The battle continues between truth (or merit) and social justice, exemplified in John Haidt’s famous lecture at Duke on the two types of approaches to education, continues. This time it’s in an article in the new Science urging expansion of DEI initiatives in STEMM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine).
The article is by Shirley Malcolm, whose associated bio is this:
Shirley Malcolm is a senior advisor and director of the STEM Equity Achievement (SEA) Change initiative at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science), Washington, DC, USA.
Since the AAAS funds a whole unit on “STEM Equity Achievement Change,” it’s not surprising that they’re defending DEI at a time when the Supreme Court has banned race-based admissions and DEI is waning everywhere—not just in academic but in the corporate world. Malcolm says she’s explicitly fighting back against this tendency/
Click to read.
None of us want a country where there is bigotry against women or members of different ethnic groups, and all of us want a country where everyone has equal opportunity to rise as high as they can (the latter is far harder to achieve). We want a country where the net for positions is cast as widely as possible, to get talent wherever it lies and to make sure that everybody’s in the net.
But this is not DEI. To me, DEI stands for extreme forms of affirmative action, and I generally oppose it for the reasons below. Malcolm’s quotes are indented.
1.) It favors not equality of opportunity but equity: the proportional representation of all groups in a population in an endeavor—STEMM in this case. This is made explicit in Malcolm’s article:
STEMM should ideally benefit all of society. However, this will not happen until the country creates a STEMM community as diverse as the population it should serve.
This neglects the view that different groups may have different preferences; for example, it’s likely that in medicine women tend to go into “people oriented” fields, like pediatrics, family medicine, and OB-GYN, while most surgeons are men. This appears to be due not to salary differentials but to preference, and is seen in countries, like those of northern Europe, which have the highest ratings for gender equality. (In fact, in more gender-equal countries, women are less likely to go into STEMM, for reasons probably connected with the freedom to exercise preference and make career choices.) Which leads us to the second problem.
2.) Differences in equity are imputed by DEI to systemic racism, not to differences preference or merit. Over and over again, we find that underrepresentation of groups are not due to people trying to keep others out of their fields, but to the fact that preference has controlled people’s movement into fields, or different groups are over- or under-represented because of differences in merit. Here we have Malcolm touting “inclusion and respect” as an important aspect of STEMM firled
The success of STEMM is measured not only by publications and head counts of underrepresented groups in STEMM fields but also by creating a culture of inclusion and respect.
3.) Systemic racism/sexism is said to have reduced equity in different STEMM fields, but there’s precious little evidence for that. In fact, STEMM fields and departments are desperate to hire minorities and women, which, because of affirmative action, actually now have an advantage in entering STEMM.
4.) Because identity trumps merit (something not good for science), differences in merit are to be either effaced or reduced using with strong affirmative action. For example, standardized tests have been largely eliminated, DEI statements prevail in hiring and promotion (and, in covert forms, in college admissions essays), and “holistic” admissions are used to circumvent legal bans on sex-based or race-based hiring.
Instead of using these stopgap measures that result in more equity, but at the expense of the quality of science produced, we should be working (in society, not in science) on bestowing equality of opportunity from birth. That’s a hard problem, of course, but solving it ensures that the quality of scientists is the overweening criterion for evaluating them (of course there’s teaching and service, too). And everybody wants science to be the best it can, especially, of course, when it comes to medical science.
The emphasis on merit as opposed to identity has been embodied in the University of Chicago’s Shils Report, which states this:
The Shils report dictates that faculty at the University of Chicago must display distinguished performance in each of the following criteria when being considered for promotion:
- Research
- Teaching and Training, including the supervision of graduate students
- Contribution to intellectual community
- Service
“Promotion” also includes hiring. We do not use DEI statements when hiring (though some departments try to do it on the sly), so that hiring as well as promotion is based on the criteria above, but mainly, because new professors don’t have a record of service or teaching, on research and contribution to the intellectual community.
I won’t bore you by quoting Malcolm at length, because it’s simply a boilerplate defense of DEI neglecting all the points above. The only remotely cogent point she makes is this:
For example, one study reports that women researchers in the United States are more likely to make innovations that benefit women as a whole but are less likely to participate in commercial patenting. Their relative absence is a loss for women and for the world economy. Critics imply that DEI promotes mediocrity, whereas research shows the exact opposite.
The link indeed shows what Malcolm says, except she doesn’t mention that the innovations are “patents for biomedical innovations”, but of course those reflect a sex-ratio bias inherited from the old days. and, more important, there is no bias in hiring, promotion or funding grants of women these days. As I said, departments are competing fiercely for good female talent, and the proportion of women in biomedical research is increasing. It will increase up to the point where representation reflects female merit and preference—I suspect this may be more than 50%. And this will happen naturally, so long as there’s no systemic misogyny, something that no biologist I know has seen. Here’s a table of recent Ph.D.s conferred in various fields: look at biology and at “health and medical sciences; the latter is 71.4% female!
