Females engaging in inferior feminine knowledge-gathering system known as “reading”.
I almost don’t know what to say to this. Echidne approached it with her usual coy humor. Violet points out that the APA was sponsoring hate speech. I’m left to point out that this is just another variation of the standard argument in favor of oppression, which is that there’s no oppression and the oppressed people are simply inferior. Slave owners argued that black people were slaves because they were too stupid to want to be free. When that was proven false, racists argued and still argue that black people are down not because of Jim Crow or poverty, but because they are lazy or stupid. Kings argued that god made them superior to peasants. And so on and so forth. And now we have Roy F. Baumeister making a speech at the American Psychological Association that says that women fall behind men not because we live in a male-dominated society, but because women are stupid. Or lazy. He argues both at different times in a “whatever bullshit you need to believe” sort of way.
This speech is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. As Baumeister is a man and he’s arguing that men are smarter than women, I would say that judging by his intelligence, this speech basically disproves its own thesis. His first attempt to argue that men are smarter than women is the strange “men are at more extremes of the IQ spectrum than women”. As Violet notes, this is a pretty weak argument, since the extremes of the range are statistically insignificant and not really the drivers of society. And since women are in fact as smart as men, the initial “men are on top because they’re just smarter LARRYSUMMERSWASAVICTIM” argument falls apart pretty quickly.
So he falls to saying women maybe aren’t dumb, just extremely fucking lazy. (Which is why we do more housework than men.)
Likewise, I mentioned the salary difference, but it may have less to do with ability than motivation. High salaries come from working super-long hours. Workaholics are mostly men. (There are some women, just not as many as men.) One study counted that over 80% of the people who work 50-hour weeks are men.
That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it’s a hard sell.
Creativity may be another example of gender difference in motivation rather than ability. The evidence presents a seeming paradox, because the tests of creativity generally show men and women scoring about the same, yet through history some men have been much more creative than women. An explanation that fits this pattern is that men and women have the same creative ability but different motivations.
I am a musician, and I’ve long wondered about this difference. We know from the classical music scene that women can play instruments beautifully, superbly, proficiently — essentially just as well as men. They can and many do. Yet in jazz, where the performer has to be creative while playing, there is a stunning imbalance: hardly any women improvise. Why? The ability is there but perhaps the motivation is less. They don’t feel driven to do it.
I love the first one—if you add up hours of work, paid and unpaid, you’ll find that women are mysteriously motivated to work more.
Before I go further, I have to point out that hearing really stupid arguments from men that are dumber than me about how women are naturally dumber than men is probably the number one thing that drove me to be a churlish feminist.
Anyway, the reason that women are less “motivated” is because they have more obstacles. If a man had to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously as a woman, we’d see similar situations where men threw in their chips. In fact, that more women don’t give up is something that I imagine sexists like Baumeister fear, because what if there was equality? If the playing field was equal, men like Baumeister who don’t have the intellectual chops to write a coherent speech that didn’t disprove itself would find themselves losing jobs and speaking opportunities to women, which is what I suspect the real fear that drives this drivel is.
Baumeister rubs his two brain cells together and realizes that the oppression of women might have something to do with their historical lack of contributions to society, and decides that the best way to handle that pretty stellar and somewhat irrefutable argument is to deny outright that women have been oppressed.
Gender inequality seems to have increased with early civilization, including agriculture. Why? The feminist explanation has been that the men banded together to create patriarchy. This is essentially a conspiracy theory, and there is little or no evidence that it is true. Some argue that the men erased it from the history books in order to safeguard their newly won power. Still, the lack of evidence should be worrisome, especially since this same kind of conspiracy would have had to happen over and over, in group after group, all over the world.
Let me offer a different explanation. It’s not that the men pushed the women down. Rather, it’s just that the women’s sphere remained about where it was, while the men’s sphere, with its big and shallow social networks, slowly benefited from the progress of culture. By accumulating knowledge and improving the gains from division of labor, the men’s sphere gradually made progress.
I’d like to find the “some” feminists who say that history of the patriarchy is hidden, because—and mind you, I’m a mere female who thinks of education as learning, reading, expanding knowledge instead of the superior Baumeister version of knowledge known as “pulling it out of my ass”—it appears that the historical oppression of women has been well-documented. How does he explain, if men have never collectively oppressed women, the historical fact that women were denied throughout history basic rights like the right to own property, vote, divorce, name their own children, control their own reproduction, etc? He argues that there’s different “spheres”, implying that women had a lesser station in society than men out of choice, but how then do you explain that women only got these rights after agitating for them, which implies not only that we didn’t choose our oppression, but that we either fought against it? Yes, some women didn’t join the fight, but historically, as soon as feminists when a right for women—to vote, to work, to divorce, to own property—I’ll be damned if women don’t eager start to use it, which is the exact opposite of what you’d expect if women naturally gravitated to a second class citizen status.
Another way this speech disproves itself: Baumeister denies the existence of a sexist system, but only under sexist oppression could a speech like this, which is about as intelligible as the rantings of someone hallucinating unicorns on a street corner, would be presented at the American Psychological Association. If the criteria for getting a speech in is that it shores up the status quo oppression of women instead of that it makes a bit of sense, that’s pretty solid evidence that sexism is alive and well, I’d think. Thank god my reasonable points can be safely written off as the hysterical conspiracy theory thinking of a feminist nut.
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Other people have said it on the other sites, but it deserves to be said again: how on earth did this speech get finished without the audience booing him off the stage or walking out? People like this do occasionally get a podium, but how in hell did he manage to keep it?? Was everyone just struck dumb in shock?
Perhaps women just weren’t motivated to own property, vote, divorce, name their own children, or control their own reproduction. ::shrug::
I love the whole, “Men are the ones who built the world’s infrastructure!” argument for male superiority. That and “All the famous composers, painters and writers were men!”
Could it be that women were too busy BEING PREGNANT, popping out babies they couldn’t plan, raising those children and supporting their husbands behind the scenes to write symphonies and build aqueducts?!
Would men have accomplished *so much* uber-important stuff without women?
May I say, as a middle-aged WM, that Baumeister is totally full of sh*t? Working extreme hours in the corpratocracy to “get ahead” is some of the most specious cr*p I think I have heard. All working excessive hours ever did for me was cause me heartburn and headaches.
Most of the individuals who made a show of working obscene hours spent the daylight/normal working hours dicking around and sucking up. And the businesses that push folks to work those hours are too damn cheap to hire the staff needed to do the work.
I was always willing to work some extra hours at a crunch time when a new release was due out or a new application, but not as a matter of course. And in those few times when I supervised or was a team lead, I encouraged evryone I was working with to have a life. But I was noted as a “non-team player” because I refused to show 12 hour days on the time sheet.
Women aren’t usually willing to work 80 hour weeks because *someone* has to pick up, feed and pay attention to the kids. They also value time with friends and family. That, and the rampant sexual harassment women still endure in the workplace is not WORTH it.
So, Baumeister is a social psychologist? How the fuck can a social psychologist so completely neglect the social?!?!?!?!
Misogynist idiot.
Well, you know. Men are going out of style, they have to be saved. Some of them are going to have to get motivated to reclaim all that civilization they built all by themselves before the wimmins and the coloreds get aholt of it.
And he doesn’t believe in patirarchy. Has he never heard of religion?
If only this were the new tokenism — you know, where the APA reserves a few slots on the program for the white male losers as a sort of living museum of stupid, archaic approaches to the world.
As a social psychologist, he should also be aware of the way that an expansionary (what other kind is there) patriarchal system can create patriarchy in the cultures around it — if all the folks who come offering to trade insist on seeing your headman, by golly you’re going to have one, and the position is going to become pretty powerful.
The APA has some really fucked up constituencies. Clinical psychology–like many “helping” professions–tends to attract a certain number of authoritarian dumbshit assholes who see that kind of profession as their only possibility of ever having any influence on other people.
Baumeister may be a social psychologist but his grasp of history is wanting. I’m including all fields of history from art to yodelling. Women have made documentable strides in almost all fields from early prehistory and in many cases it can be documented that their work was taken by men and their input removed. I’ll put him down for that higher percentage of men having mental disorders that he mentioned.
The APA also supports its members being present during the torture of prisoners at Gitmo. That is an organization with some major issues.
Oh I get it. When I was in grad school, worked part time and had two under two at home and was up at 3am nursing and writing, I was just being lazy and unable to work long hours?? Puhleeze.
If a natural healing physician is a Naturopath and a bone doctor is an Osteopath, then what does that make This Master Work?
a Sociopath!
It’s true that most geniuses are men, sure. But the vast, vast majority of the reciprocal of geniuses - that is, murderers, criminals of all stripes, and even the mentally disabled - are men. So in all, it actually tilts a bit in favor of women. Overall.
Plus it’s not purely a matter of biology. The global patriarchy can explain most of the traditional charges away with ease.
But those things have already been pointed out.. so I’d like to point out that the first novel was written by a Japanese woman, and that was one of the most important human achievements in the history of the world.
What is it about the discipline of psychology that encourages people to say such stupid crap? The ambiguity and hiddeness of the human mind seems to enable jackasses like Baumeister to spew out just-so stories that justify their bigotry. Threatened by powerful women? Find some meaningless statistic, take away the social/political/historical context that explains it, and make some wild assertion about the nature of women. Repeat ad nauseum.
If you look up his C.V., you find that he shares a lab at FL State with a woman, Dr. Dianne M. Tice. Do you suppose anyone has notified her that he thinks she’s functionally retarded and slothful because of her ovaries?
What is it about the discipline of psychology that encourages people to say such stupid crap? The ambiguity and hiddeness of the human mind seems to enable jackasses like Baumeister to spew out just-so stories that justify their bigotry. Threatened by powerful women? Find some meaningless statistic, take away the social/political/historical context that explains it, and make some wild assertion about the nature of women. Repeat ad nauseum.
If you look up his C.V., you find that he shares a lab at FL State with a woman, Dr. Dianne M. Tice. Do you suppose anyone has notified her that he thinks she’s functionally retarded and slothful because of her ovaries?
Tale of Genji perhaps Kyle? Tell us.
I love his extensive empirical research methods:
“When I walk around and try to look at men and women as if seeing them for the first time, it’s hard to escape the impression (sorry, guys!) that women are simply more likeable and lovable than men.”
And thus he concludes:
“Perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.”
Hard to argue with that compelling logic.
Patriarchy is a conspiracy theory???
So acknowleding white privilege makes you… what, batshit insane?
Five bucks says Limbaugh picks this up and rolls with it.
Except for this speech, the entire post and comments are based upon “introspection. Since the APA have ethical standards and research standards I’m sure that you can all understand if I think he has a little more clout in the matter. *Waits to be flamed, just like this researcher*
I was wondering when you’d find this load of hot air.
Statistics-wise, his central fallacy is taking the extreme outliers on the bell curve and using them to represent the average. He points out that men are slightly more likely than women to show up on the extremes (both high and low) of intelligence scores, then goes on to speak as if this means that most men possess extreme intelligence–and, conversely, all women are mediocre. In reality, as we know from the scientific process of leaving our bedrooms and talking to people, most men are not either supergeniuses or drooling idiots; they’re about average, just like most women. Nor does it follow that there are no female geniuses or idiots. Even at the most extreme ends of human intelligence, you find women. The highest recorded IQ belongs to a woman, for whatever that’s worth.
Baumeister further extrapolates this into the argument that, because extreme intelligence scores are slightly (again, I have to stress that “slightly”) more common among men, high intelligence must be a key male evolutionary strategy. This is like saying that, because more men than women are over seven feet tall, being over seven feet tall must be crucial to the success of the average man. Naturally, he doesn’t manage to explain how having slightly more of the low IQ scores works as a male evolutionary strategy. Most of the time, he just ignores that end of the problem and goes on about how nature designed men for greatness and women for being cute and running little boutique stores.
And, yeah, all the stuff about how women have achieved less than men throughout history (which quickly turns into women having achieved nothing of importance, ever) because they’re just naturally lazy and uninspired is irritating. There really are people who think that the vast unpaid female support staff responsible for doing their dirty work just sits around eating bonbons all day.
I love his extensive empirical research methods:
“When I walk around and try to look at men and women as if seeing them for the first time, it’s hard to escape the impression (sorry, guys!) that women are simply more likeable and lovable than men.”
And thus he concludes:
“Perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.”
Hard to argue with that compelling logic.
Good lord, it’s like he can’t even observe something positive about women without figuring out a way to turn it against them. If, on his walk, he’d gotten the impression that men were more likeable than women, it’d be because the men used their superior intelligence to win him over.
Oh, well. I knew the speech would be trouble when he started by citing that annoying women-talk-too-much-and-can’t-do-logic book The Female Brain as part of the anti-male agenda, because it includes some condescending line about men experiencing “brain envy.”
I am a female jazz musician, and I have to say that the whole ‘women don’t improvise’ thing is bullshit. When you teach jazz to middleschoolers, there usually as many girls as there are boys in the bands, with the girls usually being better improvisors. As soon as they get to high school, girls either drop or stop being better than the guys. These poor girls just kill themselves to benefit the boys, because it actually gets them further in the social game.
Then there are the girls who continue to compete, and are actually good. It’s tough for them, and even tougher once they get to the professional scene, full of late night jam sessions and male bonding. Men will patronize you and try to get in your pants when you hit the scene. Then if you can prove yourself either prodigiously skilled or way tough, you’ll be accepted. Seriously, guys will try to bond with you by making sexist jokes about other girls. Not you, of course, if you are a good player. If you are a good player you become a honorary guy, and that is supposed to be a great honor.
Jazz is one of those fields where your college instructor is allowed to ask you to “play like a man”, or to “stop sounding like a girl”. If you are a guy, that is. If not, they’ll cut themselves in mid-sentence, afraid of the lawsuit. An instructor once told play with my uterus. Seriously.
