SISSA labock

I was reminded that I was admitted to Radcliffe, and not Harvard, on one of my first days as an undergrad, when the female students were invited to a reception at the elegant Fogg art museum.

I asked a fellow student about the microscopic triangles of bread with no crust and a smidgen of filling. She said they were watercress sandwiches. I didn't bother to ask what watercress was, since I figured it might lead down a bottomless pit of words I'd never heard, and I didn't want to admit my ignorance more than I already had.

I knew that one isn't supposed to eat in a library, so eating and drinking while surrounded by old expensive paintings felt like a transgression.

Someone told us to get on what I now know is a "receiving line". When we got to the head of the line, we were greeted by a regal woman who chirped like a bird. She chirped the same phrase to everyone. To me, it sounded something like "SISSA labock".

After going through the line, I approached a group of classmates who were all asking each other, "Who was that woman, and what was she saying?"

Someone among the cognoscenti replied, "She was saying `Sissela Bok'. That's her name. She's the wife of Derek Bok, the Harvard president."

I felt indignant that the hostess and presumed role model at the reception for female Harvard students was someone who was there as the wife of the college's president, rather than someone who was there in her role as an acclaimed academic. (Sissela Bok did go on to eventually make a name for herself in her own right, though she is perhaps best known as a daughter of accomplished parents, each of whom won a Nobel Prize.) Surely there were distinguished female professors we could have met instead? Little did I know that there were very few female faculty at Harvard, and that that would remain the case for decades.

This was one of several times where Harvard seemed to convey the message that a woman's path to success was more likely to be based on whom she slept with, than on her intellectual accomplishments.

IQ Tests, Part 2: The Bus Driver

I got to know the friendly bus driver who drove the shuttle bus from the mathematics research institute down the hill to the UC Berkeley campus. I was often the only passenger on the last trip down the hill. Since I lived partway between the last stop and the bus depot, he would drop me off near home, even though he wasn't supposed to.

He was an undergrad who was moonlighting as a bus driver. He was enrolled in a large introductory psychology course, and he told me about some of the more interesting things he learned, including what he learned about the nature-nurture controversy.

He said that when the Stanford-Binet IQ tests were first created, the devisers created a test that they thought would measure intelligence. They tested their first drafts on various populations, and learned that females did better than males on several subtests. That didn't seem right to them, so they revised the test and retested it until they ended up with a test for which males did about as well as females, for all the subpopulations they tested.

Sometime later, while visiting Stanford University, I spent a day in the library tracking down original documents on the creation and evolution of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales. There seems to be at least some truth in what the bus driver told me.

Whenever someone tells me that IQ tests prove that men are innately more intelligent than women in some group, I roll my eyes. I don't see how one can legitimately claim anything about gender differences using a test that was manipulated to be gender-neutral (not to mention that the tests don't measure innate ability and the results are influenced by education and experience).

Near the end of the semester, the bus driver told me that his professor said to the class, "I know that there's no data or research that proves that men are smarter than women. But ask yourself, `What does my gut tell me?' In your gut, you know that men are smarter than women. You should trust your gut."

"He said WHAT?" I exclaimed. I was furious that a Berkeley professor, who was supposed to be teaching critical thinking skills, would tell the students to ignore all the data and research they learned about in his class, and just trust their gut (in other words, rely on the prejudices they had learned growing up).

When I'm asked about gender differences on tests, I usually say, "When men do better, they declare that men are genetically superior. When women do better, they rewrite the test."

IQ Tests, Part 1: The Two-Way Mirror

When my mother was a very young child, too young to read, she was given an IQ test. The person who administered the test showed my mother a drawing of a cow, and asked what it was. My mother didn't know. She had grown up in apartment buildings in the Bronx, and had never seen a cow. She probably hadn't even visited the Bronx Zoo (but I suspect it wouldn't have had a cow).

The examiner asked, "Where does milk come from?"

My mother knew that one. "From a bottle!" she exclaimed. The milkman delivered the milk in glass bottles.

My mother told me this story several times over the years. She didn't think that IQ tests were fair.

When I was a very young child, I was given an IQ test. The person who administered the test was a friend of my mother. I think she was being trained to give IQ tests, and was using me as her guinea pig. As she drove me to the testing site, we merrily chatted away.

The testing room looked like a small classroom, but we were the only ones there. My mother's friend and I sat at a round table. She asked me a bunch of questions, probably much like the ones my mother had been asked 40 years earlier. I was more sophisticated than my mother had been. I could identify the drawing of the cow, though I felt quite insulted to be asked that question. Did she think I was stupid? Did my mother's friend not know the answers to these questions? She couldn't be that ignorant. With each dumb question, I got more annoyed, and less inclined to answer. If she wanted to know the answers to these questions, she should have made it worth my while, I felt.

After the battery of questions, she left the room. As she was leaving, she gestured toward a low cabinet and casually remarked that she would be right back, but there were toys in the cabinet that I was welcome to play with.

At that time, I had an infinite amount of patience. I waited patiently for my mother's friend to return. But as the wait got longer and longer, I got more and more bored. I've always had an aversion to having my time wasted. It seems disrespectful. In addition, she had promised me she would return soon. I was furious that she had broken her promise. She had better have a good excuse.

After what seemed like an eternity, I decided that perhaps she wasn't about to return, and I might as well see what toys were in the cabinet. I slid open the cabinet door, glanced at the unappealing dolls, realized that other kids had touched them and they were probably loaded with dirt and germs, and slid the cabinet door closed. I returned to my seat.

My mother's friend eventually returned. No apology. No explanation for why she hadn't returned promptly as promised. On the drive home I was sullen, and gave one-word answers to her questions. Later, hints from my mother led me to conclude that the test had been declared a failure since I had been uncooperative.

It was only years later that I wondered whether I was being watched through a two-way mirror, to see how I interacted with the toys. She must have followed an algorithm that said that she couldn't return to the room until I played with the toys for at least x minutes. It was a battle of wills to see who would cave first.

Like my mother, I'm not a big fan of IQ tests.