"Her bit about women being incapable of giving orders or delivering blunt criticism meets the “true enough for a stand-up comedy routine” standard"
This helps encapsulate what I find exhausting about the epistemic present: there's just so much sloppy intuitive thinking dressed up with a few survey results or anecdotes and then presented as either deep intellectualism or "I'm just a simple country lawyer"-style homespun truth.
I have been guilty of this! In these comments! Many such cases!
But I try to be aware of when I'm slipping into it. It's a bad habit. And we can bicker and argue about who started it and so on, but that's also exhausting (albeit an extremely remunerative line of discourse). Maybe we can just agree that it's bad, regardless of who does it and to what end, and try to Do *clap* Better *clap*.
I'd also say there's a difference from saying it in an internet comment section and having that take be one of the key arguments in a buzzy article decrying one of the largest societal trends of the past 50 years.
Ironically enough I am about to do the very thing you're bemoaning in your comment, but I can't help but feel that the issues with the epistemic present are because any old idiot who can string some words together in an artful way gets published on the world wide web right next to investigative journalism done by the likes of the NYT. Another example of the collapse of the gatekeepers - editors used to enforce standards, now readers have to both choose what to read and apply critical thinking to ask "is what the author saying true? Is the evidence they are presenting germane to the argument they are making? I am entertained, but is there any evidence at all?"
I only made it about 2/3rds of the way through the Andrews article before I had to bail. I am not a CITATION NEEDED freak or anything but man I got there and realized not once did she cite anything despite dropping some absolute BIG IF TRUE whoppers.
Richard Hanania compared removing the gatekeepers to abolishing the police, which I really liked. Clearly the police has a lot of biases and takes some very objectionable actions. Abolishing the police eliminates those actions, but now you're wondering where all this crime is suddenly coming from.
Today's has a lot of the latter, where he talks about the virtues of driving recklessly and letting your three-year-old sit in the front seat sometimes. Unclear if he's doing both these things at once!
Agreed - it's a collapse in gatekeeping power, but also the gatekeepers themselves have not always acquitted themselves well (e.g. "moral clarity," the History and Industry episode, etc.)
You're right, but I think another symptom of modern neurosis is the demand of perfection from elites. I have very mixed feelings about this because of all social strata elites absolutely have the highest obligation to society and should be held to very high standards. I'm in take territory here, but I feel there's something with a change in how society values virtue, in both our elites and our common people, where no one is expected to consider for a second that something might be their fault, feel healthy shame. I wonder if that's a consequence of the collapse of forgiveness/grace. We've become less likely to admit fault because we are less likely to receive forgiveness. Any fault is met with condemnation.
I am not smart enough to expound on this. I don't think this is a policy or logic thing. I think this is rooted in a values and culture thing. And those can't be forced .
Part of that corrosion is that grace is about acknowledging a failure/mistake and a willingness to move forward with the goal not to repeat that. Now we have people refusing to acknowledge the failure/mistake and just continuing to do the bad thing.
A lot of complaining about the gatekeepers on their (de)merits were actually complaints about their existence in the first place. A White House press secretary who answers legitimate questions with "your mom" was never really interested in having high standards of rigor.
I would argue that our modern communication systems -- video, social media, smartphones -- have resulted in our elites and gatekeepers being unable (or unwilling) to maintain separation between their human frailties and their professional standards of behavior.
Because we see them as full humans, full of the same failings all humans have, we discount their professional expertise.
As another type of "moral deficit" driver of widespread malaise, I think gratitude has fallen off the radar as a value. With the tiny little influence we have we should try to redirect Thanksgiving this year away from the same complaints about family dynamics and consumerism into, you know, giving thanks.
When the status quo becomes "unacceptable" as a matter of hard outward-facing opinion, you can really start to underappreciate a lot of things about your life that are actually pretty good, or better. Then you demand to know why the government isn't making you happy, or assume that it must be actively making you unhappy.
The whole rise of alternative media such as Fox News was driven by the (IMHO largely correct) narrative that the MSM had a distinct liberal/Democratic bias.
The gate keepers failed repeatedly over the prior decades to be even handed, in what was covered and how it was covered.
I totally agree and I think your comment is indicative of good epistemological hygiene, but we also need to be mindful of isolated demands for rigor from the other side.
Like, we also don’t want to overcorrect in the other direction to the point of saying that we won’t believe biological males have an advantage sports unless we see a meta study of multiple peer reviewed articles.
I just don’t think the difference between “women are worse at sports on average” and “girls can’t be athletic!” is actually all that hard to navigate. But when you’re shifting from making a joke to doing real analysis of society it’s importance to stick to the accurate claim.
Be warned, I'm pulling out my soapbox and climbing up on it!
"Worse" is not a word I like here because of its qualitative nature. Women just have different standards. For example, if I run a 3:15 marathon, I actually consider myself a better athlete than a man who does, because I'm accomplishing that without male advantage. In the running world, at least, no one would say that an elite female runner was somehow "worse" than a mediocre male athlete with the same time. It's just not how we talk about it. For example, Faith Kipyegon is widely praised and admired as one of the best 1500m runners ever, even though she couldn't break 4 minutes in the mile (and didn't look great trying to do it ... shame on Nike for that whole promotional boondoggle).
I generally just avoid directly comparing men and women's athletic accomplishments altogether, because it's a tired topic that I think implicitly undermines women sports, as if they can't be as interesting or meaningful as the men unless they meet the same standard. But a close woman's race is just as exciting as a close men's race, regardless of whether the men's is faster in the absolute sense. See, for example, the TDF, where the women's version has arguably been more exciting the past two years because Pogacar's dominance makes the men's race too predictable.
To the extent it's relevant, I generally just say women lack male advantage, as I did above. If it's a sport with an objective standard, like running, I'll just use that standard and stay that yes, on average men are faster. But does that make the women "worse"? To me, no.
This is a nonstandard definition of “better” and “worse” though, right? Mediocre male athletes are indeed better than elite women at most sports at which both compete. They would win every time. It’s not due to a moral failing or lack of dedication, it’s just biology.
That doesn’t mean women’s sports, as a category, are less worthwhile as an human endeavor though! We like sport for a lot of reason and sorting by ability lets us extend those reasons to more contexts. Many people prefer college football to the pros, and that’s reasonable! No matter how good a bantam weight is or how hard he trains he will get pasted every time by a heavyweight, but that weight class is still fun to watch and bet on etc. women’s tennis was a more interesting game in the 90s than men’s (where rally ability had not caught up to the huge service revolution). But if all you cared about what “who is the best tennis player” the answer is always some guy.
So I guess the nuance is “men are better at sports” does not mean than “men’s sports are better” and people confuse these claims.
If you stop thinking in terms of men’s or women’s sports and ask, for example, “who are the fastest runners?”, sex is unquestionably an explanatory variable.
"This is a nonstandard definition of “better” and “worse” though, right?"
Maybe, but it's kind of like saying a pitching machine has "better control" than Tarik Skubal. Like, it's a machine designed to throw the ball in the same place every time. When you account for the fact that Tarik Skubal is a human throwing 3000 rpm pitches that break 10+ inches it's a different interpretation.
I mean... nobody, and I mean nobody, has a problem saying computers are better at math than people are. Nobody has qualms saying computers are better at chess than humans are.
Do we really not apply the same language to physical sports?
I'm not sure what you mean by non-standard definition, which is exactly the type of ambiguity I want to avoid. One is never sure what a person means by better or worse and people CAN read stuff into it. And what I worry they will usually read into it is not simply that the men will win (yeah, they will) but that that makes the men worth more, which obviously I don't agree with.
And when it comes to discussing who is a "better athlete," I don't think winning actually is the only criterion. For example, I also played soccer in addition to running, and played a lot of coed as an adult. There were lots of BAD guy soccer players out there who could body me off the ball, even though they were completely lacking in skill. (A lot of them were also overweight.). But I could out pass them, read the game better, and play defense more strategically. So who's the better soccer player? The former football player who's just out there throwing his weight around? Or me, doing what I can with technique and knowledge of the game? It's subjective. Yeah, I'm not gonna win because of the size and strength mismatch, but I don't think anyone, speaking casually, would say that an overweight ex football player was a "better" soccer player than me simply because he can win through sheer strength. He's still a bad player, and I'm still a good one. So talking about who is better or not doesn't even really make sense.
The answer to who is a better player, in my mind, is wins above replacement.
This sort of what I mean when I say you are introducing non-standard terms. You are using some sort of soccer-moral-virtue definition to elevate some aspects of soccer performance over others. But when most people say “that guy is better than you” they mean he helps his team win more. Or, at least, it’s not unreasonable or inappropriate or weird to use the term “better than you at soccer” to convey that meaning.
I think others here, and myself, are alluding to this subtle difference. Rephrasing one of your sentences,
"There were lots of BAD guy soccer players out there who could body Lionel Messi off the ball, even though they were lacking in skill. But Lionel Messi could out pass them, read the game better, and play more strategically. So who's the better soccer player? The 6ft 3in defender who's just out there throwing his weight around? Or Lionel Messi, doing what he can with technique and knowledge of the game? It's subjective. Yeah, Lionel Messi is still going to win despite of his size and strength mismatch, but I don't think anyone, speaking casually, would say that a big strong player was a "better" soccer player than Messi simply because he has more sheer strength."
The point is good players can win, on average, more than bad ones. There are a lot of individual differences and that is just that. And none of this translates into defining value of women's sports or women in sports.
In casual, non-rigorous speech, something like "men are better at sports" DOES mean "men’s sports are better." In the sense of "men are better are performing the activity of sports" rather than "men have more athletic skill to perform sports at a high level" So it is better to use more precision that doesn't have the ambiguity like, "on average men are stronger and faster."
I’m not sure I agree. I think it’s fine and true to say “men are better at sports” and trust your audience to understand it’s a generalization and also not a moral judgment. It’s like saying “men are taller” than women. Similarly, if I say “my daughter is really good at soccer” people will have no trouble understanding I mean “for a girl” not that I am claiming she is some athlete prodigy who can keep up with the boys who play.
If you are picking teams, it’s relevant info and we shouldn’t be so squeamish about it. That’s why cooed leagues have minimum number of girls requirements. People should just chill!
Watching people with more athletic skill perform at a high level is often worse television than people with worse athletic skill perform at a lower level. See college football v. professional football. So I don't think you can make that leap.
The Faith Kipyegon Breaking 4 thing was so silly. Everyone involved was talking constantly about how she thought she could do it, meanwhile every observer who follows track closely knew that a 1:57 800, 3:48 1500, and 14:05 5000 performer is just not that close to running sub-4 in the mile (even assuming her 800 is an old PR she could smash easily, it's still well short of what's needed). I think it's good they tried something similar to the Kipchoge Breaking-2 thing for women, but it was just crazy watching that and hearing everyone just lying that they thought it was gonna happen. I'm sure it'll happen some day but that day probably isn't soon.
Also it was funny how she broke the 1500m WR a week or so later without wearing any of the goofy high-tech gear that she really didn't seem like she enjoyed wearing!
This is all so true of the WNBA and NBA, as well as men's and women's soccer. They're just entirely different games. Women's college basketball (everyone knows) is vastly superior to men's college basketball and may represent the peak of women's basketball, unless the WNBA can solve some of their officiating problems. Women's soccer is much, much better on the international level than men's soccer for similar reasons to why college women's basketball is better: men's club soccer and the NBA are so much more lucrative and drain so much of the life out of their players because they play way too many games. The men's world cup and the NBA finals are just tired bodies flying at each other seemingly randomly; March Madness in women's basketball and the women's world cup are some of the most exciting competitions in their respective sports, no caveats.
These are interesting opinions, and I’m open to any of them being correct, but I think they’re far too subjective for this argument. Is there any evidence (survey, viewership numbers, some kind of critic’s consensus) that a majority of viewers have any of these particular sports opinions?
From a soccer perspective, I know EXACTLY what they mean and agree, but I think its likely not statistically true globally because women's soccer outside the US and western Europe still has a lot of growing to do. In much of the world (including many places that love men's soccer), women's soccer isn't really a thing yet. So worldwide data will certainly show the men's game being more popular.
Granted, a huge part of this is because of how dismally disappointing the USMNT has been. If they were better (or at least performed at the level they should), we might see these numbers be closer. But so far, their performance just hasn't been good enough.
Regarding tournament quality, I don't think many fans would disagree with the statement that the quality of the men's World Cup suffers because of the demands of the clubs. That's...a not uncommon complaint. Conversely, because the women don't have the same club pressures, they can bring their top game to their World Cup. The teams are often more cohesive, too, because they get more time to practice/play together than the men do.
In other words: Men's World Cup soccer is not the best men's soccer because the players are exhausted from their club seasons and the teams lack cohesion. But women's World Cup soccer IS the best women's soccer because the players are fresher and have played together more. I think most soccer fans would agree with that as a general statement.
Some people are disagreeing with you. I think my objection is the term “superior,” as in “men are physically superior to women.” But women live longer than men. If you’re buying an appliance, longevity may matter than power.
Secondly, while it’s a bit pedantic, men are better at almost all sports because those are the things we find interesting for the most part. Nobody wants to watch a competition on who has the best color vision. Many machines are much faster than people, but we still like watching people run competitively.
I often think that we should consider whether such people were disliked before they made those comments. I've seen many such cases! People in power were kind of watching for an opportunity to fire someone and then they seize on a particular comment.
It's still bad, but it makes a fuller and therefore truer story.
Milan has some useful inside info on this downthread. That said, maybe don't seize on normative-vs-descriptive pretexts in bad faith, particularly in the context of academia?
A downstream consequence of progressives’ distaste for stochastic statements about gender (and racial) differences is these matters are often analyzed as jokes.
As always, the details matter a lot. Will we see a WNBA player make the jump to the mens side? Ehhh..... Similarly, Serena Williams could beat many of the mens tennis players, but I don't think she could beat the best of them. Sexual dimorphism does matter at the margins. But take a more complex sport like climbing. Improvements in training and equipment have closed the gap between men's and women's performance, with the best women climbers now at the level of the best men. Even in alpine climbing, which requires a combination of strength, stamina, patience and good judgment, women are doing routes much closer to those men are doing than would have been seen a decade or two ago. The 'inherent advantage' of being male very much depends on the sport.
Total tangent, but when I scanned your headline, I thought it said "Women's professional sports rise is good, actually," and was at first bummed that it was about an article that I couldn't even bear to read. Saw a Wisconsin Badgers women's hockey game last weekend, and it was fire.
Basically no one (even the authors of the academic work purporting to defend this claim, if you read closely) claims that male puberty and growth hormones don't help in sports. People who think trans women should be included in sports just don't think that's the only consideration.
I have done Twitter threads on the two purposes of women's sports (the inclusion argument is real!), but TBC, a lot of trans activist academics absolutely dress up their work to claim there are no relevant sex differences. Whenever they mention Michael Phelps they are doing exactly that. And they are lying.
The basic point trying to be made, as I understand it, is that intra-gender difference in physiology and anatomy can be as large as inter-sex differences. Michael Phelps is anatomically built differently from me, a guy whose swimming career ended when I realized I look bad in shorts. There are many women who are between me and Michael Phelps in terms of swimming prowess, including literal female children. Despite the fact we are both male! Why, then, should gender be the construct around which sporting is divided, rather than individual capability?
Note, I do not have a Twitter, I do not know if I believe this argument, I'm just overall more sympathetic to the trans-inclusive position than most of this comment section and doing my best to be informative and fair in a way I don't see others being.
While elite women are better than the average (untrained) man, they are not better than amateur men. Without gender divisions, no women would compete in practically any athletic competition.
There's a thing activists do where they come up with a talking point and then just repeat it over and over as if it is serious analysis. And the trans movement has been particularly susceptible to that pathology:
Michael Phelps means there's no sex differences in sports!
Increases in youth transition rates are just like left handedness!
Lisa Littman's and Ray Blanchard's theories were "debunked".
It's a substitute for actual thinking. Part of it is of course just that actual analysis is complicated and it's hard to do activism around nuance. But there's also just a wish that the world would not require nuance, that we be able to pretend that it is all so simple and that our political enemies have no valid points at all.
What is the argument that Micael Phelps means there's no sex differences in sports? That feels like you're leaving out the reasoning behind using whatever fact Michael Phelps represents. Which is denying us a chance to engage with your real argument: e.g., it appears you're doing a variation of the same thing.
Tangent: A long time ago, I saw an story claiming that Michael Phelps consumed 10,000 calories a day. Apparently this was exaggerated, and he probably only ate 4,000-6,000 calories a day, which is still SO MUCH FOOD. I remember a picture or a video of him eating a whole pizza in a meal.
You think that's a lot, learn about how much NFL linemen have to eat. They have very two divergent paths after they retire--the weakest let all that muscle turn into lots of fat, while the strongest lose tons of weight just from the relief of not having to eat that much, and get back to normal weight with different workouts.
I am surprised that that is all he ate. My brother was on a swim team, and we carpooled with a very high performing teen, but obviously not close to Phelps' level. This young man had trouble keeping on weight with over 4,000 calories a day.
I don’t understand why Dilan Esper doesn’t just state what the “activist” argument is.
When I’ve come across in online debates is something like this: Michael Phelps is so good at swimming because his body is exceptionally suited for swimming. He has very long arms and legs as well as long feet and hands.
It was rumored Phelps had a version of Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that can result in elongated feet, fingers, etc.
So, while Phelps is undoubtedly an exceptionally competitive and hard-working athlete, he started with genetic advantages in swimming that are conferred by his (possibly abnormal) genetics.
The argument then makes an Olympian leap to state that trans athletes who were born male benefit from male advantage in sports but this is no less fair than Phelps benefitting from his genetic advantages.
I think this is nonsensical when applied to trans people and I’ve only seen very online people make this argument on Twitter, etc.
There’s probably more validity to this when applied to intersex people.
I think it's more used for cases like Caster Semenya, who is a woman in the normal sense of "everyone identified her as a girl at birth and she'd lived into adulthood as a girl and then a woman", but has a DSD that makes some people argue that she's male and others that she's overly masculinised for fair competition. The counter argument is that she has a comparable advantage over women without her genetic variation to what Phelps has over other men, and why should it matter that the cause was sex variation rather than something else?
