Thanks for providing a summary of the conference! My main takeaway is that people are very hung up (again) on the nature/nurture dichotomy when it comes to sex differences. It seems obvious that most of the development of human individuals is an interaction between innate tendencies and environmental influences. Arguments that polarize these factors are usually driven by emotional concerns arising from political and cultural pressures outside of the scientific debate. Sex-based discrimination is one of these. It would be helpful if both the scientists and the advocates for various interest groups could stop using arguments about sex differences to support positions that favor or oppose discrimination, which continues to be a real thing in our society.
Yes, it is obvious "that most of the development of human individuals is an interaction between innate tendencies and environmental influences". But this interaction could be 98% environmental and 2% biological or 98% biological and 2% environmental- so the extent to which both of these contribute is important to understanding. I wouldn't say these experts are "hung up" on the nature/nurture dichotomy so much as trying to find clear evidence for their relative contributions.
The relative contribution of culture and nature also is important for policy. For example the research on gender egalitarian countries implies that egalitarian cultures don't make women and men more similar and therefore the lack of equal representation of women and men in various fields isn't simply because enough money or effort has not been thrown at the problem.
Which countries are you classifying as "gender egalitarian"?
I agree that "the lack of equal representation of women and men in various fields isn't simply because enough money or effort has not been thrown at the problem." Frankly, I know of no one who is asserting that.
The lack of equal representation is multi-determined, like all social problems that have persisted for hundreds of years. One of the most common contributors is the tendency of people to discriminate in favor of men based on factors that have nothing to do with actual potential to succeed at a job, or even with demonstrated performance. Some of these preferences are blatantly sexist assumptions that women are, for example, "not qualified to be leaders." But many other non-rational factors are attraction to persons perceived to be similar to oneself, tendencies to promote people based on personal liking, recommending the bros one golfs with, and, at high levels of power, recommending only one's prep school classmates.
Men with resources have had access to pretty much any job they wanted to do for a very long time. Many of them have been incompetent at those jobs, but people did not immediately conclude that they were incompetent because they were men. I find it remarkable that within two generations after U.S. women began to increase their participation in public life and employment outside the domestic sphere, that we are now seeing so much interrogation of women's ability to replace men in those jobs.
1- which countries are gender egalitarian? - places like Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Holland and not places like Algeria, Tunisia and the UAE- the gender equality paradox paper used a measure called the Global Gender Gap Index
2- I don't think lack of equal representation is a problem. Check out Lubinski's work- they asked the most mathematically gifted men and women how many hours per week they would work a their ideal job- 30% of the women but just 7% of the men wanted to work less than full time at their ideal job. Women also prioritized their health, spending time with family and hobbies over work. Goldin, who just won the Nobel Prize said -"The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours” - the same could be said about gaps in certain fields. Goldin also said men have time for "greedy jobs" that take up all their hours whereas women's "greedy job" is usually motherhood.
Thanks for the detailed and interesting response. The pressure in “big jobs” to work 12 hour days and to some extent be available 7 days/week has become a big problem for everyone. High tech is the primary employer in my area, and is a prime offender in this regard. Young people are showing a strong commitment to changing this, even though they are taking a big hit in income. I applaud their willingness to change the American lifestyle in this direction.
It is not a problem. Most jobs are not like this. Furthermore, once you get into higher managerial roles the workload drops. These jobs are good for young people who would probably be doing bad things anyway (substance abuse, for example). 12 hours per day is not bad five days per week. That is what allows for proper compensation (again, people can work for less money at other firms, but people should have a choice to work more and get paid more). Many fields are ruined when rich people take over, turn the place into a clean, boring, gossipy nightmare with low pay, low hours, senseless travel and bad mentoring. The existence of unpaid internships are a big indicator that the organization has been made anti-male and anti[-career advancement.
I am pretty sure I would have died, like dozens of my high school friends, had I not been working 80+ hours per week in my twenties. It was great. That was the best job I ever had.
I know this is a really old thread and wish I knew about it back when it came out, but the work hours thing is really interesting. That said, the meaning of "full time" work all over the world is not the same. When people envision full time work in the Netherlands or France, they may be enivisioning 30 hours a week and 6-8 weeks of vacation. Are people in China or the U.S. imagining 48 hours and 2 weeks of vacation?
Of course it may also be that because the jobs women excel at tend to get "downgraded" by male actors (i.e. when a profession becomes more female-dominated, pay and prestige tends to go down even when competence for the profession remains the same or even improves) and so women are less rosey-eyed about work as a result of their ideal jobs being less remunerative and less able to provide social status.
What you are saying is dead wrong, Men do not "downgrade" sectors where women work. Women change the culture once they control it. My ex-wife worked in the non-profit sector when we were young. I met an older man that I liked during that time. He told me that in the 1950's and 1960's non-profits paid their staff a living wage. There were no unpaid internships. Full-time staff bought homes and retired comfortably. When females took over, they changed the culture to reflect their values. They let salaries stagnate, they de-emphasized efficiency, and they worked less and slowed career progression.
Now this is where women would jump in and claim that the "worst part" was the culture change from direct confrontation to petty rumor-mongering and exclusion. I have seen this personally, and it is better to have a manager yell at someone than to torture him/her for the next six months. Yelling is not bad. Anger is not bad. To punish these makes a work environment hell for men, especially young men. Women often promote lower pay for fewer hours. If you offer a high-paid job with 80-100 hour work weeks and high stress, men will fight for those jobs. Many, if not most women would rather make less money and work fewer hours. This is obvious, but no one can write about it because it has the wrong opinion. I have seen this multiple times where women take over a team and hire way more people at lower pay, then give garbage reviews and promotions without pay. Over time the department is full of low-paid women because no one else will work there. So many finance jobs that pay well can do so because you have a team of seven guys doing the work of thirty. You can hire a university graduate for $100k plus a big bonus in such a shop. If he does well, you can pay him $250k in his mid-twenties because it is way cheaper to have seven guys instead of thirty. Even if the baseline payroll is the` same, they will cost less after benefits and less office space. You can hire young women into these jobs, but they tend to leave after a few years. Even the women who like it often never return from maternity leave. Go talk to people in finance and it is the norm.
Men are fine working in places where they are comfortable. Women often take over an environment and make it as uncomfortable and possible for men. Unlike women, men have no EEOC to help them. Men are always wrong. This is the same force that has led so many young men to stay in the mother's basement. God save us if they ever organize and promote their terrifying worldview.
I do want to stress that it is okay for women to change environments where they dominate. That is fine, but it is not men reducing wages and prestige. Women do that.
Some of your statements are disprovable. for example, "Men with resources have had access to pretty much any job they wanted to do for a very long time." That is simply not true. I have know very wealthy men who tried hard to get jobs and simply could not do it. Furthermore, the problem with this kind of thinking is that it focuses on the ultra-elite (CEO's, journalists, senators, professors,...) instead of the other 99.9%. This might have been true in feudal Europe, but not in modern capitalist societies. The only area I can think of that this reflects reality are shallow, fake-status jobs, such as rich a-holes paying a think tank to hire them at no compensation, or a father buying a magazine for his lazy son to pretend to work at. People cannot buy his way into real jobs where people depend on them. Even wealthy people who run for officer usually fail. I think that says a lot about how much better our politicians are vs silly anti-government nonsense on the right or misguided concerns about money on left.
I believe the real issue is the "blank slate" perspective many of the anti-biology, anti-evolution supporters promote. We are all different, and that is okay. We should target getting more people to live better lives, not constantly scream and scold everyone because many young men prefer 80-hour-per-week high-income jobs, while many women prefer higher-status, more free time jobs. Of course it is rotten to tell females that they should not enjoy promiscuity, violence, and heavy drinking. The world needs more women who do. That said, there is real evidence that in some areas, women and men are different on average, from height to levels of aggression to the acceptance of violence and more. Male and female status games are different, and we should focus on making everyone better/happier, not proving or disproving whether the status games should be equal. The entire idea of "equal" is misguided. If women can be made happier by testosterone injections, silly chest-thumping in front of the opposite sex and other regressions to the mean, okay great, but we need to make sure that we are improving those individuals. The evidence from the medical care provided to gender-confused children does not inspire confidence.
My greatest concern is that so many feminist critiques over the last thirty years seem to either be a bizarre obsession with anything male-coded (whatever men do must be high status), or worse, silly revolutionary nonsense in the spirit of Angela Davis (nationalizing companies/industries, banning trade everywhere except for Cuba, where for some reason trade is not evil,...). Such positions are not simply wrong, but they appear to make the people who believe them miserable. Go hang out with childless activists over forty years of age and it will become obvious. In the traditional families that they despise, everyone is less broken and has a greater sense of efficacy and purpose in their lives.