In the end, the invidious effects of DEI, with its misguided emphasis on equity and systemic racism, and its devaluing of merit in favor of social justice, is not good for science. And yet the AAAS itself, and the journal Science, has been ideologically captured, as have nearly all scientific organizations. As Luana Maroja and I predicted, the nature of science has already changed in the past five years, and may be almost unrecognizable in another ten:
And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom. Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.
We were accused of hyperbole for saying that. And yet it’s happening, as scientific journals have science articles increasingly replaced by statements like the above, by “invited” papers on progressive issues and bias, and by ideologically-based papers accepted to reinforce a preferred ideology.
And the new science, needless to say, will not produce as much understanding of the world as science that leaves ideology at the door of the lab.
One of the biggest flaws of DEI, or identity politics, is that it “explains” what’s happening to minorities by ignoring what’s happening generally. If a black person is poor, that’s racism. If a white person is poor, that’s what? Progressives would probably say that’s justice. It doesn’t explain, though, how systemic racism allows whites to fail, and why the reasons whites fail aren’t also the reasons others fail.
Regarding “equality” and “equity”, there is a lot of conceptual confusion. The latter means “the quality of being equal or fair; fairness, impartiality; evenhanded dealing” (OED). Strictly speaking, these two words are not synonyms.
“Equity is another name for just dealing, and must not be confused with equality. While it is tautologous to say that treating people equitably is just, it is certainly not tautologous, although some think it true, to say that it is just to treat them equally.”
(Scruton, Roger. The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought. 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. pp. 219-20)
According to woke ethics, equity qua (social) fairness/justness requires not only equality of opportunity but also other kinds of equality such as equality of outcome and equality of representation.
“The emphasis on merit as opposed to identity has been embodied in the University of Chicago’s Shils Report…”
I am not in principle against merit-based social selection, but Michael Sandel has convinced me (with his book The Tyranny of Merit) that meritocracy has a dark side that is morally undesirable. In this short video, he eloquently explains the gist of his critique:
There are good points here. Two things.
1. The scale of the argument in the video is different from the one in the main post here. The main post here refers to when individuals have attained the same step on the ladder of success. Two are applying for the same job. Both have similar but slightly different qualifications — they have reached the same step — so who should get the job? The video is mainly about differences between widely separate steps – where a janitor for example should be valued and their rights and livelihood should be honored and secure because without them a surgeon cannot do their work. Also, that one’s place on this scale is more often about circumstances of birth rather than actual merit of the individual. That is very true!
2. That last part – where ones’ socioeconomic status is more about your birth -reminds me of a post that Jerry did some years ago about a study in which people were surveyed to learn what factors lay behind their socioeconomic status. Was success a matter of pulling up by the ‘ol bootstraps, or was it something else? The answer was overwhelmingly like what was pointed out in this video: Ones’ economic situation had far more to do with luck — who your parents were – than your own choices to work hard. Bootstrap pulling rarely entered into it. The rich stayed rich and the poor stayed poor over generations. Even when someone really did rise in economic status, it was a matter of having an unusual degree of intelligence and ambition, which is also a matter of luck! “Luck eats everything” was a line that stuck with me.
I wish I knew where that article was.
But there is nothing wrong with favouring the lucky, is there? If the smart, conscientious people are that way because of their lucky genetic and social endowments, they are likely to stay that way if you hire them over the unlucky dull and indolent. They may not intrinsically “deserve” their good fortune but society wants to avail itself of their talents, so it must suffer them to prosper, even if it resents their good fortune.
I understand what Mark is saying here: from the pov of the person who is born, the circumstances she might grow up in are largely down to luck or chance.
But that only makes sense if the person exists before she is born, and then some lottery determines whether she is born to a single mom in poverty, or to two wealthy law professors (cf. Sam Bankman-Fried earlier this morning).
I think about it the other way: from the pov of the parent, the future prospects of the child are strongly (not totally) predictable. It’s highly deterministic, sort of the opposite of luck.
The ethic underlying Michael Sandel’s talk is rather like that of Social Democracy in the Nordic countries—and distinct from the chatter of our DEI “progressives” in ivy league universities like Harvard, that fount of mock egalitarianism. Devotees of the latter don’t bear in mind the contingency of their academic status, nor do they endorse the dignity of non-credentialed labor. On the contrary. Equitarians of this sort worship their own academic status, and simply conflate it with merit. The difference between their ivy league credentialocracy and meritocracy is constantly revealed in their drive to undermine objective standards so as to distribute academic credentials to favored (but not unfavored) groups.
The revival of the word “quotas” might be of use for anyone trying to cut through the obfuscation of identity activists. Woke achieved a victory when the word “equity” and even “equality” became valorized as true fairness, and slotted into place for the stinging word “quotas.”