No, the point of bringing up Phelps is that some people have massive physical advantages that others competing against them won't ever have. Which is precisely the opposite of what you're saying.
I do not think this is an accurate characterization of why people talk about Phelps. What they're saying is that in sex-separated sports we nonetheless accept wide differences in physical characteristics that are fundamental to the sport without thinking that makes it "unfair".
Separately there are people who try to claim that sex difference in sports is fake. Those people are wrong, and if you read what they say closely they don't even really believe it.
Agreed - I think here the issue is the "here are some things that are overstated but rooted in banally true observations, and taken together they add up to a civilizational threat" framing, not the banally true observations themselves.
This was the whole thesis of an article I read recently, that MAGA populism is basically system 1 thinking against system 2 thinking (ie. common intuition against analytical knowledge). Pretty interesting, but also a bit scary.
I think that’s true of populist politics in general. It’s designed and used by demagogues to get people’s emotions involved instead of their reason. This has been true since Ancient Athens and why demagogues are such a threat to Democracy. It works.
A specific manifestation of this that drives me to madness, which feels rampant right now, is the use of surface level analogies that are very compelling / visceral but aren’t actually good analogues for the situation if you give it more than a second’s thought. I associate it very much with John Oliver (though in his defense he’s at least doing it for comedy, so maybe gets some leeway): “xyz policy would be like if we attached skis to a squirrel and sent him down a slide!” And it’s funny and makes the policy seem ridiculous (and often the policy truly is ridiculous) but a moment’s reflection realizes that’s actually a terrible parallel. The Economist made this point around Brexit when everyone was saying “no deal is better than a bad deal” but the idea of entering a deal was not actually a representation of the situation - it was closer to a divorce, where you’re already in an agreement and you have an option to exit it which will incur some downsides but may be worth it depending on the situation. I promise once you see this, it can’t be unseen and it’s everywhere! And it’s pernicious because the analogies are so convincing.
1) it’s good that women have joined the workforce, both morally and economically
2) men and women are fundamentally different
3) these differences manifest themselves in group settings like workplaces, and these manifestations can be both good and bad
That’s a very banal point but to take the side of Andrews and McArdle, if toxic masculinity is a problem in some workforces (and I’d argue it is), then toxic femininity also likely is.
Yea, it's funny, I actually think a more interesting take would go up against McArdle's version of this rather than Andrew's. I'm in law which is becoming female dominated and I do not see this as a civilizational threat, not remotely. However I do think there are some issues that could be dealt with in two pretty straightforward ways which are:
(I) eliminate affirmative action in favor of women, to the extent it exists. When we've got education and other important sectors dominated by women it's a sign that these efforts are no longer necessary. The facts may have once supported it but they don't now.
(II) expressly codify that institutions where free exchange of ideas are important are not 'safe spaces.' This may not have been as necessary when everything was male dominated but it is now. That deals with the Summers situation, and also addresses what I thought was Andrews' strongest point, that being that it's fair game to attack and at a certain point legally actionable if a place is deemed too rough edged in a way that women may on average find less pleasant but is not if it's, in her words, run like a 'Montessori Kindergarten.' Women are fully capable of succeeding in these environments and the kinds of complaints that ultimately got Summers run out should actually get those who made them looked at like they have two heads.
I am in academia, which is also becoming increasingly female dominated and agree completely with these points.
I did also want to make an addendum to Matt's point about it being good that more qualified women are earning MDs now. I agree, but it does cause problems that women who earn MDs are disproportionately likely to later leave medicine or work part time. A growing number of the limited number of licensed physicians who either don't practice or work fewer hours contributes to the worsening physician shortage in many places in the US (coupled with the AMA's throttling the number of medical licenses granted every year).
> coupled with Mama's throttling the number of medical licenses granted every year.
I think this is burying the lead. The implicit policy approach of the AMA that X doctors should work Y hours per doctor verse Y doctors should work X hours per doctor (where Y > X) is I'd claim in effect a gender biased approach at least in a field like medicine where the productivity is pretty tightly coupled to hours worked.
It's also been obvious to everyone for decades that the early career hourly requirements for doctors are bad for everyone. That problem would have still existed if there had been no change in the gender balance of the workplace.
I’ve encountered multiple care providers now that won’t hire part timers. They want either full timers or piecemeal fillins who dont get benefits. I don’t think it’s an AMA thing.
Agreed. I have also observed that anecdotally. My principle point is blaming the women doctors who want to work fewer hours seems like the wrong place to point blame from a normative perspective.
It is not in fact legally actionable for a workplace to be "rough edged". For something to be legally actionable it would have to be relevantly different for men and women and "everyone yells at each other" isn't that.
Yea, I understand what the law is, and I also understand the way corporate risk management works, particularly in white collar fields. You don't spend hundreds of thousands or millions litigating to a verdict you might still lose on the principle of the thing. You hire a bunch of well meaning HR people who are implicitly charged with morphing the culture into what you'd expect at a high end day care center, and use them as best you can next time someone from the labor and employment bar checks in for another game of settlement chicken.
I'd also add that if that's what the C-suite is trying to do, then it becomes relevant to note that the C-suite at most companies remains very substantially *male*, not female.
Because of fear of lawsuits most corporations have taken a better safe than sorry strategy.
To be clear shutting down actual harassment is good.
But many companies have gone overboard and created a climate of fear in companies where they are worried that any little thing can and does get you in trouble.
This is understandable, but creates an unfun work environment.
I agree with this but since this has happened over the last 20-40 years when most C-Suites were run by men why is this feminization and why is the problem women which seems to be what Andrews is saying.
Does that matter if someone gets reported to HR for yelling and creating a hostile work environment? Even if they’re not being accused of being discriminatory? If you’re called on the carpet to explain, you are already losing.
My point is that while it's true that yelling at the office is now disfavored, as the article discusses, this is not because of the requirements of employment or anti discrimination law.
I guess the legal action is a workplace that is exempted from anti-discrimination laws. (I.e. a big figurative sign that says “this workplace is a hostile one so you can’t sue us.”)
Most law practice isn’t debating ideas like a college debating club though, male norms like screaming at people make the practice a lot more unpleasant, especially given how contentious law and particularly litigation are inherently. Safe spaces and civility norms and rules are to stop personal attacks and intimidation not the expression of unpopular ideas. Most people would probably feel more comfortable speaking their mind in a Montessori kindergarten teacher than to an intimidating law firm partner or judge. The main problem with some women in law is that they overcompensate and act extra-masculine (e.g. mean, confrontational, hierarchical).
There's a difference to me between a "safe space" and a "civility norm"
Safe spaces have often been used in discussions of universities to talk about the _content_ of discussions (ideas etc) - vs a "civility norm" (at least to me) seems more about the _tone_ of discussions.
I think civility norms are important - I got early feedback in my career that because of my height combined with passion in arguing something I occasionally had inadvertently intimidated other people(and this was in games - NOT a female dominated workplace, especially in the early 2000s) - so I was careful to watch my TONE in the future.
But "safe spaces" seem to easily extend(at least in practice) to be used to shut down whole lines of discussion if they make people uncomfortable.
I wrote a blog post about how actually, I think it is okay for universities to prioritize student well being over faculty free speech. Most of our major universities list educating as their main mission. They accept tens of thousands of dollars from students in exchange for this service. Research is important to universities, but according to their missions, it is technically secondary. This has been true forever. Harvard's original statement of purpose in the 1600s was to educate. Back then it was to educate within the framework provided by Jesus. Different time...
I would argue that exposure to disagreement is an essential part of education. If disagreement is enough to damage your well being, then you are not fit to be in the mission of truth seeking.
I don't agree with this when free speech is used as a guise to protect professors that spout nonsense and don't apologize. For example, professors that say stuff like women aren't in their fields because they suck at math. That's not a research-based thought, it's just some crotchety old guy being all mad. But if you try to "cancel" the weird old guy because you think he's probably not teaching his female students equally, we protect him due to "free speech".
You need more evidence that the crotchety old guy is not teaching his female students equally than he makes a comment that women suck at math. It's also very fuzzy what "student well being" actually means. As a retired (female) faculty member, it has certainly been used to nefarious ends, so until we all are on the same page about what "student well being" looks like and how it's measured, I'm just going to disagree on principle.
I do agree that people saying bigoted nonsense should be disciplined, but I do think in doubtful cases, we should err on the side of free speech.
The weirdest thing about the Andrews article was the prescription. If you sincerely think, women are destroying Western civilization, then why are your prescriptions so meagre? And if your real problem is employment discrimination law being too zealous, then why not just say that?
"I don't agree with this when free speech is used as a guise to protect professors that spout nonsense and don't apologize."
Not to go all great books, but John Milton had a great line on this topic:, "I cannot praise a cloistered virtue." That's a little archaic, but the gist of it is that we cannot know that what's true unless we are allowed to hear what's false.
(Milton himself was, uh, inconsistent on the real-world applications of this and probably not someone I'd like much, but he had some other things going for him.)
Exposure to disagreement is an essential part of education and of research. Still, both of these missions proceed better if not *every* setting features the *same* disagreement. It can totally help both education and research if there are some settings where you can discuss and debate one set of ideas (including lots of intramural disagreements) while being safe from a particular set of hostile responses that these ideas tend to get in other settings.
I very much appreciate the willingness to take it head on and honestly. However I'd just say I disagree that it should be the priority. These places get lots and lots of tax payer money, even the private institutions, and they need to be run in a way that prioritizes the interests of the tax payer. I also think it's a mistake to assume that the the way these student well being issues are being handled is actually good for them.
"I also think it's a mistake to assume that the the way these student well being issues are being handled is actually good for them." I address this is my post and generally agree that things like trigger warnings are not in students best interests. Exposure to tough situations is the best way to build resilience for tough situations.
I do think we should level the playing field. I shouldn't have to develop MORE of a thick skin to do well than my fellow classmates just to get the same education and support. That means choosing faculty who don't have records of saying stupid crap about women or minorities. I mostly mean stupid crap like off the cuff comments that reveal biased attitudes. But I also think universities should be very careful about what kind research they fund and who they invite to their campus. If I was in charge of hiring at a university, for example, I would say "no" to hiring Sam Harris because he goes around vehemently defending that research about Black people having lower IQs. I get a bad vibe from him. Why is defending that research so important to him? It wasn't even his research.
Ironically you're demonstrating some of the worst impulses used to restrict what people are hired. I don't even like Sam Harris, but "vibes" are irrelevant, either make an argument against his actual views, or leave it alone.
If you don't understand why this logic will ultimately hurt you, consider how many people don't like the vibes of feminists, or ethnic minorities, etc.
At the same time, what is hiring for "culture fit" if not hiring based on vibes? Can't speak to academia, but at least out here in the corporate world vibes have always been at least one component of why someone gets hired, often to the detriment of those already underrepresented.
Hiring based on vibes, even in academia, is the norm. Unless someone is a savant who refuses to share their research unless you hire them, there is no reason to hire someone who won't teach well. A man wouldn't hire another man who was smart but came in and insulted the university and acted real smug. Women have the same right not to hire someone who would treat them badly.
As best as I can tell the field is not only evened, but people who share your values are now running up the score. That suggests to me that you don't understand the value proposition for funding these institutions.
I majored in music and studied with highly sought out instructors. After I graduated with my masters in San Francisco, I saw an article where a man who plays oboe with the Boston Symphony but used to play in the SF Symphony gave advice to a young woman student of his auditioning for the San Francisco Symphony: "Play with virility because they're going to want to hire a man." "They", in this context, were my teachers.
That article was about Elizabeth Rowe, the principal flutist for the BSO, being the first in Massachusetts to sue under the then newly passed equal pay law. She was making $70,000 less than the oboe player in the article, despite being performing the most solos with the orchestra of any of their players for the past 15 years.
Then, two years later, I read an article about how the first female French horn player in the New York Philharmonic was drugged raped by two of her colleagues and then subsequently denied tenure after one of the rapists started a smear campaign. It turned out that this was an open secret among orchestra musicians. I know because I texted my friend who now plays in the San Francisco Symphony asking if my teachers knew this when they invited that rapist to come teach for us.
They knew. What they got in return was that one of their players got to skip the audition process for one of the NY Phil's upcoming auditions and just perform with the orchestra as an "audition".
I think the root of a lot of issues with universities is that they are increasingly used as semi-vocational training for people who have no interest in academia and also for teaching future scholars and driving educated discussion of complex problems and these just aren't the same purpose. If we split those goals into different institutions we could just let each one specialize in its role without stepping on each others' toes. Not sure it would be worth it overall though, it would probably cause its own problems
I like that Matt says explicitly that there are interpersonal differences and that cultural differences should be examined. That's more responsible than Andrew's bomb throwing (one could argue she's pulling a feminine version of Chris Rufo's schtick)
Meghan Daum had Andrews on her podcast and instead of throwing bombs these three points were what Andrews was emphasizing. So perhaps in the written article Andrews was pumping up the flames to ensure the article got more attention?
There is absolutely such a thing as toxic femininity. You see articles about it all the time in publications aimed at women.
But in my observation and experience, when you're a guy and you're in a space that is suffering from toxic femininity, the toxic women usually deploy that toxicity against each other and leave you alone. Not so with the roles are reversed.
Also, whether we're talking about toxic masculinity or toxic femininity, for either to arise in force the environment usually has to be *heavily* male or female, not just 55-45 or whatever (obviously this is a necessary and not a sufficient condition). There just aren't that many heavily female settings with a glass ceiling for men. Usually men don't even want to be in these settings/industries/workplaces, toxic or not.
To paraphrase a half-remembered stand-up bit, you hear more men talking about their crazy exes than women because a crazy ex-boyfriend more often gets filed under "sex offender" or "violent felon". The badness is equally distributed, but one manifests in much more direct danger!
It would be amazing if we could just name the bad behavior. Like: I absolutely do think there's a real cultural battle over what it means to be a man.
But in the meantime, if you think "getting so out of control with your rage that you scream at your coworker is unprofessional, stop doing that", I think the easiest way to convince a lot of people is on the merits - sidestepping how it relates to gender.
I wonder how men would score on neuroticism if anger was included in that category. I assume it is somewhat covered in agreeableness, but only if people take out their anger on others.
The Big Five splits the feeling of anger from the expression of anger.
The feeling is a subcategory of the neuroticism measure and the expression is a subcategory of the agreeableness measure.
The relevant Neuroticism subcategory you're looking for is N2:
N1: Anxiety
N2: Angry Hostility
N3: Depression
N4: Self-Consciousness
N5: Impulsiveness
N6: Vulnerability
The relevant agreeableness subcategory is A4:
A1: Trust
A2: Straightforwardness
A3: Altruism
A4: Compliance
A5: Modesty
A6: Tender-Mindedness
People quibble about almost all aspects of the big five (what to call it, how to group the traits etc.). They stick with it because something roughly like the Big Five seems to pop out of the data empirically in multiple different scenarios.
Megan leaned way more into discussing toxic femininity than Matt did, which as Allan says is a very banal point--both sexes have toxic people, and since women and men have common difference, so too will there be sexed toxicity.
I don’t think it’s banal at all at this point, though it should be. I think our cultural moment is just starting to admit this as a possibility, whereas for the last 15 years’ discussion of toxic masculinity, there was zero acceptance of the same thing in femininity.
That isn't credible. Mean Girls is over 20 years old! The main thing that's changed is not a realization that toxic femininity exists or is bad, but that it can be used as a weapon by women in positions of power. Which in turn is mainly because women being in positions of power is factually a new phenomenon.
I feel like toxic masculinity is a concept used by less mature people though? Like, teens and college students? I don't think I've ever actually referred to someone or some people as having toxic masculinity. So I'm not really impressed by people who use the phrase toxic femininity, either. I just mean, it's not high level discourse...
I'm really tired of pieces that present false dichotomies as the only truth. Obviously, the best workplaces and societies are co-built by men and women.
Also, as a side note, I'm tired of women's social aggression being coded as agreeableness. It ain't agreeable.
Great piece. I think the conclusion hits hardest though. Of course Andrews isn't going to advocate getting women out of workplaces-- not only would her own career be threatened, but the American public would run the conservative movement out on a rail if they called for this.
So she ends up in this ridiculous place where she's claiming we are going to civilizational hell but also proposing we do nothing real to stop it, which suggests that her real purpose was just to troll the Left and get some reactions, which, of course, she did.
Watching sports is an obvious way to see that professional trolls exist and for better or worse will be sustainable. Over there it's overwhelmingly on radio and podcasts.
Skip, you say? This is the very rare day, only once every four years, when I can stomach listening to him, as he has to eat the crow he always does once every four years.
On the other hand, if a long format article like this provokes a lot of cultural discussion, and gives rise to some long format responses that make good points, it may well end up being a good thing for our overall intellectual health.
This is how the history of ideas works, and it’s why it’s really important that there are institutional incentives for the publication of academic work that is stimulating but likely incorrect. Truth doesn’t mostly come out of ideally truth seeking individuals, but out of communities motivated by real human motivations that are structurally tilted towards truth in the long run, even if not in the short run.
Feel like this is all over the right these days. "No-fault divorce is ruining civilization!!" "So if elected you are planning to end no-fault divorce?" "I'm not saying THAT!!"
"Don't Look Up" may have been a bad movie, but at least the scientist characters in that were actually trying to stop the approaching asteroid instead of just trying to nibble around it's edges.
I don't think this is quite accurate: she quietly proposes some concrete actions at the end of the article, though they are somewhat obfuscated:
> Thankfully, I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power.
That's written to be vague, perhaps intentionally, but she can really only be advocating two things, right?
* Eliminating disparate impact as a standard for establishing sex discrimination.
* Removing or severely curtailing title VII hostile workplace protections.
Yes, but she asserts without evidence that e.g. the rise of women to 55% of M.D. matriculants is due to some form of affirmative action, and restoration of a "level playing field" would "correct" it. Her policy proposal would not have the impact she is hoping it would.