Now I am in a band where we are all friends, and little by little I have gotten them to stop calling waitresses ‘honey’ and ‘doll’. Also now they all understand why it is wrong to say that “women are always right”. Still, whenever we do masterclasses in highschools I am reminded of all of this crap. There are always a few girls in the band, but none will improvise. A couple of times, when I ask them privately why they aren’t blowing, their eyes will get teary. Seriously. Because they have no clue. They do not know why they aren’t doing it. The clearly want to, but they won’t. They always get teary eyed and find th best excuses for dropping out (school, parents, blibliblahblah). They don’t know they have been pushed off the stage. Or maybe, like abused wives, they are embarrassed to admit that they are victims. I know I never complained in school about the treatment I was getting, because that would constitute bitching and whining and being a girl. And that is just asking for it.
So, sorry for the rant on a topic that the article only slightly touches on. I thought that feminists might find this interesting. And if you want to check out some awesome music by female jazz artists, start out with Maria Schneider, Ingrid Jensen, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Christine Jensen, Esperanza Spalding and Sandra Hempel. These are my favorite ones!
Wow, this is so stupid it’s hard to know where to start.
How about men are more expendable in society–yeah, that’s why most people living in poverty are women (note how he looks at homeless not the poor) and that’s why countries like India and China abort or kill female fetuses/babies. And men are more aggressive than men–ok, the new problems with girl gangs, nothing right–it doesn’t suggest that this might be social, right? And ignore the fact that women who are agressive (for example in asking for a raise) are thought of worse than men who are–just note that women are less agressive and let people come to the conclusion that it’s natural. And the fact that there is no history of men taking over societies–umm, maybe most of it happened before there was writing (and remember that the Greek myths suggest that the females used to control things, but were taken over–that’s why there are a fair number of fairly influential Greek goddesses; it also may be why inheritance goes through women for Jews). And … damn it’s all too stupid to put in everything.
In some ways, as you note, this is a typical way to keep a group down–another example is: in the middle-ages Jews were not allowed to own property or be part of a guild or many other things; one of the things they could do was lend money–of course, that was then used against them. Same here, assume women will spend more time cleaning and raising children and then complain when they spend less time at ‘work’.
But not very long ago, men were finally allowed to get involved, and the men were able to figure out ways to make childbirth safer for both mother and baby. Think of it: the most quintessentially female activity, and yet the men were able to improve on it in ways the women had not discovered for thousands and thousands of years.
Wow. I had no idea. Amazing the human race got this far with those idiot women assisting with births.
(Incidentally, I think the reason the guy wasn’t booed off the stage was because his arguments periodically make sense. For example, Semmelweis is credited with discovering that handwashing prevents transmission of infections. Although, when you think about all those male doctors who walked around with bloody hands between deliveries, it doesn’t really seem to say much for male intelligence. So between occasionally making sense and people nodding off during the address, I could see why they didn’t boo him off.)
Also, isn’t it funny that every few months we get some new study saying that women have evolved to be better at discerning shades of orange/distinguishing between subtles scents/picking up and coming up with idioms and slang/teamwork/living longer/your-favourite-useless-skill-here; and therefore that must for sure mean that men evolved to rule over women and racoons and possums and breakfast cereals and all of God’s mighty creation?
Who the hell funds that?
Sarah said
“I love the whole, “Men are the ones who built the world’s infrastructure!” argument for male superiority. That and “All the famous composers, painters and writers were men!”
Could it be that women were too busy BEING PREGNANT, popping out babies they couldn’t plan, raising those children and supporting their husbands behind the scenes to write symphonies and build aqueducts?!”
I completely agree - I would also add that, as far as any arts or literature are concerned, it seems that people arguing about how men are ’superior’ at writing, composing, painting, etc. that the criteria for evaluating said form of art did not descend from on high. These values are manufactured by society - and if that society is sexist, so are the values it manufactures.
Can we just STOP NOW, even giving LIP SERVICE to the idea that there are “more male geniuses than female”. How would we KNOW? When you don’t ALLOW a female to read, study, go to university, command an army, paint, write music, or study science (which has been the case up until around 1900!!) there is just no way of knowing how many geniuses we have been bereft of.
Not to mention, almost ALL “geniuses” in the Western World of THought are Rich dudes, because the poor dudes did not GET to do those things EITHER.
GAH!
(Might I add that, in the 1800’s wealthy leisured females WERE allowed to WRITE NOVELS, and completely kicked male ass, and continue to do so today IMHO).
God It’s like they KNOW that if they let us compete, we would HAND THEM their ASSES. Can you IMAGINE how this speech would have been treated if his thesis had been, colored people have less geniuses, and are lazy and stupid, because where are the colored geniuses?
It’s obvious that women are dumber than men… they go out with them don’t they? (but that does that mean that lesbians are smarter than men or just the same?)
I’m not so coy! Stomps foot in anger. :>)
Oh yeah, I note that he mentions that IMR went down when men got involved in births (with no, even casual, reference of course) but doesn’t note that a woman noted that cleanliness was a good thing in operating rooms. This lead to many fewer deaths in wars even though men were the main combatants and there have been wars for thousands and thousands of years.
Ahhh, I have to stop thinking about the article–I can see myself becoming stupider just thinking of it.
The mean score for females on the math SAT 1 is lower by 5-6% compared to males for every year since 1972. The standard deviation of the female score distribution is significantly smaller as well. Research shows females get higher grades than males in the same math courses. Odd.
Not only that, males have slightly outscored females on the verbal SAT 1 for every year since 1972. I had always been told verbal aptitude was a female strength. Even odder.
http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2006/national-report.pdf
How can anyone assume, expect or believe that male and female brains have exactly the same intelligence unless you assume divine intervention. Male and female bodies are quite dissimilar in comparison. Why would the brain be any different? Did Mother Nature anticipate that we’d all be going to college one day to study the same subjects and compete for the same jobs?
Does anyone have any hard evidence that male and female brains are identical? Recent MRI research has shown males and females use different amounts of gray and white matter while processing information and problem solving. Of course the researcher goes on to say “”Men and women have the same level of intelligence,” so he can keep his funding and not be hounded out of academia. Call it the “Summers Syndrome”.
http://media.www.dailylobo.com/media/storage/paper344/news/2005/01/27/News/Research.Finds.Male.Female.Brains.Differ-843195.shtml
The “esteemable” Dr. Beaumeister says:
Reality: Since men are the ones in control of the decision-making, MEN are the ones who peg men for high-risk/high-payoff ventures.
B-mesiter:
Reality: The US armed services have prohibitions against women in forward combat positions. Prohibitions drafted by men. Oops! Let’s try again…
B-meister:
Reality: The XY configuration of male chromosomes is more prone to deviation and/or error than the XX of females. This doesn’t make men bettor OR worse, just chromosomally more prone to variation. But that doesn’t sound as sexy. So let’s try…
B-meister:
Reality: Or they could both stem from years of verifiable discrimination, public and corporate policy that mandated lower pay for women, the expectation that women would quit work to raise families or make way for men in the workforce. Nah. Couldn’t be THAT.
B-meister:
Reality: Most women don’t “prefer” vacuuming and diapering any more than most men would “prefer” these jobs. They are the menial tasks of the underclass that have been foisted off on women, women who historically have not been able to pursue higher education. Even the “joke” at the end is telling in this regard. Ha. Ha. Menz don’t like baby shit. Of course, the baybees bring us to the Holy Grail of “difference”…
B-meister:
Reality: Sure. Men like to talk about liking sex more. That’s official. Whether they really like sex more won’t be sorted out until society stops disproportionately shaming women for their sexuality.
The debater in me wants to keep arguing this point-by point. But then I’d be “untrue” to my lazy feminine instincts, so I’ll stop here.
What utter, unredeemed, bulshit. I hope they run him out of the APA on a rail.
The “esteemable” Dr. Beaumeister says:
Reality: Since men are the ones in control of the decision-making, MEN are the ones who peg men for high-risk/high-payoff ventures.
B-mesiter:
Reality: The US armed services have prohibitions against women in forward combat positions. Prohibitions drafted by men. Oops! Let’s try again…
B-meister:
Reality: The XY configuration of male chromosomes is more prone to deviation and/or error than the XX of females. This doesn’t make men bettor OR worse, just chromosomally more prone to variation. But that doesn’t sound as sexy. So let’s try…
B-meister:
Reality: Or they could both stem from years of verifiable discrimination, public and corporate policy that mandated lower pay for women, the expectation that women would quit work to raise families or make way for men in the workforce. Nah. Couldn’t be THAT.
B-meister:
Reality: Most women don’t “prefer” vacuuming and diapering any more than most men would “prefer” these jobs. They are the menial tasks of the underclass that have been foisted off on women, women who historically have not been able to pursue higher education. Even the “joke” at the end is telling in this regard. Ha. Ha. Menz don’t like baby shit. Of course, the baybees bring us to the Holy Grail of “difference”…
B-meister:
Reality: Sure. Men like to talk about liking sex more. That’s official. Whether they really like sex more won’t be sorted out until society stops disproportionately shaming women for their sexuality.
The debater in me wants to keep arguing this point-by point. But then I’d be “untrue” to my lazy feminine instincts, so I’ll stop here.
What utter, unredeemed, bulshit. I hope they run him out of the APA on a rail.
Well put, KMTBERRY. I felt similarly when I got a stupid rant from some guy I was only slightly acqainted with on MySpace (he sent it to all his ‘friends’) about how modern women were so stupid (but very uppity) and now they wouldn’t even cook or do useful things like that for him and other men! The mental midget went on to rant angrily that if women were all that smart and capable, how come they still ‘fell for’ stupid shit like eating disorders and plastic surgery? Women were just so STOOOPID!
I considered writing back and saying something like “You are totally right, man, and I think the same thing goes for all those black people over in America and the Aboriginals here in Oz. They’ve had, what, over 100 years of equality with us, and they STILL haven’t got their shit together, what with high crime and poverty rates and anti-social behaviour! They’re just not cut out for life like we whites are.Stick em all back in chains, whats what I say! It’s so nice to know there are like minded white men like you out there!”
I was hoping (naively), that being a guy in his early 20s and fairly well educated, that such a rant might shock him and make him re-consider his views, because although he would be A-OK with sexism, such overt racism would bother him, forcing him to examine his own arguments. Then a Jewish friend of mine said to me “What will you do if he writes back and agrees with you?” I conceded there was a good chance that he would.
Interesting, I’m hearing “your racist friend” by TMBG echoing up the stairwell. The kids left it on the stereo when they went to bed.
Funny timing, that.
“Patriarchy is a conspiracy theory???”
It also turns out feudalism is a conspiracy theory.
Another explanation, for those of us who aren’t utterly ignorant of anything even remotely resembling the history of creativity, is that men and women have the same creative ability, but women are actively discouraged from exercising it.
I think Mr. Baumeister ought to be another one of those cases of “if you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, your opinion doesn’t count.”
But remember, the only reason the first novel was written by a woman was because womenfolk were too stoopid to bother to write dem complicated chinese char’cters, so it was much easier for womenfolk to write things.
Men were just TOO BUSY being awesome to have the time to write out a novel in more complicated script. But you can be assured that if they did write something, it would be AWESOME.
The stupid it burns!
Marilyn Vos Savant really would have been a great follow-up speaker.
I’ll admit I’m not great at motivation, but that has to do with stuff like a hyper-critical father making me afraid of failure, and my ADD brain always finding something else cool to work on instead of staying focussed on a goal. Which, guess what! Are as common problems for women as men (at least).
Wow, how did this guy pass research statistics in grad school?
About the hours thing: my husband is a recovering workaholic. Recovering because he finally realized his employer was happily using him and stringing him along with tiny two-bit raises and only if he yelled a lot for them. He hasn’t gotten very far in those years of 80 hour weeks. And meanwhile, our daughter is now a teenager (yet another reason he cut back–the sheer speed at which she was growing up startled him straight).
I, on the other hand, have not ever been a workaholic and make the same, if a bit more than him. I’ve never missed a sporting event or concert of hers, I have an active and rich social life and interests outside of work.
On your deathbed, NO ONE says “damn, I wish I had worked more hours.” No one. Trust me.
So, um, who is the dumber sex?
I’ll second what Richard said. The whole premise is wrong on its face, and frankly he should have stopped there and talked entirely about that.
It’s not socially acceptable for women to “live” at work like some men do. And those men get economically rewarded for that, even though there’s enough proof that their productivity is no different than working a standard 8-hour shift….
Argh.
You know something? It shouldn’t be socially acceptable for ANYBODY to live at their work*. It shouldn’t be economically rewarded, because in the long run, it’s a real drag on our society for a whole bunch of reasons.
* I’m not stupid. I know that sometimes you just gotta put in a busy season, something just has to be done ASAP. That’s cool. But it shouldn’t be sustained.
This speech is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.
Chris Clark whines stupider than that.
Me too.
“yet through history SOME men have been much more creative than women”
Gotta love the “some” men part of that. Yes, that’s true, some men are more creative, and they’re even more creative than some OTHER men. Some women are more creative than men, as well.
There’s always someone out there who is more whatever than another someone. What the hell does that prove?
Possibly the gentleman in question was speaking at the APA as a patient?
Unfortunately, his notion that “women” as a sex are either stupider or more lazy than “men” as a sex (and the scare quotes are because we’re becoming aware that at least biologically things *aren’t* that clear-cut) can be disproved by the same lame argument he uses against patriarchy: the assumption of cultural universalism. If what Mr Baumeister was saying was accurate, there shouldn’t be evidence of matriarchal cultures around the world, and the “spheres” of the masculine and the feminine should be fairly congruous across all cultures throughout history. Empirical historical and anthropological evidence proves this isn’t necessarily the case. Instead, gender roles are a function of culture, and culture is an adaptive technological extelligence humans have created and used to extend their ecological niche. Not every culture has the exact same roles for men and women, and not every culture has only two gender roles. Even in the “Western” group of cultures, the notions of fixed positions for masculine, feminine, male, female, and soforth is a comparatively recent one (two hundred years or thereabouts - which as part of a historic tradition which stretches for at least six thousand years, is naught but the blink of an eye).