Now I have seen activists who are happy. They have families and often have lives outside of their work (and often a well-paid spouse to help with the financial burden of life). These people seem to soften their stance towards everything controversial. I see the same from conservatives after they have families as well. The delay and often the failure to form families may be a large part of our social crisis driving suicide, substance about and other anti-social behaviors as well as the growing gender divide regarding political beliefs. Fixing that seems more productive than ever more hand-wringing about the number women running Fortune 500 companies or the number of women founding software start-ups. Such tiny groups are always going to be unique and not conform to the underlying population. Using them as a reference point is silly, yet it has become standard as women's overall success over-shadows that of males in ever more fields (grades, SAT scores, university credentials, income for 30 and under in Britain,....
I liked your first comment. It was good, but that last one is a good example of focusing on distractions that come from bad data.
Interesting to take on feminists as opposed to TRA's, but I understand the importance of being able to talk about these issues. There was a common 19th century phrase, "Classics for gentlemen, science for ladies." Computer engineering was initially thought of as a woman's job. And there have been massive increases in women in STEM, because of a concerted cultural effort to create room for them. I don't understand why these points are so often ignored. Of course there are average behavioral differences, and of course some of them are rooted in biology. But why ignore the cultural?
"In 1970, women made up 38% of all U.S. workers and 8% of STEM workers. By 2019, the STEM proportion had increased to 27% and women made up 48% of all workers.
Since 1970, the representation of women has increased across all STEM occupations and they made significant gains in social science occupations in particular – from 19% in 1970 to 64% in 2019.
Women in 2019 also made up nearly half of those in all math (47%) and life and physical science (45%) occupations."
The amount of motivated reasoning in this comments section is frankly embarrassing.
Computer science was initially considered women’s work because it was data entry. They were typists.
There have been increases of women in STEM because of the growth in social sciences, which incidentally is in a crisis of credibility.
Increases in female participation in hard sciences and computer science are the result of massive social engineering efforts and outright discrimination against men. The relatively large numbers of tech bros deciding they are now women doesn’t hurt, either.
Programmers (i.e. algorithm-creators) were women then too, not just punch card operators. So I really don't think that's true.
Going on, the biggest factor is that if you enforce neutral rules about good behavior (as opposed to assuming that a neutral system is one that tolerates male aggression and harassment on par with female injury), women excel in school well above men and end up doing better in grades, test scores, attendance, etc... So even if women may not be as likely to be drawn to STEM or whatever, the pool is increasingly female because the modern world of universal education and literacy and relative prosperity makes female tendencies and skills a lot more desirable than men. While we live closer to the state of nature, men were usually dominant. In a world of peace and cooperation, women's tendencies are quite superior and more utopian imho.
The isolated and sexually frustrated online bros wanting to blow it all up so they can be orcs presiding over a new Mordor is not that surprising, but it was avoidable. Sadly, the world created by the invention of the smartphone seems to be seeding the demise of the modern world and a retreat to serfdom and war and aggression, but that's a bigger problem.
I agree. There needs to be continued pressure on stopping discrimination based on sex. The definition of prejudice is that individuals are prejudged based on their presumed group identities, instead of on their performance as individuals. Whether or not women as a "group" are more or less interested in STEM fields than are men as a "group" should not determine whether an individual woman is admitted to a program or hired into a job. Anyway, "STEM" is not a unified subject. Many women are interested in both veterinary and human medicine, for example, and have increased their numbers dramatically since sex discrimination in these fields declined.
Yeah, that's not what is happening. Boys do worse even on standardized tests. Boys miss school more often. Boys don't sit still and listen and girls do. Women read more on their own than boys do by a large margin, with all the neurological and language benefits that conveys.
I don't know if that is true, but also don't reject the claim. Perhaps you could provide evidence for it?
I have a different theory, which is that women who are interested in biological sciences are in some cases also interested in taking care of animals and/or human beings. Work roles that involve caring for the sick tend to be appealing to many women.
That's the thing. For all we know, the older idea that computers are 'women's work' might have been 'right' all along. Ada. Adm. Hopper. I have no axe to grind either way. Why not just let it happen?
... if Lisa (above) wants to call that social engineering then fine. But I'd call it letting women be what they want to be -- and have the ability to actually succeed in doing.
> By 2019, the STEM proportion had increased to 27%
Via massive social engineering such as quotas. It seems that if social engineering is not controlling everything, the more egalitarian the society the *more* we see the sexes conforming to 'traditional' roles. Unfortunately the social engineers make it impossible to actually answer the question: what's the split between social effects and biological effects? It would really be nice to answer that question so I'd suggest that all engineering stop and actually *observe* what happens rather than force the outcomes that our ideologies demand.
Thanks for this. Will you send me some links to the quotas for women in the STEM fields and the other social engineering? I don't have that info. I know there were restrictions on what women could study, what jobs they could hold, whether they could have bank accounts and credit cards in their own names, etc, and many of those restrictions went by the wayside thanks to second wave feminism. I know less about the quotas and social engineering that followed (because you're saying that promoting the idea that woman *can* do STEM isn't social engineer, yes?). Thanks!
I suppose that formal or informal affirmative action is what is meant by "quotas." I started grad school in 1969. There were about 20 people in my class, and I think the class was about 50% women. This split had been agreed upon by faculty, starting that year. The next year, half the class was of color, mostly black men, also by faculty agreement.
Previous to 1969, most grad students in the same grad program had been white men, as were the overwhelming majority of the faculty. There were 1.5 women on the faculty, and about ten times as many men. In my class only one of the women was married at time of admission. All the rest of us were admitted without needing to go through admission interviews, but that one woman was singled out for an in person interview, in which she was grilled about her intentions to stay in school versus have babies and drop out. (Her husband was in Vietnam at the time).
I recall an incident when I was in the student lounge studying and one of the most narcissistic men in my class approached me and with a sneer asked me how I felt about "being in a male dominated field" (i.e., clinical psychology). I told him that I considered our profession to be "traditional women's work" and smiled. Undaunted by my statement, he intensified his sneer and repeated, "It IS a male-dominated field!" and waltzed out the door. My profession currently consists of 80% women.
This is in some ways a tragedy, as men are very much needed as therapists. I don't know to what extent they are being kept out of mental health professions by discrimination against white men. I suspect that most of the imbalance is due to the fact that psychotherapy is an occupation that women are very strongly drawn towards, due certainly to socialization to be caretakers as well (probably) to innate abilities and role preferences.
I mean, the current "manosphere" is about repressing feelings, destroying empathy, about how anything feminine or low testosterone is inferior, etc... Men have been sabotaging their collective ability to live in the modern world for decades and are now raging back at the institutions for not having self-sabotaged in parallel.
And at this point, it's actually the opposite. College admissions are trying to get enough qualified men into colleges and grad schools and it's harder and harder.
DEI/EDI (aka affirmative action/positive discrimination/quotas) in favour of women and “minorities” has been a much lauded and publicised initiative in university admissions and HR departments throughout the Western Word. Ramping up into full blown blatant discrimination in hiring against straight white men from
The mid 2010’s. But also it’s not happening and it never happened.
I won't do the homework for you. One hears about these things all the time, it's every day. But I don't have a list.
> I know there were restrictions on what women could study
Yes. Indeed there WERE. They are not only long-gone (and good riddance) but they have been replaced by reverse discrimination. The 'second wave' was, all considered, a necessary thing. Even Patriarchialists like myself look back on the day when a woman couldn't be an engineer (or a man a nurse) as absurd.
> (because you're saying that promoting the idea that woman *can* do STEM isn't social engineer, yes?)
Well ... if you think that a deliberate agenda of removing barriers is social engineering then I must concede the point.
Indeed. I use the term 'social engineering' in only a critical way but that's hardly fair. We properly socially engineer all the time, I just wish the progressives would stop engineering insanity.
Hm, "One hears about these things all the time." Indeed, I have not. That's why I asked. You say there are quotas—so I'm asking for the evidence so I can shift my argument. I can't learn and shift if you have no proof.
We can never just observe, this is not a lab experiment. Does implementing laws about, say, maternity leave or accommodations for nursing moms,etc count as part of "just observing" or part of social engineering? Same with laws that favor (financially) marriage or staying single? Every law and regulation a society has is social engineering in some way. Not all of it is bad (although some certainly is).
There's truth in what you say but still it is possible to 'back off' the progressive agenda to some degree. I myself would love to know what the female aptitude for STEM is absent both restrictions and inducements. Mean time we keep maternity leave.