While I’m not sure about discrimination in acceptance rates, I do know that there are many, many initiatives starting for girls when they’re young to encourage them into STEM fields. The same is not true of boys, and I think it’s a fair argument that that’s its own kind of discrimination or at least neglect, as Richard Reeves talks about in Of Boys and Men.
Serious question: Is STEM the thing to encourage boys to do to be the equivalent of what we promote for girls?
Boys already do a fair amount of STEM - is there a more female dominated profession that we want to highlight to those boys who might actually enjoy doing it, if they thought about it?
Teaching? (Unsure how to get kids fired up about this though)
I think that’s a great question. My understanding from Reeves’ work is that the problems men and boys are experiencing are significantly concentrated in socioeconomically less advantaged groups. In that case, I think any initiative that encourages boys to strive for higher education and professional careers is good.
Reeves also mentions teaching being a great thing to encourage men to go into, as male teachers are especially influential and positive for boys. Psychology is another area that’s tilted extremely female over the years, and beyond whatever that means for the profession, I think most people agree it’s good for men to have male therapists available.
I don't understand how this responds to what I wrote.
A lot of people are attacking the article by claiming she's just trolling. I think that's mistaken and it would be better to either argue that no remedy is necessary (which I think you're doing) or argue about her proposals.
Her issue is not specifically with sex discrimination legal standards or title vII, it’s with the whole idea of elite professions being “feminized” (which in the case of law or medicine seems to mean 50/50ish representation).
I think either of those proposals could be debated but neither will achieve what she wants since women go to college at much higher rates now.
The only way to go back to a medical profession like 1990 is massive affirmative action for men.
I agree, and I don't mean to be clever (or "clever"), but that sounds like a reason to consider giving up some formal protections.
That's not to say that it's wholly persuasive on its own. For my part, I think disparate impact should be downgraded, but I'm skeptical of reducing title VII protections and don't know enough about the jurisprudence to offer an informed opinion.
As a lawyer, I will say that I think the non-lawyer public significantly overestimates how easy it is to win employment discrimination litigation (by like at least one or two orders of magnitude).
I think this overestimation is downstream from a lot of modern HR policies in corporate America which, at their core, exist to protect the company from litigation.
You could make it even harder for plaintiffs to win these cases, but the effect would likely just be to foreclose restitution for cases with actual merit, while HR departments wouldn't get any less stringent/annoying because of corporate America's general love of cost control.
I kind of think with the way the culture is going disparate impact is likely to recede fairly strongly either way, so maybe it makes sense for Democrats to just be with that. Though again I'm skeptical how much of a difference this will make for much of anything.
She may well support those legal changes but surely she should be read as advocating for broader cultural change.
At my job, I would get in trouble—and possibly fired, if I did any of the following:
1) said I was going to hire a 30 year old man rather than a woman who just moved to the suburbs with her husband because I was worried about disruptive maternity leave (or directly addressed the issue at all).
2) said I agreed with Damore type theories for why we have fewer senior investors
3) in any way pushed back on efforts to increase senior female representation and related programs
4) made even pretty mild off color jokes outside of some carefully selected groups
5) questioned whether diversity actually improved returns and asked for data on that assumption,
6) took a client to a bar with cocktail waitresses,
7) said someone did something “stupid” let alone “retarded” or similar levels of insulting speech (even if it was in fact stupid).
Only some of these are illlegal. I think Andrew’s opposes any of them being sanctionable, and in fact thinks culture should chill out on all of them (and more). Thats how I read her argument anyway, and I worry we would be trading one set of stifling office norms for the return of a lot of unpleasant behavior and impossible situations for (competent and valuable) parents.
Your final point is especially good and worth bearing in mind.
Having said that, IANAL but a cursory search suggests that every single one of those actions (or close approximations) has been used as evidence in hostile workplace lawsuits. Even if they aren't specifically prohibited they are too risky to tolerate. I don't know what the solution is to that, precisely. As I said elsewhere, giving up on title VII protections doesn't seem wise to me, and I don't have any other idea about how to mitigate them.
Additionally, I think it's worth observing that Andrews is saying that society ought to tolerate *some* companies where a different set of unpleasant norms prevail, not that everyone should turn 180 degrees overnight. Personally, I doubt those would spread very far, much less dominate, now that the frat-house style monopoly has been broken.
So I think if these are her suggestions, then they're as ineffective as legislatively "shutting doors in women's faces" is evil. But I don't think these are her suggestions.
What I've personally noticed as a non-lawyer is that in areas like this - say, content moderation or privacy on social media platforms - there are a million little technicalities that develop into de facto law on the basis of a) what the corporate lawyers tell each other and see each other doing; and b) how judges interpret the law when ruling on specific cases.
A good example is the various anti-bias trainings. There's no law that says that companies must have anti-bias trainings, or that they should be produced in the most braindead, often anti-empirical way possible. But entrepreneurial anti-racism salespeople starting selling them to companies worried about lawsuits, one thing led to another, and now they're literally never going to leave our lives no matter how much evidence accumulates that they're in fact counterproductive.
Now even here, I'd claim that Andrews among others overrates the importance of these norms and hence their legal underpinnings. I think what we need is a cultural shift - for example, the academics claiming explicitly that it's legitimate to lie in your scholarship if you lie in the service of a just cause should have been thrown out of academia a long time ago. The next best time to do it is now. No laws need to be changed, no protections undermined. Leaders simply need to lead - to say "this is what our organization is trying to achieve, this is what our institution is for, and if you don't like it you can get out."
I +1'ed because I strongly agree with everything after the first paragraph.
But disagree that the suggestions I attributed to Andrews would have zero results. They would change incentives significantly. (Though to reiterate, I have little confidence that straight-up renouncing hostile workplace standards would have positive outcomes.)
As I wrote below, what was done to stop male-dominated fields and institutions from being rampant with sexual harassment and worse - and, as Matt points out, less severe problems like tons of yelling at the office? Nobody passed a law saying you must not yell in the office, and what Harvey Weinstein did was illegal before MeToo as much as after.
What changed was the culture. It's hard to say that we should engineer a cultural shift, or how we would even attempt to do so. But similarly with respect to developed-nation birthrates and fertility, the response I see - from Matt and others - is "we've tried nothing and we're all out of options!" because for some reason they assume that the only option is to literally legislate misogyny. I just don't get why Matt and/or you Dilan are making that assumption.
Outstanding article, Matt. I think too many have been too credulous about Andrews's article, yet also too many critiques of it have been too dismissive. It's really good to have this laid out in quite descriptive terms of what's been play, beginning and ending with the very important assertion that the past century or so of women being able to enter the workforce and leadership positions on more equal grounds is Very Good, Actually, and how it would be a nightmare to roll that back. Integration with the sexes brings out the better in both sexes, and the remaining holdout just need to deal with it and join the ride toward betterment.
This phrase is actually what gives me hope in this dark moment we are in with the second Trump term. Because it seems really clear to me that people like Pete Hesgeth, Stephen Miller and Russ Vought really truly believe in trying to move the country back to the 1950s. As in women should have rights stripped away to what they had in the 50s and 50s style law and attitude on race (I honestly think it would be difficult to make an argument that Pete Hesgeth is not a 50s style White Supremcist based on available evidence)
Think my point, even among just GOP voters, many of whom probably don’t have the most modern enlightened 2025 views on race and gender, actually don’t want to turn back the clock to the 50s to this stuff.
I’ve mentioned before that I support Matt’s contention that Dems need to be ok with senate candidates with moderate stances on culture issues to win senate seats. But I think that sometimes gets conflated with “Trump administration policies on social issues has popular support” which I really don’t think is true.
In this world, I would have to get a new doctor, lawyer, dentist, and accountant. That would just be annoying. As a guy, how would this somehow make my life better? And that's not even getting ethics and my professional life.
I think dismissiveness is generally a good attitude towards work of that quality. Given that it's gone viral, detailed responses like Matt's are useful, but a serious hearing should be reserved for people who actually try to say things that are sensible.
In this week's questions thread, @drosophilist asks what kinds of things we can do to support voters that lean more towards "common sense" thinking than the analytic style, in order to draw people away from the temptations of populism.
Actual engagement should be high on that list, which would demonstrate a touch of winning humility.
Dismissiveness of people genuinely asking questions, even dumb ones, is a bad idea. But there's a big difference between people who we shouldn't dismiss because they should be brought around to a better way of thinking, and right wing hacks with prestigious media jobs.
Wait, I don't follow. We're talking about whether popular ideas should be dismissed, not cancelation dynamics. They're related, but cancellation is a significant escalation.
To be fair, if what Andrews is saying wasn’t sensible - perhaps not in the way you’re thinking about it, admittedly - it would not resonate, and hence would not be going viral.
Dismissiveness is exactly the culprit that has sowed all of our divisions.
To bring in a different thread, chemtrails-type stuff goes viral. Q-anon is viral. Obviously anything that is popular is resonant in some sense for many people but that doesn't really imply anything.
You are correct that there are definitely cases of memes and other media that go viral while lacking the sensibility we’re talking about. I feel it’s disingenuous for you to point out this fact, when clearly this is not the case regarding Andrews, and it’s fairly clear her arguments are resonant with a certain segment of the population that you are apparently very eager to dismiss, and thus do not fit the category in which you’re trying to assign them.
Given the fact that the left has had major issues winning elections, despite their opposing political party being headed by a known con-man doing his best as-seen-on-tv-impression of an authoritarian, doing their best to hand victory to their opponents,
perhaps it would be more wise for the left to generally consider a few potentially helpful tactics that may actually end up bolstering them in the long run: Look more inward, be less inclined towards dismissal, and be more geared towards understanding why some of these ideas you find to be so asinine end up carrying water with others who don’t share your beliefs.
What the left has been doing since at least 2016 is not working very well. As obvious as it is to you and most reading this post this far that our President is indeed a con-man, it is at least equally obvious, if not more, to those who somehow are able to look past him being a con-man that you and everyone else on the left are complete idiots who will undoubtedly (to them) run this country into the ground if handed power.
But you’re probably right - just ignore some more. That will probably work out ok too.
I do not think that the secret to beating Donald Trump is to take right wingers claiming that women have ruined the country more seriously. That does not seem like the kind of common sense advocates by this publication.
To be clear, that was where my attitude was going, especially as her article went on and on. But this is why Matt is a better writer and reader than I, and I'm glad he stood up to a productive challenge.
> Integration with the sexes brings out the better in both sexes,
I've definitely found this to be true for my research group. I even had one female group member complain once that it was getting out of balance *in favor of* women, and I should look for more men to join.
Having moved from a very female-dominated space (education nonprofits) to a male-dominated one (engineering), being able to stop couching every critique in a compliment sandwich was such a massive relief. And I am a woman.
No one in my engineering job yells at each other even though it’s 75%+ men. We just disagree. Yelling and compliment sandwiches are only two extremes, not the only options.
My wife works in education nonprofits, and it seems so exhausting. A significant fraction of total work hours are devoted to managing everyone’s feelings about everything. Also a lot of money for external consultants and mediators. It’s quite sad — I strongly believe in the mission of the org, but I would never in a million years donate to them.
Would be interesting to get your perspective as a woman- do men take criticism fairly well? Or do they get defensive?
This is a bit of a stretch, but it makes me think of German vs. American culture. I'm an American but my best friend's Mom growing up was a German immigrant, and they're famously direct, blunt, and critical. Everything was couched as a (to my ears) somewhat harshly-stated order. But supposedly the book on Germans is that they don't *take* criticism well and get defensive. No idea how their society works with that combination
One thing I've become pretty attuned to from hanging out with eastern Europeans is that there's a difference between being blunt and lacking a filter. They often sound the same to Americans, but they're really quite different. The former is reasoned feedback delivered directly. The latter often includes insults of one form or another (direct or implied) and is generally less well reasoned. I'm guessing that Germans can handle bluntness but not unfilteredness. (My experience is that, while some cultures handle unfilteredness better than others, none handle it well, and it leads to a bunch of stupid interpersonal conflicts because people dish it out but can't take it.)
My guess is that there's no female-dominated field that's as female as education nonprofits.
The best balance is probably a majority-female space that wasn't traditionally female and that attracts a lot of ambitious high-achievers, like medicine or law, maybe architecture? accounting? Then you can kind of approximate the best of both worlds.
i don't think compliment sandwiches are even considered best practice if you are trying to couch a criticism... you are supposed to end with an action item. otherwise the recipient of the critique will just decide they don't need to change anything lol.
I'm basically in agreement with Matt on this one. Andrews is pointing towards real things, but basically in a shoddy way.
What Matt doesn't touch on that I think is maybe the biggest deal is the gender polarization of the political parties. The "feminization"/agreeableness run amok/woke/SJW/political correctness/identitarian/etc thing that came to dominate the Democratic party, and has pushed men towards the Republican party in turn, is a political catastrophe for all sides. This flavor of "feminized" orientation is incredibly corrosive to liberalism and it's institutions, as Matt briefly notes on the 1st Amendment. I think it goes well beyond the 1st Amendment and that we've seen in practice that it has severe implications for things like due process as well. The Democrats as an institution badly need to re-incorporate a stronger culture of rational-elightenment style thinking and procedures, because they cannot be a viable opposition to illiberalism as long as this style of polarization remains the dominant political cleavage.
As Matt noted, Trump is engaging in a massive state assault on free speech. Women may dislike disagreement and prize conformity more than men and so create different social vibes in spaces they dominate but are probably also less likely to use state power to throw people in jail or deport them over disagreements. The latter if what’s illiberal.
Correct, gender polarization has been extremely bad for both parties. The Trumpian style of bullshit machismo is incredibly illiberal and toxic. Countering the illiberal threat requires depolarizing around these particular tendencies because the resulting dynamics are so toxic and tend to overwhelm more productive concerns and disagreements..
I think it's critical to note that Trump has changed the focus of the state assault on free speech - but, laundered through Title VI rulemaking, hostile environment harassment suits, and so on, there's been a huge amount of government pressure on free speech for the last 30 years. (See Eugene Volokh's work for a great deal of detail on this.)
To be fair, the Republicans as an institution *also* badly need to reincorporate a stronger culture of rational enlightenment style thinking and procedures. Both parties used to have more of this, and this was always a non-gendered thing. Feminists raised a series of critiques of it in the late 20th century, which were real and meaningful ones, but some of which went way too far. Right now we are seeing a different masculinist critique of it that I think hasn’t produced anything as valuable, but is also going way too far.
I’m a computer programmer and some of the ways this has played out in my field left a bitter taste in my mouth:
1) I found the Damore firing pretty shocking. Not just that he got fired but the extreme language some respectable people used to defend and justify it (which, iirc, basically amounted to: if you noticed that gender personality differences existed and were important you were a bad person. Which IMO doesn’t even type check - beliefs about facts don’t implicate morality).
2) Programming is around 20% women. The sub fields I have been particularly interested in are more like 1-5% women. This has made me very negative towards “disparate impact” arguments that assume something nefarious is going on when fields are not 50% women; as far as I can see nothing nefarious is going on (although I’m sure being “the only woman in the room” is sometimes uncomfortable).
3) I haven’t seen this directly but my understanding is some groups (especially in open source) have weaponized “codes of conduct” to enforce an ideological monoculture (not totally sure this has to do with “feminization”, but I think so?)
4) There are a fair number of women-only things to try and get more women into programming. Feels a little bad to be excluded. At times I think this has ventured into “illegal pro-woman hiring discrimination”, which IMO is quite bad.
My impression is that none of this has moved the needle much in terms of what percentage of computer programmers are women.
An interesting historical note about Damore is that after his firing Matt, Ezra Klein, and Sarah Kliff discussed it on The Weeds (https://www.vox.com/2017/8/10/16119014/the-weeds-podcast-google-sexism-prescription-drugs-doctor-training). Matt and Ezra both agreed that Damore's memo basically argued that "we should be sexist assholes" and his firing was justified; Sara talked about the research on the gender wage gap. In other words, the two men on the podcast responded with catty gloating and the one woman responded with cold hard data.
I was junior engineer at Google at the time of the Damore firing and without particular inside information I came to the conclusion that Google fired Damore because he created and exasterbated a huge PR scandal for Google more so than because of the per se content of what he wrote. While I don't think he leaked the document, he unequivocally was litigating the matter very publicly between when the document leaked and when Google fired him. There's a massive difference between slamming your employer behind closed doors and doing so in national news stories.
I don’t really mind if Google wants to fire him for causing bad PR; it’s cowardly but I guess companies can want good PR.
But I did mind a lot of the subsequent commentary about how suggesting women might be less interested in being software engineers made him a bad person who women should not have to work with.
Cool thread! I had no idea Kelsey was tangentially involved in the whole thing. And yeah blacklisting is totally different than firing.
That said where I'd push back is that I don't necessarily think it was cowardly for Google to fire him. I really do think if Damore had not doubled down on his document in national news outlets he at least 50/50 would not have been fired. Especially so if he had said something like: "the document is being taken out of context, I don't think women are worse engineers than men and I'm sorry this hurt people."
It's not that different than if he somehow got national news coverage talking about YouTube being terrible for creating echo chambers. It's not evil to do so, but like you aren't really earning your keep either and it's reasonable to not employ someone who is harming the bottom line.
It’s been a while so I may be misremembering but I don’t remember him talking to the national media at all (before he got fired). I thought he posted it internally and someone else leaked it and then he got fired without really doing much else. That seems to line up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber
Yikes. You seem to be right on that fact and I am seemingly misremembering. My apologies for not doing a better fact check.
I do sort of stand by the PR problem point and that there is more to the story than he was purely fired for the precise contents of the document, but I'm not sure if I want to wade into it further. I can but not sure it's useful.
I remember the Damore thing. I was a sophomore CS major at the time. I feel like I was the only one who actually read Damore's writing. I was woke-lite back then (now I'm fairly anti woke) and even then I didn't see anything that was actually fire-able worthy.
If anything the liberal media coverage made Damore sound way more sexist than he "was". That's when I first realized that you can't trust the mainstream media.
Damore never claimed that women shouldn't be computer programmers, that women can't be good computer programmers, that women can't be interested in or talented at programming. I don't think he ever even implied that the female software devs at Google were all crappy affirmative action hires.