Of course, the problem with anthropology and cultural studies has always been that it’s impossible to truly understand another culture from the outside - one can observe, but not actually understand, and one observes through the cultural filter of ones own culture, so a behaviour which is significant in culture A might not be understood as such when viewed through the lens of culture B. Thus a lot of activities which were (in cultures in Africa, Asia, South America, North America, Australia, etc) indicative of female status being equivalent to that of male were interpreted by (male, European) anthropologists as being indicative of female status being lower than that of male, because that was the cultural assumption the anthropologists had started off with.
In our own “Western” group of cultures, we’re finding much more evidence of female participation, creativity and similar now we’re bothering to investigate things without the blinkers of the assumption “anyone who did anything of significance was male”. For example, that extremely prolific writer down the centuries, “Anon”, is being unmasked, to be revealed as a collection of female writers whose participation in the literary scene had been ignored because the assumption of later critics was if it was good, then the writer had to be male.
If you’re going to drag someone totally unrelated on a completely non sequitur troll, GJay, at least try to spell his name right, you fucking tool.
I teach college for a living. Both in my classroom, and nationally, colleges are increasingly majority female. Male dominance of academe will inevitably end, as this trend has moved into graduate school. The long-term outcome of these trends is quiet predictable, and perhaps, as some have suggested, this is exactly what Baumeister is afraid of. If our friend Baumeister wants to talk about stereotypes, how about the one about the hyper-efficient girl who sits on the front row, takes excellent notes, turns everything in on time, never misses classes, and overdoes every assignment? She’s real - I meet her every semester and she always gets an excellent grade. Brilliant young women who still feel they have to overachieve to prove themselves. But Baumeister wouldn’t have a clue about that, now would he?
I actually don’t think this is accurate. Women are actively discouraged from exercising creative ability in high-status arenas, like musical composition for the nobility and painting portraits and any sort of academia (in the past I mean), but women are and have been encouraged and have been successfully doing all of the DAILY creativity functions of most societies for like EVER: growing the food, cooking the food, making the clothes, knitting the sweaters, making the rugs and blankets and quilts, weaving, making the baskets, making the home, and making the new human beings, both physically and raising them up.
The thing is, those things just don’t “Count” !
That’s not “REal” creativity…but let a MAN put on an apron and cook like his Ma, then he “Invented Cuisine” (Escoffier)
Whatta quack. You guys have done a pretty handy job of eviscerating him, and I really am a lazy dumb broad (though that’s no reflection on anyone but me). So I’d just like to add that in addition to all the housework, childrearing, and emotional caretaking that is still incumbent upon women to perform in their personal lives, there is also the 80 fucking bazillion hours a day we are expected to devote to slavishly maintaining an acceptably sex-bottish appearance. Particularly if we are in any type of career that involves sales, marketing, or interaction with the public.
If dumbshit wants to know why I’m not spending 80 hours a week pounding the pavement, it’s because I have to work out at least 4 times a week, get my hair and nails done regularly, and follow various and sundry other stupid ass arbitrary fashion mandates so dicks like him will find me appealing enough to pay attention to my sales pitch so I can earn my daily bread. And then he can turn aroung and claim that my doing that is proof of my innate inferiority.
As my friends and I revel in yesterday’s WNBA championship victory by our Phoenix Mercury, guess what we find on online commentary boards about the team.
If you guessed sour grapes, ignoramus put-downs of women athletes (and women in general) and the most childish pettiness imaginable, you are correct.
Of course homophobia also figures prominently, as, doncha know, “all” the players and fans are lesbos.
It’s as if every slimy rock in the world were simultaneously turned over so what’s underneath could slither out.
Damn! I’m sorry Baumeister put his foot in the shit, because I think he is right about some things, such as that perpetrators of crimes are often proud of what they have done rather than suffering from “low self esteem.”
What I think about him is that he probably doesn’t get around much.
Anyway, as with all academics, with him the issue is simple: Who gets the jobs? Who gets tenure?
This is all you need to know.
May I repeat: It’s about jobs. It’s about tenure. End of message.
That “women work less hours so get paid less” argument is bullshit. In Spain, the gap between genders also exists, BUT, there are no 50+ working hours weeks (at least not officially) because there’s a limit in the number of overtime hours one can do per year. So, basically everybody is working 40 hours per week on average (although I’ve been 4 years doing 45 hours in a -what a surprise- heavily feminized work environment).
“I have to point out that hearing really stupid arguments from men that are dumber than me about how women are naturally dumber than men is probably the number one thing that drove me to be a churlish feminist.”
I’ll third that.
Granted, I always leaned that way anyway, but it was really experiences like receiving a magazine as a kid with the headline: “Are Girls as Smart as Boys?” that pushed me into the militant and churlish variety.
So if “men built the infrastructure and civilization and all that, so they deserve to lead” holds, shouldn’t there be some credit-where-credit-is-due going on, putting a cabal of pagans (Christian Rome was fucking worthless. Civilization was a product of the Caesars), Jews (Money lending was a fundamentally necessary industry), Muslims (ending the ‘dark ages’) and gays (pretty much every artist and writer of note since the dawn of time) in charge of the white christian males?
and lets not get into the wealth and power of tiny holes of a country like England becoming a global power due to the labors of Africans and Residents of the Subcontinent. Or how the strength America relies on so consistantly as being a determining factor was forged through the work of the French like a blacksmith at an anvil. Or everyone, everywhere owing China for EVERYTHING.
It’s almost like cultural achievement is attained through the interaction of different human beings, and through communication and cooperation, progress can be made. And if someone hogs credit unfairly or tries to benefit too much at the expense of others, they’re societal parasites who end up having what appears the very enviable position of cultural hegemony.
Let me just say, as a bottle-scared veteran of the Larry Sommers kerlfuffle, that it’s a relief to find so many others willing and able to do the heavy lifting of laughing and scoffing.
I’m not being ironic. There was near unanimity among my fellow liberals that of course men had a monopoly in various endeavors and I wearied of being a wimpy feminist in various comment threads.
Throughout history, though, whoever asserted that “women can’t do X” found X shoved down his throat sooner or later. Who but a fool would expect different results in the future?
My degree was in math, my career was in engineering, and nearly all of my peers were male. From this I would conclude nothing, given the time and place. Half of the most capable people I’ve known have been female, but then I’m human. Perhaps other species have different experiences.
Throughout history, though, whoever asserted that “women can’t do X” found X shoved down his throat sooner or later.
Women can’t do cheesecake.
Who but a fool would expect different results in the future?
So how long do I have to wait?
I am a civil engineer and also write engineering history; during my research I occasionally come across stories of women engineers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some months ago, for example, I read in the obituary of a British engineer working in India the following parenthetical sentence:
’In connection with this undertaking mention should be made of the courage of the widow of Mr. Solomon Tredwell, the Contractor, who, after his too early decease, determined, for the honour of her husband’s name, to continue the works, and with the efficient aid of Mr. Clowser and Mr. Adamson, did complete them most satisfactorily.’
I find myself facing a dilemma here–on the one hand, why should we (historians or anyone else) make a big deal of this? She didn’t do anything more exceptional than thousands of men in similar situations; highlighting it just reinforces how unexpected it is. Making a big deal of it can lead to a sort of ‘oh wow, isn’t that special, an exceptional woman did something exceptional for women but typical for men’. On the other hand, not highlighting the accomplishments of this and other women leads to them being ignored completely, so that people like Baumeister and others get away with saying ‘men built all the infrastructure and did all the brilliant and important things’ with a straight face. Any suggestions on how to resolve this?
Has anyone considered that this isn’t the result of exhaustive research and analysis so much as because the shleb has some very deep personal issues with women?
For all we know, he may be getting rejected at bars in his off-hours.
Carolyn, as a non-historian reading what you’ve written, what makes me curious is why she was allowed to do the work, and how she had the education in those days to do it. Did Mt Tredwell’s colleagues just accept it? If you focus on what was exceptional about her circumstances or her personality that allowed her to do work like that, then I think that’s a really interesting story to tell, and if you keep the emphasis there then you’re also telling the story of why other women of equal “innate” abillity couldn’t do the same thing.
(rasnfrasn spamtrap. Am I doing the right thing resubmitting the comment? It keeps telling me to, but I am starting not to trust it.)
As I never tire of pointing out, JS Mill debunked all this “men created civilization, men have all the genius” crap back in the 1860s.
Phoenician in a time of Romans wrote:
Women can’t do cheesecake.
Olivia. Julie Bell.
(I know you were being facetious.)
The A.P.A.( Authoritarian Patriarchal Association) has been associated with this kind of trash before in its instututional history. These creeps are the ones who write and read crap like Psychology Today.
I am a civil engineer and also write engineering history; during my research I occasionally come across stories of women engineers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Technology Review, the MIT Alum Rag Plus, has a stellar article this month on Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman graduate of MIT and Goddess of Water Quality and Sanitation engineering from the 1870s on.
Much easier for men to save women in childbirth if they have clean water to work with, eh?
Oooh, this one made my blood boil:
He’s never heard of Dr. Semmelweis, I’m afraid.
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/19217/page3/ is a link to the article on Swallow Richards.
Of course many woman had a good idea on how to make childbirth safer - they simply lacked access to resources and the authority to tell doctors to wash their goddamn hands - just like many do now!
You know, speaking as a sociologist, whose work is in social-pysch, I seriously have to say I’m kinda embarrassed to be getting a doctorate in a related field to this guy.
I almost want to take his away so it doesn’t tarnish those of the rest of us.
I mean, assuming biological causes to social behaviours? Disregarding socio-structural constraints on actions? Looking to historical trends and assuming intrinsic characteristics?
Where did this guy get his degree, Regent?
Big and shallow social network? That’s totally not unique to men. This guy’s mom would totally beat him up. Well, with the help of her bridge club anyway.
If my comment ever comes out of mod, I want to state I wrote it real quick and would have elaborated, clarified, or formulated things more carefully if I had more time.
I may or may not be online again before Friday morning.
No one’s surprised that Tierney’s already on this, or that he’s droolingly in love with the speech and its author, are they?
It looks like my link isn’t working. Trying again: http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions/
Wait, wait. Isn’t it an established fact that when the at the time all-male medical establishment first took over handling childbirth from the local women - the 17th century or s -, deaths of mothers post-partum actually SOARED from Puerperal fever ie. serious strep infections? This was because the doctors in their infinite wisdom would come directly from touching suppurating wounds and performing autopsies to handle the birth without once ever washing their hands? It was absolutely rampant, especially amongst the rich and higher classes - the ones who could afford to pay actual doctors instead of labouring at home.
How can anyone assume, expect or believe that male and female brains have exactly the same intelligence unless you assume divine intervention. Male and female bodies are quite dissimilar in comparison. Why would the brain be any different?
Well, nerve tissue is pretty much the same in men and women, the spinal cord functions the same, so why should the brain (or any individual organ that is not reproductive) be any different? On a tissue or cellular level, there is much, much more in common between men and women then there is different.
Does anyone have any hard evidence that male and female brains are identical? Recent MRI research has shown males and females use different amounts of gray and white matter while processing information and problem solving.
“Identical” isn’t the point. “Amount of difference” is the point. The differences between two men at opposite ends of the Bell curve are far, far greater than the differences between a man and a woman at the same point in the Bell curve.
Baumeister’s “men are naturally smarter than women” argument requires that the men at the bottom of the Bell curve be superior to the women at the top of the Bell curve. Are you actually arguing this? Do you actually believe that a man with an IQ of 90 is intellectually superior to a woman with an IQ of 160?
Some men are smart. Some men are dumb. Some women are smart. Some women are dumb. I suspect that the distribution is pretty even in each gender, but I’m a lazy woman and can’t be bothered to look it up.
The point is that you cannot point to a random man and claim he is automatically smarter than a random woman, and vice versa.
And the laziness factor? Please. Someone show me any single study that indicates any single personality trait is physically ingrained rather than developed through experience (and capable of being changed).
I believe that in the 19th century when births in hospitals became more the norm, maternal death rates from infections wnet UP, not down, because women were foced to give birth on the same bloody sheets the previous occupant of the bed had used, while (male) doctors went from woman to woman without washing their hands.
When women gave birth at home, typically under the care of midwives, at least chances for transmission of disease were limited.
(I know I read this somewhere, but, sorry, don’t have a cite.)
JimB asks…
I ask…
How can anyone assume that all male brains are the same as other male brains, and that all female brains are the same as other female brains? Does anyone have any hard evidence that male brains are all identical to each other? That female brains are all identical to each other?
Sheesh, I try so hard to get across in my statistics classes and intro-psych classes the difference between WITHIN-Group variation and BETWEEN-group variation — in nearly all of these “differences b/t men and women” stories, the within-group variation is HUGE compared to the between-group variation. I am female and have test scores on the SAT and GRE to put me in the ‘triple nine society’; that is, I test out as more “intelligent” than 99.9% of the population (males and females, and probably also higher than Mr. JimB and his “superior male brain”!). And I did have to work pretty hard for the PhD too, somehow overcoming my lazy, gregarious feminine nature, not to mention the two professors who actually told me to essentially tone down my brilliance in class discussions because me being smarter than most people can make “some men” uncomfortable. For my own benefit (of course), they suggested I talk in more non-threatening ways (I guess using those feminine weasel-words like “it’s just my opinion, but…” ICK ICK ICK!!! I will NOT! Men don’t have to dismiss their own statements before they even say them!!!) And I do love how it’s never they themselves who are threatened, but always some “other guys”.
I did put “intelligent” in quotes because, while I obviously think I’m pretty smart (hell, certainly smarter than Baumeister), I’m also aware that what those tests JimB talks about measure is your ability to do well in a traditional western educational environment (thus, the name SCHOLASTIC APTITUDE test) rather than being some measure of the abstract construct of “intelligence” (for which no one has even been able to agree on a definition, throughout history, and which certainly cannot be concretely “measured” in the way that one’s height can). And of course, these tests come after years of differential socialization and schooling experiences by men and women, so how they can be taken as evidence of some innate difference, I don’t know. Test scores correlate with SES too, so I guess that’s evidence that rich people are just “born smarter” and “have different brains” and has absolutely nothing to do with the presence of books in the home, caregiver time, stimulating experiences, school quality, etc…
KMTBERRY:
Conceded. I guess I’m drawing a (non-gendered) distinction between “creativity” (artistic creativity) and “craft” (practical creativity). Not that there isn’t any overlap, of course.
