a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by thundara
thundara  ·  3148 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is There Anything Good About Men?

Shared most of my thoughts individually with a friend, and would rather not fully repeat them here (mostly out of laziness). That said I thought this was a pretty interesting read, OB, minus the fact that the author did not cite any of his sources and overall is not particularly constructive about his message.

I think that initially, I agree with the author's overall point: that attributes of men tend to have a higher spread, even when their average is similar to those of women. However I disagree with how he then applies this as a universal argument towards present and historical gender inequalities as well as using them as justifications for the inguinuity of men. He seems to mistake a social / evolutionary trend for an absolute argument as to why things are the way they are.

Take his discussion of academics, for example: (mainly focused on CS and biology, since those are what I know)

    Return for a moment to the Larry Summers issue about why there aren’t more female physics professors at Harvard. Maybe women can do math and science perfectly well but they just don’t like to. After all, most men don’t like math either! Of the small minority of people who do like math, there are probably more men than women.

The thing is, gender inequality is itself not uniform across STEM. Across math, computing, and engineering, women make up a much smaller fraction of the students and faculty. Yet as you switch to biology, psychology, and medicine, suddenly the enrollment gap shrinks, blurs, and you switch from questions of sheer percent student composition to those of pay, faculty acceptances, and grant rewards.

Is biology a fundamentally less aggressive / testosterone-driven field? (Hint: no) Is biology a less social field? (Hint: no) Was computing more male-dominated from the start? (Hint: no) Or are these differences between these two fields due to cultural, historical, and behavioral differences that don't quite fit into the author's one-size-fits-all model?

There are definitely gendered differences in computing that are very tangible (see the general lack of female interest in bitcoin and cryptography), but they aren't really explained by the kurtosis of male attributes. Perhaps male dominance in those topics stems from a stereotypical desire to have complete control over ones digital information. Perhaps it's a self-perpetuating loop due to a historical lack of women there. But Ada Lovelace designed the first computer algorithm and Grace Hopper the first programming language. And the story there doesn't really match our authors' narrative:

    "Men were interested in building, the hardware," says Isaacson, "doing the circuits, figuring out the machinery. And women were very good mathematicians back then."

    Isaacson says in the 1930s female math majors were fairly common — though mostly they went off to teach. But during World War II, these skilled women signed up to help with the war effort.

    Bartik told a live audience at the Computer History Museum in 2008 that the job lacked prestige. The ENIAC wasn't working the day before its first demo. Bartik's team worked late into the night and got it working.

    "They all went out to dinner at the announcement," she says. "We weren't invited and there we were. People never recognized, they never acted as though we knew what we were doing. I mean, we were in a lot of pictures."

    At the time, though, media outlets didn't name the women in the pictures. After the war, Bartik and her team went on to work on the UNIVAC, one of the first major commercial computers.

--

Finally, I'd like to not let this paragraph go uncommented:

    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.

Of all of the writing, this section bothered me the most. It's completely revisionist history that ignores the deliberate exclusion of women from the early days of medical research. Scientific medicine changed childbirth. Men led medicine at the time. Therefore only when men were allowed in could childbirth be improved. Garbage reasoning.

--

Still, appreciate the read, since it definitely got me thinking and I appreciate the author trying to broach this subject without being too PC-y or MRA-y about it. I don't like that he argues from such absolute terms, but bits of this is worth ruminating on.





kleinbl00  ·  3148 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The page belongs to an author five years dead and records the remarks made at a closed conference eight years ago. Some things you just have to take without hypertext.

It's also a mistake to contradict generalities with cherry-picked statistics. Your link is to "the forgotten female programmers who created modern tech" - the argument isn't that women are incapable of anything men are capable of, the argument is that broad trends highlight a handful of women in a sea of dudes. Programming actually highlights the point: I don't know if you've ever tried knitting or weaving, but it's a highly mathematical, numerically intensive process involving manual dexterity and memory. Anyone who can knit kicks ass at arithmetic, bare minimum, and definitely has the necessary skills for coding. Yet the leap from weaving to computing? From a dude.

Just to be clear: Neither Baumeister nor myself are arguing that women can't code, that a woman couldn't have invented the Jacquard loom. The argument is that given a loom, men will have an easier time getting rich off of it.