Damore actually suggested changes to tech that would make the field more friendly to women and help with female dev retention like offering more part-time work for moms.
That's how these things work- they read as bland, innocuous nonsense that make you think "did this really need to get spelled out?" so people agree to it without much thought. Especially the engineers who are focused on programming, not writing legal papers or doing degrees in feminist studies.
But then they put a committee in charge of enforcing those things. And the committee is made up of the sort of person who *does* write legal papers and academic feminist essays. Usually they have an explicit goal of increasing the number of women in tech, which means replacing men with women.
They put in place a system where anyone can report anyone, at any time, to the committee. The committee has broad power to do whatever it wants to enforce the code of conduct, including firing or banning people from life. The accused has no right to a lawyer, or to face his accusor, or even to know the details of what he's being accused of. There is certainly no "innocent until proven guilty." Usually, the number of accusations towards someone is taken as evidence that it must be true.
This has had exactly the sort of chilling effect on discourse that Helen Andrews discusses in her essay. You can't just "be wrong," or "agree to disagree," everyone knows that you can get fired from these things for almost any reason because you pissed off the wrong person.
Great piece! Regarding gender differences in various professional fields—at what point are we ok with the equilibrium that establishes itself through people exercising their free choices, or do we think there should always be efforts to boost representation in fields with a significant skew in one direction or another, and is this good policy? I could see that it might be a good idea to keep up some kind of integrative efforts so that people who are inclined towards opposite-gender-skewed fields don’t give into self-doubt or feeling out of place by pursuing a career more typical of the opposite gender.
My immediate take is to just encourage kids to get involved in things that they like, and support them to that. It's likely true that some professions will regularly slant to 9ne sex or the other, but being supportive and saying that it's fine and good for anyone to cut against that slant seems wise to me.
I think it’s really hard to know how close to gender equilibrium we are—and there is always a danger in assuming the gender norms of today, whenever today is, are an accurate reflection of what’s coded into our biology.
My wife works in tech. She has definitely worked for tech firms where her experience was similar to Matt’s sister-in-law’s as an electrician. How much of the gender skew in tech and electrician work today is about innate abilities and preferences rooted in biology, and how much is about socialized norms both in education and then in the workplace culture of those fields? I’d just be hesitant to give up on pro-integrative efforts when the latter still seems to play a notable role in many, many professions.
My assumption for some of these - like tech firms, is that you have something (NUMBERS MADE UP) like an "ideal" balance of 30% women 70% men(because men are more interested in it). But when you're a woman working for a company that is 30% women 70% men, then, without effort, it may be a slightly less pleasant working environment for you because of gender differences... so 5% leave and you get to 25% women 75% men. And now the skew makes it more likely that one of your male colleagues will doing something borderline and make you feel uncomfortable... so we slip a bit more until only the _most_ dedicated/interested women are still there.
Efforts to lambast people for failing to get to 50/50 will fail (some companies can achieve it but the industry as a whole wouldn't), but efforts to make sure that women at a 20/80 company feel comfortable to work are still important.
I'm also a woman who works in tech. I started out in a scientific field despite considering going into tech because the workplace culture seemed like one that was not very pleasant for women. I knew a bunch of guys who were going into tech who would make gross comments about women as if it was no big deal. Think asking a woman they'd just met her bra size and then insisting the woman is overreacting for getting upset. I did not want to work with people like that even though coding was interesting. I also didn't really fit into the nerd culture, so I'd be left out along with a lot of men who weren't into that type of nerd culture. A man would be more likely to shrug and go into tech anyway. A woman is more likely to conclude she's going to be perpetually left out and decide to find another field. Unfortunately, we don't know how much of the underrepresentation of women in tech is due to that rather than simply not being interested in tech in general.
"I don't want to do a job that I'm not good at" vs. "I don't want to do a job because I don't feel welcome there / because my coworkers are assholes" are both free choice. The challenge is to figure out how to leave room for (1) while reducing (2). It would be nice to see, on the one hand, less misogyny or outright harassment in things like construction and electrical work (per Matt's anecdote), and on the other hand, a healthier social context for men with more "feminine" traits (empathy, gentleness, "bedside manner") in things like education and nursing.
How do you do that? Dunno. Maybe we reach that equilibrium after a long-enough time without policy intervention. Maybe the better gentle hand on the scale is through pop culture that tells more stories of empathetic male teachers/nurses or tough/badass women construction workers...?
It’s not even a well-defined problem. Say a man would be fine being a nurse, but doesn’t want to be in a female dominated profession. Is that because (1) he wants to have coworkers like himself, (2) he’s worried he wouldn’t vibe well in a female-dominated environment, (3) he’s worried about his coworkers isolating him or singling him out, (4) he’s worried about the reputational effects of working in a female dominated environment, (5) the idea never occurred to him because of a lack of role models, (6) he’s perfectly happy in another profession and some random assignment pattern differentially affects the genders (say women like the idea of nursing more even if they don’t enjoy it more and aren’t better at it). These and a million other things could cause an observed discrimination pattern, and other than banning overt harassment it’s basically impossible to tease out the “good” and “bad” causes even if we could agree on them (is it a bad thing if nursing advertisements heavily represent the women that work there?)
I feel like every movie about a teacher reaching out to a class of troubled youth with bad grades features a male teacher. "Let's make action movies/shows with cool female leads who punch stuff" was a running theme through the 90s and 00s. I liked both of these things and I think they made a difference, though they seem to have subsided a little recently. Or maybe they just don't feel as special anymore, I don't know.
My question about this is whether the free choice is actually free. I know a 20-something woman like Matt's electrician SIL. She trained in construction and loved the work and the apprenticeship, but when she got to a "real" job where supervisors weren't working to beef up the number of people going into the profession like in her apprenticeship, she decided the pain and ostracism weren't worth her while. She "freely" chose to move to an office job, and now uses her skills to renovate her and her relatives' houses. This was around 2023, so not old news.
I don't think you can make general rules about whether there should 'always' be efforts one way or the other. In education, for example, I think most people's intuition about kindergarten is that male teachers are not as good or appropriate as female ones (even though I've seen first hand some amazing make kindergarten teachers), whereas I think a lot of people agree that by elementary school age, it's a problem if boys don't get to see any positive male role models. This isn't about 'ability' but just general social senses, norms and expectations. Ultimately I think you have to focus on what you're trying to achieve in a particular area and then consider whether 'efforts to boost representation' would help or not.
This is a great piece! Was it ever explicit though that the education system relied on excellent female expertise? I remember Little House on the Prairie books fondly, and I don't think any system that got 14 yos to teach was relying on anything other than warm bodies!
Edit: Also, did the school system really expect mums to stay at home? State education really kicked off at the end of the 19th century in the UK, and for poorer pupils (most of them), their parents including mum would have been working long hours. Kids were expected to make their own way to and from school even in the era of stay at home mums.
Certainly in places like Germany mums are apparently expected to be at home at 12pm to cook a nutritious lunch for their kids before they head back to school, but that was never the expectation in either the UK or the US to my knowledge!
I can't speak to American education, but an interesting element of the French education system is that it was seen as a real manly man kind of pursuit, because following its full secularization and systematization in 1881 (but also prior to that), there was a pretty explicit ideological imperative to "institute" the Republic (from which the generic term for a schoolteacher, "instituteur") and turn "peasants into Frenchmen." The "teaching as embodying virile civic virtue" framing was quite explicit.
In my teaching I often use the example of Charles Péguy, who was a prominent early-20th century republican intellectual, who wrote an influential essay that uses the metaphor of "hussards noirs" - a badass 15th century Hungarian calvary regiment - to describe the Third Republic's teaching corps (the essay is also incredibly homoerotic - clearly the young Péguy's teachers, uh, made an impression on him).
That's not to say that there weren't a lot of female teachers (edit: there was even a full parallel école normale track for female teachers after 1880), and now the system is something like 2/3 female if I recall correctly. But since it was professionalized and ideologically charged from the beginning, teaching was not traditionally seen as a feminized pursuit.
There are plenty of counterexamples if you go back far enough in American history, to one-room frontier schools, when it was not uncommon for literate men to do stints as schoolteachers, lawyers, ministers, etc., or to other countries like France.
But as a description of the American public school system in the mid-twentieth century, as it existed at the time of the women's rights movement, it's pretty accurate.
That old insult "those who can't do, teach" really takes on a whole new dimension if you think about it in context of women being barred from professions other than teaching...
I'm just wondering whether it was ever explicit, or rather a happy accident? Like, did anyone sit down and strategise "we are aiming to recruit the top 10% of female talent for teaching"?
Whether or not it was explicit, it may well be that in the 1950s they had a plan of how to make the education system work, and it did work, and then after some time doing the same thing no longer worked, because they no longer had this subsidy they hadn’t realized (of a lot of skilled people having no better paying option than being a teacher, so teaching could get by with low salaries).
Up until at least the 1850s (in America) the school system was decentralized enough that no one could make that decision. I think it was more due to a lack of options; law, medicine and other professional fields were closed to women so unless you were a top-notch writer (your Beechers, Fullers etc) the only white-collar job for educated women was a teacher or tutor.
Wasn't a big part of the late 19th-century French push for "civic virtue" and "peasants into Frenchmen" also geared toward getting everyone ready to fight the Germans again? I would assume that especially at that time, having a martial element to your education system would push toward more male educators.
I'm not entirely sure, and I think it probably did to some degree. To be clear, the "hussards noir" analogy was not, as far as I know, more widespread than Péguy's essay (though it was itself well-known). And the dynamics I'm describing - masculinized civic virtue channeled into a pedagogical nation-building project - had been developing throughout the 19th century, well before the Franco-Prussian War. But the loss to Prussia / Germany definitely gave it all a kick in the seat of the pants, yes.
Prior to the war, the nation-building struggle had been waged in a low-key way against the church; the story of mid-to-late 19th century France is a long-term bid to gradually loosen the hold of the Catholic Church over education, and then fully yank it away in 1881-1882 with the lois Ferry.
Something really interesting that I found in some random boxes over at the Archives Nationales a few years ago is reports from education inspectors from roughly the 1850s through 1870 (they were still filing reports as, like, the Prussians were marching towards Paris), and they always include a section that says something like "relationship between the State and the Church," and although the handwriting is hard to make out the reports are always comically diplomatic, when reading between the lines it's a bit "these clerical freaks, what a drag."
There were a lot of male teachers in my own country, primarily because of single sex schools at the higher level. I think probably fewer now as the profession has become so feminised. Would need to check out the stats though!
Yeah - likewise in France secondary education for women was established in 1880, but it was a parallel track and a separate, "feminized" pedagogy (i.e. no math and Latin) until 1924.
What country are you in?
Edit: oh, right, the UK - we had a whole conversation about UK HE compared to the US. Sorry!
Ha, no problem! I'm also thinking that no one did expect women to stay at home with their kids - kids would go to and from and school by themselves right from the start, as they still do in other European countries. No one was expecting mum to stay at home and cook lunch in the early 20th century when most parents would both have been working all hours.
I think the American education system should be doing something similar. It should be educating kids and preparing them to be full citizens in a democratic republic.
Giving them the proper understanding of history, economics, constitutional law etc. Along with an appreciation for Western Civilization and modernity and why what we have is so wonderful but also unique and fragile and that it must be protected.
1) This was in the context of progressively imposing a national, centralized, secular education system over a linguistically diverse and largely religious population. A lot of what happened in France would appear downright tyrannical to most Americans. The way the school system is run *today* would probably seem tyrannical - extremely difficult (but IIRC not literally impossible) to homeschool, there is private religious education but it's not fully independent, etc., the whole hijab thing (and if you're not sympathetic to that, also prayer in school would be a complete non-starter).
Edit: homeschooling became much more difficult recently, in 2021 - in a bill pretty clearly at curbing Muslim "separatism" following Samuel Paty's murder. But it affects everyone equally. Now there are very few conditions under which homeschooling is allowed...and religious instruction is very much *not* one of them.
Another edit: ever wonder why there are no real regional dialects in France, while Germany and Italy have a wide range of dialects (and in the case of Italy, just plain separate Romance languages)? There were, but teachers literally beat them out of students. Now there are really barely even regional *accents.*
2) No, really - the level of coordination and top-down bureaucracy that the French education system operates under is really quite alien in a lot of ways to American sensibilities. This is hard to overstate. Theoretically what you describe is possible in a decentralized system, but much more difficult.
3) I should also really reiterate the whole anti-clerical agenda that animated a lot of the republican reformers who were the most passionate about l'École de la République. No other country in the world has tamed and domesticated its majority religion in the way France did, and it took place over at least 150 years (stretching back to the Middle Ages if you count the Philip the Fair and the Gallician Church tradition) with schooling as the primary battleground.
4) As someone notes above, the sui generis Franco-Prussian War gave this process a serious kick in the ass, as wars and perceived civilizational conflicts (against, say, the Germans) tend to do.
Basically, while the outcome has some admirable aspects, I'm not sure how replicable it is. The education system helped forged a nation in the provinces where before there had only been a state, and a lot of this civic unity was imposed under pretty unique circumstances through what we would see as downright authoritarian means.
agreed, I wouldn't want to exactly copy the system, but I think the overall purpose is correct.
The points about French language instruction are really interesting. I used to think their department of language was silly.
But as we spoken English differs more and more from how it's spelled I'm reconsidering (not enough to advocate for it, but I think they have a point. I would love a real attempt to redo and align English spelling with how it sounds. One that makes clear whether we are making the hard or soft vowel sounds.
"The points about French language instruction are really interesting. I used to think their department of language was silly."
That's a separate thing, and it should be noted that a lot of countries, not just France, have an analogous office (in Finland, they have two: one for Finnish and one for the Swedish spoken in Finland). It of course influences how the language is taught, but the "annihilate dialects" movement (and I'm not exaggerating by using the word "annihilate": see the 1791 "Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens ***d’anéantir*** les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française") has a somewhat different lineage. But the result was that the French in Brest is the same French as in Nice. Compare German, which is less a language and more a dialect continuum.
If you want spelling reform, well...I don't know. Maybe over time, but as a top-down movement I think the ship has sailed, even if there were some "National Office of the English Language" or whatever. Speaking of Finnish, they benefited that Finnish was basically an oral language until the nineteenth century, so the writing system could develop under pretty strict orthographic principles (and mercifully was initially developed under Swedish rule so that it didn't do something ridiculous like adopt a Cyrillic alphabet).
It’s just mechanically true that is women are limited to teaching and nursing, you will get alot of incredible female teachers and nurses at relatively low salaries.
If I'm not mistaken, something similar happened with segregated schools. Because so many college educated black Americans were denied the jobs their skills (and degree) suggested they should have, you had a lot of quite frankly way over qualified teachers teaching at segregated schools.
Not entirely sure what the policy response is to this. Despite what Harrison Butker and the ghouls that actually run the White House might tell you, turning back the clock on Civil Rights and feminism to 1950 is not a viable solution.
Think maybe it's just a reminder there is literally nothing that doesn't have some sort of unintended negative consequence, even the most positive developments you can think of. And that maybe concentrating so much on possible unintended consequences can blind you to the overall positives that can come from a policy or social change (my basic reason I find Megan McCardle libertarianism infuriating. But post/rant for another day).
There were certainly antifeminists arguing in the early 1970's that women were natural nurterers and caretakers, justifying traditional employment practices. That, of course, is the argument Andrews doesn't have the guts to actually make, whether she might believe it or not.
BTW Mrs. Crabapple on The Simpsons was in many ways a compendium of pre-workplace equality stereotypes about female teachers.
*Krabappel. (Pronounced cra-BAHP-el). In addition to the humorous pronunciation / spelling play, likely an allusion to Ms. Crabtree of The Little Rascals.
No, Diane Ravitch has an excellent book on this called the education wars and she showed that a lot of education feminization was driven by the fact that they cost less than men.
I wonder if WW1 and WW2 sped up the process, as so many male teachers were called up. My impression from media from that time is that there were a lot of men in teaching. Post WW2 many soldiers were recruited straight into teacher training programmes in the UK to fulfil the new Labour government's expansion of 13+ education.
I've always wanted to learn more about how war changes societies in this regard after it's over, especially given that, tragically, it usually results in a lot of men that are prematurely killed.
I read an excellent book about single women after WW1 who were unable to marry as so many young men were killed. In a dark way, I wonder if it improved social mobility, at least in the UK; so many aristocratic young men were killed.
I wonder if the process of recruiting men led to a big increase in the number of men teaching in the primary and preschool levels. I’m guessing that the nursery schools and kindergartens remained female dominated.
My grandfather's teacher and my father's teacher in primary school were both men. n=2 but there were plenty of men in primary schools; nurseries I think probably more female dominated as lower prestige and more childcare orientated (or with a more play based pedagogy?).
edit: grandad at school from 1913; father at school from 1957.
But we DO spend a lot more per capita on education than in the past. It would certainly have been possible to make K12 teaching a remunertive profession for men.
Starting from where we are (not in utopia) isn't there an argument for affirmative action for men in teaching and nursing.
Cost disease will always make any labour intensive industry more expensive. What benefits would affirmative action bring in those industries? I think we should have a high bar for affirmative action in any direction.
Dunno how strong the evidence is but there are definitely studies claiming that having a Black male teacher has large positive impacts on the academic achievement of Black boys in particular.
Right, but Black British people are a different group than Ancestral Black Americans, I'm pretty sure if you break out Americans with ancestry in the former British colonies in the Caribbean you'd see something similar.
Can you be clear about what you mean, because people often say similar things when I point out that Black Britons are healthier, live longer & have better educational attainment than white people in the UK, but they never clearly outline what is different and why it would result in such different outcomes.
If I'm honest, the only real difference I can think of between black Americans & black Britons is that black Americans have substantially more European ancestry as they've been in the US for longer & there was so much sexual assault during slavery.
"Whatever you think of some of the excesses of the #MeToo era, Harvey Weinstein’s crimes were real — and he was an extremely influential man in Hollywood! Do you think his presence, and that of the men who looked the other way, has zero implications for how many women got a shot at directing ambitious projects or at moving up the ladder in production roles?"