Sarah - actually, he got his Ph.D. from Princeton, in 1978. Shocker, actually.
An unresearched member of CAP?
deep6
Well, just shows they’ll give a PhD to just about anyone unfortunately.
I mean, I’m sure there is some niche, somewhere, that he knows inside and out … somewhere … just this apparently isn’t even vaguely near it.
This made my morning.
I am female and have test scores on the SAT and GRE to put me in the ‘triple nine society’; that is, I test out as more “intelligent” than 99.9% of the population (males and females, and probably also higher than Mr. JimB and his “superior male brain”!). And I did have to work pretty hard for the PhD too, somehow overcoming my lazy, gregarious feminine nature, not to mention the two professors who actually told me to essentially tone down my brilliance in class discussions because me being smarter than most people can make “some men” uncomfortable.
Beth, are you my long lost twin sister?
I never had professors do that, but I went to MIT and they kind of knew better (also, the general population of a given classroom was selected for brightness, so no threats).
I think that “intelligence societies” can get stuffed, too. Wankers, wankers all. “Scored well on standardized tests” is a pretty shitty epitaph, if that’s all you got.
I will third or fourth or a hundredth this sentiment. Argghhh! It’s maddening that we’re still dealing with it.
In junior high, with a good math program, I twice scored in the top 10 of a regional math test. When I went to my all-girl high school, my score dropped to something like 250th in the region. There were lots of good things about my high school, but the math program flat out sucked, and no one seemed to care because we were just girls.
When I went on to college, I was *actively* discouraged from pursuing math or engineering. Not subtly. Actively and overtly.
All this was happening in the 1980s. So just color me shocked - shocked I tell you! - to discover that 20 odd (very odd) years later, we still have shortages of women in math, science and engineering.
I’m going to go back to my lazy existence and stop thinking about this before it makes the veins in my head explode.
From Beth: …”I guess using those feminine weasel-words like “it’s just my opinion, but…” ICK ICK ICK!!! I will NOT! Men don’t have to dismiss their own statements before they even say them!!!”
You are COMPLETELY right and I will forcefully slap myself if I EVER do the “IMO” bullshit again! Miserable habit… Thanks, Beth.
As far as standardized tests go, for a long time these tests were slanted to favor white males. The math word problems, to give one example, were set up as football questions with lingo that many girls weren’t familiar with, and they tended to get hung up on the unfamiliar terms and would miss the questions. When boys were given math word problems that were to be solved the exact same way, but were framed in terms involving stereotypically female pursuits such as babysitting or shoe shopping, the boys missed the question and the girls answered it correctly. From what I understand, the SATs have been revamped to be more gender and racially sensitive, and the scores evened out.
The racial example given was from a multiple choice standardized test for younger children, “What do you do when you cut open your finger?” The correct answer was “Go to the doctor,” but black children more commonly answered “Put your finger in your mouth,” because their experience wasn’t to go to the doctor unless their leg was falling off.
Now that I think about it, the first reaction I have when I get a paper cut is to put my finger in my mouth, so maybe the answer to that question is just wrong, regardless.
Beth, exactly, re the SAT and GRE being markers of one’s preparedness to perform in a traditional Western educational system. Most standard IQ tests are not that different–they measure what the participant has learned how to do, not her/his capacity for learning. This is why the IQ levels of children with demonstrable organic developmental disabilities (for example, Down syndrome) improve significantly in early-intervention programs.
IQ tests can be valuable in identifying trends (i.e., a certain segment of the population is growing more proficient at reading comprehension) or, in individuals, isolating discrepancies in scores that can signal a learning disability, mini-stroke, or other problem. They do NOT measure how “intelligent” a person is. I am consistently shocked by the assumption of people in my own field (clinical psychology) that they do.
And then, when we argue that SAT scores improve with coaching, the response is often that this is an “artifact,” because everyone knows that SAT scores correlate with IQ scores.
My definition of dumb is producing or supporting a system in which the only way to succeed in it is to put in “superlong’ hours and become a workaholic. And this is being recommended at a convention of psychologists? This is beyond belief dumb. Luckily, the world is big, and in many places - like Europe - one can succeed and not put in superlong hours. How about that! And you can even feed yourself, put the kids through college, take longer vacations, retire early.
All of which simply proves: patriarchy is dumb. It has dumb goals, sets up a dumb system, and promotes dummies who will conform to it. Americans are dumb if they continue to be addicted to such a dumb system. Dumb dumb dumb. And it evidently produces resentful misogyny, which is no doubt the result of point headed little white collar mannikens feeling the bitterness of wasting their lives putting in superlong hours and becoming workaholics and looking around for substitutes who they can blame for their dumb little hollow lives.
Flea, I was once not allowed to give a kid credit for answering a question about why cotton can be preferable to wool because his response: “It doesn’t hurt anybody–sheep probably don’t like to be shaved, and you have to kill the cow for the leather, but you can just grow cotton,” missed the “point,” which was that the child was supposed to identify attributes of the substance that are more beneficial to HUMANS. No points for creative or altruistic thinking.
I think it’s important to remember that the people who construct and revise and standardize these tests are the ones who define who is “smart,” so of course “smart” means “like us.”
JSM said it first, and it pretty much covers this situation:
“This would have been said by many persons some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and men thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made them. But it will be said by no one now who is worth replying to.”
I love when people base their whole justification for inherent differences between men and women on the SAT. Thanks to Beth for the ‘rich people must have better brains’ comment. After all, if we’re making generalizations based on SAT outcomes that must be the truth, right?
More about female jazz musicians: Maybe a big part of that difference is that male musicians don’t feel that they need to be hawwwwt in order to be worthy of the stage, that their great chops are enough, while women are made to feel as though they are eyesores unworthy of playing an instrument in public if they don’t look like Diana Krall or Norah Jones? IOW, maybe plenty of chicks are improvising, but in the privacy of their own homes where someone won’t heckle them for not being thin or cute enough.
Shaenon: I like your brilliant commentary and your cartoons. How can you be witty, smart, and creative. You’re just a woman!
Samantha Vimes:
I hear ya. Got any Adderall you can spare?
Seriously, a lot of what looks like lack of intellectual ability in someone -male or female - is due to other factors like emotional issues, ADD, etc.
-Actually what this says is that the ‘female’ brain
tends to cluster in the bell.
-And the ‘male’ brain is less concentrated there and
inhabits the flare or tail rather more.
The male then can be seen to bring us lots of the brightest…
and the very dull…too.
-That is very simply further confirmation of woman-
as-template and norm…rather more centrally
concentrated then under the ‘human’ under the curve.
-The sense that there are is in fact sexual differentiation brain-wise is,
I know, fraught in this forum.
But many of us will vouch for it..
particularly most - like me - in the gay demographic.
-I’m pretty happy with and in that population…there are lots of perks…
Lots [If anybody cares] and hope we’ll grow up sometime to celebrate &
do the ‘vive la difference’ instead of the squabbling
and nit-picking..
-But too to accept woman as…norm and
to reject her standing
finally & always as…outlier. Or at all ’strange’.
[Y’see here, as always, the attitudinal Patriarchy hard at work.]
I wonder if it hurts to be this stupid? I know I am in pain from Baumeister’s idiocy.
What bugs me about this is that Baumeister’s suppositions are all speculative, as speculative as any “Chalice Versus Sword” feminist theorizing ever was. (And, to be fair, he really doesn’t try to present them as anything else.) Yet, mark my words, it won’t be long before the evo-psych guys start treating these notions of his as though they were authoritative pronouncements passed down from the slopes of Mount Olympus by Zeus. It won’t be long, I predict, before we all start reading articles beginning with the clause “According to Baumeister…”
See if we don’t.
(If you remember, this was exactly what happened with Murray & Herrnstein. It wasn’t exactly what happened with Larry Summers, which I gather is part of Mr. Baumeister’s beef.)
Women only really took off in Classical music after blind auditions were installed; once musicians started auditioning for orchestras behind screens, women started getting chairs.
Hard to do that for jazz. Note that female jazz *vocalists* seem to improvise just fine, thanks… isn’t it nice that they’ve overcome their natural disadvantages?
The APA still considers it within professional ethics to aid in torture-interrogation by providing advice on how to break the prisoner.
’nuff said.
Coming out of lurking to say that I’m a college student, and I actually had to read an article by this guy for my social psych class last semester. It was about how sex can be understood through an economics/marketplace model, wherein sex is a commodity that is sold by females and bought by males. At the time I interpreted it as a stark example of how limiting women to constricting roles in which sex is one of the only sources of power they have can really warp relationships and create a twisted economic dynamic between the genders when it comes to even something as intimate as sex. But now I know I was being way too generous, and this guy just needs to come up with over-arching societal theories in order to explain his own inability to get laid.
Anyway, my favorite part of the speech is this quote: “The chances that a woman will, say, go to the mall and end up in a knife fight with another woman are vanishingly small, but there is more such risk for men.” Because it implies that whenever men go to the mall, the possibility of getting into a knife fight is hovering just on the edge of their minds.
Chalice *versus* Sword? The book was actually called The Chalice *and* the Blade, and the author was theorizing how the domination of women came about in prehistory. Because the publishing company, in an effort to market a reprinting of the book, put a sticker on the cover of The Chalice and the Blade that said “Source for the Da Vinci code!”, a lot of people conflate the themes of the two books. Eisler’s book was only a source in as much as she referenced the work of Elaine Pagels about the gnostic Gospels.
That said, deriding Eisler’s meticulously researched work as speculation on the same level of Baumeister’s is a gross error. And especially unfortunate as her works contain some valuable information on how to combat the kind of evolutionary psych babble we’re so often confronted with (long story short, we’re not stuck in a women vs. men or blacks vs. white paradigm but a dominator vs. dominated paradigm which needs to be addressed as the root cause).
On a separate note, by chance I just finished reading a book today that referred to Baumeister as one of the leading experts on “self-regulation”, so that’s apparently his claim to fame.
And I 1,000th the primary reason why I too am a churlish feminist.
Baumeister is not a logical thinker, not a scientific thinker. And he lacks intuition, as well.
Kind of the trifecta.
I mean, assuming biological causes to social behaviours? Disregarding socio-structural constraints on actions? Looking to historical trends and assuming intrinsic characteristics?
My general thought on guys like him are they’re overcompensating in an attempt to have their work recognized as serious science rather than “just psychology.”
They see that “real science” like chemistry, biology physics, and such don’t play favorites, that they “tell it like it is, and even if unpopular, they’ll eventually be proven right” and reflexively assume “in order to be taken seriously as a real scientist, I have to tell the hard truth, even if no one wants to hear it.” They seem to think that real science is about completely subverting the paradigm and saying things that are contrary to common understanding (and since we’re talking about people, not subatomic particles, highly offensive to those people).
Of course, what he forgot was Werner Heisenberg had something to actually be right about. “Women are inherently inferior” just like any broad claim in sociology, is untestable (and often unfalsifiable, to boot). It’s an unscientific comment pretending to be science because he thinks making broad, imaginative claims is what scientists do.
the social sciences are still young, and in the coming decades and centuries, should develop to the point where you could make broad, sweeping claims and actually TEST them. until then, he’s just being a dick.
Not a knock against the social sciences. At their respective ages of about a century, Physics mean “things made of earth seek the center of the universe, and things made of air rise toward the aether. Birds have more air in them than people” and Biology thought disease was caused by exposure to bad air and maggots sprang forth on meat ex nihilo. Sociology and Psychology are profoundly precocious for fields of study.I mean, assuming biological causes to social behaviours? Disregarding socio-structural constraints on actions? Looking to historical trends and assuming intrinsic characteristics?
My general thought on guys like him are they’re overcompensating in an attempt to have their work recognized as serious science rather than “just psychology.”
They see that “real science” like chemistry, biology physics, and such don’t play favorites, that they “tell it like it is, and even if unpopular, they’ll eventually be proven right” and reflexively assume “in order to be taken seriously as a real scientist, I have to tell the hard truth, even if no one wants to hear it.” They seem to think that real science is about completely subverting the paradigm and saying things that are contrary to common understanding (and since we’re talking about people, not subatomic particles, highly offensive to those people).
Of course, what he forgot was Werner Heisenberg had something to actually be right about. “Women are inherently inferior” just like any broad claim in sociology, is untestable (and often unfalsifiable, to boot). It’s an unscientific comment pretending to be science because he thinks making broad, imaginative claims is what scientists do.
the social sciences are still young, and in the coming decades and centuries, should develop to the point where you could make broad, sweeping claims and actually TEST them. until then, he’s just being a dick.
Not a knock against the social sciences. At their respective ages of about a century, Physics mean “things made of earth seek the center of the universe, and things made of air rise toward the aether. Birds have more air in them than people” and Biology thought disease was caused by exposure to bad air and maggots sprang forth on meat ex nihilo. Sociology and Psychology are profoundly precocious for fields of study.
I know, because I read it in college. But I’m trying to get over my rhetorical habit of being an absolute stickler for everything and thereby–potentially–alienating those people who don’t expect footnotes and a bibliography to be tacked on to the comments they read in the comments section. Sorry about the discrepancy. This being an informal venue, I don’t consider it a drastic one.
I’m not deriding anything–I liked the Eisler book. I’m willing to amend my statement to the extent of saying that Baumeister’s work is speculative in a flimflammish way which Eisler’s is not, and erected upon foundations a good deal more precarious. Is that okay? All I meant was that Eisler and Baumeister are both in the business of constructing narratives which will account for things like, in the first instance, the phenomena Eisler dug out of early history, and in the second, statistics of the kind has_te cites. I’m not saying that I don’t think Eisler does a better job of it.
In other words, basically I agree with you. I am a nitpicker, but it’s my philosophy that minor differences ought not to be worried at until they come between people who according to any reasonable world scheme should be firm allies.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it…
@bekabot
What a pleasant response, seriously. I don’t consider it a drastic discrepancy either, and it’s not my intention to personally nitpick you, just to set the record straight for those who may be less familiar with her work than us.
