First homeopathy is decreed bogus and unsupportable by the NHS, and now this: UK doctors are declaring gay conversion therapy damaging and harmful. There is a bit of wishful thinking, but at least this sentiment is optimistic:

Hopefully, anyone involved in the so-called treatment of homosexuality will realize that the medical profession considers them dangerous charlatans, and will reconsider their beliefs. I also sincerely hope that any vulnerable gay person who is unhappy about their sexuality takes notice of this motion and realizes that it is the world that needs to change, not them.

Changing the world…it’s an admirable and ambitious goal.

The ghost of Larry Summers (I know! And he isn’t even dead yet!) has risen again, with John Tierney of the NY Times “daring” to consider the notion that maybe women aren’t as mathy as men. There’s a lot to object to in his story, from the title (Sorry, John, but it isn’t daring to promote a stereotype at all) to the feeble caveat at the end, where he says he willing to consider “possible social bias against women” in the sciences. “Possible”? Really? Say it ain’t so, John!

But no, let’s cut straight to the heart of the issue. The problem here is sneaky sleight of hand.

Here’s what everyone in society, in academia, and in the sciences wants: we want to employ the best people with the best aptitude for the job, and with the greatest possibility of success. The universities want to hire people who are really, really good at science. Agreed?

Now here’s the problem: there is no clear marker or metric for success in science. It’s a complicated task, with lots of variables and lots of different strategies for doing well. It’s not like looking for the person who runs the 100 meter dash the fastest, in which we could just line up the applicants, fire a starting gun, and give the job to the first person who crosses the finishing line. So what do we do? We use proxy metrics.

The best proxies are measurements that most closely approximate performance in science. We look at publication records, grants awarded, recommendations of colleagues, the sort of thing we’d expect our new scientist to continue doing. It’s not perfect — maybe the applicant is a neurotic living on the edge who’s about to break down, or maybe they have an abrasive personality that will affect the performance of other faculty — but it’s a good start. It’s what most committees should evaluate most highly in the hiring process.

There are other proxies, too. Did they get good grades in their college courses? That indicates some discipline. In their teaching, did they get good student evaluations? Student evals are fraught with problems, but an unbroken record of negatives is a warning sign. Do they score well in IQ tests, SATs, GREs? That’s a proxy, too. It would indicate that they’re pretty smart, which is an extremely important property if you’re going to be a scientist.

All of those things are still just proxies for the constellation of properties you want in a scientific colleague. We have to balance them to get an idea of the potential of an applicant: it would be insane to hire someone with no experience, no publications, and no grants just because they got straight As in high school and college. But for some reason, in this tedious argument about the suitability of women to do science, all that gets mentioned is a gender difference in performance on standardized tests.

Even if we concede a genuine gender difference in performance on standardized math tests that is independent of social factors (which I don’t yet), gender is a proxy for intelligence (and a very poor proxy, too), which is a proxy for scientific aptitude. We’re getting pretty damned far from actual substance of the job requirements.

So I have two proposals, both of which still use the handy shortcut of a simple numeric proxy which the advocates of these ideas favor beyond all reason, but additionally, get away from these inflammatory, socially loaded issues of gender and race (let’s not even get into that one, but skin color is another proxy used to estimate intelligence). It might help defuse the tension that talking about judging people on their sex always causes if we simply used a different proxy.

1. Let’s just use a different indirect metric; I suggest wealth. We already know that this one works out surprisingly well, as this chart shows.

   

   Obviously, rich people are inherently smarter than poor people. Tierney points out that the right tail of the SAT math test distribution has about a 3:1 boy:girl difference; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn, though, that the rich:poor difference is even greater.

   Tierney has a wonderful quote in his article. The sex ratio at the right end of the distribution hasn’t been changing much, so he reports that

   The Duke researchers report in Intelligence, “Our data clearly show that there are sex differences in cognitive abilities in the extreme right tail, with some favoring males and some favoring females.”

   The researchers say it’s impossible to predict how long these math and science gender gaps will last. But given the gaps’ stability for two decades, the researchers conclude, “Thus, sex differences in abilities in the extreme right tail should not be dismissed as no longer part of the explanation for the dearth of women in math-intensive fields of science.”

