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.
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.
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.