Now we know why guys won’t go out with their dates to the mall…it’s not because they think that shopping is Girl Stuff and that therefore they’ll look like a wuss; instead, it’s because they’re afraid of being cut down in the strength of their prime by packs of knife-wielding Real Men. Hmm. This is not a realization I would ever have reached on my own; here, I suppose, we have yet another example of that Male Creativity which stops for nothing and which never takes a break. And who would be so oafish as to begrudge such creativity, when the results of it can be so delightful? I ask.
I also like the implication that women are safer when out-of-doors than men are. That’s not a realization I’d ever have gotten to on my own either. Male Creativity sure is capable of producing wonders, I must say. Practitioners of it are often talented people, in their line.
P. S.: Many thanks, mae.
As the social sciences begin to merge
- or be fulfilled in -
neuro-science, they assume more and more
the mantle of the ‘real sciences’.
The fMRI is actually revolutionary.
It, along with PET scans, transcranial magnetic wipes
and others about which I am totally ignorant,
is going to change not just our thinking but
a whole lot of how we do almost everything social.
So there’s a roundness to this thing which is both
delightful and scary as hell.
Better overall, I think. for us.
But you think we know profiling? Stay tuned.
This is particularly egregious:
But not very long ago, men were finally allowed to get involved, and the men were able to figure out ways to make childbirth safer for both mother and baby. Think of it: the most quintessentially female activity, and yet the men were able to improve on it in ways the women had not discovered for thousands and thousands of years.
Well, no. As a matter of fact, infant mortality rates increased in the US in the early 20th century after obstetric surgery was popularized in this country. Particularly due to ‘birth injury’, a euphemism employed for botched forceps use.
Jackass.
Cisslepants, don’t bother him with your silly girly facts, he’s having a brilliant masculine cranial bowel movement!
That said, does anybody else find it HIGHLY amusing that an educational system to which girls were denied access and told that they didn’t have what it takes to succeed so they shouldn’t bother is now, suddenly, rigged against males and a “war on boys” and oh so unfair now that female performance is outstripping male achievement?
Wait, wait. Isn’t it an established fact that when the at the time all-male medical establishment first took over handling childbirth from the local women - the 17th century or s -, deaths of mothers post-partum actually SOARED from Puerperal fever ie. serious strep infections? This was because the doctors in their infinite wisdom would come directly from touching suppurating wounds and performing autopsies to handle the birth without once ever washing their hands? It was absolutely rampant, especially amongst the rich and higher classes - the ones who could afford to pay actual doctors instead of labouring at home.
Wow, it’s almost like the eventual advances in obstetrics came about as a result of men and women working together on the problem of safe childbirth, rather than men bustling in and telling those dimwitted women what they were doing wrong. But that can’t be the case, because a) women are stupid, and b) men and women are locked in an unending war in which one side must ultimately be proven the one true perfect ruler of the Earth, and are not, in fact, members of the same species who need each other to survive.
Shaenon: I like your brilliant commentary and your cartoons. How can you be witty, smart, and creative. You’re just a woman!
I got a man to do it for me. With my charm.
Shaenon: There you go! I knew it was too good to be true!
karpad,
one of the disadvantages we social scientists have is that we can’t control our research subjects in the way some of the “hard” scientists can. Wanna do chemistry experiements, you can get pure chemicals, control the temp and pressure, etc. and you don’t have to worry about the damned things changing their mind.
Give me the same control over humans and I’ll give you some replicable hard core stuff. However, I’ll also, invariable, run afoul of a hell of a lot of ethical concerns.
We’re working at a permanent disadvantage, but it’s one I honestly don’t think we should “rectify.”
RE: higher maternal/infant mortality rates once men got involved-
There are numerous net references to Dr. Semmelweis, and his observations: among them, that the levels of general cleanliness in the nun/midwife ward (2% mortality) were much higher, and that the nuns/midwives washed their hands frequently and between physical examinations of women in labor. In contrast, doctor/med student ward had a 20% mortality rate.
Go figger.
one of the disadvantages we social scientists have is that we can’t control our research subjects in the way some of the “hard” scientists can. Wanna do chemistry experiements, you can get pure chemicals, control the temp and pressure, etc. and you don’t have to worry about the damned things changing their mind.
And the situations where people were controlled yield unrealistic information from unrealistic situations.
The problems arise when observational scientists overdraw conclusions from studies or make shit up outright! That’s when it hits the fan and hard scientists, who know everything about nothing, start to sneer because they don’t understand that the problem is with the human investigator, not the field.
In Epidemiology, one must start from the observational and work toward the clinical. Otherwise, you might not infer air pollution exposure is a problem because somebody had a heart attack, but you can work toward understanding the role air pollution plays in physiologi responses leading to arterial lesion formation and plaque rupture if you start with the observations that there are more heart attacks a day after the bad pollution days occur.
I just want to point out that from an anthropological perspective, what Baumeister is really saying is that women aren’t human.
Culture is the key marker of humanness: we create, we adapt, and we pass that knowledge on. Baumeister attributes this behavior wholly to men, claiming that women are unmotivated to invent anything. His idea is that because women don’t have to do anything to get laid, they don’t do anything. They just function at a pre-cultural level.
Of course this makes absolutely no sense on any grounds. Female primates are in the business of getting food and negotiating their environment, just as males are, and in fact tool use among primates usually seems to be initiated and passed on by females. There is no reason — no logical reason, no primatological reason, no biological reason — to suppose that early female humans sat around like dull-eyed lumps waiting to be fucked and fed.
And from the anthropological perspective, the evidence is very much the other way, that female humans were at least equal with males in creating human culture, and possibly even ahead. Social structures, stone tools, rock art, the Fiber Revolution, pottery, the domestication of plants — women were either co-creators or leaders or even sole inventors of all these tremendous innovations.
“I ask…
How can anyone assume that all male brains are the same as other male brains, and that all female brains are the same as other female brains? Does anyone have any hard evidence that male brains are all identical to each other? That female brains are all identical to each other?”
I answer… No one does. No. No.
Beth, you didn’t address the SAT data from 1972 to 2006. That’s 10’s of millions of n. There is a statistically significant difference between the mean performance of the male and female brain when math and verbal aptitude are tested that begs a response.
I’m really tiring of the “difference between WITHIN-Group variation and BETWEEN-group variation” ruse. It’s really quite obvious and pointless. What matters is the mean difference that shows up between males and females for the last 35 years of SAT testing. According to feminist theory, they should be identical. Asian females outscore white males on the math SAT, while being out scored by Asian males by the magical 5-6%. Have any good explanations?
JimB! Go to this site:
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/spelke2005.pdf
The conclusion of the smart folk at Harvard:
“In summary, males and females show somewhat different
cognitive profiles when presented with complex
tasks that can be solved by multiple strategies, but they
show equal performance on tasks that tap the core foundations
of mathematical thinking. Moreover, males and females
show equal abilities to learn advanced, college-level
mathematics. Insofar as mathematical ability is central to
students’ progress in the sciences, males and females
would seem to be equally capable of learning science.”
So suck it.
You know, bullshit like this does more to discredit the theory of evolution in the eyes of uneducated people than anything the intelligent design camp might say. Not that I think evolution *should* be discredited or that this is a *valid* discrediting, I’m just making an observation.
Simply put: A trait exists in a species because it has not killed off that species yet. Period. Just because we have a trait does not mean we evolved TO have that trait, or that it must benefit us in any way.
Maybe when the so-called scholars get this and quit arguing evolution backwards, we might get somewhere.
Interesting article. I suspect the author would benefit some from reading Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy–a primatologist and sociobiologist. She keyed in on the likelihood than men and women tended, given historical and evolutionary constraints–to have different ideas of success. Of course, one of the ways males define success is high achievement. Another one is controlling the fertility of women, so as to reproduce lots of time. Women, on the other hand, given the limitations placed on them by a system where they were out-weight-classed (literally) by men, tended to define success relative to child bearing and -rearing. Historically and evolutionarily. Hrdy noticed that now that women are free to define success without restraint, some women do define success as high achievement and make the trade-off that there will be fewer or no children (evolutionarily, a dead end) while many other women (like me) choose to be satisfied with more moderate achievement while still attempting to rear (fewer) high-quality offspring, and still others concentrate on the rearing of children.
Re test scores:
1. The much-claimed disparity is not constant:
Results of the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) math tests: No significant difference between the sexes in Australia, Poland, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Serbia, and Thailand. In Austria, Belgium, the United States and Latvia, males outperformed females only on the space and shape scale. In Japan, the Netherlands and Norway males outperformed females only on the uncertainty scale. And in Iceland, females consistently outperformed males in all areas.
2. Even if the much-claimed disparity in test results were constant, there would be no reason to suppose that this represented an innate difference in ability. This is sociology 101. The test scores of black Americans are consistently below white Americans and have been for decades, but I hope we all understand that there are sociological rather than genetic reasons for that.
Females are socialized differently than males, all over the world. And every single industrial society today is patriarchal and androcentric — every single one.
Oh, and one of those last comments there about how females often initiate tool use among the great apes? They’ve noticed that with ravens, too, of all things. The females make tools and use them. The males, not so much.
JimB, I notice you had zero, zilch, nada to say to the folks who explained to you that standardized tests have cultural bias and that they can only measure what one has learned, not one’s intellectual capacity.
There is nothing in our DNA that has been preprogrammed to perform on an SAT. The SAT is a wholly cultural invention, not a natural one.
JimB:
Several have already been offered in this very thread, actually. The fact that you didn’t bother to read any of them isn’t proof that they weren’t provided.
@Dana:
The political side of teh awsome male obstetricians was just as bad as the mortality and morbidity rates of their victims.
While the midwives had better hygiene and mother/child survival rates, the male monopoly in medicine and government quickly made midwifery a crime, because they competed with male physicians. And clearly, since midwives were women, they couldn’t possibly be as competent as disease trailing male doctors, could they? And women could not be trusted to choose the proper assistant for childbirth, could they? If they were permitted to do so, then the midwives would have won.
Eileen: Harvard? You’ve got to be kidding. Harvard lost its credibility when they fired Larry Summers and is full of biased shit, but it’s the kind you like smelling.
“but they show equal performance on tasks that tap the core foundations
of mathematical thinking”. The math SAT taken over 35 years by 10’s of millions obviously contradicts their “findings”.
By the way, I fuck rather than suck.
Dan, I did read them, but I obviously find flaws in the logic.
Who do you pick for the top five womans basketball teams this year?
Violet Socks, check this out. It’s about your Iceland example.
“But the story of female achievement in Iceland doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending. Educators have found that when girls leave their rural enclaves to attend universities in the nation’s cities, their science advantage generally shrinks. While 61% of university students are women, they make up only one-third of Iceland’s science students. By the time they enter the labor market, many are overtaken by men, who become doctors, engineers and computer technicians. Educators say they watch many bright girls suddenly recoil in the face of real, head-to-head competition with boys. In a math class at a Reykjavík school, Asgeir Gurdmundsson, 17, says that although girls were consistently brighter than boys at school, “they just seem to leave the technical jobs to us.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1032361-2,00.html
The PISA is a knowledge based test. The SAT is an aptitude test. It has strict time limits to produce a performance dispersion. The math SAT skill requisites are Algebra 1 and Geometry.
As someone who wrote tests for a living once told me- the only thing being good at a standardized test proves is that you are good at taking tests.
JimB: All you have is the SAT and women in Iceland who (perhaps for social reasons) don’t compete with men?
Did you read the link at all, or did you dismiss it because it disagrees with your prejudice? Talk about picking the shit you like to smell. I actually haven’t seen you provide any specific citation for the particular brand of shit you’re trying to sell here, so I have to assume that you’ve cherry-picked it from some old or discredited source.
Let’s return to the article I linked above:
“The strategy of inferring sex differences
in mathematical ability from sex differences in the SAT-M is problematic, however, for several reasons. First, more girls take the SAT-M, and so the sample of boys is more highly selected. Second, and more deeply, tests such as the SAT-M are themselves in need of explanation and justification (see Gallagher & Kaufman, 2005). The SAT-M and similar tests consist of a variety of items assessing a complex mix of capacities and strategies. Because different
items show different performance disparities by sex (Gallagher et al., 2002), such tests can be made to favor either boys or girls by suitable choice of items (see Browne, 2002; Halpern, 2002). How can we determine whether the particular mix of items composing the SAT-M provides a fair measure of the relative mathematical abilities of boys and girls?
This problem may be illustrated by a specific example.
Girls consistently perform better than boys on items in
which the student must determine if the data provided in a problem are sufficient to answer the problem. Such datasufficiency items once appeared on the SAT-M, but they have been eliminated. According to Chipman (2005), the decision to eliminate these items was justified on pragmatic grounds, because performance on the items benefits considerably from coaching. Removing a class of items on which girls score better nevertheless has the effect of lowering the scores of girls, relative to boys, and it raises a question: Did this change increase or decrease the fairness of the SAT-M as a measure of mathematical ability in men and women? If boys are more talented than girls, then this
change may have increased the fairness of the test. If boys and girls are equally talented, then this change increased the test’s bias against girls.”
By the way, JimB… don’t peddle your shit here again without proper citations. Your observations are worthless if they can’t be independently investigated.
After reading the comments here, and of course many things that have been written about this elsewhere, I think we can boil down the answer to ‘why haven’t women ever done anything important?’ to the following statements:
1. Any number of obstacles were and are put in the way of women in ‘important’ fields of work and study by men threatened by the idea that a woman might succeed in them.
2. Woman were and are disproportionately burdened with the ‘reproductive’ rather than ‘productive’ work of society (what I call ‘process work’ and ‘product work’)–it’s a lot easier to be ‘creative’ and ‘do important things’ if someone else is doing all of your cooking and cleaning for you.
3. The standards of achievement in these ‘important’ fields are devised by men–a few women are occasionally ‘permitted’ to gain recognition to the extent that they adopt, where possible, masculine behaviours and worldviews. In some cases women’s achievements are simply dismissed out of hand as unworthy of any serious consideration, simply because they are done by women (great example here:
http://fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com/91345.html ).