    Certainly today anybody of any gender can start a business, and if anything there are some set-asides and advantages to help women do so. There are no hidden obstacles or blocks, and that’s shown by the fact that women start more businesses than men. But the women are content to stay small, such as operating a part-time business out of the spare bedroom, making a little extra money for the family. They don’t seem driven to build these up into giant corporations. There are some exceptions, of course, but there is a big difference on average.

So let's talk about the section that bothers you the most.

There's nothing genius about forceps. I reckon any midwife with access to a forge could have come up with forceps. A woman who invented forceps would likely have made herself a pair and used them to save the lives of the mothers under her care.

Peter Chamberlin, on the other hand, fled Paris under threat of death by the Medicis, went to medical school and was such a wild card that he went to prison, then got himself released under royal decree to be the Queens obstetrician. All because he invented a gadget his family leveraged in secret for 200 years before Elizabeth Blackwell was even born. Yay Semmelweis, boo Victorian England, but the period you're talking about women weren't allowed to vote or own property, let alone contribute to medical science. And the whole point of the discussion is not that women don't contribute, it's that the overwhelming course of history is deeply oppressive to women and either all men are evil dicks or there's a biological, evolutionary reason for the exclusion of females from the structures of society. Say what you will about patriarchy - it's universal among cultures that have invented, say, writing.

You can find outliers in any statistical study. The argument of the author is that the women who have succeeded are even greater outliers than the men who have succeeded because numerically, the female gender produces fewer outliers.

thundara  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    The page belongs to an author five years dead and records the remarks made at a closed conference eight years ago. Some things you just have to take without hypertext.

Noted. I don't like accepting arguments where I don't have the sources, but it's still food for thought.

I think what bothers me about his argument though is that he takes a somewhat old observation (see: old analogy of keys and locks) and tries to apply it to situations where it could follow, but it just as well could not. Minorities weren't the ones dominating programming, and in the early days, women were highly discouraged from the sort of creative thinking involved in computer design. Does that point to differences in ability? Or access / motivation?

Yet in spite of that, women invented the first programming language and compiler, operated the first general computer, and invented / co-invented many of the broadcast and networking protocols available today. Were they dominant the whole way? No. But at a time when the relative accessibility of these technologies was highly limited for women, it seems erroneous to me to point to there being fewer achievements by one gender and immediately claim an explanation based on an evolutionary and not a social argument.

    Peter Chamberlen

I honestly don't know the full story here, but from what I looked up... this was an invention from before germ theory could even explain why forceps would be useful and he kept them a secret for most of his life. That's not a fitting example here since he neither used them to get rich or benefit humanity at large, and his male offspring, too, failed to sell them when they tried.

But again, I think this is a circular argument: saying that society's are better when women are assigned their place and arguing that from evidence of men's superiority during times when women were oppressed. It doesn't really hold up when you look at modern times when those constraints have been relaxed, nor in non-Euro/American cultures where women were not as deeply oppressed.

kleinbl00  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You're not really making an argument. You're saying "I'm uncomfortable with your counterargument."

The speech was entitled "Is there anything good about men?" Perhaps you forget, but I don't -

"Men Are Not Cost Effective"

"Are Men Necessary?"

"The Female brain"

    (Why are women more verbal than men? Why do women remember details of fights that men can’t remember at all? Why do women tend to form deeper bonds with their female friends than men do with their male counterparts? These and other questions have stumped both sexes throughout the ages. )

The implication has been, since the dawn of women's lib, that women aren't just equal to men, they are superior in many ways... and that it is only through (a) the concerted efforts of a misogynist patriarchy or (b) the natural malevolence and antagonism towards women by men that society remains a male-dominated enterprise. In other words, men are over-represented in positions of power because we're either conspiring or evil.

I am not a member of the men's rights movement. I fully support equality for women in all things. I always have. I have always gone out of my way to reverse the tide that women face in a man's world, and I have always been reminded that I'm part of the problem, not the solution, and that there are some things I just won't understand because I have a penis. Yet every son has a mother and every daughter has a father and I guarantee you, nobody set out to make things harder for their loved ones.

Yet we've evolved a social environment where even questioning the reasons behind the imbalance is taboo. We've gotten to the point where someone can mention that childbirth was made safer by integration into society and someone else feels perfectly justified getting uncomfortable that the suggestion was even made.