   [By the way, that double-negative in the sentence is hopelessly confusing — it should mean that sex differences should be dismissed as part of the explanation, but in the context they’re saying exactly the opposite. Must have been written by a man, with their poorer verbal skills.]

   By the same reasoning, we can also argue that wealth differences in abilities should not be dismissed, since they tend to be perpetuated over many generations. We can just stop wasting time and money trying to educate poor children or correcting the inequities of poverty in our schools, because the data clearly says that it’s highly unlikely that any of them will succeed in science.

   So here’s my specific proposal: every scientist should report on their CV the approximate amount of money their parents were making while they were attending college. It’s a simple, single number with a wide range, allowing us to easily place everyone on a scale of potential performance. If you come from parents on the left side of that chart, you are less likely to be a competent scientist, and you should admit that fact; if you’re on the right side, employers ought to be able to use the information that you’ve had definite advantages and a leg up on the job.

2. Wait — we’re still using a proxy for a proxy. Let’s cut straight to it and use SAT/GRE scores directly. Forget everything else, let male and female faculty report their scores right on the CV, and we’ll sort them out for matters of tenure, promotion, rank, etc. right from the value being argued over.

   You see, there’s a shifty little game that proponents of gender discrimination are playing. They argue that high SAT scores are indicative of success in science, and then they say that males tend to have higher math SAT scores, and therefore it is OK to encourage more men in the higher ranks of science careers…but they never get around to saying what their SAT scores were. Larry Summers could smugly lecture to a bunch of accomplished women about how men and women were different and having testicles helps you do science, but his message really was “I have an intellectual edge over you because some men are incredibly smart, and I am a man”, which is a logical fallacy. Even if we accept his premise, we don’t know that any individual man is smarter than any individual woman — unless we get full disclosure. It’s as if I went up before a WNBA team and lectured them on how men were on average taller and stronger than women, and therefore play a better game of basketball, and didn’t have to do a little one-on-one on the court — where I’d be humiliated despite my membership in the testosterone club.

   If these scores are really so important, let’s go for it and rank scientists work by their math SAT scores. The NIH can use it to prescreen grant applications — those from scientists with scores below 750 go in a pity pile for funding if there’s left-over money, those with scores over 750 get priority ranked by the usual methods, with the math SAT used as tie-breaker for applications on the edge of the funding level. We’ll resolve scientific debates that way, too: for instance, isn’t the one thing you need to know to figure out what side of the group selection debate you should be on is the relative SAT scores of David Sloan Wilson and George C. Williams? Why aren’t these numbers available?

   The real advantage, though, is amusement. Suddenly all the men who had been arguing that being in the elite top 0.001% of was so essential to great scientific success, but who are not themselves quite that high, would find themselves arguing that science is an enterprise with many parameters and no single simple number can encapsulate the entirety of the process, and say, shouldn’t you all be looking at my publication record, my grants, my contributions to scholarly discussions?

Lest you think I’m being self-serving here, I will admit that under proposal 1, I’d have to get demoted — my parents’ economic status was way, way over to the left. I’d do much better under proposal 2, because I’ve always done phenomenally well on standardized tests. Either way, I don’t care, and if either of my schemes were actually implemented I’d be arguing against them, anyway.

The problem is fundamentally one of hitch-hiking on others’ reputations. We get these waves of articles touting the statistical superiority of males because some people want their club, the Men’s Club, to have that prestige of being better than the Women’s Club, despite the fact that their individual performance may not be better than the performance of individuals in that other, ‘inferior’ group. “Men” is a proud and meaningless association of human beings — it is a granfalloon. Seriously, the fact that Stephen Hawking happens to be in Club XY with me does not in any way bestow upon me the intellectual luster of Hawking. Nor are Carolyn Porco, Lisa Randall, Shirley Ann Jackson, or Pardis Sabeti somehow less likely to succeed in science because they don’t have a Hawking-like penis. Yet somehow we end up going around and around this irrelevant argument about the statistics of a granfalloon all the time.

