Summerstime

I was excited to see Larry Summers when he gave a seminar in 1988 at the University of Chicago, where I was then a graduate student in Economics.  Summers was Economics royalty, the child of Penn economists and the nephew of two different Nobel Prize winners, and he had himself been tenured at Harvard at a very young age. My reaction was that he was just a bit off, too blunt, argumentative, and pedantic, perhaps a little “on the spectrum” as they say in psychiatry….but then so were the all other economists I knew.  Economics was a very male field at the time as, for example, my 1984 entering class at Chicago had 60 men and five women. Surely reflecting that gender makeup, economics tended to reward confidence and aggression, the type of skills often found in people who, like Summers, had been debate champions in high school and college.  Seminar rooms were a war zone where speakers were interrupted, provocations were expected, and the intellectual sparring was fierce.

Summers spoke in 2005 at an interdisciplinary conference on why there were still so few women scientists at elite American universities.  Many more women had entered science and economics since I had matriculated in the mid-1980s, but the share of senior women in these fields remained well below 25 percent.  So there was no controversy over whether women were underrepresented in the sciences – the questions were why and what to do about it.  Summers delivered a speech that was long on argument and provocation, one well-suited for the seminar rooms of his youth, one that would likely have not raised much attention if delivered by a mere professor.  But Summers was by then a former Treasury Secretary, a former Chief Economist of the World Bank and, most importantly, he was then President of Harvard, and he soon found out that the blustery style of his youth was not well-suited to his new position.

Summers hypothesized that there were three main reasons why there were so few women in elite science positions.  The first reason was that senior scientists – the gatekeepers of academic careers - thought that women were intrinsically inept or thought that young women would not put in the years of sustained work required to change science.  Why should I mentor you, some older men would say, when you’re going to soon become a full-time mother – it would be a waste of my time to hire you, to supervise your PhD, or even to read your work.

Summers’ second theory – really a corollary of his first - was that men are more likely than women to put in the years of long hours required to become a senior scientist.  Summers acknowledged that neither of these conditions were written in stone, that perhaps science could survive without restricting itself to workaholics, that perhaps science could become more like pharmacy, an occupation that better accommodates varied work schedules.  Summers hoped that continued erosion of norms about childcare and scientific careers would allow more young women to become senior scientists.

Summers last theory was that while the sexes are equally “intelligent” on average, there are both more geniuses and, how shall I put it, extreme non-geniuses among the male population. If elite scientists must be geniuses, then this theory would explain why MIT had so few female physicists.  It would also explain why men are so overrepresented among recipients of the Darwin Award.  I have several objections to this theory.  First, it’s speculative in that we don’t really know what qualities make a great scientist.  Hell, we can’t even agree on who is a great scientist!  Second, it’s very difficult to sort out genetics from acculturation in spheres like “intelligence,” although, as Summers points out, twins separated at birth tend to be a lot alike. Third, perhaps physics would be improved if we funneled a few non-geniuses, of either sex, into those Harvard physics seminars.

This third theory of Summers created a firestorm that eventually led to his dismissal as Harvard President, but not for any of the objections stated above.  He was instead fired because many people in the room that day – and eventually many beyond as well – heard Summers to say that “women are dumber than men,”…and it made them angry. Indeed, I have heard very smart people, through the present day, say that Summers said that women are stupid.   But that’s not what Summers said.  Summers did say that, if you compare the top one percent of women to the top one percent of men, then perhaps men are smarter than the women.  But Summers also said the converse, i.e. that the bottom one percent of women are smarter than the bottom one percent of men. These effects would offset in Summers’ theory, so he did not say that “women are dumber than men” on average…..but that’s what people heard and that’s what got him fired.

Now, perhaps any claim that the sexes have different distributions in innate attributes is intrinsically sexist.  But ask yourself why it is that 90 percent of American prisoners are men. Is it that women get away with crimes that send men to jail?  Is it that we have unfairly defined male behavior as criminal?  Or is it that men and women have different propensities to commit crime, partly due to something on the Y chromosome?  I think this latter theory is at least partially accurate and I think that most of Summers’ critics would agree with me.  But if we partly ascribe men’s incarceration to their genes, then how can we be simultaneously outraged by Summer’s hypothesis about gender differences in the incidence of genius? Summers’ theory may be wrong or untestable, but is it blasphemy to state the hypothesis? I think it’s hypocritical to think so, and as a result I’ve always been a bit salty about Summers’ treatment at the conference. 