The people who "looked the other way" is probably not best described as "men". This was apparently an "open secret" for many years, joked about on sitcoms and award shows and people of all genders still lined up to work with him.
The reality is if there are 3,000 qualified applicants for every good job, a powerful sexual harasser will get plenty of women who go along with it and plenty more afraid to take him on. That's what sustains the casting couch (which BTW has not gone away past Weinstein).
Glenn Close made this point explicitly after Weinstein was brought down.
The rumors were that he was a creep/pervert, not a full-on rapist. Obviously post Me Too, neither would be acceptable anymore. But it is also true that the full extent of the truth was not what was being openly joked about.
I just checked. According to the Google AI, she was only in one Miramax film when she was around 40, but the Wikipedia entry for that movie (Dangerous Liaisons) doesn't mention Miramax and only mentions Warner Brothers, so I'm not even sure if Miramax was actually involved. There's a good chance she never actually worked with Weinstein and never met him beyond seeing him quickly at public industry events.
I see, perhaps encouragingly, that I will not be the only commenter today who does not think it is entirely churlish to lament the fact that we now seem to live in an era when far-right-edgelord crap like the Helen Andrews screed draws enough water that the likes of MY and Damon Linker feel compelled to rebut it, instead of ignoring it in the same way sane people once ignored crazy stuff in The Minuteman or letters to the editor from the hometown crank or mimeographed brain spasms (no, young fella, Jerry Ford is not a communist and water fluoridation is not the work of Satan) distributed by obscure and obscurantist local right-fringe-breakaways from the college YAF chapter. Yes, please, bring back the gatekeepers!
The main thing the Andrews piece reminded me of is that for all the problems and disagreements I have with progs, I'm still basically on their side because the other side is so much worse.
Incidentally, I have a suspicion that somehow the LaRouchies managed to infiltrate the Chinese Belt-and-Road initiative. They both share the same fascination with huge development successes through weird infrastructure projects, and I see them mentioned together in a bunch of contexts.
Love the shoutout to YAF, the head of my alma mater's chapter is now an ambassador. Great to see that founding a local YAF chapter in response to the CRs not doing enough to mock gay people's inability to get married at the time sets you up for success in the present day!
Great article overall, but the fact that "[t]ons of companies underrepresent women in their workforces" does not disprove the claim that "civil-rights law makes it literally illegal to underrepresent women". It really isn't even evidence against it. Law isn't automatic or self-executing.
It’s illegal to discriminate. It’s not illegal to simply have a disparity.
There’s a lot of complications over the extent to which you can infer discrimination from statistical disparities (see: Richard Hanania’s work before his face turn). It’s a balancing act between acknowledging it’s very hard to prove discrimination in individual cases absent written evidence with the obvious-but-until-recently-verboten fact that statistical disparities can reflect actual differences in ability or interest between groups rather than unfair treatment.
Absolutely. Having said that, I think Andrews would say that's a distinction without a difference, though no doubt it matters in the court of public opinion. "Underrepresent" sounds more defensible than "discriminate". On the other hand, disparate impact still guides a substantial (but dwindling?) minority of civil employment actions and does not require proving discrimination.
And having said *that*, Matt's original statement was weak, bordering on silly in an otherwise solid article.
If it were literally illegal, surely anyone from an underrepresented demo who was denied a job offer could get a summary decision? You don’t hear about too many people being fired for getting pregnant, or new builds that aren’t ADA compliant — some laws are pretty close to self executing.
Yes? One of them is true (it is illegal to discriminate) and the other is not. If it were illegal to underrepresent women the same way it’s illegal to fire somebody for being a woman, we would live in a very different world, because any woman who wasn’t hired in a disproportionately male company would get a summary judgement.
The disparate impact standard muddies the waters, because it infers discriminatory intent from disproportionate hiring levels.
Cases guided by DI are dwindling, but still a substantial minority of title VII judgements: until thats no longer the case, I think it's fair to say underrepresentation is illegal.
That argument aside, Matt's claim was wrong: even if Andrews' claim was false.
Lawyers can correct me (it would be a relief), but my understanding is that nowadays, disparate impact is really only used when no other evidence is available. In those cases it is not "a piece of evidence" but approximately all the evidence. In those cases, it is correct to say that it is illegal to underrepresent some group.
Doubt anyone will see this since it's comment like 300 but I was just thinking about how this sort of overlaps with the related concern that the U.S. is becoming "feminized" because we don't build anything.
This is kind of baked into the "abundance" framework, in the idea that we used to be a society that builds stuff, now we mostly are lawyers who make regulations.
Because we've undergone the conversion from an industrial economy to a service-driven economy where the primary exports are software and financial services, I think it's easy to associate this with women entering the workforce. But if you compare us to countries that lie somewhere else on the growth curve, you see that women also enter the workforce at very high rates even in countries that emphasize heavy industry (Germany and the US have basically identical female labor force participation rates).
Even across the Muslim world, women are a large majority of science and engineering students. I won't pretend to know the cultural impact the rise of educated women has had in Germany or Iran or something. But the U.S. conversion to a country that is very service/finance/tech driven instead of heavy industry and infrastructure seems coincidental to the change in gender roles, not something that was driven by it.
The merits of our conversion to a less heavy industry focused economy are obviously enough content for another entire blog post. But I think even if we still had the exact industry mix as we did in 1965, we'd still have seen the same change in gender roles.
Both these pieces elide the more mundane fact that some small, subset of women treat the professional, corporate workplace like an elementary school classroom, and that this behavior will be, on average, more annoying to men in that workplace than to other women.
Is this behavior more annoying to men, on average?
My experience of bad female bosses has been that their negative attentions were directed at female subordinates, and that men in those workplaces largely either avoided that negative attention or just kind of mentally checked out.
The way I would put it is that some small subset of men also treat the professional corporate workplace like an elementary school classroom, except that instead of playing the role of the school-marmy teacher, they play the role of the out-of-control kid with psych issues.
Bad male bosses are also annoying in their own way. When I've worked in male-dominated offices, hearing puffery about their sex lives was very annoying.
My wife's boss has complained to her about how the Victoria's Secret models aren't as hot as they used to be now that they are inclusive last week. Many such cases
"She tells us that the existence of female professors, journalists, lawyers, and judges is an existential threat to civilization, then claims she has no desire to take any opportunities away from anyone — she just wants to curb the bad employment-discrimination policies that she says give women an unfair leg up."
Why not call a spade a spade--Andrews is a hack. There is a pattern of intellectually vapid right wing 'thought' that is more or less vibes and catering to a base of people who have already come to a conclusion before the argument is made. This person seems no different in that regard.
I remember the Larry Summers controversy but I still think the guy is a windbag, for other reasons.
Also bonus points, Matt, for using the word 'defenestration'.
Yeah, I mean if she really felt that strongly about "The Great Feminization" of society, she should do the obvious thing and remove herself from the workforce, instead of taking away publishing opportunities from male authors who are clearly more deserving by virtue of their gender. But obviously she hasn't done that. Because there's good money to be made as a female Uncle Tom for conservative men.
I think put that way alone the point is a little cheap, a pure hypocrisy argument, and hypocrisy arguments are always weak.
But the key is not only does she not call for the elimination of her own job, but also doesn't call for any sort of real de-feminization of the workplace generally. Because she knows how unpopular that would be.
I mean, can’t it be true that she doesn’t think we need to remove females from the workforce to de-feminize workspaces? Isn’t that just, maybe, a nuanced thought?
When people made workspaces more friendly to women, they didn’t accompany those moves with calls to remove men from the workplace.
Larry Summers is, I think pretty obviously, not a wind bag. He’s a smart and very successful economist with thoughtful views.
You calling him a windbag degrades my view of your credibility, and undermines your assertion that Andrew’s is a hack (though she may be if this article is representative).
You are familiar with his comments he made about female students while he was a at Harvard right? Also I’m an anonymous commenter on a blog, I have no credibility!
His expertise is in economics, not evolutionary biology, so I give him slack on those issues, but I am given to understand that he hypotheses that population level differences or interest, especially at the high end, might help explain the gender gap in math and science. Then everyone freaked the hell out and he got fired.
I think the resulting freakout over some pretty mild speculation is in fact why we are forced to endure pieces like Andrew’s’. To coin a phrase, if it is considered disgraceful sexist hackery to speculate on population level gender differences outside of blank slate assumptions, then only sexist hacks will be writing about population level gender differences.
Yea, I think that episode really is illustrative and makes Andrews hard to completely dismiss, in spite of an otherwise over the top hyperbolic framing. If a well tenured academic can't politely speculate about something like this in an expressly academic setting with seemingly sound research in hand then... well who can?
I feel like making broad pronouncements about areas where you lack expertise (as someone with enough of a platform for those pronouncements to matter, as Summer was at the time) is pretty much the definition of a windbag, regardless of how well he may have performed in his actual discipline.
You articulated the point I was trying to make about Summers. Smart guy, yes, but overreached. He also thought in 2022 we’d have to suffer a massive recession to defeat inflation. He certainly wasn’t alone in his wrongness but he kind of doubled down.
> The heft of Andrews’s piece comes from the prospect of widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms.
Is this true? I would say the heft of her piece comes from the prospect of re-establishing classically liberal, American norms in all these areas - politics, journalism, academia, corporate workplaces, medicine, etc. - proactively, rather than simply assuming that The American Way will sort of naturally re-assert itself by default.
> But even at Peak Woke, no major tech companies were fielding 50-percent-female engineering teams.
Well, they tried. For real. Illegally. Talk to any hiring manager in tech during that period and they’ll tell you that “diversity goals” were cover for explicit minimum quotas.
Which would be closer to “true merit-based hiring” in tech: pre-feminist exclusion of women from the field altogether, 2018-era illegal quotas, or forced 50/50 representation? I don’t know, but I would lean towards 2018-era practices being closer to true meritocracy than the pre-feminist status quo. But I wouldn’t say that this constitutes an “extremely large share” of feminization of the SWE occupation.
> [What we know about sex differences]
Your point about facial dimorphism cuts both ways. I will give an example: researchers in obstetric medicine and maternal public health have, for about a decade, been going ham with the “finding” that American women are far more likely to experience maternal mortality than women in other developed countries. We’ve all seen countless news articles on the paper making that claim. Most of us have probably also seen the debunking: turns out this is all an artifact of different data collection practices. The paper was, in fact, obviously total garbage. And yet it animated the entire field for the better part of a decade.
Is it a coincidence that such obvious failure occurred in the sub field of medicine dominated by women both as practitioners and patients? Let’s recall your classic “overlayed normal distribution” graphs, where small shifts in the mean can drive large shifts in the prevalence of outlier events. I’m going to say no: I think the probability of a similar failure occurring in urology is roughly zero.
Does that mean I want to ban women from the field so that they can go back to being caregivers and teachers? Well no: my wife is an OBGYN, I worked extremely hard during her residency raising our son and working full-time so that she could train as one (and so that we could afford it), and she’s a great doctor. A (very disagreeable) female colleague of hers, who happens to be a close friend of ours, pointed out the problem with this paper and the associated press coverage to me about 5 years before the news did. But this goes back to my main point: we can’t simply assume that the norms with respect to free speech, pursuit of truth, and The American Way will simply assert themselves by default; one vector for failure is indeed feminization - even if women bring plenty of other good qualities to the table that outweigh the bad. And more importantly - even if they didn’t, excluding women on this basis would be a fundamental betrayal of those classical liberal values!
I think that some sort of cultural fix is in order in women-dominated professions and institutions, the same way Me Too ushered in massively necessary cultural fixes in male-dominated professions and institutions (not least of which is, as you note, that people don’t scream in the office anymore). Similarly with respect to fertility and developed-country birthrates, how you get this cultural fix to occur - I don’t know. But if you take (or replace) that as the unspoken goal of Andrews’ piece rather than somehow banning women from all walks of life outside of teaching and childcare, then this is a problem worth taking seriously. Exactly as you did yourself with respect to the havoc feminism wreaked on the American education system - without concluding that women need to be sent back to the classroom en masse.
"Her bit about women being incapable of giving orders or delivering blunt criticism meets the “true enough for a stand-up comedy routine” standard"
This helps encapsulate what I find exhausting about the epistemic present: there's just so much sloppy intuitive thinking dressed up with a few survey results or anecdotes and then presented as either deep intellectualism or "I'm just a simple country lawyer"-style homespun truth.
I have been guilty of this! In these comments! Many such cases!
But I try to be aware of when I'm slipping into it. It's a bad habit. And we can bicker and argue about who started it and so on, but that's also exhausting (albeit an extremely remunerative line of discourse). Maybe we can just agree that it's bad, regardless of who does it and to what end, and try to Do *clap* Better *clap*.
I'd also say there's a difference from saying it in an internet comment section and having that take be one of the key arguments in a buzzy article decrying one of the largest societal trends of the past 50 years.
Yeah, definitely - the "WHAT THEY WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT OUR COLLAPSING CIVILIZATION" framing is the issue here.
The Slow Boring comments section is my intellectual sandbox! Sometimes I come up with castles, sometimes with wet piles of slop.
"The Slow Boring comments section is my intellectual sandbox! Sometimes I come up with castles, sometimes with wet piles of slop."
And its my job to read all of it!
We appreciate your service in the Slow Boring mines!
How do you describe that function on your resume?
At least it’s not toxic materials handling, as it would be for many comments sections!
Toil away.
Ironically enough I am about to do the very thing you're bemoaning in your comment, but I can't help but feel that the issues with the epistemic present are because any old idiot who can string some words together in an artful way gets published on the world wide web right next to investigative journalism done by the likes of the NYT. Another example of the collapse of the gatekeepers - editors used to enforce standards, now readers have to both choose what to read and apply critical thinking to ask "is what the author saying true? Is the evidence they are presenting germane to the argument they are making? I am entertained, but is there any evidence at all?"
I only made it about 2/3rds of the way through the Andrews article before I had to bail. I am not a CITATION NEEDED freak or anything but man I got there and realized not once did she cite anything despite dropping some absolute BIG IF TRUE whoppers.
Richard Hanania compared removing the gatekeepers to abolishing the police, which I really liked. Clearly the police has a lot of biases and takes some very objectionable actions. Abolishing the police eliminates those actions, but now you're wondering where all this crime is suddenly coming from.
Yeah, that's a very good metaphor. Man, when he hits he hits.
hanania is adam dunn HR or strike out takes
Today's has a lot of the latter, where he talks about the virtues of driving recklessly and letting your three-year-old sit in the front seat sometimes. Unclear if he's doing both these things at once!
What's the punditry equivalent of a walk, though?
a boring milquetoast opinion
You point out your opponent's mistakes without advancing an argument of your own
Agreed - it's a collapse in gatekeeping power, but also the gatekeepers themselves have not always acquitted themselves well (e.g. "moral clarity," the History and Industry episode, etc.)
You're right, but I think another symptom of modern neurosis is the demand of perfection from elites. I have very mixed feelings about this because of all social strata elites absolutely have the highest obligation to society and should be held to very high standards. I'm in take territory here, but I feel there's something with a change in how society values virtue, in both our elites and our common people, where no one is expected to consider for a second that something might be their fault, feel healthy shame. I wonder if that's a consequence of the collapse of forgiveness/grace. We've become less likely to admit fault because we are less likely to receive forgiveness. Any fault is met with condemnation.
I am not smart enough to expound on this. I don't think this is a policy or logic thing. I think this is rooted in a values and culture thing. And those can't be forced .
No, I think you're on to something - grace has been completely trashed as a virtue by basically everyone, and that has been incredibly corrosive.
Part of that corrosion is that grace is about acknowledging a failure/mistake and a willingness to move forward with the goal not to repeat that. Now we have people refusing to acknowledge the failure/mistake and just continuing to do the bad thing.
A lot of complaining about the gatekeepers on their (de)merits were actually complaints about their existence in the first place. A White House press secretary who answers legitimate questions with "your mom" was never really interested in having high standards of rigor.
I would argue that our modern communication systems -- video, social media, smartphones -- have resulted in our elites and gatekeepers being unable (or unwilling) to maintain separation between their human frailties and their professional standards of behavior.
Because we see them as full humans, full of the same failings all humans have, we discount their professional expertise.
Yeah, I mean, they don't help, that's for sure.
As another type of "moral deficit" driver of widespread malaise, I think gratitude has fallen off the radar as a value. With the tiny little influence we have we should try to redirect Thanksgiving this year away from the same complaints about family dynamics and consumerism into, you know, giving thanks.
When the status quo becomes "unacceptable" as a matter of hard outward-facing opinion, you can really start to underappreciate a lot of things about your life that are actually pretty good, or better. Then you demand to know why the government isn't making you happy, or assume that it must be actively making you unhappy.
Overall agreed but
The gatekeepers haven't exactly covered themselves in glory
Relative to when, though?
The whole rise of alternative media such as Fox News was driven by the (IMHO largely correct) narrative that the MSM had a distinct liberal/Democratic bias.
The gate keepers failed repeatedly over the prior decades to be even handed, in what was covered and how it was covered.
They’ve been doing better every year for almost all of human history.
Yeah, I'm with you. As a retired scientist if you can't, or won't, supply your references then you're DOA.
I totally agree and I think your comment is indicative of good epistemological hygiene, but we also need to be mindful of isolated demands for rigor from the other side.
Like, we also don’t want to overcorrect in the other direction to the point of saying that we won’t believe biological males have an advantage sports unless we see a meta study of multiple peer reviewed articles.
I just don’t think the difference between “women are worse at sports on average” and “girls can’t be athletic!” is actually all that hard to navigate. But when you’re shifting from making a joke to doing real analysis of society it’s importance to stick to the accurate claim.
"...women are worse at sports on average..."
Be warned, I'm pulling out my soapbox and climbing up on it!
"Worse" is not a word I like here because of its qualitative nature. Women just have different standards. For example, if I run a 3:15 marathon, I actually consider myself a better athlete than a man who does, because I'm accomplishing that without male advantage. In the running world, at least, no one would say that an elite female runner was somehow "worse" than a mediocre male athlete with the same time. It's just not how we talk about it. For example, Faith Kipyegon is widely praised and admired as one of the best 1500m runners ever, even though she couldn't break 4 minutes in the mile (and didn't look great trying to do it ... shame on Nike for that whole promotional boondoggle).