Is there some kind of competition here? Are states vying for the title of most screwed up, repulsive state in the nation? ‘Cause Arizona is really working hard to make Texas look sane.

An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.

Hang on. Seriously? This is unbelievable.

The radio station in question is one of those AM talk radio horrors that spews conservative poison into the air all day long, with the likes of Limbaugh and Savage and Hannity. Steve Blair is just another loud-mouthed racist in the stable of angry white jerks. Blair has been fired by the radio station; he’s now claiming that he was just disliking the artistic quality of the mural and its prominent placement, which does make one wonder why in his comments on air were preceded by saying “I am not a racist individual” and then focused his complaints on the portrayal of a “black guy in the middle of that mural”.

The citizens of Prescott can hang their heads in shame, too. You people listen to these low-life scum? You drive by the mural and shout “Nigger!” and “Spic!” out your car windows? That’s the impression the rest of the country now has. Just firing the one bigot who inflames this stuff on the radio is not quite enough to compensate.

There’s one group of people, though, who I particularly despise: cowardly school administrators.

Wall [director of the city mural project] said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children’s faces appear happier and brighter.

“It is being lightened because of the controversy,” Wall said, adding that “they want it to look like the children are coming into light.”

Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. “We asked them to fix the shading on the children’s faces,” he said. “We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race.”

Because, heaven knows, darker complexions always look so glum and dull. Look at that section of the mural up there; does the brown child on the right look sad or stupid? If he does, how will making him pink correct the problem?

Gaaah. This country enrages me.

One of the most cunning tools of the patriarchy is the assignment of woo as a feminine virtue. Women are supposed to be intuitive, nurturing, accepting, and trusting, unlike those harsh and suspicious men. It’s a double-trap; women are brought up indoctrinated into believing that being smart and skeptical is unladylike and unattractive, and at the same time, anyone who dares to suggest that intuition and soothing, supportive words are often unproductive can be slammed for being anti-woman, because, obviously, to suggest that a human being might want to do more with their life than changing diapers and baking cookies is a direct assault on womanhood.

This naive imposition of unscientific modes of thought on women specifically leads to the state we have now. Assume a fundamental difference in attitude: women feel, while men think. Now declare an obvious truth: science requires rigorous thought. The conclusion follows that women will not be taking advantage of their strengths (that woo stuff) if they are trying to do science, therefore they will not be as good at science as men, and they will also be harming their femininity if they try to shoehorn their tender and passionate minds into the restrictive constraints of manly critical thinking.

I’ve seen that condescending attitude often enough; it was at its most vivid when I was working with surgeons in training, and if there were any women in a group, they would invariably be shunted off into some task like post-op animal care while the men would get the sharp scalpels and dental drills and do the hard work of cutting into the animal subjects. I once dared to ask the team I was assisting, after seeing that casually assumed division of labor, if maybe they should ask her what she wanted to do, and was told indignantly by the men that she would be so much better at taking care of sick cats, as if their concern was their inferiority at the nurturing part of the job. It’s the academic version of the wheedle, “Honey, I couldn’t possibly do housework as well as you do…”, and it’s just as phony.

Twisty Faster has the other side of this bias — it ends up portraying science as anti-woman, therefore women should embrace the woo.

The argument has been made that intuition is superior to science because it is somehow free of the oppressive misogynist entanglements that encumber its dude-dominated counterpart. A spin-off of this argument says that, because academia has traditionally given (and continues to give) women the stink-eyed bum’s rush, science is antifeminist and, presumably, must be shunned in favor of this women-centric intuition dealio.

I have to say that I really like her two answers to this view.

Science, like everything else on the planet, is Dude Nation’s minion, yes, but “intuition” doesn’t exist in a magical patriarchy-free zone merely because it is associated with women’s reality. In fact, it is because of patriarchy that women were assigned the supposedly unique and mystical power of hunchiness the first place.

Exactly. Woo is powerless; you want to make someone powerless, put them in charge of nothing, but give it a happy-sounding title. Women have been taken on a millennia-long snipe hunt. But, you know, it keeps them busy and out of the hair of the guys doing the real, important work.