‘These stories are ignored’ because the only reason anyone researches ‘sex differences’ is to prove that women are inferior to males and should never be allowed education, economic power, or any kind of legal rights. The only people who research ‘sex differences’ do it because they loathe women.
The dismantling appears to be pretty well advanced where I live. I hope that it can be reversed here and stopped elsewhere. Unfortunately, young people here are to a great extent in favor of the gender madness.
I am starting to think that the best solution to our social problems in the U.S. is to resurrect the principle of "majority rule" that used to guide our formal decisions. Of course we must voluntarily consider the needs of minorities, but pandering to small groups of extremists has gotten us to where we are now.
Can someone explain what is being dismantled or causing such an intense backlash? This seems to be most pronounced in the U.S., which has remained a masculinist culture in a ton of ways, and has also had its most advanced levels of growth and cultural dominance during the very period that all of these DEI/gender equity programs have been pushed. In so many ways, I am confused what people are railing back against. Violent and sexual crime has fallen by 2/3 over the last 35 years even while the country has become more diverse. The economy here has outperformed every other nation in the world, especially if we are talking about large developed economies. Productivity is up. Etc...
It seems that we have a media driven vibes recession, as a combined result of male anger at a kinder, gentler society, and fear-baiting. And that has been driven inordinately by dishonest conservative media like Fox News and OANN (i.e. the ones who pretend that there are recessions whenever a Democrat comes to office, that fraud is everywhere rather than relatively rare, and there are ever increasing crime waves destroying every city where immigrants and black people live and so all the white people in suburbs need to stay safe from the tsunami).
To say that the larger brains in men indicate higher intelligence is not the sort of conclusion I would expect from educated people.
An elephant brain is 3-4 times the size of a human brain but nobody would say that elephants are more intelligent than humans. Some whale species have brains ten time the size of human brains.
Men show superior 3D visualization; this is important because while topographic intelligence, two dimensions, is inborn, the ability to think in 3D correlates with intelligence and is one of the six scales that should be used in place of the singular metric of IQ. We don't naturally think in 3D; we've been out of trees too long.
Trying to shoehorn two distinct sexes into one is a contemporary foolishness that I hope goes away soon.
There is one factor nobody mentioned; every century or so the world produces a mathematician whose insight is off the scale. Not a math genius, much more, someone who makes a century of progress in a few years. Galois was one. Two factors that all these stellar methematicians have in common:
* they do all their best work before age 20
* they are all men
There have been female math geniuses but there has never been a woman comparable to these rare men.
I recommend looking at Marco del Guidice's presentation about why he thinks, in light of new evidence, that men have 3-5 points higher IQ on average. And it's not just because their brains are bigger.
Isn't it a common understanding now that the bell curve of male intelligence is flatter? More geniuses but also more morons? And do we not have solid evolutionary understanding of why this must be so? Females, we would expect, seek security -- a safe place to raise their kids. Males, disposable and competitive by the nature of their fundamental biological role, seek opportunity to triumph -- win or die. Take deer for example -- there's no second place for bucks -- if you want to pass on your genes you hafta go all-in and defeat the dominant buck. If you loose, you may just as well die. If you win, you sire the next generation, but might have exhausted yourself to the point were you are sure to die over the winter -- but that doesn't matter. Thus we notice successful men, but we don't notice the pile of failures -- failed men don't matter and nobody cares. But females demand security.
One nitpick, the "infamous Google Memo" written by James Damore went out of it's way to state that the problem of women's participation in STEM had nothing to do with capability and everything to do with interest. Women aren't interested in STEM fields as much as men. As a result of this lack of interest, women therefore don't study STEM topics as much as men. Women certainly are capable of studying STEM and enter the field in greater percentages in societies that limit female advancement, such as India and China.
Damore wrote "Women generally … have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men." Further, this may “in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.” That tends to follow the research in this area. Given a free choice, women tend to be attracted to medicine and education. It's why women dominate teaching and nursing. It's also why women have caught up to men as doctors, but not as engineers. Being a doctor is a social career with lots of interpersonal interaction, whereas engineering deals with tools and machines more than people. Both are highly difficult fields that require highly capable people. Again, women's choice of one field over another has nothing to do with capability and everything to do with interest.
That begs the question: what explains women and men's vocational interests?
As a man who has been a manager and has not liked it at all, I wonder why, if men are said to like things more than people, men still tend to dominate management jobs where they are responsible for the performance of other people.
I don't see why someone's sex should be commented on or relevant for most things unless one is courting or seeing a doctor...I'm in agreement with Joel. One's sex is just one facet of one's identity, it might be much more relevant and interesting to be focusing on other things about a person, most of the time.
Just FYI: males given estrogen have their brains shrink--this is shown both in people
Pol, H. E. H., Cohen-Kettenis, P. T., Van Haren, N. E. M., Peper, J. S., Brans, R. G. H., Cahn, W., Schnack, H. G., Gooren, L. J. G., & Kahn, R. S. (2006). Changing your sex changes your brain: Influences of testosterone and estrogen on adult human brain structure European Journal of Endocrinology, 155(Supplement_1), S107–S114. https://doi.org/10.1530/eje.1.02248
and rats
Gómez, Á., Cerdán, S., Pérez-Laso, C., Ortega, E., Pásaro, E., Fernández, R., Gómez-Gil, E., Mora, M., Marcos, A., del Cerro, M. C. R., & Guillamon, A. (2020). Effects of adult male rat feminization treatments on brain morphology and metabolomic profile. Hormones and Behavior, 125, 104839. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2020.104839
In her book Testosterone Rex, Cordelia Fine also talks about women's risk taking:
"The reported gender gap in risk-taking would almost certainly narrow if researchers’ questionnaires started to include more items like: ‘How likely is it that you would bake an impressive but difficult soufflé for an important dinner party, risk misogynist backlash by writing a feminist opinion piece, or train for a lucrative career in which there’s a high probability of sex-based discrimination and harassment?”"
The difference is that pregnancy is sorta hard coded as something that the females of a species are going to do. The risks males take are often explicitly of a 'recreational' nature.
Why is this discussion entirely colonized by women? Are men going to lose they jobs if they take part to those events? (Del Giudice is safe - labor protections in Italy makes his firing almost impossible)
These kinds of articles and conferences are so strange: the actual question is “why aren’t women happy with low social status”. I call it “why does a shitty male programmer get paid more than a good female teacher”.
My conference summary:
Why aren’t women’s brains like men’s brains? Why don’t women get more men’s jobs? Why doesn’t medicine ignore women more? Why doesn’t erasing female sex as a concept make women happier? Why don’t we tell children more often that growing up a woman is valueless? Are women low status because of biology or social conditioning? In medicine, “Dosing women the same as men may be suboptimal, and affects men who insist they are women.”
Very important questions all, indeed Professor Higgins!
The money quote:
“Daphna Joel countered this by pointing out that women are generally happier in gender-egalitarian countries compared to those with strict gender roles, like Afghanistan and Iran.”
Translation:
Women are generally happier in societies that value them than those which don’t.
That is generally called a tautology.
Staggering insight.
Lerner and Lowe said it best in 1964, and to music!
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historically fair.
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Why can't a woman be like that?
Why does every one do what the others do?
Can't a woman learn to use her head?
Why do they do everything their mothers do?
Why don't they grow up, well, like their father instead?
Why can't a woman take after a man?
Men are so pleasant, so easy to please.
Whenever you're with them, you're always at ease.
Would you be slighted if I didn't speak for hours?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Of course not.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Would you be livid if I had a drink or two?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Nonsense.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Would you be wounded if I never sent you flowers?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Never.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Well, why can't a woman be like you?
One man in a million may shout a bit.
Now and then, there's one with slight defects.
One perhaps whose truthfulness you doubt a bit,
But by and large we are a marvelous sex!
Why can't a woman take after a man?
'Cause men are so friendly, good-natured and kind.
A better companion you never will find.
If I were hours late for dinner would you bellow?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Of course not.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Nonsense.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Would you complain if I took out another fellow?
Pickering
Never.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Why can't a woman be like us?
[dialog]
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so decent, such regular chaps;
Ready to help you through any mishaps;
Ready to buck you up whenever you're glum.
Why can't a woman be a chum?
Why is thinking something women never do?
And why is logic never even tried?
Straightening up their hair is all they ever do.
Why don't they straighten up the mess that's inside?
The answer to your question is that women are naturally opposed to heirarchy and have a greater preference for group harmony and less for objective truth.