I generally just avoid directly comparing men and women's athletic accomplishments altogether, because it's a tired topic that I think implicitly undermines women sports, as if they can't be as interesting or meaningful as the men unless they meet the same standard. But a close woman's race is just as exciting as a close men's race, regardless of whether the men's is faster in the absolute sense. See, for example, the TDF, where the women's version has arguably been more exciting the past two years because Pogacar's dominance makes the men's race too predictable.
To the extent it's relevant, I generally just say women lack male advantage, as I did above. If it's a sport with an objective standard, like running, I'll just use that standard and stay that yes, on average men are faster. But does that make the women "worse"? To me, no.
Alright, lecture over!
This is a nonstandard definition of “better” and “worse” though, right? Mediocre male athletes are indeed better than elite women at most sports at which both compete. They would win every time. It’s not due to a moral failing or lack of dedication, it’s just biology.
That doesn’t mean women’s sports, as a category, are less worthwhile as an human endeavor though! We like sport for a lot of reason and sorting by ability lets us extend those reasons to more contexts. Many people prefer college football to the pros, and that’s reasonable! No matter how good a bantam weight is or how hard he trains he will get pasted every time by a heavyweight, but that weight class is still fun to watch and bet on etc. women’s tennis was a more interesting game in the 90s than men’s (where rally ability had not caught up to the huge service revolution). But if all you cared about what “who is the best tennis player” the answer is always some guy.
So I guess the nuance is “men are better at sports” does not mean than “men’s sports are better” and people confuse these claims.
If you stop thinking in terms of men’s or women’s sports and ask, for example, “who are the fastest runners?”, sex is unquestionably an explanatory variable.
"This is a nonstandard definition of “better” and “worse” though, right?"
Maybe, but it's kind of like saying a pitching machine has "better control" than Tarik Skubal. Like, it's a machine designed to throw the ball in the same place every time. When you account for the fact that Tarik Skubal is a human throwing 3000 rpm pitches that break 10+ inches it's a different interpretation.
I mean... nobody, and I mean nobody, has a problem saying computers are better at math than people are. Nobody has qualms saying computers are better at chess than humans are.
Do we really not apply the same language to physical sports?
I'm not sure what you mean by non-standard definition, which is exactly the type of ambiguity I want to avoid. One is never sure what a person means by better or worse and people CAN read stuff into it. And what I worry they will usually read into it is not simply that the men will win (yeah, they will) but that that makes the men worth more, which obviously I don't agree with.
And when it comes to discussing who is a "better athlete," I don't think winning actually is the only criterion. For example, I also played soccer in addition to running, and played a lot of coed as an adult. There were lots of BAD guy soccer players out there who could body me off the ball, even though they were completely lacking in skill. (A lot of them were also overweight.). But I could out pass them, read the game better, and play defense more strategically. So who's the better soccer player? The former football player who's just out there throwing his weight around? Or me, doing what I can with technique and knowledge of the game? It's subjective. Yeah, I'm not gonna win because of the size and strength mismatch, but I don't think anyone, speaking casually, would say that an overweight ex football player was a "better" soccer player than me simply because he can win through sheer strength. He's still a bad player, and I'm still a good one. So talking about who is better or not doesn't even really make sense.
The answer to who is a better player, in my mind, is wins above replacement.
This sort of what I mean when I say you are introducing non-standard terms. You are using some sort of soccer-moral-virtue definition to elevate some aspects of soccer performance over others. But when most people say “that guy is better than you” they mean he helps his team win more. Or, at least, it’s not unreasonable or inappropriate or weird to use the term “better than you at soccer” to convey that meaning.
I think others here, and myself, are alluding to this subtle difference. Rephrasing one of your sentences,
"There were lots of BAD guy soccer players out there who could body Lionel Messi off the ball, even though they were lacking in skill. But Lionel Messi could out pass them, read the game better, and play more strategically. So who's the better soccer player? The 6ft 3in defender who's just out there throwing his weight around? Or Lionel Messi, doing what he can with technique and knowledge of the game? It's subjective. Yeah, Lionel Messi is still going to win despite of his size and strength mismatch, but I don't think anyone, speaking casually, would say that a big strong player was a "better" soccer player than Messi simply because he has more sheer strength."
The point is good players can win, on average, more than bad ones. There are a lot of individual differences and that is just that. And none of this translates into defining value of women's sports or women in sports.
In casual, non-rigorous speech, something like "men are better at sports" DOES mean "men’s sports are better." In the sense of "men are better are performing the activity of sports" rather than "men have more athletic skill to perform sports at a high level" So it is better to use more precision that doesn't have the ambiguity like, "on average men are stronger and faster."
I’m not sure I agree. I think it’s fine and true to say “men are better at sports” and trust your audience to understand it’s a generalization and also not a moral judgment. It’s like saying “men are taller” than women. Similarly, if I say “my daughter is really good at soccer” people will have no trouble understanding I mean “for a girl” not that I am claiming she is some athlete prodigy who can keep up with the boys who play.
If you are picking teams, it’s relevant info and we shouldn’t be so squeamish about it. That’s why cooed leagues have minimum number of girls requirements. People should just chill!
Watching people with more athletic skill perform at a high level is often worse television than people with worse athletic skill perform at a lower level. See college football v. professional football. So I don't think you can make that leap.
The Faith Kipyegon Breaking 4 thing was so silly. Everyone involved was talking constantly about how she thought she could do it, meanwhile every observer who follows track closely knew that a 1:57 800, 3:48 1500, and 14:05 5000 performer is just not that close to running sub-4 in the mile (even assuming her 800 is an old PR she could smash easily, it's still well short of what's needed). I think it's good they tried something similar to the Kipchoge Breaking-2 thing for women, but it was just crazy watching that and hearing everyone just lying that they thought it was gonna happen. I'm sure it'll happen some day but that day probably isn't soon.
Also it was funny how she broke the 1500m WR a week or so later without wearing any of the goofy high-tech gear that she really didn't seem like she enjoyed wearing!
And just as bad were the folks afterwards talking about how "close" she was at 4:07! No, she was not close, not at all.
This is all so true of the WNBA and NBA, as well as men's and women's soccer. They're just entirely different games. Women's college basketball (everyone knows) is vastly superior to men's college basketball and may represent the peak of women's basketball, unless the WNBA can solve some of their officiating problems. Women's soccer is much, much better on the international level than men's soccer for similar reasons to why college women's basketball is better: men's club soccer and the NBA are so much more lucrative and drain so much of the life out of their players because they play way too many games. The men's world cup and the NBA finals are just tired bodies flying at each other seemingly randomly; March Madness in women's basketball and the women's world cup are some of the most exciting competitions in their respective sports, no caveats.
These are interesting opinions, and I’m open to any of them being correct, but I think they’re far too subjective for this argument. Is there any evidence (survey, viewership numbers, some kind of critic’s consensus) that a majority of viewers have any of these particular sports opinions?
From a soccer perspective, I know EXACTLY what they mean and agree, but I think its likely not statistically true globally because women's soccer outside the US and western Europe still has a lot of growing to do. In much of the world (including many places that love men's soccer), women's soccer isn't really a thing yet. So worldwide data will certainly show the men's game being more popular.
But it the US, yes, the USWNT will often get more viewers and be more well known than the USMNT. E.g., https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/10/us-viewership-of-the-womens-world-cup-final-was-higher-than-the-mens.html
Granted, a huge part of this is because of how dismally disappointing the USMNT has been. If they were better (or at least performed at the level they should), we might see these numbers be closer. But so far, their performance just hasn't been good enough.
Regarding tournament quality, I don't think many fans would disagree with the statement that the quality of the men's World Cup suffers because of the demands of the clubs. That's...a not uncommon complaint. Conversely, because the women don't have the same club pressures, they can bring their top game to their World Cup. The teams are often more cohesive, too, because they get more time to practice/play together than the men do.
In other words: Men's World Cup soccer is not the best men's soccer because the players are exhausted from their club seasons and the teams lack cohesion. But women's World Cup soccer IS the best women's soccer because the players are fresher and have played together more. I think most soccer fans would agree with that as a general statement.
Some people are disagreeing with you. I think my objection is the term “superior,” as in “men are physically superior to women.” But women live longer than men. If you’re buying an appliance, longevity may matter than power.
Secondly, while it’s a bit pedantic, men are better at almost all sports because those are the things we find interesting for the most part. Nobody wants to watch a competition on who has the best color vision. Many machines are much faster than people, but we still like watching people run competitively.
This is exactly what the Summers pile-on *was* failing to navigate, though, (and AIUI the Damore one too.)
I often think that we should consider whether such people were disliked before they made those comments. I've seen many such cases! People in power were kind of watching for an opportunity to fire someone and then they seize on a particular comment.
It's still bad, but it makes a fuller and therefore truer story.
Milan has some useful inside info on this downthread. That said, maybe don't seize on normative-vs-descriptive pretexts in bad faith, particularly in the context of academia?
I'm in California this week; I can't wake up early enough to comment 😭 !
A downstream consequence of progressives’ distaste for stochastic statements about gender (and racial) differences is these matters are often analyzed as jokes.
As always, the details matter a lot. Will we see a WNBA player make the jump to the mens side? Ehhh..... Similarly, Serena Williams could beat many of the mens tennis players, but I don't think she could beat the best of them. Sexual dimorphism does matter at the margins. But take a more complex sport like climbing. Improvements in training and equipment have closed the gap between men's and women's performance, with the best women climbers now at the level of the best men. Even in alpine climbing, which requires a combination of strength, stamina, patience and good judgment, women are doing routes much closer to those men are doing than would have been seen a decade or two ago. The 'inherent advantage' of being male very much depends on the sport.
Total tangent, but when I scanned your headline, I thought it said "Women's professional sports rise is good, actually," and was at first bummed that it was about an article that I couldn't even bear to read. Saw a Wisconsin Badgers women's hockey game last weekend, and it was fire.
Basically no one (even the authors of the academic work purporting to defend this claim, if you read closely) claims that male puberty and growth hormones don't help in sports. People who think trans women should be included in sports just don't think that's the only consideration.
I have done Twitter threads on the two purposes of women's sports (the inclusion argument is real!), but TBC, a lot of trans activist academics absolutely dress up their work to claim there are no relevant sex differences. Whenever they mention Michael Phelps they are doing exactly that. And they are lying.
I can't even comprehend how mentioning Michael Phelps can be part of their argument...
The basic point trying to be made, as I understand it, is that intra-gender difference in physiology and anatomy can be as large as inter-sex differences. Michael Phelps is anatomically built differently from me, a guy whose swimming career ended when I realized I look bad in shorts. There are many women who are between me and Michael Phelps in terms of swimming prowess, including literal female children. Despite the fact we are both male! Why, then, should gender be the construct around which sporting is divided, rather than individual capability?
Note, I do not have a Twitter, I do not know if I believe this argument, I'm just overall more sympathetic to the trans-inclusive position than most of this comment section and doing my best to be informative and fair in a way I don't see others being.
While elite women are better than the average (untrained) man, they are not better than amateur men. Without gender divisions, no women would compete in practically any athletic competition.
There's a thing activists do where they come up with a talking point and then just repeat it over and over as if it is serious analysis. And the trans movement has been particularly susceptible to that pathology:
Michael Phelps means there's no sex differences in sports!
Increases in youth transition rates are just like left handedness!
Lisa Littman's and Ray Blanchard's theories were "debunked".
It's a substitute for actual thinking. Part of it is of course just that actual analysis is complicated and it's hard to do activism around nuance. But there's also just a wish that the world would not require nuance, that we be able to pretend that it is all so simple and that our political enemies have no valid points at all.
So did they just make up the Michael Phelps talking point without any explanation why?
What is the argument that Micael Phelps means there's no sex differences in sports? That feels like you're leaving out the reasoning behind using whatever fact Michael Phelps represents. Which is denying us a chance to engage with your real argument: e.g., it appears you're doing a variation of the same thing.
Tangent: A long time ago, I saw an story claiming that Michael Phelps consumed 10,000 calories a day. Apparently this was exaggerated, and he probably only ate 4,000-6,000 calories a day, which is still SO MUCH FOOD. I remember a picture or a video of him eating a whole pizza in a meal.
I'm a bit obsessed with this.
You think that's a lot, learn about how much NFL linemen have to eat. They have very two divergent paths after they retire--the weakest let all that muscle turn into lots of fat, while the strongest lose tons of weight just from the relief of not having to eat that much, and get back to normal weight with different workouts.
I am surprised that that is all he ate. My brother was on a swim team, and we carpooled with a very high performing teen, but obviously not close to Phelps' level. This young man had trouble keeping on weight with over 4,000 calories a day.
You like mukbang don’t you?
I don’t understand why Dilan Esper doesn’t just state what the “activist” argument is.
When I’ve come across in online debates is something like this: Michael Phelps is so good at swimming because his body is exceptionally suited for swimming. He has very long arms and legs as well as long feet and hands.
It was rumored Phelps had a version of Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that can result in elongated feet, fingers, etc.
So, while Phelps is undoubtedly an exceptionally competitive and hard-working athlete, he started with genetic advantages in swimming that are conferred by his (possibly abnormal) genetics.
The argument then makes an Olympian leap to state that trans athletes who were born male benefit from male advantage in sports but this is no less fair than Phelps benefitting from his genetic advantages.
I think this is nonsensical when applied to trans people and I’ve only seen very online people make this argument on Twitter, etc.
There’s probably more validity to this when applied to intersex people.
I think it's more used for cases like Caster Semenya, who is a woman in the normal sense of "everyone identified her as a girl at birth and she'd lived into adulthood as a girl and then a woman", but has a DSD that makes some people argue that she's male and others that she's overly masculinised for fair competition. The counter argument is that she has a comparable advantage over women without her genetic variation to what Phelps has over other men, and why should it matter that the cause was sex variation rather than something else?
It seems more relevant for DSD athletes.
No, the point of bringing up Phelps is that some people have massive physical advantages that others competing against them won't ever have. Which is precisely the opposite of what you're saying.
The point is that they are claiming such differences are not sex based. They are just do to some people being outstanding athletes.
I do not think this is an accurate characterization of why people talk about Phelps. What they're saying is that in sex-separated sports we nonetheless accept wide differences in physical characteristics that are fundamental to the sport without thinking that makes it "unfair".
Separately there are people who try to claim that sex difference in sports is fake. Those people are wrong, and if you read what they say closely they don't even really believe it.
Agreed - I think here the issue is the "here are some things that are overstated but rooted in banally true observations, and taken together they add up to a civilizational threat" framing, not the banally true observations themselves.
This was the whole thesis of an article I read recently, that MAGA populism is basically system 1 thinking against system 2 thinking (ie. common intuition against analytical knowledge). Pretty interesting, but also a bit scary.
https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/populism-fast-and-slow?r=3j596
I think that’s true of populist politics in general. It’s designed and used by demagogues to get people’s emotions involved instead of their reason. This has been true since Ancient Athens and why demagogues are such a threat to Democracy. It works.
That's such a great article
A specific manifestation of this that drives me to madness, which feels rampant right now, is the use of surface level analogies that are very compelling / visceral but aren’t actually good analogues for the situation if you give it more than a second’s thought. I associate it very much with John Oliver (though in his defense he’s at least doing it for comedy, so maybe gets some leeway): “xyz policy would be like if we attached skis to a squirrel and sent him down a slide!” And it’s funny and makes the policy seem ridiculous (and often the policy truly is ridiculous) but a moment’s reflection realizes that’s actually a terrible parallel. The Economist made this point around Brexit when everyone was saying “no deal is better than a bad deal” but the idea of entering a deal was not actually a representation of the situation - it was closer to a divorce, where you’re already in an agreement and you have an option to exit it which will incur some downsides but may be worth it depending on the situation. I promise once you see this, it can’t be unseen and it’s everywhere! And it’s pernicious because the analogies are so convincing.
Edit: John Oliver not Jamie lol
I'm guessing you mean _John_ Oliver? :)
lol yes thank you
And also, you are commenting, not getting paid for your writing. So you can continue to do this all you want!
Yessssssss a free pass!
I think multiple things can be true:
1) it’s good that women have joined the workforce, both morally and economically
2) men and women are fundamentally different
3) these differences manifest themselves in group settings like workplaces, and these manifestations can be both good and bad
That’s a very banal point but to take the side of Andrews and McArdle, if toxic masculinity is a problem in some workforces (and I’d argue it is), then toxic femininity also likely is.
Yea, it's funny, I actually think a more interesting take would go up against McArdle's version of this rather than Andrew's. I'm in law which is becoming female dominated and I do not see this as a civilizational threat, not remotely. However I do think there are some issues that could be dealt with in two pretty straightforward ways which are:
(I) eliminate affirmative action in favor of women, to the extent it exists. When we've got education and other important sectors dominated by women it's a sign that these efforts are no longer necessary. The facts may have once supported it but they don't now.
(II) expressly codify that institutions where free exchange of ideas are important are not 'safe spaces.' This may not have been as necessary when everything was male dominated but it is now. That deals with the Summers situation, and also addresses what I thought was Andrews' strongest point, that being that it's fair game to attack and at a certain point legally actionable if a place is deemed too rough edged in a way that women may on average find less pleasant but is not if it's, in her words, run like a 'Montessori Kindergarten.' Women are fully capable of succeeding in these environments and the kinds of complaints that ultimately got Summers run out should actually get those who made them looked at like they have two heads.
I am in academia, which is also becoming increasingly female dominated and agree completely with these points.
I did also want to make an addendum to Matt's point about it being good that more qualified women are earning MDs now. I agree, but it does cause problems that women who earn MDs are disproportionately likely to later leave medicine or work part time. A growing number of the limited number of licensed physicians who either don't practice or work fewer hours contributes to the worsening physician shortage in many places in the US (coupled with the AMA's throttling the number of medical licenses granted every year).
https://www.aamc.org/news/women-are-changing-face-medicine-america
> coupled with Mama's throttling the number of medical licenses granted every year.