I was also salty because I knew of a very different speech that Summers had delivered in Pakistan, in 1993, when he was Chief Economist of the World Bank.  The title of that speech was “Investing in All Your People,” and it exhorted Pakistan to improve its schooling of girls and women.  Summers noted that “as many as 100 million women are missing worldwide primarily due to higher death rates for young girls than boys” and that the “higher death rates are symptomatic of a much more general pattern of female deprivation in the developing world, especially in South Asia.”  Summers also noted that “underinvestment in girls is not an ineluctable consequence of poverty, nor is it made necessary by any religious or cultural tradition.”  Rather, such underinvestment “results from a vicious cycle” in which “the expectation that girls will grow to do little other than serve their husbands reduces parents’ incentive to invest in their daughters’ human capital.”  Summers also noted that “increased outlays directed at educating girls may well yield the highest return of all investments available in developing countries.”  This speech was delivered in the face of the Pakistani patriarchy, and he was quite aware that it would cause blowback to the World Bank and to himself.  A dear friend, one who wholly agreed with the substance of Summers’ remarks, came back from Karachi wondering whether Summers would have had a bigger impact if he hadn’t been so confrontational.

In his notes to that World Bank paper, Summers thanked a young-at-the-time woman, Sheryl Sandberg, who had taken one of his classes at Harvard and who he had brought with him to the World Bank.   Sandberg later worked as Summers’ chief of staff when he was the Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. Sandberg has of course gone on to a long career at Facebook, becoming one of a handful of female self-made billionaires, and has also written a book, Lean In, which exhorts young women to engage more fully with their careers, even if they might ultimately take a less-demanding job after they had children. Sandberg has cited Summers as an important influence, and she herself has gone on to serve as an admired mentor to Mark Zuckerberg.  Whatever else you think of Summers, Sandberg, and Zuckerberg, they do serve as useful models of intergender mentoring.

So I’ve always thought that Summers got a raw deal at Harvard, that his academic audience should have heard his speech as an intellectual provocation, the kind of semi-informed speculation useful in seminar rooms; that people should have been able to parse the difference between a mean and a variance; that it was hypocritical of people to tear their vestments at blasphemy when they were quite willing – as am I – to attribute differences in imprisonment to the intrinsic failings of men; that they should have known of Summers’ earlier, feminist speech to the Pakistani patriarchy; that he had been a mentor to young women; that he had told his first wife to “bill like a man” when she had wondered why she billed fewer hours than her male law firm colleagues; and that he had been married to two accomplished women, neither of whom is anybody’s second fiddle.  I think it’s a shame that his audience at that 2005 conference didn’t listen a little more closely, that they didn’t get past their response to what they thought Summers was saying and instead engage with what he did say in his inartful, confrontational manner.

But my mind was shifted recently by a lunch with an old economics friend, someone who had known Larry Summers for longer and better than I had.  He heard my defense of Summers and wagged his head in disagreement. “No, No,” he said. “You’re right about the economics, about the statistics, about all that, but Larry had it all wrong about people.  He was a fool to be a provocateur as the President of Harvard at that conference.  His job was to be the facilitator, the diplomat, the one who comes in and makes everyone feel like they’re getting something done, like Harvard has a steady hand at the till.  But instead he was the young bull in the china shop, arguing his points, talking too long and too combatively.  You can be the enfant terrible when you’re a young professor, but you have to be something else when you’re a university president.”

“So he got what he deserved?” I asked.

“Yep,” said my friend.  “He got what he deserved.”

Economics has continued to change in the years since 2005.  There has long been an American Economics Association (AEA) committee devoted to the support of women in Economics, and I think they’ve done a lot of good work.  The AEA’s efforts on this dimension have been supercharged since the election of Donald Trump and the advent of the Me-Too movement.  I sometimes find the new gendered politics in Economics arrogant and self-righteous, like most revolutions, but I think it will be great if we continue trending towards more women economists.  Women’s growth has already helped shift the field away from abstract theory and towards the practical evaluation of social programs like Medicaid, both shifts that suit my own preferences as well.  The presence of more women has also started to change the seminar culture within Economics (and perhaps other fields as well), and blustery, combative people like Larry Summers are less common than they were 30 years ago.  I think these things are generally good, but I also hope that the culture of economics does not become too feminized, as women have their own biases, both in interests and in methods of discourse.  I hope we can meet halfway.  After all, some debate of ideas is always a good thing.

I’ve had the privilege of working with a number of young women during my years at the CBO, a government agency that differs in some but not all ways from the gender environment of academia.  Some of these younger-than-me women have done an excellent job of guiding my work and helping me navigate the CBO bureaucracy.  Some of the even-younger women are preparing to enter graduate school in economics.  They’re very smart and I think they’ll have great careers in the field, and I’m glad that knowing people like me and Larry Summers didn’t scare them off.  And if one of them does become a self-made billionaire, then I’ll be happy to provide investment advice at very attractive rates.