Therefore any institution that becomes female dominated will become low status. Testosterone is essentially a driver of status seeking behavior.
my dears: I wish you cozy holidays with significant elders conversations, phones off, unless recording their unique and never recorded memories. I hope for the younger generation to renew a sense of history and of appreciation for those of us who went before you. While your tapping onto little thin boxes means the world to you, our world is soon to be lost.
"...any observed disparities between men and women are invariably interpreted by the strong socialization camp as de facto evidence of coercive gender role socialization. Therefore, efforts to eradicate all gender disparities could become as restrictive and coercive as the traditional roles they aim to replace."
This is a great point. I have a boy and a girl in the age 3-5 range. They have been raised exactly the same, same environmental influences and opportunities, yet there are a few distinct differences in how they behave and what they like to play with. For example, my son likes building with LEGOS substantially more; my daughter enjoys playing with dolls and play kitchens more than my son. I'm sure if gender ideologues had their way, they would try to discourage, and thereby shame, these natural inclinations.
A lot of these hairbrained ideas about socialization can only exist in a world where people are divorced from things that used to be common knowledge. People no longer live in multi-generational households and communities so they aren’t exposed to babies and old timers and they forget what is normal.
There are studies showing differences in eye contact between boys and girls minutes after birth. And anyone who has been around infants of both sexes will attest that they usually show gendered preferences way before they could have possibly been influenced.
Meanwhile fertility is collapsing all around the world and is already well below replacement in most countries. I suspect that teaching women that they are just like men is an important factor in this terrifying trend.
The consequences of firehose immigration from third world countries is all around us, and the lack of children is the so-called justification for that immigration.
In a world of collapsing population it will be your kind that goes first. How many children do you have or plan to have? Your friends? Your co-workers?
Who does have lots of children? Devote Muslims? Hasidic Jews? Evangelical Christians?
I don’t think you’re going to like the future you’re hoping for.
You are brainless. There will be zero population in an uninhabitable world. Since an absorption spectrum is outsaide your comprehension, I'm sure you think AGW is a hoax.
You think breeding is some sort of competition.
When you find your kids floating facedown in the living room, let's chat again.
Actually I’m an environmental engineer who was a partner in a large international consultancy. My specialty was renewable energy. I’d guess I know a bit more about things like absorption spectrums than you do.
I just reviewed those stats for the U.S. no one knows what is causing the declining births. There are various theories. In the U. S. Sex is not a topic of great interest anymore to young people or married people.
I doubt very much it's a declining interest in sex.
A lot of people know the world is hurtling into calamity; environmental, political, social. Bringing a child into the world when his survival to old age is very improbable is an irresponsible thing to do.
Also, there is less stigma around being child-free.
I agree that all the factors you list are important contributors. Educated liberal people are particularly sensitive to the environmental destruction and overpopulation.
Some of the arguments I have read are about people being too busy, too tired to have sex. This has been talked about for years in the popular press. I recall an article from decades ago that said many American couples they interviewed had sex only on Sunday morning, because they didn't have time or energy for it during the week.
More recently the focus is on young Millennials and Gen Z. One theory is of course that these young people have less in-person contact with each other than previous generations. Boys are particularly inclined to immerse themselves in gaming, while girls are on TikTok and other social media. Sexual attraction is kindled primarily by being around other people physically, so this argument makes sense. There seems to be a lot more to it, however. When I talk to these young people, there just isn't much sense of urgency as there was in my generation around finding a GF or BF.
I doubt that many women are actually being "taught" that they are "just like" men.
That phraseology strikes me as a highly uncharitable take on the generations-long effort to break down stereotypes and prejudices that kept women out of traditionally male vocations and even out of what was viewed as the masculine sphere.
Case in point: my mother, a member of the class of 1929 in her home town in central Kansas, took shop in high school. She said the next year the school adopted a rule limiting enrollment in shop to boys.
I have heard something like the argument that "women are just like men" from very few people in my life. All of them were basically anti-feminist women, who would get hostile around any discussion of differences between women and men.
During the Second Wave feminist movement most of the discourse was about expanding occupational and social role opportunities for women, with corresponding emphasis on the need for men to do their share of the domestic work that women had been stuck with.
During the Nineties the feminist movement included a focus on essentialism, which argued that women and men have differing values and strengths with respect to care for others and responsibility for others, versus individual rights and freedoms. (Carol Gilligan at Harvard, and the Stone Center group at Wellesley). This movement was very popular among feminist psychologists for a while.
What I hear from women who are relatively or completely uninvolved in politics has consistently been that men are quite different from women, and this difference is a source of a lot of frustration in close relationships between people of differing sexes. I personally perceive that men are (on the average) quite different from women (on the average), but there are also many ways in which they are similar or identical (shared human tendencies).
I think that men who can talk to women in the ways that women like to converse, about the subjects that women like to talk about, tend to be very attractive to women, often overly so.
Anyway this conference seems to have been a fantastic thing. Imagine fraternizing with the enemy? And realizing that they're just people too? Whoever called that conference has my deepest respect. (Two men, naturally ;-)
Yes it is admirable. I wish I could claim to have the willingness and ability to do the same, but the more I fraternize with the enemy, the more I hate them.
I think that's the natural feeling. But it seems to me that the essential thing about democratic civilization is that we train ourselves to learn to get along in a civil way with our opponents. Thus, the polarizing vectors are tamed before they get out of hand. When we cut each other loose, there's nothing to stop things from getting more and more polarized, is there? We need JS Mill right about now. I've seen these 'round table' shows where a bunch of Reps and Rats get together over beers. Far from it ending up as a gunfight, it ends up as a love-in. There's ways of getting people together such that they want to friends. I think this conference is a shining example. In the right environment I suspect that the sex cancellers -- who are also the gender essentialists, interestingly -- must surely come to see the absurdity of their religion. We want their faith to die, not with the bang of defeat on the battlefield (tho that might have to suffice) but with the whimper of the corrected child.
J. S. Mill is the bugbear of a certain kind of Substack philosophy bro who can't get over the fact that we won't see the light and simply follow natural law.
Natural law is the most vile of all concepts and must be eradicated forever if a useful future for mankind is to ever be achieved. Natural law isn't a law, it's the resort of those who would rather slink back into war and darkness and rape rather than continue building the incredibly beautiful world we had achieved and is now being torn asunder based on nothing.
Hallelujah!!! Part of what leads to gender war enhanced mental illness is, again, displacement. Either/or. If we accept that gender expression has as many forms as all the other fascinating variety in our species, then we obviate the need or acceptance of stereotypical expectations. With rare exception, this would allow people to be, and to gather with, their natural selves. The truly gender dysphoric should get and deserve the mediation and support they need.
One does not need to tear everyone apart by edict in order to find a very personal place for happiness. Humility and acceptance goes a long way, for all sides.
Also, can a health provider or our endless forms not distinguish the old, young, obese, pregnant, severely disabled, etc., on those charts without unnecessary, invasive and expensive analysis? Common sense?
So women are simply inferior to males in every single aspect and we women should learn to love being men’s slaves.
ALL research into differences between men and women is designed solely and entirely to prove that women are inferior to men and to eliminate us from education, legal rights, and all of public life. Only men who hate women do this research.
Thanks for providing a summary of the conference! My main takeaway is that people are very hung up (again) on the nature/nurture dichotomy when it comes to sex differences. It seems obvious that most of the development of human individuals is an interaction between innate tendencies and environmental influences. Arguments that polarize these factors are usually driven by emotional concerns arising from political and cultural pressures outside of the scientific debate. Sex-based discrimination is one of these. It would be helpful if both the scientists and the advocates for various interest groups could stop using arguments about sex differences to support positions that favor or oppose discrimination, which continues to be a real thing in our society.
Yes, it is obvious "that most of the development of human individuals is an interaction between innate tendencies and environmental influences". But this interaction could be 98% environmental and 2% biological or 98% biological and 2% environmental- so the extent to which both of these contribute is important to understanding. I wouldn't say these experts are "hung up" on the nature/nurture dichotomy so much as trying to find clear evidence for their relative contributions.
The relative contribution of culture and nature also is important for policy. For example the research on gender egalitarian countries implies that egalitarian cultures don't make women and men more similar and therefore the lack of equal representation of women and men in various fields isn't simply because enough money or effort has not been thrown at the problem.
Which countries are you classifying as "gender egalitarian"?
I agree that "the lack of equal representation of women and men in various fields isn't simply because enough money or effort has not been thrown at the problem." Frankly, I know of no one who is asserting that.