I think this is burying the lead. The implicit policy approach of the AMA that X doctors should work Y hours per doctor verse Y doctors should work X hours per doctor (where Y > X) is I'd claim in effect a gender biased approach at least in a field like medicine where the productivity is pretty tightly coupled to hours worked.
It's also been obvious to everyone for decades that the early career hourly requirements for doctors are bad for everyone. That problem would have still existed if there had been no change in the gender balance of the workplace.
I’ve encountered multiple care providers now that won’t hire part timers. They want either full timers or piecemeal fillins who dont get benefits. I don’t think it’s an AMA thing.
Agreed. I have also observed that anecdotally. My principle point is blaming the women doctors who want to work fewer hours seems like the wrong place to point blame from a normative perspective.
It is not in fact legally actionable for a workplace to be "rough edged". For something to be legally actionable it would have to be relevantly different for men and women and "everyone yells at each other" isn't that.
Yea, I understand what the law is, and I also understand the way corporate risk management works, particularly in white collar fields. You don't spend hundreds of thousands or millions litigating to a verdict you might still lose on the principle of the thing. You hire a bunch of well meaning HR people who are implicitly charged with morphing the culture into what you'd expect at a high end day care center, and use them as best you can next time someone from the labor and employment bar checks in for another game of settlement chicken.
I do not think this analogy suggests that you have an accurate assessment either of white collar work environments or day cares.
I'd also add that if that's what the C-suite is trying to do, then it becomes relevant to note that the C-suite at most companies remains very substantially *male*, not female.
You say this as though it's a counter-point!
Disagree.
Because of fear of lawsuits most corporations have taken a better safe than sorry strategy.
To be clear shutting down actual harassment is good.
But many companies have gone overboard and created a climate of fear in companies where they are worried that any little thing can and does get you in trouble.
This is understandable, but creates an unfun work environment.
I agree with this but since this has happened over the last 20-40 years when most C-Suites were run by men why is this feminization and why is the problem women which seems to be what Andrews is saying.
There's a lot of defensive medicine that gets engaged in by HR departments, beyond what can get an employer successfully sued.
I agree that lots of workplaces have rules that are not required by law.
Does that matter if someone gets reported to HR for yelling and creating a hostile work environment? Even if they’re not being accused of being discriminatory? If you’re called on the carpet to explain, you are already losing.
My point is that while it's true that yelling at the office is now disfavored, as the article discusses, this is not because of the requirements of employment or anti discrimination law.
I guess the legal action is a workplace that is exempted from anti-discrimination laws. (I.e. a big figurative sign that says “this workplace is a hostile one so you can’t sue us.”)
No it's not possible to declare that your workplace is exempt. It's that yelling is not a hostile environment.
To your earlier point, even if it were hostile, if it is just hostile to everyone a plaintiff is not likely to win a discrimination suit.
Most law practice isn’t debating ideas like a college debating club though, male norms like screaming at people make the practice a lot more unpleasant, especially given how contentious law and particularly litigation are inherently. Safe spaces and civility norms and rules are to stop personal attacks and intimidation not the expression of unpopular ideas. Most people would probably feel more comfortable speaking their mind in a Montessori kindergarten teacher than to an intimidating law firm partner or judge. The main problem with some women in law is that they overcompensate and act extra-masculine (e.g. mean, confrontational, hierarchical).
There's a difference to me between a "safe space" and a "civility norm"
Safe spaces have often been used in discussions of universities to talk about the _content_ of discussions (ideas etc) - vs a "civility norm" (at least to me) seems more about the _tone_ of discussions.
I think civility norms are important - I got early feedback in my career that because of my height combined with passion in arguing something I occasionally had inadvertently intimidated other people(and this was in games - NOT a female dominated workplace, especially in the early 2000s) - so I was careful to watch my TONE in the future.
But "safe spaces" seem to easily extend(at least in practice) to be used to shut down whole lines of discussion if they make people uncomfortable.
This is very well stated and exactly my point.
I wrote a blog post about how actually, I think it is okay for universities to prioritize student well being over faculty free speech. Most of our major universities list educating as their main mission. They accept tens of thousands of dollars from students in exchange for this service. Research is important to universities, but according to their missions, it is technically secondary. This has been true forever. Harvard's original statement of purpose in the 1600s was to educate. Back then it was to educate within the framework provided by Jesus. Different time...
https://open.substack.com/pub/elizarodriguez/p/universities-should-aim-to-fulfill?r=16xusl&utm_medium=ios
I would argue that exposure to disagreement is an essential part of education. If disagreement is enough to damage your well being, then you are not fit to be in the mission of truth seeking.
Agree with this in almost all cases.
I don't agree with this when free speech is used as a guise to protect professors that spout nonsense and don't apologize. For example, professors that say stuff like women aren't in their fields because they suck at math. That's not a research-based thought, it's just some crotchety old guy being all mad. But if you try to "cancel" the weird old guy because you think he's probably not teaching his female students equally, we protect him due to "free speech".
You need more evidence that the crotchety old guy is not teaching his female students equally than he makes a comment that women suck at math. It's also very fuzzy what "student well being" actually means. As a retired (female) faculty member, it has certainly been used to nefarious ends, so until we all are on the same page about what "student well being" looks like and how it's measured, I'm just going to disagree on principle.
Yes, I think evidence is necessary.
This is actually a prime example of the conceptual slide some comments are denying happens: unpalatable speech becomes prima facie suspicious speech.
I do agree that people saying bigoted nonsense should be disciplined, but I do think in doubtful cases, we should err on the side of free speech.
The weirdest thing about the Andrews article was the prescription. If you sincerely think, women are destroying Western civilization, then why are your prescriptions so meagre? And if your real problem is employment discrimination law being too zealous, then why not just say that?
Also, why should we listen to her at all if women are so poorly suited for academia? Aren't her thoughts just dumb girl thoughts?
"I don't agree with this when free speech is used as a guise to protect professors that spout nonsense and don't apologize."
Not to go all great books, but John Milton had a great line on this topic:, "I cannot praise a cloistered virtue." That's a little archaic, but the gist of it is that we cannot know that what's true unless we are allowed to hear what's false.
(Milton himself was, uh, inconsistent on the real-world applications of this and probably not someone I'd like much, but he had some other things going for him.)
Exposure to disagreement is an essential part of education and of research. Still, both of these missions proceed better if not *every* setting features the *same* disagreement. It can totally help both education and research if there are some settings where you can discuss and debate one set of ideas (including lots of intramural disagreements) while being safe from a particular set of hostile responses that these ideas tend to get in other settings.
I very much appreciate the willingness to take it head on and honestly. However I'd just say I disagree that it should be the priority. These places get lots and lots of tax payer money, even the private institutions, and they need to be run in a way that prioritizes the interests of the tax payer. I also think it's a mistake to assume that the the way these student well being issues are being handled is actually good for them.
Tax money from men, women, minorities... yes?
"I also think it's a mistake to assume that the the way these student well being issues are being handled is actually good for them." I address this is my post and generally agree that things like trigger warnings are not in students best interests. Exposure to tough situations is the best way to build resilience for tough situations.
I do think we should level the playing field. I shouldn't have to develop MORE of a thick skin to do well than my fellow classmates just to get the same education and support. That means choosing faculty who don't have records of saying stupid crap about women or minorities. I mostly mean stupid crap like off the cuff comments that reveal biased attitudes. But I also think universities should be very careful about what kind research they fund and who they invite to their campus. If I was in charge of hiring at a university, for example, I would say "no" to hiring Sam Harris because he goes around vehemently defending that research about Black people having lower IQs. I get a bad vibe from him. Why is defending that research so important to him? It wasn't even his research.
Ironically you're demonstrating some of the worst impulses used to restrict what people are hired. I don't even like Sam Harris, but "vibes" are irrelevant, either make an argument against his actual views, or leave it alone.
If you don't understand why this logic will ultimately hurt you, consider how many people don't like the vibes of feminists, or ethnic minorities, etc.
At the same time, what is hiring for "culture fit" if not hiring based on vibes? Can't speak to academia, but at least out here in the corporate world vibes have always been at least one component of why someone gets hired, often to the detriment of those already underrepresented.
Hiring based on vibes, even in academia, is the norm. Unless someone is a savant who refuses to share their research unless you hire them, there is no reason to hire someone who won't teach well. A man wouldn't hire another man who was smart but came in and insulted the university and acted real smug. Women have the same right not to hire someone who would treat them badly.
As best as I can tell the field is not only evened, but people who share your values are now running up the score. That suggests to me that you don't understand the value proposition for funding these institutions.
I majored in music and studied with highly sought out instructors. After I graduated with my masters in San Francisco, I saw an article where a man who plays oboe with the Boston Symphony but used to play in the SF Symphony gave advice to a young woman student of his auditioning for the San Francisco Symphony: "Play with virility because they're going to want to hire a man." "They", in this context, were my teachers.
That article was about Elizabeth Rowe, the principal flutist for the BSO, being the first in Massachusetts to sue under the then newly passed equal pay law. She was making $70,000 less than the oboe player in the article, despite being performing the most solos with the orchestra of any of their players for the past 15 years.
Then, two years later, I read an article about how the first female French horn player in the New York Philharmonic was drugged raped by two of her colleagues and then subsequently denied tenure after one of the rapists started a smear campaign. It turned out that this was an open secret among orchestra musicians. I know because I texted my friend who now plays in the San Francisco Symphony asking if my teachers knew this when they invited that rapist to come teach for us.
They knew. What they got in return was that one of their players got to skip the audition process for one of the NY Phil's upcoming auditions and just perform with the orchestra as an "audition".
It's not equal.
I think the root of a lot of issues with universities is that they are increasingly used as semi-vocational training for people who have no interest in academia and also for teaching future scholars and driving educated discussion of complex problems and these just aren't the same purpose. If we split those goals into different institutions we could just let each one specialize in its role without stepping on each others' toes. Not sure it would be worth it overall though, it would probably cause its own problems
You mentioning being in law makes me wonder what Jeanie Suk Gerson thinks of this, generationally. Here's her and three other law profs, all female, Gerson, who's in her 50s, the youngest: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-revolt-of-the-feminist-law-profs/
I like that Matt says explicitly that there are interpersonal differences and that cultural differences should be examined. That's more responsible than Andrew's bomb throwing (one could argue she's pulling a feminine version of Chris Rufo's schtick)
Meghan Daum had Andrews on her podcast and instead of throwing bombs these three points were what Andrews was emphasizing. So perhaps in the written article Andrews was pumping up the flames to ensure the article got more attention?
Almost certainly.
She was owning the libs.
There is absolutely such a thing as toxic femininity. You see articles about it all the time in publications aimed at women.
But in my observation and experience, when you're a guy and you're in a space that is suffering from toxic femininity, the toxic women usually deploy that toxicity against each other and leave you alone. Not so with the roles are reversed.
Also, whether we're talking about toxic masculinity or toxic femininity, for either to arise in force the environment usually has to be *heavily* male or female, not just 55-45 or whatever (obviously this is a necessary and not a sufficient condition). There just aren't that many heavily female settings with a glass ceiling for men. Usually men don't even want to be in these settings/industries/workplaces, toxic or not.
To paraphrase a half-remembered stand-up bit, you hear more men talking about their crazy exes than women because a crazy ex-boyfriend more often gets filed under "sex offender" or "violent felon". The badness is equally distributed, but one manifests in much more direct danger!
Yes. Crazy ex-boyfriends are certainly not great material for a comedy routine.
Tbh sometimes it can be kind of fun when you are safe from "toxic femininity"
It would be amazing if we could just name the bad behavior. Like: I absolutely do think there's a real cultural battle over what it means to be a man.
But in the meantime, if you think "getting so out of control with your rage that you scream at your coworker is unprofessional, stop doing that", I think the easiest way to convince a lot of people is on the merits - sidestepping how it relates to gender.
I wonder how men would score on neuroticism if anger was included in that category. I assume it is somewhat covered in agreeableness, but only if people take out their anger on others.
The Big Five splits the feeling of anger from the expression of anger.
The feeling is a subcategory of the neuroticism measure and the expression is a subcategory of the agreeableness measure.
The relevant Neuroticism subcategory you're looking for is N2:
N1: Anxiety
N2: Angry Hostility
N3: Depression
N4: Self-Consciousness
N5: Impulsiveness
N6: Vulnerability
The relevant agreeableness subcategory is A4:
A1: Trust
A2: Straightforwardness
A3: Altruism
A4: Compliance
A5: Modesty
A6: Tender-Mindedness
People quibble about almost all aspects of the big five (what to call it, how to group the traits etc.). They stick with it because something roughly like the Big Five seems to pop out of the data empirically in multiple different scenarios.
Interesting! Thanks. I think they should put bottled up anger in neuroticism and make angry hostility count against agreeableness
It’s covered in the negative emotions bit. Men generally get angry easier/more often. Experience other negative emotions less.
I feel like Matt and Megan are largely saying the same things.
Megan leaned way more into discussing toxic femininity than Matt did, which as Allan says is a very banal point--both sexes have toxic people, and since women and men have common difference, so too will there be sexed toxicity.
I don’t think it’s banal at all at this point, though it should be. I think our cultural moment is just starting to admit this as a possibility, whereas for the last 15 years’ discussion of toxic masculinity, there was zero acceptance of the same thing in femininity.
That isn't credible. Mean Girls is over 20 years old! The main thing that's changed is not a realization that toxic femininity exists or is bad, but that it can be used as a weapon by women in positions of power. Which in turn is mainly because women being in positions of power is factually a new phenomenon.
I feel like toxic masculinity is a concept used by less mature people though? Like, teens and college students? I don't think I've ever actually referred to someone or some people as having toxic masculinity. So I'm not really impressed by people who use the phrase toxic femininity, either. I just mean, it's not high level discourse...
Fair--at least banal to typical Slow Borers.
I'm really tired of pieces that present false dichotomies as the only truth. Obviously, the best workplaces and societies are co-built by men and women.
Also, as a side note, I'm tired of women's social aggression being coded as agreeableness. It ain't agreeable.
Great piece. I think the conclusion hits hardest though. Of course Andrews isn't going to advocate getting women out of workplaces-- not only would her own career be threatened, but the American public would run the conservative movement out on a rail if they called for this.
So she ends up in this ridiculous place where she's claiming we are going to civilizational hell but also proposing we do nothing real to stop it, which suggests that her real purpose was just to troll the Left and get some reactions, which, of course, she did.
Right, if your real purpose was just to troll the left and get some reactions — then... tweet? So many words for no real conclusion.
Well Compact paid her to publish a long tweet. Great work if you can get it. :)
Watching sports is an obvious way to see that professional trolls exist and for better or worse will be sustainable. Over there it's overwhelmingly on radio and podcasts.
Skip I want to ADDRESS this issue. You KNOW I don't really want to expel women from the workplace.
Wow, that's a blast from the memetic past.
Skip, you say? This is the very rare day, only once every four years, when I can stomach listening to him, as he has to eat the crow he always does once every four years.
Matt Twitter Post from ages back I wish I’d screen-shotted: “Most books should have been articles, most articles should have been tweets”
And most Tweets should be expressed privately to a friend at 1:38 am
On the other hand, if a long format article like this provokes a lot of cultural discussion, and gives rise to some long format responses that make good points, it may well end up being a good thing for our overall intellectual health.
This is how the history of ideas works, and it’s why it’s really important that there are institutional incentives for the publication of academic work that is stimulating but likely incorrect. Truth doesn’t mostly come out of ideally truth seeking individuals, but out of communities motivated by real human motivations that are structurally tilted towards truth in the long run, even if not in the short run.
Feel like this is all over the right these days. "No-fault divorce is ruining civilization!!" "So if elected you are planning to end no-fault divorce?" "I'm not saying THAT!!"
"Don't Look Up" may have been a bad movie, but at least the scientist characters in that were actually trying to stop the approaching asteroid instead of just trying to nibble around it's edges.
I don't think this is quite accurate: she quietly proposes some concrete actions at the end of the article, though they are somewhat obfuscated:
> Thankfully, I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power.
That's written to be vague, perhaps intentionally, but she can really only be advocating two things, right?
* Eliminating disparate impact as a standard for establishing sex discrimination.
* Removing or severely curtailing title VII hostile workplace protections.
Yes, but she asserts without evidence that e.g. the rise of women to 55% of M.D. matriculants is due to some form of affirmative action, and restoration of a "level playing field" would "correct" it. Her policy proposal would not have the impact she is hoping it would.
While I’m not sure about discrimination in acceptance rates, I do know that there are many, many initiatives starting for girls when they’re young to encourage them into STEM fields. The same is not true of boys, and I think it’s a fair argument that that’s its own kind of discrimination or at least neglect, as Richard Reeves talks about in Of Boys and Men.
Serious question: Is STEM the thing to encourage boys to do to be the equivalent of what we promote for girls?
Boys already do a fair amount of STEM - is there a more female dominated profession that we want to highlight to those boys who might actually enjoy doing it, if they thought about it?
Teaching? (Unsure how to get kids fired up about this though)
I think that’s a great question. My understanding from Reeves’ work is that the problems men and boys are experiencing are significantly concentrated in socioeconomically less advantaged groups. In that case, I think any initiative that encourages boys to strive for higher education and professional careers is good.
Reeves also mentions teaching being a great thing to encourage men to go into, as male teachers are especially influential and positive for boys. Psychology is another area that’s tilted extremely female over the years, and beyond whatever that means for the profession, I think most people agree it’s good for men to have male therapists available.
Nursing? Good money being made there.
I don't understand how this responds to what I wrote.
A lot of people are attacking the article by claiming she's just trolling. I think that's mistaken and it would be better to either argue that no remedy is necessary (which I think you're doing) or argue about her proposals.
Her issue is not specifically with sex discrimination legal standards or title vII, it’s with the whole idea of elite professions being “feminized” (which in the case of law or medicine seems to mean 50/50ish representation).
I think either of those proposals could be debated but neither will achieve what she wants since women go to college at much higher rates now.
The only way to go back to a medical profession like 1990 is massive affirmative action for men.
