PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Elizabeth S. Spelke '71

Professor of Psychology Elizabeth S. Spelke ’71 is renowned for her research on the development of spatial abilities and mathematical skills. In an e-mail to The Crimson yesterday, Spelke shared her thoughts on President Summers’ recent remarks regarding women inthe sciences:

SPELKE: All over the world, in every culture, there is a difference between the work levels of men and women, but it doesn’t go the way President Summers suggests: women work harder, longer, and more consistently than men...Among the top-flight scientists, I would estimate that women tend to work somewhat longer and harder than their male counterparts in mid- and late-career stages, and somewhat less long and hard in the earliest stage. If that’s right (and I agree with our president that such claims should be backed by data, not hunches), then a system that tenures people on the basis of their productivity in their 20s and 30s will produce a fair number of tenured faculty who, in their 50s and 60s, slow down or turn their attention to secondary pursuits.

CRIMSON: From what psychologists know, is there ample evidence to support the hypothesis that a difference in “innate ability” accounts for the under-representation of women on science faculties?

SPELKE: The field of cognitive development has been testing for gender differences in cognitive abilities and motivations for generations. To make a long story short, motivational differences can be large...but cognitive differences are tiny: far too small to account for the enormous gap between the proportion of capable female students, on one hard, and of female professors, on the other. For example, there’s a slight tendency for girls to have higher verbal skills than boys, but we’d be crazy to take this small difference into account in hiring English professors. The effects are so small that knowing the gender of a candidate scholar of Elizabethan theatre will tell us next to nothing about his or her achievements or potential.

Since gender differences in cognitive ability are negligible, it doesn’t much matter whether they stem from differences in our biology or our upbringing...The tendency to treat one’s male and female children differently may itself have a biological basis. It is so ingrained and universal that the classic methods for teasing apart genes and environment fail to work. When biological twins are raised by different sets of adoptive parents, for example, both families are likely to share conceptions and feelings about boys and girls that lead to common patterns of differential treatment. In light of these differences, the close cognitive similarities between girls and boys are all the more striking...

CRIMSON: Do you think President Summers should have given more weight to the ‘socialization’ hypothesis in his summary of explanations for female under-representation?

SPELKE: ...Study after study has documented gender discrimination in every aspect of academic life. The same academic paper, submitted to a set of journals, has been found to fare very differently when the unknown, fictitious author was given a male versus a female name: with a female name, the paper was distinctly more likely to be rejected. To receive a postdoctoral fellowship, in one Swedish study, an applicant needed to publish 2.5 times as many papers if she was a woman. One of the biggest effects in the research of another Harvard colleague, [Cabot Professor of Social Ethics] Mahzarin Banaji, is the implicit prejudice that associates men with the workplace and women with domestic pursuits. More research is always welcome, but the evidence for gender prejudice and gender discrimination is overwhelming.