The lack of equal representation is multi-determined, like all social problems that have persisted for hundreds of years. One of the most common contributors is the tendency of people to discriminate in favor of men based on factors that have nothing to do with actual potential to succeed at a job, or even with demonstrated performance. Some of these preferences are blatantly sexist assumptions that women are, for example, "not qualified to be leaders." But many other non-rational factors are attraction to persons perceived to be similar to oneself, tendencies to promote people based on personal liking, recommending the bros one golfs with, and, at high levels of power, recommending only one's prep school classmates.
Men with resources have had access to pretty much any job they wanted to do for a very long time. Many of them have been incompetent at those jobs, but people did not immediately conclude that they were incompetent because they were men. I find it remarkable that within two generations after U.S. women began to increase their participation in public life and employment outside the domestic sphere, that we are now seeing so much interrogation of women's ability to replace men in those jobs.
1- which countries are gender egalitarian? - places like Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Holland and not places like Algeria, Tunisia and the UAE- the gender equality paradox paper used a measure called the Global Gender Gap Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report
2- I don't think lack of equal representation is a problem. Check out Lubinski's work- they asked the most mathematically gifted men and women how many hours per week they would work a their ideal job- 30% of the women but just 7% of the men wanted to work less than full time at their ideal job. Women also prioritized their health, spending time with family and hobbies over work. Goldin, who just won the Nobel Prize said -"The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours” - the same could be said about gaps in certain fields. Goldin also said men have time for "greedy jobs" that take up all their hours whereas women's "greedy job" is usually motherhood.
Thanks for the detailed and interesting response. The pressure in “big jobs” to work 12 hour days and to some extent be available 7 days/week has become a big problem for everyone. High tech is the primary employer in my area, and is a prime offender in this regard. Young people are showing a strong commitment to changing this, even though they are taking a big hit in income. I applaud their willingness to change the American lifestyle in this direction.
It is not a problem. Most jobs are not like this. Furthermore, once you get into higher managerial roles the workload drops. These jobs are good for young people who would probably be doing bad things anyway (substance abuse, for example). 12 hours per day is not bad five days per week. That is what allows for proper compensation (again, people can work for less money at other firms, but people should have a choice to work more and get paid more). Many fields are ruined when rich people take over, turn the place into a clean, boring, gossipy nightmare with low pay, low hours, senseless travel and bad mentoring. The existence of unpaid internships are a big indicator that the organization has been made anti-male and anti[-career advancement.
I am pretty sure I would have died, like dozens of my high school friends, had I not been working 80+ hours per week in my twenties. It was great. That was the best job I ever had.
Based on your last paragraph, you might not be like the average person. :-)
Thanks for sharing your perspective!
I know this is a really old thread and wish I knew about it back when it came out, but the work hours thing is really interesting. That said, the meaning of "full time" work all over the world is not the same. When people envision full time work in the Netherlands or France, they may be enivisioning 30 hours a week and 6-8 weeks of vacation. Are people in China or the U.S. imagining 48 hours and 2 weeks of vacation?
Of course it may also be that because the jobs women excel at tend to get "downgraded" by male actors (i.e. when a profession becomes more female-dominated, pay and prestige tends to go down even when competence for the profession remains the same or even improves) and so women are less rosey-eyed about work as a result of their ideal jobs being less remunerative and less able to provide social status.
What you are saying is dead wrong, Men do not "downgrade" sectors where women work. Women change the culture once they control it. My ex-wife worked in the non-profit sector when we were young. I met an older man that I liked during that time. He told me that in the 1950's and 1960's non-profits paid their staff a living wage. There were no unpaid internships. Full-time staff bought homes and retired comfortably. When females took over, they changed the culture to reflect their values. They let salaries stagnate, they de-emphasized efficiency, and they worked less and slowed career progression.
Now this is where women would jump in and claim that the "worst part" was the culture change from direct confrontation to petty rumor-mongering and exclusion. I have seen this personally, and it is better to have a manager yell at someone than to torture him/her for the next six months. Yelling is not bad. Anger is not bad. To punish these makes a work environment hell for men, especially young men. Women often promote lower pay for fewer hours. If you offer a high-paid job with 80-100 hour work weeks and high stress, men will fight for those jobs. Many, if not most women would rather make less money and work fewer hours. This is obvious, but no one can write about it because it has the wrong opinion. I have seen this multiple times where women take over a team and hire way more people at lower pay, then give garbage reviews and promotions without pay. Over time the department is full of low-paid women because no one else will work there. So many finance jobs that pay well can do so because you have a team of seven guys doing the work of thirty. You can hire a university graduate for $100k plus a big bonus in such a shop. If he does well, you can pay him $250k in his mid-twenties because it is way cheaper to have seven guys instead of thirty. Even if the baseline payroll is the` same, they will cost less after benefits and less office space. You can hire young women into these jobs, but they tend to leave after a few years. Even the women who like it often never return from maternity leave. Go talk to people in finance and it is the norm.
Men are fine working in places where they are comfortable. Women often take over an environment and make it as uncomfortable and possible for men. Unlike women, men have no EEOC to help them. Men are always wrong. This is the same force that has led so many young men to stay in the mother's basement. God save us if they ever organize and promote their terrifying worldview.
I do want to stress that it is okay for women to change environments where they dominate. That is fine, but it is not men reducing wages and prestige. Women do that.
Some of your statements are disprovable. for example, "Men with resources have had access to pretty much any job they wanted to do for a very long time." That is simply not true. I have know very wealthy men who tried hard to get jobs and simply could not do it. Furthermore, the problem with this kind of thinking is that it focuses on the ultra-elite (CEO's, journalists, senators, professors,...) instead of the other 99.9%. This might have been true in feudal Europe, but not in modern capitalist societies. The only area I can think of that this reflects reality are shallow, fake-status jobs, such as rich a-holes paying a think tank to hire them at no compensation, or a father buying a magazine for his lazy son to pretend to work at. People cannot buy his way into real jobs where people depend on them. Even wealthy people who run for officer usually fail. I think that says a lot about how much better our politicians are vs silly anti-government nonsense on the right or misguided concerns about money on left.
I believe the real issue is the "blank slate" perspective many of the anti-biology, anti-evolution supporters promote. We are all different, and that is okay. We should target getting more people to live better lives, not constantly scream and scold everyone because many young men prefer 80-hour-per-week high-income jobs, while many women prefer higher-status, more free time jobs. Of course it is rotten to tell females that they should not enjoy promiscuity, violence, and heavy drinking. The world needs more women who do. That said, there is real evidence that in some areas, women and men are different on average, from height to levels of aggression to the acceptance of violence and more. Male and female status games are different, and we should focus on making everyone better/happier, not proving or disproving whether the status games should be equal. The entire idea of "equal" is misguided. If women can be made happier by testosterone injections, silly chest-thumping in front of the opposite sex and other regressions to the mean, okay great, but we need to make sure that we are improving those individuals. The evidence from the medical care provided to gender-confused children does not inspire confidence.
My greatest concern is that so many feminist critiques over the last thirty years seem to either be a bizarre obsession with anything male-coded (whatever men do must be high status), or worse, silly revolutionary nonsense in the spirit of Angela Davis (nationalizing companies/industries, banning trade everywhere except for Cuba, where for some reason trade is not evil,...). Such positions are not simply wrong, but they appear to make the people who believe them miserable. Go hang out with childless activists over forty years of age and it will become obvious. In the traditional families that they despise, everyone is less broken and has a greater sense of efficacy and purpose in their lives.
Now I have seen activists who are happy. They have families and often have lives outside of their work (and often a well-paid spouse to help with the financial burden of life). These people seem to soften their stance towards everything controversial. I see the same from conservatives after they have families as well. The delay and often the failure to form families may be a large part of our social crisis driving suicide, substance about and other anti-social behaviors as well as the growing gender divide regarding political beliefs. Fixing that seems more productive than ever more hand-wringing about the number women running Fortune 500 companies or the number of women founding software start-ups. Such tiny groups are always going to be unique and not conform to the underlying population. Using them as a reference point is silly, yet it has become standard as women's overall success over-shadows that of males in ever more fields (grades, SAT scores, university credentials, income for 30 and under in Britain,....
I liked your first comment. It was good, but that last one is a good example of focusing on distractions that come from bad data.
What is known about why women (and men) in gender egalitarian countries are making the vocational choices they are making?
Did you even read the post? Baffling comment.
All of the evidence suggests that biology is a much larger factor than socialization.
Interesting to take on feminists as opposed to TRA's, but I understand the importance of being able to talk about these issues. There was a common 19th century phrase, "Classics for gentlemen, science for ladies." Computer engineering was initially thought of as a woman's job. And there have been massive increases in women in STEM, because of a concerted cultural effort to create room for them. I don't understand why these points are so often ignored. Of course there are average behavioral differences, and of course some of them are rooted in biology. But why ignore the cultural?