4. As pointed out above by the people talking about jazz musicians, women practicing in these fields are almost always held to different and stricter standards than men doing the same work are held to.
5. Women actually have invented and improved many if not most of the achievements of civilisation–farming, weaving, pottery, etc.
To this I’d also like to add:
6. Throughout history women have in fact participated and excelled in these fields far more often than most of us realise.
We’re reasonably familiar with the contribution of women writers (though I’m indebted to Joanna Russ for explaining how even that area of women’s excellence can be so willfully ignored that women often don’t appear in literature class reading lists and someone can still write a book about how ‘Mary Shelly couldn’t have written Frankenstein’ that gets reviews in respectable newspapers), but know less about the women artists, composers, scholars, explorers, engineers, etc. that have worked in these fields for millennia, not because their work is undeserving of notice but because we already know that women can’t do these things, or at least can’t do them well. The good news is that recently more has been published by and about women in these fields, both individually (I particularly like the recent biography of Beatrice Shilling–engineer, inventor and motorcycle racer) and collectively (I recommend Women of Discovery and Ingenious Women, but there are lots more out there).
kali, your answer is a good one, but it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that plenty of other women did the same, with even less recognition than the unnamed Mrs. Tredwell. As an engineer myself, I can legitimately say that it’s not really that difficult. (I contend that we make a big mystery of it to keep undesirables out of the profession.) If this woman was able to manage a middle-class household in India, and paid any attention to her husband’s conversation, she could manage the work. Chances are, though, that even before he died she did more than that–I suspect that a great deal more creative, intellectual and technical work is done in husband and wife collaborations than is ever formally admitted (you can get an idea of this by reading the acknowledgments of many ‘important’ books)–this is naturally referred to as women ‘assisting’ the more important partner. Women taking over their husbands’ work is not unheard of even in civil engineering; you may have run across the more famous case of Emily Roebling taking over the work on the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband fell ill. In fact, such situations were so typical that the ‘wealthy widow that runs her dead husband’s business’ is a stock character in popular literature from the Middle Ages to the 18th century.
And Ms. Kate, thanks for the link…naturally I’d never heard of her. (She’s only a girl, so why should I have?)
He does not say that women are dumber than men, as some of the above comments chastise him for. Rather, he plainly said that men more often inhabit the extremes of the IQ range than women. But on average in a population, men and women’s IQs are equal.
Some others have said that women have been too busy being pregnant, raising kids, and keeping the home functioning. True, but that’s in line with what he says about the female “sphere.”
He does not say that women are dumber than men, as some of the above comments chastise him for. Rather, he plainly said that men more often inhabit the extremes of the IQ range than women. But on average in a population, men and women’s IQs are equal.
Some others have said that women have been too busy being pregnant, raising kids, and keeping the home functioning. True, but that’s in line with what he says about the female “sphere.”
Stay awake, Rick. He uses the observation about extremes of the IQ range to draw specious conclusions about women being too unmotivated and lazy to make major achievements. And yes, he suggests that they are stupid as well.
Thanks for the reply, Eileen. He didn’t imply laziness, but unmotivated, yes. Why does he assert women are unmotivated to be risk-takers, explorers, “achievers,” et cetera? Because they do not need to compete for opportunities to procreate like men do or compete against other human groups, which the men do (warfare, procuring resources, so on).. By being “safe” (i.e. ensuring their own survival and that of their [future] offspring) women ensure perpetuation of our species. Because, as is clear to everyone, more females than males are required to sustain a population.
And please tell me where he says women are “stupid.” I thought he clearly said that on average the IQs of the two sexes are equal.
When am I going to start collecting a paycheck for participating in my womanly sphere, is what I’d like to know. Because the manly sphere seems to be where I gotta go if I want to do things like eat and pay rent, and I would submit that it then ceases to be the manly sphere anymore.
The number of people commenting who actually read his article seems woefully small. He never said men were smarter than women - in fact he specifically said that on average they were equal. He never said that dumb men were smarter than the smartest women - in fact he said exactly the opposite. He simply said that there are more men at the top of the distribution (and to those who thought they were brilliant by pointing out that there are also more men at the bottom - he made that point in the first few paragraphs!).
He never said that women were lazier than men. He said that in certain areas - such as those that make a difference for making a lot of money in modern western societies - that women are not as motivated to excel as men. Material goods are things that men cherish far more than women and therefore they spend way too much effort on obtaining them. This isn’t even anti-woman (in fact, it could be every bit as anti-man given how much men waste for very little gain) - it’s just a difference.
To all those people who found one woman doctor or engineer and think that refutes his point have no idea about even basic statistics. There are many, many women who are stronger than the overwhelming majority of men. But that doesn’t change the fact that on average, men are far stronger than women.
To all those people who think that women and men should be identical because, after all, they share like 98% of their DNA should remember that the difference between a retarded person and a genius is about the same. Heck, orangutans and humans share about 90% of their DNA. Small differences in DNA do not equal small differences in people.
To all those people who think that male oppression accounts for everything, ask yourself why women never set up their own offices/schools/armies/etc. that only admit women? Nothing stopped women from starting a woman-only school to educate women. Nothing stops women from starting a corporation where the men face a glass ceiling. But few do it. They “why” is what he addresses.
In the future, please at least read the piece before working yourself into a tizzy assuming he’s just a misogynist, because his piece was actually every bit as anti-man as it was anti-woman. In fact, his central point (which you would’ve known if you’d read the first few sentences) was that it’s not about better or worse, it’s about differences that are each better in particular contexts.
“What matters is the mean difference that shows up between males and females for the last 35 years of SAT testing. According to feminist theory, they should be identical. Asian females outscore white males on the math SAT, while being out scored by Asian males by the magical 5-6%. Have any good explanations?”
Apparently Asians are, on innate biological grounds, better at the math SAT/better at math/smarter than whites, or so one might assume given this line of argument? After all, how can one assume, expect or believe that Asian and white brains have exactly the same intelligence unless you assume divine intervention? Asian and white bodies are quite dissimilar in comparison. Why would the brain be any different? Did Mother Nature anticipate that we’d all be going to college one day to study the same subjects and compete for the same jobs?
Now that’s perhaps not entirely fair. However, it seems entirely plausible, if not certain, that JimB does believe that Asians are, for reasons of biological difference, ’smarter’ (for some value of smarter; possibly just on-average slightly better at math) than whites. And we also know, I think, that there are certain other beliefs highly correlated to this one. Which is say that it’s possible that Violet Socks’ hoped-for understanding at 12:25 may be sadly lacking in JimB’s case. But hopefully not.
“According to feminist theory, they should be identical.”
Actually, this is almost certainly wrong. I would think feminist theory generally holds that they should be identical - ie, that’s a desirable thing, and that they could be identical - ie, that’s a possible thing. But assuming that feminist theory predicts that mean male & female math SAT scores would be identical under current conditions (and thus is falsified?) - that’s wildly doubtful.
Look at it this way. a) There’s a very small difference in mean math SAT scores for girls&boys. That’s certainly interesting. JimB, you go from there to apparently assuming b) that this is caused by (presumably innate) biological differences between males and females. Well, perhaps - it’s not impossible. However, to say this with any degree of confidence, we would also have to assume c) - that we’ve reached sociocultural gender equality in all areas of life that could affect math SAT scores. In fact, we might have to go further and assume that we’ve reached not just formal but genuine equality in all such areas - ie, that in any case where on-average gender differences mean that males and females have equal but different math SAT scoring abilities - perhaps even for biological reasons - (say, strictly for argument’s sake that, on average, girls do better with cooperative learning, boys better with an individual/competitive approach), that everyone is being treated appropriately.
Now, we’ve certainly made great progress in recent years. But claiming with certainty that everything’s equal now -equal enough that it could not plausibly account for much or even all of a teeny 5-6% difference - well, I dunno. It’s also interesting, as noted above, that the history of claims re: biologically based ‘differences’ in women’s intellectual ability has, over the last few centuries, been really one very long (and bloodily protracted) retreat. Indeed, over merely the span of two decently long lives we’ve gone from claims that women are biologically unsuited for higher education to claims that women are simply biologically unsuited for the sciences, medical research, (etc.) to claims that well, despite women having flooded into the ‘lesser’ fields of science and medicine (which really are just plants and animals and cooking and nurturing and such, they’re simply biologically unsuited for the highest achievements within the most intellectually demanding disciplines . . .
- a history which, while certainly not proving anything about the most recent claims, does suggest one take a decent degree of caution and critical awareness in making them, one that’s been remarkably lacking in certain celebrated boys (as echidne points out).
“it’s about differences that are each better in particular contexts.
Yes, it always is, isn’t it . . .
Well, it’s a mystery to my middle-of-the-distribution brain how it came about that the things that men are “motivated” to do just happen to be the things that are rewarded with money, glory, and status, while the things that women are “motivated” to do, like, I don’t know, give birth, can only be improved by a little male attention, since women are not (and this is strongly implied, if not outright stated) motivated to improve or excel at anything.
As to why I don’t set up my own kingdom in which men can’t get ahead no matter how hard they try, and where they have a market value that’s a fraction of that of their female counterparts, and in which everything that is coded masculine is devalued and degraded, while everything that’s coded feminine is exalted and oohed over and compensated vastly beyond its objective worth, and where men feel like women don’t care about their bodily integrity or physical safety? I’m not a fucking jackass, that’s why.
Ah, the fictitious average person was designed by statisticians to make things easier to write about in scientific journals.
Baumeister’s first few sentences are all about how ’see I’m not a misogynist and studies show that I really, really like you but …’ It would appear that likeability may be a good survival trait, just not a good social advancement trait. Afterall, the less likeable men are often thrown in jail or killed on battlefields for no better reason than that they are men. Since society likes women enough to not throw them on spears as a first option then lesser advancement oppurtunities is a good trade off.
Fine, he knows that XY is a much less stable genetic system than XX. Yet his article is basically that the small upper end XY should merit greater rewards than any of the lesser XY and all XX. Maybe he isn’t a misogynist, maybe he is just an elitist.
“Well, it’s a mystery to my middle-of-the-distribution brain how it came about that the things that men are “motivated” to do just happen to be the things that are rewarded with money, glory, and status,. . . ”
It would to cease to a mystery to you, Erin, if you understood that men have those motivations in order to secure more opportunities to pass on their genes. Money, glory, and status open the doors to procreation. Try to maintain a gene’s-eye view and things will clear up.
Josh sez:
In the future, please at least read the piece before working yourself into a tizzy assuming he’s just a misogynist, because his piece was actually every bit as anti-man as it was anti-woman. In fact, his central point (which you would’ve known if you’d read the first few sentences) was that it’s not about better or worse, it’s about differences that are each better in particular contexts.
This absolutely right. If we had actually read the speech we would have known that Baumeister is “neutral” and not “anti-woman” because he SAYS so!!! Right there in the opening portion!!! He even says that he likes women and finds us more “loveable” than men!
Therefore, when Baumeister says that women, who had been giving birth for millenia, were unable to improve without male assistance, that is just a “neutral” observation, rather than an uninformed anti-woman slur. He SAID so right there in the speech, dumbasses! Geez — pay attention people.
Josh also sez:
Material goods are things that men cherish far more than women and therefore they spend way too much effort on obtaining them. This isn’t even anti-woman (in fact, it could be every bit as anti-man given how much men waste for very little gain) - it’s just a difference.
See? He is not anti-woman. He even said so. The “differences” to which he refers just happen to be very conveeeeenient for those who would prefer not to see any change to the status quo.
To all those people who found one woman doctor or engineer and think that refutes his point
This is exactly the dilemma I was describing. If we highlight the work of women in ‘masculine’ fields we get this kind of statement; if we don’t, we get ‘women have never done x’. Mrs. Tredwell and thousands like her can’t win for losing; I’m coming to see this as a pattern in anything relating to women in our culture.
“Baumeister’s first few sentences are all about how ’see I’m not a misogynist and studies show that I really, really like you but …’ It would appear that likeability may be a good survival trait, just not a good social advancement trait.”
Judging by the flaming he’s received in comments here by people who do think he’s a misogynist for his views I do not think his disclaimer was unwarranted. And really, it’s sad that it’s even needed because the content of his article was rather usual for discussion of evolutionary psychology, genetics, anthropology, cultural studies. Whether his thesis is correct or not, I did not find it inflammatory or morally objectionable.
What I’m saying, Rick, is that the statement is bullshit. There’s nothing more inherently valuable about stock trading than kindergarten teaching. And yet, the titanic discrepancy in compensation for and gendered participation in the two activities is caused by, what? The fact that stock traders have more opportunities to meet fertile women than do the people who provide services to demonstrably fertile women? We define the things that men tend to do as valuable, and worth money. We define the things women tend to do as nice. When men decide to do the things that women have traditionally done (cooking, clothing design, advice-giving, delivering children), we pay them more than we ever paid women who did the same things. Hell, we make chefs and clothing designers famous and rich.
And before you lecture me on how stock traders have the responsibility of handling vast amounts of money, remember the average amount of money that parents “invest” in their children throughout their lives, and the supposedly gene-motivated investments that at least Dad had to make before Junior was born.. The comparison isn’t entirely facetious.
So Rick, your basic theory is that men go about cullng the herd of other males and gathering females into secure locations for breeding purposes, and this has what to do with math scores and the income gap?
“The fact that stock traders have more opportunities to meet fertile women than do the people who provide services to demonstrably fertile women?”
Let’s change up the scenario a little bit, Erin. Taller men have more children than shorter men, and women find tall men more attractive. It’s intuitive and born out by research. Older men and younger women seems to also be the universal norm for couples. It’s evolutionary psychology at work. We are not as rational or free agents as we would like to think. Now back to the stockbroker. He has the ability to display signs of wealth, which to many women makes him more attractive. I don’t agree that it’s right, just as men taller than me are more attractive, but I have to live with it. And so do you. We don’t have a choice in defining what men do as valuable — it is valuable because it evolved to be (”achieving,” colloquially). What women did for hundreds of thousands years with domestic housework and gardening was also just as valuable for survival. But men do their “achieving” to attract women who want to mate with achievers. Now we are stuck in the 21st century with men still wanting to be achievers and women being attracted to that. The hypothetical kindergarten teacher winds up often being viewed by women a “a nice guy” but not in a position to romantically attract women.