This also helped them spin “equality of opportunity” into a default inclusion of quotas. As in, “well, the barriers to voluntary and natural opportunity are strong, due to racism and sexism, so opportunity must be guaranteed by regulation and law.” They would never say that aloud, but would consider it silent de facto sanction to proceed.
It has long been the case that the main point of K-12 education is socialization and not actual education; ‘socialization’ defined as learning to sit in an assigned seat and do assigned work as a preparation for office and/or warehouse work as an adult.
It seems that if DEI is more important than merit then it’s just another form of socialization and we should be unconcerned whether any education is provided to under grads, grads or in the workforce.
From a Princeton student op-ed:
“A Princeton student argues that some courses are unfair because not everyone is equally prepared:
“In order to effectively address this disparity, Princeton needs to re-evaluate the difficulty of the STEM introductory courses and implement equity-oriented solutions that directly address the different levels of student preparation. After all, the level of academic rigor at Princeton can only be truly effective if all students are first able to work on a level playing field.”
https://twitter.com/sfmcguire79/status/1773681755012165974
Ah, yes. Oppressor/oppressed with the university in the role of oppressor. I would hope the opinion piece causes Princeton to expand its GE requirements to include a remedial ‘Taking Responsibility for My Choices (aka Having Agency)’ course.
In science, we need the best scientific minds, not necessarily the minds that are most representative. That will become apparent when the need for another Manhattan Project arises. Until an existential crisis comes about (something I hope never happens, but will), society will continue to have the luxury of treating science as a social program—much to its detriment.
The scientific enterprise is (or should be and we’d should strive to make it so) open to anyone who has the talent and drive to join in.
“It favors not equality of opportunity but equity: the proportional representation of all groups in a population in an endeavor—STEMM in this case.”
There is a disproportionate fraction of Blacks in some professional sports. Is this a problem they’re trying to address, too?
Dialectical Epistemic Inversion is the sacred object of a gnostic cult whose core belief is faith in dialectic.
That is, “DEI” is fraud, and it will be productive to start with that premise.
It is strange that “DEI” proponents are required to produce no evidence for the project’s merit – but it’s targets and critics go to great lengths do all the work as a way to find any reason to support it. Strikes me as a religious manipulation – a gnostic manipulation – getting everyone else prove the gnosis right.
I really need a Thyroid Planet Substack
Appreciated (… I think…) but in fact, I am pretty much reporting my take from James Lindsay’s material.
I usually say I’m not trying to hide that, but I can’t cite all his stuff each time. I think the readers here understand that.
Perhaps a good book to check out which Lindsay cites is :
Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
Eric Voegelin
1968, 1997
Regenery Press, Chicago;Washington D.C.
Cheers
I definitely meant it as a compliment.
I also enjoy Lindsay and Voegelin.
Maybe it’s because we’re working here in a comments section, your short bursts are usually sharper and pithier than James’ posts and James could really use some R&R from the Culture War, sometimes he veers into the conspiratorial (esp w the “grooming” thing). But he is an essential guide. Also, he does many videos, when I’m a reader not a watcher.
Either way, see you in the gulag!
The University of Washington’s medical school enjoys an Office of Faculty Affairs. This office recently underwent a stupendous change in its gender representation. A year ago, its website showed a female:male ratio of 8:0. But NOW, the female:male ratio on the website has changed to—wait for it— 9:1!
If the ratios reflect preferences rather than systemic misandry, this might have something to do with one glaring statistic in the table of 2020 advanced degrees. The highest female proportion of all, 76.2%, is in “public administration”. I sometimes wonder what “public administration” actually is. I guess we are in the process of finding out.
Lawrence M. Krauss: Academia’s Missing Men. Quillette, Sept 11, 2023
Men are disappearing from science and academia. The public perception is, however, exactly the opposite.
https://archive.is/18k9n
There is dispute about whether medicine really belongs in STEM(M). A good test is whether women are choosing to do it. If they are flocking to it, it’s not STEM. It therefore distorts the sex-equity “success” of STEM if you include medicine. Men flee feminized careers because when something becomes perceived as family-friendly “women’s work”, social status and remuneration fall. (Medicine is a broad enough field that the sexes can differentiate through self-sorting into the different disciplines, as Jerry observes.)
Leslie, I would like to see some evidence for this claim:
I’m especially intrigued by the financial part of the claim (more women in a line of work means lower wages – I know this is boiler-plate feminists talk, but I’ve never seen a study making a theoretical argument for it and providing empirical data supporting it).
All I can say is that since I’m not a feminist, my agreement with a boiler-plate feminist trope means that it is probably well-founded.