"In 1970, women made up 38% of all U.S. workers and 8% of STEM workers. By 2019, the STEM proportion had increased to 27% and women made up 48% of all workers.
Since 1970, the representation of women has increased across all STEM occupations and they made significant gains in social science occupations in particular – from 19% in 1970 to 64% in 2019.
Women in 2019 also made up nearly half of those in all math (47%) and life and physical science (45%) occupations."
The amount of motivated reasoning in this comments section is frankly embarrassing.
Computer science was initially considered women’s work because it was data entry. They were typists.
There have been increases of women in STEM because of the growth in social sciences, which incidentally is in a crisis of credibility.
Increases in female participation in hard sciences and computer science are the result of massive social engineering efforts and outright discrimination against men. The relatively large numbers of tech bros deciding they are now women doesn’t hurt, either.
Programmers (i.e. algorithm-creators) were women then too, not just punch card operators. So I really don't think that's true.
Going on, the biggest factor is that if you enforce neutral rules about good behavior (as opposed to assuming that a neutral system is one that tolerates male aggression and harassment on par with female injury), women excel in school well above men and end up doing better in grades, test scores, attendance, etc... So even if women may not be as likely to be drawn to STEM or whatever, the pool is increasingly female because the modern world of universal education and literacy and relative prosperity makes female tendencies and skills a lot more desirable than men. While we live closer to the state of nature, men were usually dominant. In a world of peace and cooperation, women's tendencies are quite superior and more utopian imho.
The isolated and sexually frustrated online bros wanting to blow it all up so they can be orcs presiding over a new Mordor is not that surprising, but it was avoidable. Sadly, the world created by the invention of the smartphone seems to be seeding the demise of the modern world and a retreat to serfdom and war and aggression, but that's a bigger problem.
I agree. There needs to be continued pressure on stopping discrimination based on sex. The definition of prejudice is that individuals are prejudged based on their presumed group identities, instead of on their performance as individuals. Whether or not women as a "group" are more or less interested in STEM fields than are men as a "group" should not determine whether an individual woman is admitted to a program or hired into a job. Anyway, "STEM" is not a unified subject. Many women are interested in both veterinary and human medicine, for example, and have increased their numbers dramatically since sex discrimination in these fields declined.
As far as I know, this has been achieved through discrimination. Boys' grades are sabotaged by feminist teachers, so they have lower GPAs
Yeah, that's not what is happening. Boys do worse even on standardized tests. Boys miss school more often. Boys don't sit still and listen and girls do. Women read more on their own than boys do by a large margin, with all the neurological and language benefits that conveys.
That's the result of demotivation. If you get worse grades than you deserve, just because you aren't serviceable
and compliant, you stop trustingthe process and its fairness.
I don't know if that is true, but also don't reject the claim. Perhaps you could provide evidence for it?
I have a different theory, which is that women who are interested in biological sciences are in some cases also interested in taking care of animals and/or human beings. Work roles that involve caring for the sick tend to be appealing to many women.
That's the thing. For all we know, the older idea that computers are 'women's work' might have been 'right' all along. Ada. Adm. Hopper. I have no axe to grind either way. Why not just let it happen?
I have a feeling that when they said computers were "women's work" they were thinking about jobs where people spent all day wrangling punch cards.
I’m all for letting it happen!
... if Lisa (above) wants to call that social engineering then fine. But I'd call it letting women be what they want to be -- and have the ability to actually succeed in doing.
> By 2019, the STEM proportion had increased to 27%
Via massive social engineering such as quotas. It seems that if social engineering is not controlling everything, the more egalitarian the society the *more* we see the sexes conforming to 'traditional' roles. Unfortunately the social engineers make it impossible to actually answer the question: what's the split between social effects and biological effects? It would really be nice to answer that question so I'd suggest that all engineering stop and actually *observe* what happens rather than force the outcomes that our ideologies demand.
Thanks for this. Will you send me some links to the quotas for women in the STEM fields and the other social engineering? I don't have that info. I know there were restrictions on what women could study, what jobs they could hold, whether they could have bank accounts and credit cards in their own names, etc, and many of those restrictions went by the wayside thanks to second wave feminism. I know less about the quotas and social engineering that followed (because you're saying that promoting the idea that woman *can* do STEM isn't social engineer, yes?). Thanks!
I suppose that formal or informal affirmative action is what is meant by "quotas." I started grad school in 1969. There were about 20 people in my class, and I think the class was about 50% women. This split had been agreed upon by faculty, starting that year. The next year, half the class was of color, mostly black men, also by faculty agreement.
Previous to 1969, most grad students in the same grad program had been white men, as were the overwhelming majority of the faculty. There were 1.5 women on the faculty, and about ten times as many men. In my class only one of the women was married at time of admission. All the rest of us were admitted without needing to go through admission interviews, but that one woman was singled out for an in person interview, in which she was grilled about her intentions to stay in school versus have babies and drop out. (Her husband was in Vietnam at the time).
I recall an incident when I was in the student lounge studying and one of the most narcissistic men in my class approached me and with a sneer asked me how I felt about "being in a male dominated field" (i.e., clinical psychology). I told him that I considered our profession to be "traditional women's work" and smiled. Undaunted by my statement, he intensified his sneer and repeated, "It IS a male-dominated field!" and waltzed out the door. My profession currently consists of 80% women.
This is in some ways a tragedy, as men are very much needed as therapists. I don't know to what extent they are being kept out of mental health professions by discrimination against white men. I suspect that most of the imbalance is due to the fact that psychotherapy is an occupation that women are very strongly drawn towards, due certainly to socialization to be caretakers as well (probably) to innate abilities and role preferences.
I mean, the current "manosphere" is about repressing feelings, destroying empathy, about how anything feminine or low testosterone is inferior, etc... Men have been sabotaging their collective ability to live in the modern world for decades and are now raging back at the institutions for not having self-sabotaged in parallel.
And at this point, it's actually the opposite. College admissions are trying to get enough qualified men into colleges and grad schools and it's harder and harder.
The manosphere is misogynistic, and the real discrimination against white men that is happening just gives them an excuse.
DEI/EDI (aka affirmative action/positive discrimination/quotas) in favour of women and “minorities” has been a much lauded and publicised initiative in university admissions and HR departments throughout the Western Word. Ramping up into full blown blatant discrimination in hiring against straight white men from
The mid 2010’s. But also it’s not happening and it never happened.
I guess that's because therapy is like gossip magazines in the flesh.
I won't do the homework for you. One hears about these things all the time, it's every day. But I don't have a list.
> I know there were restrictions on what women could study
Yes. Indeed there WERE. They are not only long-gone (and good riddance) but they have been replaced by reverse discrimination. The 'second wave' was, all considered, a necessary thing. Even Patriarchialists like myself look back on the day when a woman couldn't be an engineer (or a man a nurse) as absurd.
> (because you're saying that promoting the idea that woman *can* do STEM isn't social engineer, yes?)
Well ... if you think that a deliberate agenda of removing barriers is social engineering then I must concede the point.
Indeed. I use the term 'social engineering' in only a critical way but that's hardly fair. We properly socially engineer all the time, I just wish the progressives would stop engineering insanity.
Hm, "One hears about these things all the time." Indeed, I have not. That's why I asked. You say there are quotas—so I'm asking for the evidence so I can shift my argument. I can't learn and shift if you have no proof.
Google 'gender quotas in STEM', you'll get the usual million hits.
While you’re at it, see also the mega viral article ‘the lost generation’ in Compact Magazine by Jacob Savage.
We can never just observe, this is not a lab experiment. Does implementing laws about, say, maternity leave or accommodations for nursing moms,etc count as part of "just observing" or part of social engineering? Same with laws that favor (financially) marriage or staying single? Every law and regulation a society has is social engineering in some way. Not all of it is bad (although some certainly is).
There's truth in what you say but still it is possible to 'back off' the progressive agenda to some degree. I myself would love to know what the female aptitude for STEM is absent both restrictions and inducements. Mean time we keep maternity leave.
‘These stories are ignored’ because the only reason anyone researches ‘sex differences’ is to prove that women are inferior to males and should never be allowed education, economic power, or any kind of legal rights. The only people who research ‘sex differences’ do it because they loathe women.
No way in hell will we allow our entire society to be dismantled just to kowtow to a small group of psychologically disturbed misfits.
The dismantling appears to be pretty well advanced where I live. I hope that it can be reversed here and stopped elsewhere. Unfortunately, young people here are to a great extent in favor of the gender madness.