Her reply to the argument that science is anti-feminist, is even better:

But the statement “science harms women” is not as accurate as is “the application, by misogynist knobs, of scientific method to systems of oppression harms women.”

The answer seems clear to me. Women shouldn’t be cornered into the realm of superstition because it is more touchy-feely, and they shouldn’t be anti-science. What they need to do is take the toys out of the hands of the misogynist knobs.

Tony Perkins, president of the Patriarchy Research Council (wait — they don’t do any kind or research, so maybe Patriarchy Propaganda Council would be better) is very upset that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the US military might be repealed. This would cause terrible suffering for military chaplains, compromising their liberty to be bigots.

This means that all 1.4 million members of the U.S. military will be subject to sensitivity training intended to indoctrinate them into the myths of the homosexual movement: that people are born “gay” and cannot change and that homosexual conduct does no harm to the individual or to society.

Anyone who points to the mountain of evidence to the contrary – or merely expresses the personal conviction that sex should be reserved for marriage between one man and one woman – runs the risk of receiving a negative performance evaluation for failing to support the military’s “equal opportunity policy” regarding “sexual orientation.”

Oh, I believe you can change how people behave sexually, and this policy change won’t change that at all. Of course, forcing people to act sexually in ways which bring them no joy is also a great way to cause deep misery. I just look at all the tightly puckered smarmy jiveweasels inhabiting right wing Christian think-tanks, for instance, and see a horde of frustrated, tightly-wound self-flagellators — it’s no wonder they so look forward to an afterlife in their death-cult, because this one is giving them nothing but priggishness.

For no other offense than believing what all the great monotheistic religions have believed for all of history, some service members will be denied promotion, will be forced out of the service altogether, or will simply choose not to reenlist. Other citizens will choose not to join the military in the first place. The numbers lost will dwarf the numbers gained by opening the ranks to practicing homosexuals.

Those “great” monotheistic religions also teach that women are inferior, that slavery is a respectable institution, that to kill and be killed for your god is a virtue, that homosexuals are to be stoned to death. Don’t try to tell me that because a centuries-old book of tribalism and superstition says something is so, it deserves respect. It does not. It has earned contempt and dissent.

These same kinds of bigoted remarks were made when the executive order to integrate blacks and whites in the military was made, which wasn’t actually that long ago…before 1948, military units were segregated.

Many white Americans (especially Southerners) responded with visceral revulsion to the idea of close physical contact with blacks. Many also perceived racial integration as a profound affront to their sense of social order. Blacks, for their part, often harbored deep mistrust of whites and great sensitivity to any language or actions that might be construed as racial discrimination

So his holy book and ignorant superstitions are not cause to continue a policy of discrimination, we have a history of similar arguments being made and being proven wrong…what about his claim that this change in policy will drive out good god-fearin’ gay-hatin’ soldiers and chaplains?

Screw them. Let ’em go. We’re better off without those fundagelical frauds in the military anyway. And just think how much this will hurt their efforts to infiltrate and take over our military forces!

And in case you’re feeling some pity for good ol’ boys with a hatred for gays who’ll be forced to change their professions and leave a military career because they feel so deeply that the faggots need to be caged, don’t. Martyrdom is a very Christian ideal.

Of course, they only like the pseudo-martyrdom of being compelled to tolerate others. Voluntarily quitting a career isn’t quite a sacrifice on the scale that Matthew Shepard made, or comparable to the kind of persecution they’ve been perpetrating on gay citizens for a long, long time.

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Oh, here’s a site that promotes discrimination against gays. Take a look at this lovely argument:

We Must Protect Our Military

Our military exists to fight and win wars, not engage in radical social engineering. Forcing soldiers to cohabit with people who view them as sexual objects would inevitably lead to increased sexual tension, sexual harassment, and even sexual assault.

Hey, that sounds familiar — isn’t that the same claim Muslims use for swaddling women up to protect them from the uncontrollable lusts of men? I guess the US is in big trouble — our soldiers are so weak and undisciplined that they’ll simply lapse into gay orgies if ordered to exercise tolerance.