“So Rick, your basic theory is that men go about culling the herd of other males and gathering females into secure locations for breeding purposes, and this has what to do with math scores and the income gap?”
Why Asian Americans tend to score higher on math than other Americans is a similar question, but based on ancestry instead of gender. Genetic aptitude or culture? Or a mix of those forces? I do not know the answer — few assert they do. My own pet theory is that male and female brains are constructed to be more proficient than the other gender in specific skills (on average). Spatial reasoning for men, communication for women, for instance could be one general pattern. Why did they develop differently? Hunting is a spatial activity while gardening and child-rearing tend to be more social.
/blockquote We don’t have a choice in defining what men do as valuable /end blockquote
Umm, the whole discussion is about the fact that we feel that we do have a choice in defining value in society. Some things are more attractive than others but if a stockbroker and a male nurse had equal access to capital then the monetary advantages of the stockbroker would be eliminated and the fact that he has what is essentially a secretary’s job would not play as well.
And none of this answers my question about when I’m going to be able to draw a paycheck for participation in my appropriate sphere, which seems to involve (from what I’ve been able to piece together) sitting around being fertile and thinking about kittens and waiting to be penetrated and impregnated by some jazz musician? Can that be right? I know I’m not to have anything to do with the birthing of any children, lest I mess it up with my lack of improvisational ability, but really? Jazz musicians? Can’t I at least get a bullfighter or gangster or something like that? Jazz musicians just seem to lack a certain… genetic fitness to my (admittedly estrogen-clouded) way of thinking. Certainly not the kind of masculinity and fitness that comes from racketeering or being chased by livestock for a living.
Ooooh, or a pirate! That way, he wouldn’t be home most of the time, and I could just lie around pregnant, exploiting all his resources without, you know, having to interact with him too much.
Damn, did the blockquote wrong.
Josh also sez:
To all those people who think that male oppression accounts for everything, ask yourself why women never set up their own offices/schools/armies/etc. that only admit women? Nothing stopped women from starting a woman-only school to educate women. Nothing stops women from starting a corporation where the men face a glass ceiling. But few do it. They “why” is what he addresses.
First of all, I don’t hear anyone saying “male oppression accounts for everything.” (Are you sure you read the comments in this thread before working yourself up into a tizzy and making assumptions?) We are all male and female subject to “patriarchal” assumptions, i.e. assumptions about the relative worth, proper roles, and proper awards for different genders. There are plenty of women throughout history and today who have bought into patriarchal dogma. Feminism has never been about men-v.-women, notwithstanding the attempts of anti-feminist folks like you and Baumeister to characterize it as such. Feminism is about refuting and dismantling certain mores and assumptions that are pervasive in our culture and that primarily benefit a small group of elite men at the expense of women as a class and at the expense of non-elite men as a class.
Secondly, it is silly to say that “nothing stopped” women from starting their own universities and corporations and such, yet women did not do so. In fact, historically there have been RULES barring women from a number of different ventures, including most of the public corporate endeavors that Baumeister claims have moved society forward — such as university attendance, the practice of law, or presenting papers to scientific associations, to give just a few examples (a fact that Baumeister completely ignores). Some of these RULES are not just statutory but RELIGIOUS in nature. There would be no need for such rules and no need to invoke the name of GOD HIMSELF to keep women from competition and exploration if women have no particular inclination to do such things.
Yet notwithstanding the centuries-long wholesale exclusion of women from the public aspects of society, and the invocation of a male God to keep women in their place, women DID manage to start their own universities (Smith College anyone? Mount Holyoke?) and DID make their way into traditionally male endeavors DESPITE the obstacles placed in their path. And we are not talking about a few exceptions to the rule — we are talking quite a large number of women who have bucked the status quo and achieved at high levels despite societal disadvantages and the physiological stresses the pregnancy and childbearing functions. (Another nice example is Henrietta Swann Leavitt who made perhaps the most significant insights in astronomy in the 20th century, despite being treated like a menial by Harvard U. and dismissed from being taken seriously because of her sex).
“Some things are more attractive than others but if a stockbroker and a male nurse had equal access to capital then the monetary advantages of the stockbroker would be eliminated and the fact that he has what is essentially a secretary’s job would not play as well.”
You make my point.
…and Hawise makes my point about the definitions of value far more succinctly and politely than I was going to.
Apologies in advance if this double posts; I just got an error message when I tried to submit.
The thing that gets me about the mainstreaming of evolutionary psychology is that it inevitably gets distorted by people who don’t know much about evolution or psychology. Traits don’t survive because they’re the Most Perfect By Default; they survive because they didn’t kill us off. Those are very different things. Lots of things that we do and think and believe can and do have a totally neutral evolutionary value; they’ve just hung around because they weren’t deadly.
Plus, most traits aren’t inherited by gender, so even if things like nurturing or achievement were heritable, roughly half of boys would be high in nurturing behavior and half of girls would be high in achievement-motivation (those traits that are heritable by gender tend to be bad news for men, by the way - I’m looking at baldness, hemophilia, colorblindness, etc.). It’s unlikely that half of our female and male ancestors died off without reproducing, but maybe that’s so. Which brings me to my next point: just because something had a particular adaptive value a few millennia ago, doesn’t mean that it continues to be just as adaptive now. Even if, at the dawn of time, all high-achieving girls were knocked dead by sabre-toothed tigers, and all high-nurturance boys were left on cliffs to perish from exposure, we’d still have roughly the same distributions today (again, assuming you believe that these things are heritable, and assuming that high-achievement in men and high nurturance in women are overwhelmingly attractive qualities for human beings) — half nurturing boys, and half high-achievement women. Those traits are just not at all likely to kill you these days.
Evolution didn’t stop with the hunter-gatherer, or even the early agrarian societies. What might have been attractive in the centuries past is not what gives you an evolutionary edge today. So why, for the love of Pete and Ivy, do we look at these things as if Moses came down from the mountain and said “Let electrical engineers be of greater value than librarians! And it shall be good! For caveman hunters begat the electrical engineers, and cavewoman baby machines begat the librarians. Amen.” and that was that. Jobs that didn’t even exist a generation or two ago are gendered now; not because they’re predestined to be male jobs or female jobs, but because we value men’s interests more than we do women’s. And, by and large, we’re willing to put a dollar amount on that value. It doesn’t happen because OMG men need to make more money to get the hot cave girls. It happens because we, as a society, have decided that a garbageman gets paid more money than a cleaning woman; that a doctor gets paid more money than a nurse; that a database administrator gets paid more than a librarian. And if you think that those valuations have nothing to do with the values we give each gender, I have a bridge I’d like you to buy before your maladaptive genes do you in. Because that pirate, while he may be virile, isn’t paying my rent. And he didn’t pay my mom’s or my grandmother’s, or my great-grandmother’s, or all of the women in my family who worked, outside the home, in the marketplace with men, for the same supposed reason (to provide material resources for offspring), and yet could never really compete on an equal footing. So I, as someone who needs her own material resources before she’s willing to consider reproducing with anyone, have a lot invested in seeing those societally-determined valuations change, if not for me, then for my hypothetical achievement-oriented offspring.
There’s nothing more inherently valuable about stock trading than kindergarten teaching.
His focus is on describing the way things are; he implies at the outset that he doesn’t always think it’s the way things ought to be. For example, if you presented solid evidence to him that stock traders are systemically overcompensated compared to the incremental value they contribute to society, and kindergarten teachers are undercompensated, I think he would be happy to see structural changes that reduced this misallocation. (Coming up with appropriate structural changes would be a very hard problem, but at least you’d recognize your common ground and cooperate in solving it rather than pointlessly bickering with each other.)
…getting back to the original post, in my experience the vast majority of educated people agree on an ideal of equality of opportunity, and I’m confident he’s no exception. Patriarchy emerged in most societies in the past not because it was the best system for approximating that ideal, but because it was an easily reachable local optimum (in terms of societal survivability, not quality of life) thanks primarily to greater male physical strength. But we are no longer slaves to the crudest forces that usually govern the evolution of social systems. Over the last century, unprecedented abundance has given us increasing freedom to shape our own destiny; and US triumphs in the major wars of the century has resulted in convergence to “equality of opportunity” over stuff like “deutschland uber alles” and “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. Yes, you will occasionally run into someone with a genuinely different vision, but that is the exception, not the rule.
The thorny question is, how do you enforce equality of opportunity? It is convenient to assume that all groups have identical ability/motivation/etc. distributions, and attribute any statistically significant deviations from what that assumption would predict to discrimination. But as far as I can tell, this convenient assumption is wrong in many important contexts. It seems more likely that our ideal society would gravitate toward something like ~60% female representation among doctors, ~30% female representation among mathematicians, etc., rather than ~50% across the board (and that these numbers would be driven more by differences in interest/motivation than in “raw ability”). And it seems plausible that there will continue to be greater male representation among both those who do the most groundbreaking work, as well as lazy bums. How can we recognize when such residual inequality of result is not actually the result of discrimination?
Erin, your arguments are valid and well-thought out. The reason Rick isn’t understanding your points or even your main thesis (that the Bau-dude is a mysoginist) is that he, by virtue of being an XY and being able to benefit from the system, is not even truly aware that the patriarchy exists and informs most all cultural constructs that have developed in the Western world. I bet he doesn’t even know know that the patriarchy hurts men too. In fact, I know he doesn’t because he lamented the fact that he is not tall and so “not attractive to women.” If he quit thinking in terms of fake “evo-psych” Darwinism, he might be able to get out of his Maxim-addled world and meet some women who don’t buy into patrarchal notions of attractivness.
Also, is everybody’s comment being typed in much slower than they are typing? It’s driving me nuts and making in hard for me to type.
It doesn’t confuse me so much that there are men who can believe this sort of thing (men and women do SEEM different, after all, and it’s not that far a leap to insisting that these supposed differences are flaws), but I can’t understand why a man would say these things out loud. It wouldn’t exactly draw in the ladies, would it? Or is it one of the legendary “negs”?
Rick, this is a guess but you don’t garden, do you? Most primitive hunting is a group activity that requires elaborate forms of non-verbal communication and gardening is a solitary activity that requires the ability to identify by sight multiple types of plants at different stages of development. Child rearing is a complex of skills that include nurturing, instruction, communication and time management- as well as a strong stomach and hopefully the ability to provide food out of glands.
The point of the nurse/stockbroker analogy is that we already value skill sets based on variables that don’t aid in the long term survival of the species- you are more likely to die by taking the advice of a stockbroker than a nurse.
Money doesn’t mean anything on a purely survival basis. Try this test- get lost in the deep woods, bring with you a credit card with a very high limit, see how far that gets you. Money is a social construct that changes value as society changes its valuations on the goods that it represents. Try this test- get lost in downtown Chicago, bring with you a very big chainsaw with lots of fuel, see how far that gets you.
The problem with Baumeister is that he waves off a significant amount of variables as insignificant so that he can prove that he is an upper echelon XY and therefore worthy of all the goodies he desires. I would argue that his talk proves that he is an unstable XY variant who may not be desirable in the gene pool.
Okay. Amanda, you’re the one who explained this to me, so I can’t exactly say that this is stupid on the face of it, but you’d think that a social psychologist would recognize this as a possibility.
A patriarchy forming doesn’t require a conspiracy; it only requires evolution of social institutions, and such evolutions naturally favor those who are already seizing (or have) power.
What a remarkably lame address. Sheesh.
“high salaries come from working super-long hours”. Cite, B-Man? I know my anecdotal experience doesn’t jibe with that. Some wealthy people work long hours, some don’t. Some poor people work long hours, some don’t. In my experience, familial connections are a better predictor of wealth than number of hours worked.
“Culture can be seen as a biological strategy.”. Yes, it CAN be, but it really doesn’t make sense. Just as “survival of the fittest” defines “fittest” (and not “most likely to survive” as is commonly meant by context - in high malaria areas scicle-cell anemia makes you “fittest”), B-Man here defines “Culture” as “that which kicks most ass”. Were the Visigoths more “cultured” than the Romans? Vikings more “cultured” than Angles and Saxons? Not by any common understanding of the meaning of the word “culture”.
And of the course, The Big One, patriarchy as conspiracy theory. Do what? Back in nomadic days, “red in tooth and claw”, the strongest men could call the shots. Once the agricultural revolution freed up time, those inclined to grab power did so (it’s a great shallow relationship!) Inertia kept it going from there. Women were not allowed to make armies (not allowed assembly, not able to raise money). Same for exploring, same for etc. etc. etc. Sure, women have made colleges for women, but since no men would hire them they were signing up for a life for poverty by doing so (and many still did it anyway).
B-Man’s basic assumption that in any given instant all choices are available is ridiculous. Take the army example - women could not assemble. Well, golly gosh, why? Because they were property (check out that Old Testament for documentation to that effect). Sure, they weren’t property quite as overtly as back in Biblical times, but were still kept by all the elements of society (family, friends, cops, monied interests) out of the process “because that’s the way it always was”. The free choices that Baumeister requires for his analysis to work were simply not there, out of the considerable force of social inertia. If nobody publishes women’s symphonies, if nobody allows them an orchestra to compose with, how in the hell could they do it?
Damn near every other sentence in that tripe is refutable. It’s almost hard to pick a couple of spots, there is so much to go WTF? over.
“Now we are stuck in the 21st century with men still wanting to be achievers and women being attracted to that. The hypothetical kindergarten teacher winds up often being viewed by women a “a nice guy” but not in a position to romantically attract women.”
Evidence? I haven’t actually heard any evidence that men in kindergarden-variety jobs have any more trouble finding mates than other men.
In any case, it’s difficult to get any accurate data on the inherent of men and women when there are still so many people/authorities telling people to do (or not do) X or Y just because “[wo]men [don’t] do that”, or “That’s just how it is.”
In any case, his speech is crap, especially his patronizing sentances like:
“It’s hard to escape the impression (sorry, guys!) that women are simply more likeable and lovable than men.”
