Posted by Eugene Volokh:
God Forbid That People Should Look at Demographic Data
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_07_08-2007_07_14.shtml#1184272689
(except, of course, when [1]God forbid that people should ignore
demographic data): The [2]Feminist Law Professors blog writes:
Oh for the love of...
July 10th, 2007
Exactly what possessed Eugene Volokh to look into the sexual
orientation of female law profs whose scholarship gets cited a lot?
See his "update" at end of [3]this post and try to avoid banging
your head on the computer monitor.
Hmm -- what would possess an academic to look into disproportionate
representation by sexual orientation when one is looking at data
showing disproportionate representation by sex and ethnicity? Could it
be academic curiosity? A desire to find -- and then to call attention
to -- interesting data points that might help shed light on the degree
to which personal attributes correlate with professional success, and
potentially influence professional success?
Look, let's say the data I give did generalize beyond its very small
sample. I stressed that it was quite limited, since it revealed only
that 2 of the 6 women law professors on the list of the 50 most cited
professors who entered law teaching since 1992; at this point, it is
at most very tentatively suggestive. But let's say it did lead some
readers to look more closely, and find that indeed lesbians and
bisexual women are substantially overrepresented among successful
women in certain fields.
Wouldn't that be a matter of some scholarly interest? It doesn't
matter what one thinks the cause for this disproportion might be:
different patterns of discrimination by outsiders, different internal
cultural norms within the group, different social and familial
structures, biological differences, or whatever else. It doesn't even
matter if one is unsure of the cause at the outset, but is just trying
to find data that may eventually help identify the cause. Wouldn't the
data be pretty interesting to people who are seriously interested in
sociology, biology, demography, the legal profession, and a wide range
of other fields?
To me, the glory of the academic life is that you're supposed to look
for interesting data, bring it up to colleagues, investigate it,
speculate about it, and the like. All people should be entitled to do
this, but for us this sort of inquisitiveness is part of our jobs.
It's too bad that identifying such data leads some to want to bang
their heads against their monitors.
More broadly, if you're curious about human behavior -- as a scholar
or just as a fellow human -- isn't there something striking and
intriguing about the marked correlations between sexual orientation
and participation in various professions? Male homosexuals are
notoriously overrepresented in some fields, and while some such claims
might at times be spurious, my sense is that on balance conventional
wisdom reflects reality. Lesbians are also often said to be
overrepresented in other fields (chiefly athletic, in my experience,
though not only that); again, some of this may be myth, but I see no
reason to assume that it's all myth.
Why is this? Is it culture? The effects of discrimination? Biology?
Some mix of these factors? Does it relate only to different rates of
interest in the fields, or also to different rates of success?
Fascinating questions, it seems to me, and ones that get more
fascinating as one acquires more data. So that's what possessed me,
and I don't see what's wrong with such possession.
References
1. http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=2035
2. http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=2040
3. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_07_08-2007_07_14.shtml#1184046901
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