an absolute and clear prediction. The prediction is that if there’s a discriminated-against group, that if you measure subsequent performance, their subsequent performance will be stronger than that of the non-discriminated-against group. And that’s a simple prediction of a theory of discrimination. And it’s a testable prediction of a theory of discrimination, and it would be a revolution, and it would be an enormously powerful finding in this field, to demonstrate, and I suspect there are contexts in which that can be demonstrated, but there’s a straightforward methodology, it seems to me, for testing exactly that idea. I’m going to run out of time. But, let me take—if people ask very short questions, I will give very short answers.

[SHEILA TOBIAS ‘57, science education consultant]: What about the rest of the world. Are we keeping up? Physics, France, very high powered women in science in top positions. Same nature, same hormones, same ambitions we have to assume. Different cultural, given.

LHS: Good question. Good question. I don’t know much about it. My guess is that you’ll find that in most of those places, the pressure to be high powered, to work eighty hours a week, is not the same as it is in the United States. And therefore it is easier to balance on both sides. But I thought about that, and I think that you’ll find that’s probably at least part of the explanation.

Q: [unintelligible] because his book was referred to.

LHS: Right.

[YU XIE, professor of sociology, University of Michigan]: I would like to make an on observation and then make a suggestion. The observation is that of the three. There is a contradiction in your three major observations that is the high-powered intensive need of scientific work—that’s the first—and then the ability, and then the socialization, the social process. Would it be possible the first two result from the last one and that math ability could be a result of education, parenting, a lot of things. We only observe what happens, we don’t know the reason for why there’s a variance. I’ll give you another thing, a suggestion. The suggestion is that one way to read your remarks is to say maybe those are not the things we can solve immediately. Especially as leaders of higher education because they are just so wide, so deep, and involves all aspects of society, institution, education, a lot of things, parenting, marriages are institutions, for example. We could have changed the institution of those things a lot of things we cannot change. Rather, it’s not nature and nurture, it is really pre-college versus post-college. From your college point of view maybe those are things too late and too little you can do but a lot of things which are determined by sources outside the college you’re in. Is that...

LHS: I think...

[XIE]: That’s a different read on your set of remarks.

LHS: I think your observation goes much more to my second point about the abilities and the variances than it does to the first point about what married woman....

Q: [unintelligible]

LHS: Yeah, look anything could be social, ultimately in all of that. I think that if you look at the literature on behavioral genetics and you look at the impact, the changed view as to what difference parenting makes, the evidence is really quite striking and amazing. I mean, just read Judith Rich Harris’s book. It is just very striking that people’s—and her book is probably wrong and its probably more than she says it is, and I know there are thirteen critiques and you can argue about it and I am not certainly a leading expert on that—but there is a lot there. And I think what it surely establishes is that human intuition tends to substantially overestimate the role—just like teachers overestimate their impact on their students relative to fellow students on other students—I think we all have a tendency with our intuitions to do it. So, you may be right, but my guess is that there are some very deep forces here that are going to be with us for a long time.

[DENICE D. DENTON, chancellor, University of California-Santa Cruz]: You know, in the spirit of speaking truth to power, I’m not an expert in this area but a lot of people in the room are, and they’ve written a lot of papers in here that address...

LHS: I’ve read a lot of them.

[DENTON]: And, you know, a lot of us would disagree with your hypotheses and your premises...