I am starting to think that the best solution to our social problems in the U.S. is to resurrect the principle of "majority rule" that used to guide our formal decisions. Of course we must voluntarily consider the needs of minorities, but pandering to small groups of extremists has gotten us to where we are now.
Absolutely true. Bring it back.
Those who advocate for a gender-free society tend to share an excessive obsession with gender and a prodigious appetite for tilting at windmills.
Can someone explain what is being dismantled or causing such an intense backlash? This seems to be most pronounced in the U.S., which has remained a masculinist culture in a ton of ways, and has also had its most advanced levels of growth and cultural dominance during the very period that all of these DEI/gender equity programs have been pushed. In so many ways, I am confused what people are railing back against. Violent and sexual crime has fallen by 2/3 over the last 35 years even while the country has become more diverse. The economy here has outperformed every other nation in the world, especially if we are talking about large developed economies. Productivity is up. Etc...
It seems that we have a media driven vibes recession, as a combined result of male anger at a kinder, gentler society, and fear-baiting. And that has been driven inordinately by dishonest conservative media like Fox News and OANN (i.e. the ones who pretend that there are recessions whenever a Democrat comes to office, that fraud is everywhere rather than relatively rare, and there are ever increasing crime waves destroying every city where immigrants and black people live and so all the white people in suburbs need to stay safe from the tsunami).
To say that the larger brains in men indicate higher intelligence is not the sort of conclusion I would expect from educated people.
An elephant brain is 3-4 times the size of a human brain but nobody would say that elephants are more intelligent than humans. Some whale species have brains ten time the size of human brains.
Men show superior 3D visualization; this is important because while topographic intelligence, two dimensions, is inborn, the ability to think in 3D correlates with intelligence and is one of the six scales that should be used in place of the singular metric of IQ. We don't naturally think in 3D; we've been out of trees too long.
Trying to shoehorn two distinct sexes into one is a contemporary foolishness that I hope goes away soon.
There is one factor nobody mentioned; every century or so the world produces a mathematician whose insight is off the scale. Not a math genius, much more, someone who makes a century of progress in a few years. Galois was one. Two factors that all these stellar methematicians have in common:
* they do all their best work before age 20
* they are all men
There have been female math geniuses but there has never been a woman comparable to these rare men.
I recommend looking at Marco del Guidice's presentation about why he thinks, in light of new evidence, that men have 3-5 points higher IQ on average. And it's not just because their brains are bigger.
https://youtu.be/iCI2mS-jEtQ?si=bQ7JpQBuUwjk4Fri&t=361
Isn't it a common understanding now that the bell curve of male intelligence is flatter? More geniuses but also more morons? And do we not have solid evolutionary understanding of why this must be so? Females, we would expect, seek security -- a safe place to raise their kids. Males, disposable and competitive by the nature of their fundamental biological role, seek opportunity to triumph -- win or die. Take deer for example -- there's no second place for bucks -- if you want to pass on your genes you hafta go all-in and defeat the dominant buck. If you loose, you may just as well die. If you win, you sire the next generation, but might have exhausted yourself to the point were you are sure to die over the winter -- but that doesn't matter. Thus we notice successful men, but we don't notice the pile of failures -- failed men don't matter and nobody cares. But females demand security.
It’s common understanding among people who are interested in an objective understanding of reality, yes.
Cue gender essentialism . . .
One nitpick, the "infamous Google Memo" written by James Damore went out of it's way to state that the problem of women's participation in STEM had nothing to do with capability and everything to do with interest. Women aren't interested in STEM fields as much as men. As a result of this lack of interest, women therefore don't study STEM topics as much as men. Women certainly are capable of studying STEM and enter the field in greater percentages in societies that limit female advancement, such as India and China.
What is it that shapes women's vocational interests?
Damore wrote "Women generally … have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men." Further, this may “in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.” That tends to follow the research in this area. Given a free choice, women tend to be attracted to medicine and education. It's why women dominate teaching and nursing. It's also why women have caught up to men as doctors, but not as engineers. Being a doctor is a social career with lots of interpersonal interaction, whereas engineering deals with tools and machines more than people. Both are highly difficult fields that require highly capable people. Again, women's choice of one field over another has nothing to do with capability and everything to do with interest.
That begs the question: what explains women and men's vocational interests?
As a man who has been a manager and has not liked it at all, I wonder why, if men are said to like things more than people, men still tend to dominate management jobs where they are responsible for the performance of other people.
I don't see why someone's sex should be commented on or relevant for most things unless one is courting or seeing a doctor...I'm in agreement with Joel. One's sex is just one facet of one's identity, it might be much more relevant and interesting to be focusing on other things about a person, most of the time.
Just FYI: males given estrogen have their brains shrink--this is shown both in people
Pol, H. E. H., Cohen-Kettenis, P. T., Van Haren, N. E. M., Peper, J. S., Brans, R. G. H., Cahn, W., Schnack, H. G., Gooren, L. J. G., & Kahn, R. S. (2006). Changing your sex changes your brain: Influences of testosterone and estrogen on adult human brain structure European Journal of Endocrinology, 155(Supplement_1), S107–S114. https://doi.org/10.1530/eje.1.02248
and rats
Gómez, Á., Cerdán, S., Pérez-Laso, C., Ortega, E., Pásaro, E., Fernández, R., Gómez-Gil, E., Mora, M., Marcos, A., del Cerro, M. C. R., & Guillamon, A. (2020). Effects of adult male rat feminization treatments on brain morphology and metabolomic profile. Hormones and Behavior, 125, 104839. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2020.104839
You provided an excellent reason why someone’s sex should be relevant in most things.
Many women also engage in risk-taking behavior - it’s called childbirth. So I’m not sure risk-taking behavior is that useful a distinction.
In her book Testosterone Rex, Cordelia Fine also talks about women's risk taking:
"The reported gender gap in risk-taking would almost certainly narrow if researchers’ questionnaires started to include more items like: ‘How likely is it that you would bake an impressive but difficult soufflé for an important dinner party, risk misogynist backlash by writing a feminist opinion piece, or train for a lucrative career in which there’s a high probability of sex-based discrimination and harassment?”"
Lol
The difference is that pregnancy is sorta hard coded as something that the females of a species are going to do. The risks males take are often explicitly of a 'recreational' nature.
Male risk-taking is recreational only until when is applied in real-life situations. It's called "training" and every man is very aware about that.
Exactly.
Why is this discussion entirely colonized by women? Are men going to lose they jobs if they take part to those events? (Del Giudice is safe - labor protections in Italy makes his firing almost impossible)
It’s kind of like getting into a push up contest with a girl. Either way you look bad.
These kinds of articles and conferences are so strange: the actual question is “why aren’t women happy with low social status”. I call it “why does a shitty male programmer get paid more than a good female teacher”.
My conference summary:
Why aren’t women’s brains like men’s brains? Why don’t women get more men’s jobs? Why doesn’t medicine ignore women more? Why doesn’t erasing female sex as a concept make women happier? Why don’t we tell children more often that growing up a woman is valueless? Are women low status because of biology or social conditioning? In medicine, “Dosing women the same as men may be suboptimal, and affects men who insist they are women.”
Very important questions all, indeed Professor Higgins!
The money quote:
“Daphna Joel countered this by pointing out that women are generally happier in gender-egalitarian countries compared to those with strict gender roles, like Afghanistan and Iran.”
Translation:
Women are generally happier in societies that value them than those which don’t.
That is generally called a tautology.
Staggering insight.
Lerner and Lowe said it best in 1964, and to music!
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historically fair.
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Why can't a woman be like that?
Why does every one do what the others do?
Can't a woman learn to use her head?
Why do they do everything their mothers do?
Why don't they grow up, well, like their father instead?
Why can't a woman take after a man?
Men are so pleasant, so easy to please.
Whenever you're with them, you're always at ease.
Would you be slighted if I didn't speak for hours?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Of course not.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Would you be livid if I had a drink or two?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Nonsense.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Would you be wounded if I never sent you flowers?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Never.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Well, why can't a woman be like you?
One man in a million may shout a bit.
Now and then, there's one with slight defects.
One perhaps whose truthfulness you doubt a bit,
But by and large we are a marvelous sex!
Why can't a woman take after a man?
'Cause men are so friendly, good-natured and kind.
A better companion you never will find.
If I were hours late for dinner would you bellow?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Of course not.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss?
COLONEL PICKERING:
Nonsense.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Would you complain if I took out another fellow?
Pickering
Never.
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Why can't a woman be like us?
[dialog]
PROFESSOR HIGGINS:
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so decent, such regular chaps;
Ready to help you through any mishaps;
Ready to buck you up whenever you're glum.
Why can't a woman be a chum?