More seriously, it is an article of faith among residency program directors in medical schools. While surgical problems assiduously court promising female grads showing interest and aptitude for surgery, directors of programs* that tilt female have told me they wish they could attract more men, the better to boost the salaries or fees their graduates of either sex will attract, as that is one determination of any program’s competitiveness. Remuneration differences by sex across disciplines, and even within a discipline billing the same fees for the same work, are robust in observational studies but suffer from uncontrolled selection bias. It is very difficult to study self-fulfilling prophecies (like white flight) scientifically.
At least in medicine and surgery, society values work that requires great cognitive and procedural exertion, is individualized to the patient and not protocol-driven, and promises to be made available at 2 a.m. without canceling the scheduled patients next morning. Society says it values talking and listening about “health promotion” in scheduled office appointments during regular hours that end promptly at 5, but it doesn’t want to pay much for it. This is the work women disproportionately choose to do….and nurse-practitioners are going to eat their lunch.
————————-
* I was once the next tier down in post-graduate medical education.
It’s worth pointing out that woke people don’t want this. Woke people want to actively deny you opportunity if others in your “identity” group tend to be more successful than average.
I think, by the way, that we pretty much do have equal opportunity these days in most Western countries, and the woke sure don’t like it.
It is said, Equity Equalizes Downward
I also note, as “equity” and “equal outcome” has/is getting scrutinized, a target word for subversion is now :
opportunity
I agree about opportunity.
The determination is: “Sure, under “Freedom” (cough), everyone has equal opportunity, in theory. Freely. However, the systemic barriers to opportunity are so strong we have to assist oppressed classes to access it.”
Cue the wonks to cook up the assist by Gov. Opportunity, Yea! Good intentions. Moral value. What could possibly go wrong?
+1
What constitutes those purported opportunities? If one starts from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, it still takes a great deal of both luck and smarts to concretely realize their potential.
For a sobering look into the staggering role of social factors in the U.S., see the new book Troubled, a “memoir and an analysis of the muddled thinking on college campuses”, by former foster child Rob Henderson, so summarized in a recent review in
The Economist.
What are the opportunities? Well, they are publicly-funded schools, and the availability of loans for college. A smart but poor kid can generally get a good-enough education and take it from there.
The evidence from twin studies and similar is that family socioeconomic circumstances are much less important than generally supposed (mostly because people ignore genes; if the parents are on the “lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder” it’s generally because they are less able overall, and they pass on genes for being less able to their offspring).
Rob Henderson is an extreme example; only a small fraction will have an upbringing that bad, with that amount of being passed between foster parents, but even then, when he became an adult, and was able to make his own trajectory, he then did ok, attending Yale and Cambridge (though, yes, had be been born into a wealthy and stable two-parent family he would have had more opportunities).
From my reading of Henderson’s book so far (I just started) his thesis is precisely the opposite, and I think agrees with those by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, in that parental circumstances and family stability matter a great deal.
As to what the root cause is and means to overcome bad circumstances, that’s a different matter, with cause and effect hard to disentangle. You hypothesize:
Paired with present correlations in the US, this looks to be quite contentious.
And how does this mesh with evidence from the higher success rate of recent African immigrants compared with that of US-born African Americans?
First, again, Rob Henderson’s story is extreme in terms of a chaotic and deprived childhood (but even so, he ended up at Yale and Cambridge). But leaving one anecdotal person aside:
There have been lots and lots of studies of this, and twin studies really do give us a very good idea of the effect of “shared environment” (all environmental influences that siblings living together would share) on kids’ outcomes. And the finding — counter-intuitive perhaps — is that it is much less important than generally supposed. Much of the effects popularly attributed to SES are actually about genes. (A good starting point is this link.)
It might be “contentious” in the sense that the mainstream discourse is still dominated by blank-slatism. But blank-slatism is just utterly wrong; and the bit you quoted really is settled science. (By the way, what I said there is about within-group, within-race variation.)
The obvious suggestion is that those who have the wherewithall to migrate to the US are a selected elite. Recent African immigrants to the US tend to be highly educated, high-income, high-IQ people. They could well be around 1.5 or 2 standard deviations above average for their home country.
(So, if it were the case that sub-Saharan African IQ and African-American IQ tends to average a standard deviation below the US average — which is what data actually suggest, whether one likes that or not — then the recent African immigrants to the US could well be, on average, a standard deviation above the US average, which then explains their success. Ditto recent immigrants from places like India, who are also successful.)
I was so frustrated with AAAS I had intended to drop the membership, but now think need to stay abreast of this stuff as well as the science info. Complementing Jerry’s points is an interesting EDITORIAL in 22 March (previous issue, mail behind here) Science on p.1271 “music and the mind” where there is acknowledgement that “some musical aptitude is genetic” and some anecdotal connection between music ability and STEM. From an organization supporting DEI. I apologize if this reference was already discussed and I missed it.