I have to laugh at the “more lovable, more likable” comment. Not only is totally patronizing (”Nice girlies! Here’s a cookie!”) it disproves his whole point. From the day we’re born, girls are rewarded more for politeness, (especially with men) and punished more for nonconforming. Thus, he’s “aggressive”, but she’s “pushy”. He’s “witty”, but she’s “bitchy”. He’s “a loner”, but she’s “a weirdo”.
Of course, it works the other way too. She’s “sweet”, but he’s “an asskisser”. She’s “modest”, but he’s “a prude”. She’s “gentle” but he’s “a wimp” and so forth.
So, while the same traits may be equally distributed across the sexes at birth, it’s the aggressive boys who get the jobs and the promotions, and the pushy girls who are shown the door. The gentle girls get the dates and the proposals, while the wimpy boys stay home alone. If you’re born a tough girl, you quickly learn to be quiet and sweet, even if you’d rather be loud and rude. If you’re born a sensitive boy, you’d better learn to speak up and throw your elbows, or you’ll get trampled.*
it’s changing, but not fast enough, as all good Pandagonians can testify.
*Of course, girls have their own competitions for male approval and social acceptance, which can be just as mean as boys, but far more subtle. If Annie sees Betsy dancing with a boy Annie has her eye on, Annie doesn’t walk up and deck Betsy; Annie just turns to her best friend, smiles sweetly and says “Betsy’s such a great dancer! She’s certainly recovered from her case of the clap!” Whethere or not Betsy actually ever had the clap is irrelevant; by the time the rumor’s all over school, Betsy’s been decked all right. And Annie is still considered “sweet” (at least by the boys)
But as far as I can tell, this convenient assumption is wrong in many important contexts. It seems more likely that our ideal society would gravitate toward something like
Non sequitor. You need to give compelling reasons for why it’s wrong (in those particular contexts).
Eileen: I do dismiss the article you cite. Check out my first post on this thread September 17, 2007 at 10:27 pm. One of my sources are: http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2006/national-report.pdf
Go to the the “Total Group Mean…” data and then check out tables 9 and 10.
Your article states “sex differences in the SAT-M is problematic, however, for several reasons. First, more girls take the SAT-M, and so the sample of boys is more highly selected”.
If this was true, then the “groups” identified by the College Board that have the highest percentage of females taking the test should have the largest M-F gap. Just the opposite occurs. Black females make up 58% of the African-American test takers and exhibit only a 15 point M-F gap. On the other hand, Asian females make up just 51% of the Asian-American test takers and exhibit a typical 32 point M-F gap.
Spleke writes: “How can we determine whether the particular mix of items composing the SAT-M provides a fair measure of the relative mathematical abilities of boys and girls?” That’s a good old fashioned smear. The simple answer is to give them the same math SAT test and one that isn’t easily coachable, which is what the College Board does.
JimB, as an epidemiologist I can tell you straight away: those statistics are not adequately controlled for any number of SES confounding variables which predict access to math education and educational quality and educational resources, nor do they account for effect modification situations with those variables when stratified by gender and race.
In other words, there is all sorts of bullshit mucking up the race and gender comparisons using SAT scores as an outcome variable. The Princeton Review doesn’t want to bother with the heavy statistics, including autocorrelation issues, which make true comparisons impossible (and would, of course, taint their marketing of the test to schools as a predictor of success in college when that is so profoundly effect modified by income).
Older men and younger women seems to also be the universal norm for couples.
Actually…not so much…when women have the right of refusal.
There would be no need for such rules and no need to invoke the name of GOD HIMSELF to keep women from competition and exploration if women have no particular inclination to do such things.
Why, oh why, is this salient point forever ignored by the Ricks of the world? And as far as “motivation” to take risks goes…it would really be helpful if, historically, the social and physical price women/girls paid for “risktaking” had not been so much higher.
Artemesia Gentileschi?
I went to the thing itself and found this:
“Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks.”
Um? Even when looking ONLY AT MEN, this is bogus. Big rewards? Like all those miners, paid huge salaries and given company cars to make up for the dangers of their jobs? Like the guys who joined the army because it was a better deal than what they were getting offered in their (difficult, depressed, job-scarce) neighborhood, and who are of course now driving luxury cars and have astonishing stock option plans and lots of money socked away from speakers fees? Like the men who worked beside me in the factory, where losing a finger was just something that happened to folks sometimes and everybody knew at least one person who had done so, and who are now no doubt wearing really nice suits and playing golf and daydreaming about where they’re going to buy their third house?
No, it does not offer big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. It offers big rewards to people who figure out how to get other people to take those risks at the lowest possible payout.
Actually, seen from that perspective, women’s unpaid (and uncredited) labor fits right in: another great achievement! Let’s give a raise to the person who implemented that one.
Non sequitor. You need to give compelling reasons for why it’s wrong (in those particular contexts).
Um, Baumeister’s speech provided some plausible reasons.
Anyway, the most important thing is to set up a superstructure that will allow the truth to emerge no matter what it is. I think Baumeister is mostly right, clearly you don’t agree. As long as we’re both pretty much free to make the best decisions we know how, the market will tend to reward the more accurate worldview. (Markets do have known failure modes, of course, so there is a role for regulation.) If you’re free to seriously upgrade the science and engineering program at a women’s college without being actively obstructed by skeptical men, and I’m free to start up a company without being forced to maintain ~50% female representation among my engineers, everything will probably be okay.
IF you’re free to seriously upgrade the science and engineering program at a women’s college without being actively obstructed by skeptical men, and I’m free to start up a company without being forced to maintain 50% female representation among my engineers, everything will probably be okay.
Easy peasy! Unfortunately, Dog’s argument assumes that people will behave rationally. People don’t behave rationally. People often behave IRRATIONALLY due to cultural norms and assumptions that have been accepted through the generations without question. People also make RATIONAL decisions that may not be the best solution either in marketplace terms or human terms. (I.E. “I want to be comfortable spending 12 hours a day with my VP, and I am more comfortable hanging out with a man, so I will hire a man even though the woman candidate may be equally qualified or more qualified.”) This kind of thinking leads to a desirable result for the employer (i.e. a high level of personal comfort in his day-to-day interactions with his employees), but not a desirable result for the women who face pervasive attitudes of this nature and are therefore face greater obstacles than men in pursuit of their life’s ambitions.
P.S. I don’t favor forcing you to maintain 50% female representation in your company, although I do favor American laws that prohibit you (assuming you have a private company) from discriminating based on sex. Those are two different things. While such laws may impinge on your freedom to decide you want an all-male company (if that’s you want), these laws protect my freedom to participate fully in our society, a freedom that was denied my mother and grandmother to their disadvantage throughout their entire LIVES and in every aspect of their lives to this day.)
P.P.S. Interestingly, it IS the women’s colleges that have some of the most kick-ass science programs in the country. (Chemistry at Mount Holyoke anyone? I wonder, however, why you focus on women’s colleges in particular when the vast majority of female college and university students attend coeducational institutions.) However, women’s colleges face other problems TODAY that are directly the result of women’s second class citizenship for the last couple centuries. First, Smith and Wellesley may be very highly regarded colleges but no matter how well they do, they will never have the reputation of the top tier colleges that were historically for men — such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; they will always lose top students due to the prestige factor. Second, these colleges do not have the endowments of a Harvard, Yale, or Princeton because the alumnae of women’s colleges do not have the same resources as the male alumni of those other schools. This is due to a history of active discrimination against women. A woman in my mother’s age group (aged 70) was part of a generation that was often actively discouraged or barred from many lucrative professions (listen to the small number of 70 year old women lawyers if you want to hear some horror stories about breaking into a male profession) or pushed by cultural pressures into the non-lucrative fields of teaching or homemaking. Sure, some women may have married rich men, but when the time comes to give away one’s money, the male CEO’s alma mater will get preference over his wife’s.
Dog’s libertarian argument reminds me of this old chestnut (which also may have been raised earlier in this thread — I don’t remember):
“Well, gee, if women are really being paid 75 cents to the dollar for doing work equal to a man’s, then you’d thinks corporations would be THRILLED to hire women. Corporations would ONLY hire women because that would save their bottom line.”
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that corporations view women employees as having equal value to male employees. But what if corporations pay women less because they view women employees as less valuable for reasons that have nothing to do with women’s ability or motivation? Perhaps the decision makers (being fallible human beings) are inclined to leap to unsupported conclusions that women are less able and motivated. Or perhaps the decision maker is rational but knows that his customer base is irrational and will be less likely to accept services from a female practitioner.
“Moral suasion” is too slow and unreliable a solution. That’s why the law has had to intervene — with spectacular results by the way. 50 years ago many members of the general public would have been uncomfortable with a woman lawyer representing them or a woman financial consultant handling their investments. Now most people (I hope) accept women’s competence in this areas because they have SEEN women’s competence in these areas because employers were forced to stop discriminating and place women in these positions. The law was the only way to break the stranglehold of deeply ingrained patriarchal assumptions.
“[the] argument assumes that people will behave rationally. People don’t behave rationally. People often behave IRRATIONALLY due to cultural norms and assumptions . . . the problem with [the other] argument is that it assumes that corporations view women employees as having equal value to male employees . . .”
Margaret - exactly. Hence, we have [mocking tone]poor martyred St. Summers[/mocking tone] making an economic argument, in his famous speech, that universities *couldn’t* be discriminating against women in terms of tenure, hiring, etc., because if that was the case, then some other university/ies would have simply hired all the highly-talented but poorly-treated women away and become a real powerhouse. I believe the technical term for this is the argumentum ad ‘free market economist from Mars with no real knowledge of Earth customs, history, society, or culture’ - sorry, the Latin’s escaped me for the moment; must be that one X chromosome . . . .
“My own pet theory is that male and female brains are constructed to be more proficient than the other gender in specific skills (on average). Spatial reasoning for men, communication for women, for instance could be one general pattern. Why did they develop differently? Hunting is a spatial activity while gardening and child-rearing tend to be more social.
No offense, Rick, but in this case and at this level of sophistication - as already pointed out - this is less a theory and more a story, along the lines of ‘In the Dreamtime,’ ‘One day Coyote was walking along,’ ‘And then the snake began speaking to Eve,’ or ‘O my Best Beloved, the Elephant Child went down to the bank of the great river . . .’ And remember, we’re not talking merely since the dawn of agriculture - we’re talking the majority of our species history, and before - little to no gardening involved. Would you like to give a go at positing gender roles for the 100,000 - 10,000 years ago period, including why/on what evidence we might think this?
we should remember, of course, that part of the reason Summers was involved in a conference about gender and the academy was that the number of women getting tenure there rather dropped during his administration, causing a bit of fuss . . .
My own pet theory is that male and female brains are constructed to be more proficient than the other gender in specific skills (on average). Spatial reasoning for men, communication for women, for instance could be one general pattern. Why did they develop differently? Hunting is a spatial activity while gardening and child-rearing tend to be more social.
—
Oooohhh. Evo-PSYCHE! Good times. Let me fire up the bong…
Cats have an uncanny ability to accurately judge distance; does this indicate some evolutionary advantage to being predisposed to mathematical prowess?
Perhaps the male of our species retained whiskers as a function of hunting and thus also gained a mathematical advantage in the process. I present Exhibit A:
http://www.maniacworld.com/albert-einstein-1.jpg
Compelling. Thought-provoking. Notice even the cat-like facial gesture at play. Was he examined for unusual papillae? Perhaps just a mating call: the advertisement of a firm tongue with which to please his myriad mates. Through grooming of course, nothing naughty.
Oh wait, cats are different, somehow. What was I thinking…males hunted, females played in the garden and talked too much…ensuring survival and growth of the species…can’t put my opposable thumb on it, brb… Frito break…
People often behave IRRATIONALLY due to cultural norms and assumptions that have been accepted through the generations without question. People also make RATIONAL decisions that may not be the best solution either in marketplace terms or human terms.
Look, even if “most corporations” are congenitally irrational, there is nothing stopping you and other like-minded people from starting and running an institution in a more rational manner. If you’re right about women being irrationally undervalued by others, your institution should benefit from it, at least, even if others are slow to copy your example. And I think there’s plenty of evidence that markets aren’t as slow as you seem to think in this context; I found the following report of goings-on in China illuminating:
Yes, the bottom line really can be more powerful than “moral suasion”. If this can happen in an autocratic country, I don’t see why the welfare of women can’t be improved in a similar manner in the US where the ideological and legal climate is more favorable.
If you set up a business, hire women at a higher frequency than standard for your industry, and succeed, then you’ve actually proven something. While if you force all businesses in the industry to change their practices by force of law, how do you know you haven’t noticeably reduced the efficiency of those businesses, and thus given a competitive advantage to countries like the autocratic one just mentioned?
Now most people (I hope) accept women’s competence in this areas because they have SEEN women’s competence in these areas because employers were forced to stop discriminating and place women in these positions.
Now, I am in favor of laws ensuring that no opportunities are closed off to competent women. Seeing women’s competence is the most powerful antidote to unjust discrimination.
My point is just that these laws need to be written with awareness that the genders do have legitimate differences in their distributions of abilities and preferences, and as a result the fair equilibrium outcome may deviate considerably from 50-50. It is not the principle of anti-discrimination laws that I have a problem with, it is the practical question of “how do you avoid having too many false positives when looking for unfair discrimination?”
This is ridiculous. So because men made a “no girls allowed” tree club, women are less motivated?
“If you’re right about women being irrationally undervalued by others, your institution should benefit from it, at least”
Now where did we just hear that on this thread . . . ?
Seeing women’s competence is the most powerful antidote to unjust discrimination.
Once again, we’ve not reached a place where the work of a woman is evaluated as the work of a person.
Time after time, research demonstrates that virtually any work is evaluated as being of lesser quality, if the person doing the work possesses a womb. Hence, the need for blind auditions.
Hence, the need for blind auditions.
And I am completely in favor of such practices; I was actually thinking of mentioning blind auditions as a positive example in my previous comment. The more objective the hiring/screening process, the better. I only object to laws that are likely to decrease performance.
(Yes, I realize this thread is getting too old for me to expect more than a handful of people to keep reading, so this will probably be my last comment here.)