Why is thinking something women never do?
And why is logic never even tried?
Straightening up their hair is all they ever do.
Why don't they straighten up the mess that's inside?
Why can't a woman behave like a man?
The answer to your question is that women are naturally opposed to heirarchy and have a greater preference for group harmony and less for objective truth.
Therefore any institution that becomes female dominated will become low status. Testosterone is essentially a driver of status seeking behavior.
Women do seek status for offspring Don’t they? The eternal joke on “Then Nanny” about finding a single Jewish doctor…
my dears: I wish you cozy holidays with significant elders conversations, phones off, unless recording their unique and never recorded memories. I hope for the younger generation to renew a sense of history and of appreciation for those of us who went before you. While your tapping onto little thin boxes means the world to you, our world is soon to be lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stQpwGcrZPg
"...any observed disparities between men and women are invariably interpreted by the strong socialization camp as de facto evidence of coercive gender role socialization. Therefore, efforts to eradicate all gender disparities could become as restrictive and coercive as the traditional roles they aim to replace."
This is a great point. I have a boy and a girl in the age 3-5 range. They have been raised exactly the same, same environmental influences and opportunities, yet there are a few distinct differences in how they behave and what they like to play with. For example, my son likes building with LEGOS substantially more; my daughter enjoys playing with dolls and play kitchens more than my son. I'm sure if gender ideologues had their way, they would try to discourage, and thereby shame, these natural inclinations.
A lot of these hairbrained ideas about socialization can only exist in a world where people are divorced from things that used to be common knowledge. People no longer live in multi-generational households and communities so they aren’t exposed to babies and old timers and they forget what is normal.
There are studies showing differences in eye contact between boys and girls minutes after birth. And anyone who has been around infants of both sexes will attest that they usually show gendered preferences way before they could have possibly been influenced.
Meanwhile fertility is collapsing all around the world and is already well below replacement in most countries. I suspect that teaching women that they are just like men is an important factor in this terrifying trend.
Why is this a terrifying trend? I call it the most encouraging news possible.
The world can barely support three billion people. We just passed eight billion. The consequences are all around us.
If we don't reduce our population, nature will do it for us. You won't like it.
The consequences of firehose immigration from third world countries is all around us, and the lack of children is the so-called justification for that immigration.
In a world of collapsing population it will be your kind that goes first. How many children do you have or plan to have? Your friends? Your co-workers?
Who does have lots of children? Devote Muslims? Hasidic Jews? Evangelical Christians?
I don’t think you’re going to like the future you’re hoping for.
You are brainless. There will be zero population in an uninhabitable world. Since an absorption spectrum is outsaide your comprehension, I'm sure you think AGW is a hoax.
You think breeding is some sort of competition.
When you find your kids floating facedown in the living room, let's chat again.
Actually I’m an environmental engineer who was a partner in a large international consultancy. My specialty was renewable energy. I’d guess I know a bit more about things like absorption spectrums than you do.
I just reviewed those stats for the U.S. no one knows what is causing the declining births. There are various theories. In the U. S. Sex is not a topic of great interest anymore to young people or married people.
I doubt very much it's a declining interest in sex.
A lot of people know the world is hurtling into calamity; environmental, political, social. Bringing a child into the world when his survival to old age is very improbable is an irresponsible thing to do.
Also, there is less stigma around being child-free.
I agree that all the factors you list are important contributors. Educated liberal people are particularly sensitive to the environmental destruction and overpopulation.
Some of the arguments I have read are about people being too busy, too tired to have sex. This has been talked about for years in the popular press. I recall an article from decades ago that said many American couples they interviewed had sex only on Sunday morning, because they didn't have time or energy for it during the week.
More recently the focus is on young Millennials and Gen Z. One theory is of course that these young people have less in-person contact with each other than previous generations. Boys are particularly inclined to immerse themselves in gaming, while girls are on TikTok and other social media. Sexual attraction is kindled primarily by being around other people physically, so this argument makes sense. There seems to be a lot more to it, however. When I talk to these young people, there just isn't much sense of urgency as there was in my generation around finding a GF or BF.
I doubt that many women are actually being "taught" that they are "just like" men.
That phraseology strikes me as a highly uncharitable take on the generations-long effort to break down stereotypes and prejudices that kept women out of traditionally male vocations and even out of what was viewed as the masculine sphere.
Case in point: my mother, a member of the class of 1929 in her home town in central Kansas, took shop in high school. She said the next year the school adopted a rule limiting enrollment in shop to boys.
Looks like you replied to me instead of Stephen Schwartz here.
Of the two, you strike me as the more receptive audience.
I have heard something like the argument that "women are just like men" from very few people in my life. All of them were basically anti-feminist women, who would get hostile around any discussion of differences between women and men.
During the Second Wave feminist movement most of the discourse was about expanding occupational and social role opportunities for women, with corresponding emphasis on the need for men to do their share of the domestic work that women had been stuck with.
During the Nineties the feminist movement included a focus on essentialism, which argued that women and men have differing values and strengths with respect to care for others and responsibility for others, versus individual rights and freedoms. (Carol Gilligan at Harvard, and the Stone Center group at Wellesley). This movement was very popular among feminist psychologists for a while.
What I hear from women who are relatively or completely uninvolved in politics has consistently been that men are quite different from women, and this difference is a source of a lot of frustration in close relationships between people of differing sexes. I personally perceive that men are (on the average) quite different from women (on the average), but there are also many ways in which they are similar or identical (shared human tendencies).
I think that men who can talk to women in the ways that women like to converse, about the subjects that women like to talk about, tend to be very attractive to women, often overly so.
And quite often we're gay . . .
Dialogue is key
Anyway this conference seems to have been a fantastic thing. Imagine fraternizing with the enemy? And realizing that they're just people too? Whoever called that conference has my deepest respect. (Two men, naturally ;-)
Yes it is admirable. I wish I could claim to have the willingness and ability to do the same, but the more I fraternize with the enemy, the more I hate them.
I think that's the natural feeling. But it seems to me that the essential thing about democratic civilization is that we train ourselves to learn to get along in a civil way with our opponents. Thus, the polarizing vectors are tamed before they get out of hand. When we cut each other loose, there's nothing to stop things from getting more and more polarized, is there? We need JS Mill right about now. I've seen these 'round table' shows where a bunch of Reps and Rats get together over beers. Far from it ending up as a gunfight, it ends up as a love-in. There's ways of getting people together such that they want to friends. I think this conference is a shining example. In the right environment I suspect that the sex cancellers -- who are also the gender essentialists, interestingly -- must surely come to see the absurdity of their religion. We want their faith to die, not with the bang of defeat on the battlefield (tho that might have to suffice) but with the whimper of the corrected child.
The more we communicate, the more we learn that we agree.
Who'm I kidding?
Sorry, what's your point?
Responding to your first paragraph
I just bought a copy of J.S. Mill, On Liberty. These times reveal the lasting wisdom and relevance of our founders.
That was a long time ago. If you think liberty an' freedom are so rewarding, go to a mall and look at the shoppers' faces.
J. S. Mill is the bugbear of a certain kind of Substack philosophy bro who can't get over the fact that we won't see the light and simply follow natural law.
Natural law is the most vile of all concepts and must be eradicated forever if a useful future for mankind is to ever be achieved. Natural law isn't a law, it's the resort of those who would rather slink back into war and darkness and rape rather than continue building the incredibly beautiful world we had achieved and is now being torn asunder based on nothing.
You get it. More people need to understand the threat that so-called natural law still presents to our institutions and politics.
For example, I just heard that smarmy evangelist of natural law, David French, cite the 13th century Thomas Aquinas in a discussion of modern war.
Ah! To own a copy, that's the right commitment. I've only read it online. Hard truth in hard copy it better.
Hallelujah!!! Part of what leads to gender war enhanced mental illness is, again, displacement. Either/or. If we accept that gender expression has as many forms as all the other fascinating variety in our species, then we obviate the need or acceptance of stereotypical expectations. With rare exception, this would allow people to be, and to gather with, their natural selves. The truly gender dysphoric should get and deserve the mediation and support they need.
One does not need to tear everyone apart by edict in order to find a very personal place for happiness. Humility and acceptance goes a long way, for all sides.
Also, can a health provider or our endless forms not distinguish the old, young, obese, pregnant, severely disabled, etc., on those charts without unnecessary, invasive and expensive analysis? Common sense?
So women are simply inferior to males in every single aspect and we women should learn to love being men’s slaves.
ALL research into differences between men and women is designed solely and entirely to prove that women are inferior to men and to eliminate us from education, legal rights, and all of public life. Only men who hate women do this research.