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.)

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.

Now where did we just hear that on this thread . . . ?

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:

Girls born after the Cultural Revolution are much less likely to have been spoilt, which means some employers see them as good hires. Liam Casey, the boss of PCH China Solutions, a contract-manufacturer in southern China, says he once noticed in a shopping mall that there were typically groups of seven people or groups of three. The groups of seven consisted of two sets of grandparents, parents and a boy. Those of three comprised parents and a daughter. He says he realised then that girls were valued less by society and that if he hired them and showed them loyalty, they would be more loyal in return. This is one reason, he says, that his business has much lower rates of staff turnover than his rivals’ businesses do.

But even hiring women is getting harder. In Zhuhai another foreign manufacturer which hires staff from all over China says it prefers to recruit women too. The managers believe that women are generally harder-working and tend to stay longer. But schools and universities have cottoned on to this now and set quotas on the number of women that firms can recruit. The company says that for every group of women it selects, it now has to hire a share of men too.

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?”

—

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…

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?

“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.

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.