It PISSES ME OFF that we can't even talk about anthropological differences without somebody getting hot under the collar. It PISSES ME OFF that the default position is "men are evil, accept it and shut up" is the only position you can take without getting screamed at. It PISSES ME OFF that you feel comfortable saying "I honestly don't know the full story here..." but your argument is invalid. THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT is that modern times are DIFFERENT.

It's not a circular argument. Either (A) men are evil or (B) there's something else at play and I, for one, am sick of being the fucking bad guy.

user-inactivated  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

As much as he's easy to mock for being impenetrable, Derrida has a good theory for why what you're seeing happens. Because when you're comparing opposites it's hard to do it from a neutral position; you're not really asking how men and women are different, you're asking how women are different from men or how men are different from women. Because you start with one as your model, you see the other as lacking whatever traits aren't shared, and so being deficient. In light of which, while it may or may not be true, "there are no essential differences" is the only position that isn't perilous.

thundara  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Calm down. I'm not getting hot under the collar. I'm not saying I'm uncomfortable with the argument, or that it's inappropriate, or accusing you of being a bad person in any aspect. I'm just saying that I don't buy the author's argument. I think it's searching for one explanation to a phenomenon that I consider highly complex and hard to ascribe to any one factor without mountains more evidence than what the article presented.

If a professor of social psychology is making observations of how things are, that's fine. If they want to get mechanistic and say X is the reason why things are that way, I'm going to put on my skeptic hat and ask: is that reasoning sound?

And my conclusion is that I don't think it's sound to use the historical prevalence of men in technical innovation as an argument for their innate tendency towards the edges of intelligence / creativity when all the while women were actively discouraged from doing those very things. And my most basic counterexample is that the trends of women involvement across different fields don't correlate with the attributes described by the author.

He could have made a non-PC appeal towards differences in abstract vs. concrete thinking ability and I would have taken it more seriously. But he argued from the perspective of motivation, sociability, and sexual reward and I gave the counterexample of CS vs. biology.

Past that, I largely agree with his argument that cultures put men to use at both of the extremes of the world and that men have a greater need to prove themselves to improve their chances of reproduction.

kleinbl00  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Fair enough. At the same time, recognize that _refugee_ hasn't talked to me in three days because I dared to support the notion that maybe men and women are different in ways other than "men are evil, women aren't."

And I've had this argument, over and over again, where some attempt is made to divine a reason for inequality other than "men are evil" and the consensus opinion remains "it is taboo to discuss the idea that men aren't evil." Which is what you're doing - you're arguing that it's inappropriate to explore the prevalence of men in history to explain the prevalence of men in history. You're arguing, in effect, that you'd humor the argument if only he'd made a completely different argument.

This is the argument that was made. This is the argument being discussed. Instead of the default "women are better and different" or "men are worse and different" the discussion is "how are men different?" and a hypothesis was put forth. Reject that hypothesis if you want, but don't rejected on the basis that it isn't the hypothesis you wish to discuss.

thundara  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well, for a bit of context, coffeesp00ns told me off the other day for my use of language and I got dumped last month for being too politically apathetic. I'm not really in a position to judge others morals and, even if I were, I'm trying my best these days to try and be non-judgemental towards other people and actually understand all the compassion and mindfulness preachings that the hippies I lived around in Berkeley used to always talk about.

I think my dispute in this case is that, yeah, each gender's innate abilities is a touchy subject, so I don't like seeing what I see as poorly reasoned argument being put forth as fact. Like I said though, author is definitely not MRA-y about what he says, so I'm only poking at one component of his essay / speech.

b_b  ·  3144 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Anyone who dumps you for being politically apathetic is someone you don't want to be with anyway :)

Hard not to be apathetic in the Age of Trump. I can't help but watch the car fire, but I only wish I had the guts to look away.

_refugee_  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Woah buddy, hold up. First, when do we ever talk every 3 days? Second, who have I talked to in hubski at all in the past 3 days?

kleinbl00  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Exactly.

_refugee_  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Is this your way of getting me to participate more? How's it working, champ?

kleinbl00  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This is my way of making sure we good.

_refugee_  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You know, that fanfic guy had the decency to contact me via PM to ask the same thing, and I haven't even gotten back to him.

kleinbl00  ·  3145 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hey, I gotta be me.