I agree, and I don't mean to be clever (or "clever"), but that sounds like a reason to consider giving up some formal protections.
That's not to say that it's wholly persuasive on its own. For my part, I think disparate impact should be downgraded, but I'm skeptical of reducing title VII protections and don't know enough about the jurisprudence to offer an informed opinion.
As a lawyer, I will say that I think the non-lawyer public significantly overestimates how easy it is to win employment discrimination litigation (by like at least one or two orders of magnitude).
I think this overestimation is downstream from a lot of modern HR policies in corporate America which, at their core, exist to protect the company from litigation.
You could make it even harder for plaintiffs to win these cases, but the effect would likely just be to foreclose restitution for cases with actual merit, while HR departments wouldn't get any less stringent/annoying because of corporate America's general love of cost control.
I kind of think with the way the culture is going disparate impact is likely to recede fairly strongly either way, so maybe it makes sense for Democrats to just be with that. Though again I'm skeptical how much of a difference this will make for much of anything.
She may well support those legal changes but surely she should be read as advocating for broader cultural change.
At my job, I would get in trouble—and possibly fired, if I did any of the following:
1) said I was going to hire a 30 year old man rather than a woman who just moved to the suburbs with her husband because I was worried about disruptive maternity leave (or directly addressed the issue at all).
2) said I agreed with Damore type theories for why we have fewer senior investors
3) in any way pushed back on efforts to increase senior female representation and related programs
4) made even pretty mild off color jokes outside of some carefully selected groups
5) questioned whether diversity actually improved returns and asked for data on that assumption,
6) took a client to a bar with cocktail waitresses,
7) said someone did something “stupid” let alone “retarded” or similar levels of insulting speech (even if it was in fact stupid).
Only some of these are illlegal. I think Andrew’s opposes any of them being sanctionable, and in fact thinks culture should chill out on all of them (and more). Thats how I read her argument anyway, and I worry we would be trading one set of stifling office norms for the return of a lot of unpleasant behavior and impossible situations for (competent and valuable) parents.
Your final point is especially good and worth bearing in mind.
Having said that, IANAL but a cursory search suggests that every single one of those actions (or close approximations) has been used as evidence in hostile workplace lawsuits. Even if they aren't specifically prohibited they are too risky to tolerate. I don't know what the solution is to that, precisely. As I said elsewhere, giving up on title VII protections doesn't seem wise to me, and I don't have any other idea about how to mitigate them.
Additionally, I think it's worth observing that Andrews is saying that society ought to tolerate *some* companies where a different set of unpleasant norms prevail, not that everyone should turn 180 degrees overnight. Personally, I doubt those would spread very far, much less dominate, now that the frat-house style monopoly has been broken.
So I think if these are her suggestions, then they're as ineffective as legislatively "shutting doors in women's faces" is evil. But I don't think these are her suggestions.
What I've personally noticed as a non-lawyer is that in areas like this - say, content moderation or privacy on social media platforms - there are a million little technicalities that develop into de facto law on the basis of a) what the corporate lawyers tell each other and see each other doing; and b) how judges interpret the law when ruling on specific cases.
A good example is the various anti-bias trainings. There's no law that says that companies must have anti-bias trainings, or that they should be produced in the most braindead, often anti-empirical way possible. But entrepreneurial anti-racism salespeople starting selling them to companies worried about lawsuits, one thing led to another, and now they're literally never going to leave our lives no matter how much evidence accumulates that they're in fact counterproductive.
Now even here, I'd claim that Andrews among others overrates the importance of these norms and hence their legal underpinnings. I think what we need is a cultural shift - for example, the academics claiming explicitly that it's legitimate to lie in your scholarship if you lie in the service of a just cause should have been thrown out of academia a long time ago. The next best time to do it is now. No laws need to be changed, no protections undermined. Leaders simply need to lead - to say "this is what our organization is trying to achieve, this is what our institution is for, and if you don't like it you can get out."
I +1'ed because I strongly agree with everything after the first paragraph.
But disagree that the suggestions I attributed to Andrews would have zero results. They would change incentives significantly. (Though to reiterate, I have little confidence that straight-up renouncing hostile workplace standards would have positive outcomes.)
As I wrote below, what was done to stop male-dominated fields and institutions from being rampant with sexual harassment and worse - and, as Matt points out, less severe problems like tons of yelling at the office? Nobody passed a law saying you must not yell in the office, and what Harvey Weinstein did was illegal before MeToo as much as after.
What changed was the culture. It's hard to say that we should engineer a cultural shift, or how we would even attempt to do so. But similarly with respect to developed-nation birthrates and fertility, the response I see - from Matt and others - is "we've tried nothing and we're all out of options!" because for some reason they assume that the only option is to literally legislate misogyny. I just don't get why Matt and/or you Dilan are making that assumption.
Outstanding article, Matt. I think too many have been too credulous about Andrews's article, yet also too many critiques of it have been too dismissive. It's really good to have this laid out in quite descriptive terms of what's been play, beginning and ending with the very important assertion that the past century or so of women being able to enter the workforce and leadership positions on more equal grounds is Very Good, Actually, and how it would be a nightmare to roll that back. Integration with the sexes brings out the better in both sexes, and the remaining holdout just need to deal with it and join the ride toward betterment.
“How it would be a nightmare to roll that back”.
This phrase is actually what gives me hope in this dark moment we are in with the second Trump term. Because it seems really clear to me that people like Pete Hesgeth, Stephen Miller and Russ Vought really truly believe in trying to move the country back to the 1950s. As in women should have rights stripped away to what they had in the 50s and 50s style law and attitude on race (I honestly think it would be difficult to make an argument that Pete Hesgeth is not a 50s style White Supremcist based on available evidence)
Think my point, even among just GOP voters, many of whom probably don’t have the most modern enlightened 2025 views on race and gender, actually don’t want to turn back the clock to the 50s to this stuff.
I’ve mentioned before that I support Matt’s contention that Dems need to be ok with senate candidates with moderate stances on culture issues to win senate seats. But I think that sometimes gets conflated with “Trump administration policies on social issues has popular support” which I really don’t think is true.
In this world, I would have to get a new doctor, lawyer, dentist, and accountant. That would just be annoying. As a guy, how would this somehow make my life better? And that's not even getting ethics and my professional life.
I think dismissiveness is generally a good attitude towards work of that quality. Given that it's gone viral, detailed responses like Matt's are useful, but a serious hearing should be reserved for people who actually try to say things that are sensible.
In this week's questions thread, @drosophilist asks what kinds of things we can do to support voters that lean more towards "common sense" thinking than the analytic style, in order to draw people away from the temptations of populism.
Actual engagement should be high on that list, which would demonstrate a touch of winning humility.
Dismissiveness of people genuinely asking questions, even dumb ones, is a bad idea. But there's a big difference between people who we shouldn't dismiss because they should be brought around to a better way of thinking, and right wing hacks with prestigious media jobs.
Andrews is their representative. They understand that our treatment of her predicts how their own opinions will be treated.
Maybe if she was getting fired for saying that stuff. I'm skeptical that otherwise it is relevant to anyone else.
Wait, I don't follow. We're talking about whether popular ideas should be dismissed, not cancelation dynamics. They're related, but cancellation is a significant escalation.
To be fair, if what Andrews is saying wasn’t sensible - perhaps not in the way you’re thinking about it, admittedly - it would not resonate, and hence would not be going viral.
Dismissiveness is exactly the culprit that has sowed all of our divisions.
No that's not true. Lots of things go viral despite not being sensible at all.
How about "plausible" or "resonant"?
To bring in a different thread, chemtrails-type stuff goes viral. Q-anon is viral. Obviously anything that is popular is resonant in some sense for many people but that doesn't really imply anything.
Agree, sometimes implausible stuff goes viral for "what are they hiding from you" hook
You are correct that there are definitely cases of memes and other media that go viral while lacking the sensibility we’re talking about. I feel it’s disingenuous for you to point out this fact, when clearly this is not the case regarding Andrews, and it’s fairly clear her arguments are resonant with a certain segment of the population that you are apparently very eager to dismiss, and thus do not fit the category in which you’re trying to assign them.
Given the fact that the left has had major issues winning elections, despite their opposing political party being headed by a known con-man doing his best as-seen-on-tv-impression of an authoritarian, doing their best to hand victory to their opponents,
perhaps it would be more wise for the left to generally consider a few potentially helpful tactics that may actually end up bolstering them in the long run: Look more inward, be less inclined towards dismissal, and be more geared towards understanding why some of these ideas you find to be so asinine end up carrying water with others who don’t share your beliefs.
What the left has been doing since at least 2016 is not working very well. As obvious as it is to you and most reading this post this far that our President is indeed a con-man, it is at least equally obvious, if not more, to those who somehow are able to look past him being a con-man that you and everyone else on the left are complete idiots who will undoubtedly (to them) run this country into the ground if handed power.
But you’re probably right - just ignore some more. That will probably work out ok too.
I do not think that the secret to beating Donald Trump is to take right wingers claiming that women have ruined the country more seriously. That does not seem like the kind of common sense advocates by this publication.
"It takes two people to lie, Marge. One to lie and one to listen."
To be clear, that was where my attitude was going, especially as her article went on and on. But this is why Matt is a better writer and reader than I, and I'm glad he stood up to a productive challenge.
> Integration with the sexes brings out the better in both sexes,
I've definitely found this to be true for my research group. I even had one female group member complain once that it was getting out of balance *in favor of* women, and I should look for more men to join.
Having moved from a very female-dominated space (education nonprofits) to a male-dominated one (engineering), being able to stop couching every critique in a compliment sandwich was such a massive relief. And I am a woman.
No one in my engineering job yells at each other even though it’s 75%+ men. We just disagree. Yelling and compliment sandwiches are only two extremes, not the only options.
My wife works in education nonprofits, and it seems so exhausting. A significant fraction of total work hours are devoted to managing everyone’s feelings about everything. Also a lot of money for external consultants and mediators. It’s quite sad — I strongly believe in the mission of the org, but I would never in a million years donate to them.
Would be interesting to get your perspective as a woman- do men take criticism fairly well? Or do they get defensive?
This is a bit of a stretch, but it makes me think of German vs. American culture. I'm an American but my best friend's Mom growing up was a German immigrant, and they're famously direct, blunt, and critical. Everything was couched as a (to my ears) somewhat harshly-stated order. But supposedly the book on Germans is that they don't *take* criticism well and get defensive. No idea how their society works with that combination
A common pattern I see is
1) Person tells guy he made a mistake
2) Guy gets angry, goes quiet and doesn't respond, fumes silently, exits situation
3) Guy calms down, admits to himself he made a mistake, tries to change behavior
4) Guy never admits publicly that he was wrong
I feel incredibly seen. I’m quietly seething at my desk.
One thing I've become pretty attuned to from hanging out with eastern Europeans is that there's a difference between being blunt and lacking a filter. They often sound the same to Americans, but they're really quite different. The former is reasoned feedback delivered directly. The latter often includes insults of one form or another (direct or implied) and is generally less well reasoned. I'm guessing that Germans can handle bluntness but not unfilteredness. (My experience is that, while some cultures handle unfilteredness better than others, none handle it well, and it leads to a bunch of stupid interpersonal conflicts because people dish it out but can't take it.)
"No idea how their society works with that combination"
Well, they've had some problems in the past.
My guess is that there's no female-dominated field that's as female as education nonprofits.
The best balance is probably a majority-female space that wasn't traditionally female and that attracts a lot of ambitious high-achievers, like medicine or law, maybe architecture? accounting? Then you can kind of approximate the best of both worlds.
Daycares might be more female. For office work I can’t think of anything that would skew stronger than ed nonprofits, though.
i don't think compliment sandwiches are even considered best practice if you are trying to couch a criticism... you are supposed to end with an action item. otherwise the recipient of the critique will just decide they don't need to change anything lol.
I think that's slightly different, but agreed that good feedback should be actionable. Otherwise you're just lashing out/venting.
I wouldn’t think that compliment sandwiches are as extreme as actual yelling.
I'm basically in agreement with Matt on this one. Andrews is pointing towards real things, but basically in a shoddy way.
What Matt doesn't touch on that I think is maybe the biggest deal is the gender polarization of the political parties. The "feminization"/agreeableness run amok/woke/SJW/political correctness/identitarian/etc thing that came to dominate the Democratic party, and has pushed men towards the Republican party in turn, is a political catastrophe for all sides. This flavor of "feminized" orientation is incredibly corrosive to liberalism and it's institutions, as Matt briefly notes on the 1st Amendment. I think it goes well beyond the 1st Amendment and that we've seen in practice that it has severe implications for things like due process as well. The Democrats as an institution badly need to re-incorporate a stronger culture of rational-elightenment style thinking and procedures, because they cannot be a viable opposition to illiberalism as long as this style of polarization remains the dominant political cleavage.
As Matt noted, Trump is engaging in a massive state assault on free speech. Women may dislike disagreement and prize conformity more than men and so create different social vibes in spaces they dominate but are probably also less likely to use state power to throw people in jail or deport them over disagreements. The latter if what’s illiberal.
Correct, gender polarization has been extremely bad for both parties. The Trumpian style of bullshit machismo is incredibly illiberal and toxic. Countering the illiberal threat requires depolarizing around these particular tendencies because the resulting dynamics are so toxic and tend to overwhelm more productive concerns and disagreements..
I think it's critical to note that Trump has changed the focus of the state assault on free speech - but, laundered through Title VI rulemaking, hostile environment harassment suits, and so on, there's been a huge amount of government pressure on free speech for the last 30 years. (See Eugene Volokh's work for a great deal of detail on this.)
To be fair, the Republicans as an institution *also* badly need to reincorporate a stronger culture of rational enlightenment style thinking and procedures. Both parties used to have more of this, and this was always a non-gendered thing. Feminists raised a series of critiques of it in the late 20th century, which were real and meaningful ones, but some of which went way too far. Right now we are seeing a different masculinist critique of it that I think hasn’t produced anything as valuable, but is also going way too far.
I’m a computer programmer and some of the ways this has played out in my field left a bitter taste in my mouth:
1) I found the Damore firing pretty shocking. Not just that he got fired but the extreme language some respectable people used to defend and justify it (which, iirc, basically amounted to: if you noticed that gender personality differences existed and were important you were a bad person. Which IMO doesn’t even type check - beliefs about facts don’t implicate morality).
2) Programming is around 20% women. The sub fields I have been particularly interested in are more like 1-5% women. This has made me very negative towards “disparate impact” arguments that assume something nefarious is going on when fields are not 50% women; as far as I can see nothing nefarious is going on (although I’m sure being “the only woman in the room” is sometimes uncomfortable).
3) I haven’t seen this directly but my understanding is some groups (especially in open source) have weaponized “codes of conduct” to enforce an ideological monoculture (not totally sure this has to do with “feminization”, but I think so?)
4) There are a fair number of women-only things to try and get more women into programming. Feels a little bad to be excluded. At times I think this has ventured into “illegal pro-woman hiring discrimination”, which IMO is quite bad.
My impression is that none of this has moved the needle much in terms of what percentage of computer programmers are women.
An interesting historical note about Damore is that after his firing Matt, Ezra Klein, and Sarah Kliff discussed it on The Weeds (https://www.vox.com/2017/8/10/16119014/the-weeds-podcast-google-sexism-prescription-drugs-doctor-training). Matt and Ezra both agreed that Damore's memo basically argued that "we should be sexist assholes" and his firing was justified; Sara talked about the research on the gender wage gap. In other words, the two men on the podcast responded with catty gloating and the one woman responded with cold hard data.
I was junior engineer at Google at the time of the Damore firing and without particular inside information I came to the conclusion that Google fired Damore because he created and exasterbated a huge PR scandal for Google more so than because of the per se content of what he wrote. While I don't think he leaked the document, he unequivocally was litigating the matter very publicly between when the document leaked and when Google fired him. There's a massive difference between slamming your employer behind closed doors and doing so in national news stories.
I don’t really mind if Google wants to fire him for causing bad PR; it’s cowardly but I guess companies can want good PR.
But I did mind a lot of the subsequent commentary about how suggesting women might be less interested in being software engineers made him a bad person who women should not have to work with.
I didn’t realize this at the time but apparently people tried to get him black listed from the industry: https://x.com/kelseytuoc/status/1884702831451754548?s=46&t=UlLg1ou4o7odVYEppVUWoQ
Cool thread! I had no idea Kelsey was tangentially involved in the whole thing. And yeah blacklisting is totally different than firing.
That said where I'd push back is that I don't necessarily think it was cowardly for Google to fire him. I really do think if Damore had not doubled down on his document in national news outlets he at least 50/50 would not have been fired. Especially so if he had said something like: "the document is being taken out of context, I don't think women are worse engineers than men and I'm sorry this hurt people."
It's not that different than if he somehow got national news coverage talking about YouTube being terrible for creating echo chambers. It's not evil to do so, but like you aren't really earning your keep either and it's reasonable to not employ someone who is harming the bottom line.
It’s been a while so I may be misremembering but I don’t remember him talking to the national media at all (before he got fired). I thought he posted it internally and someone else leaked it and then he got fired without really doing much else. That seems to line up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber
Yikes. You seem to be right on that fact and I am seemingly misremembering. My apologies for not doing a better fact check.
I do sort of stand by the PR problem point and that there is more to the story than he was purely fired for the precise contents of the document, but I'm not sure if I want to wade into it further. I can but not sure it's useful.
Were apologies something that still worked during that time period? I thought we'd already shot past any extension of grace by then.
I remember the Damore thing. I was a sophomore CS major at the time. I feel like I was the only one who actually read Damore's writing. I was woke-lite back then (now I'm fairly anti woke) and even then I didn't see anything that was actually fire-able worthy.
If anything the liberal media coverage made Damore sound way more sexist than he "was". That's when I first realized that you can't trust the mainstream media.
Damore never claimed that women shouldn't be computer programmers, that women can't be good computer programmers, that women can't be interested in or talented at programming. I don't think he ever even implied that the female software devs at Google were all crappy affirmative action hires.
Damore actually suggested changes to tech that would make the field more friendly to women and help with female dev retention like offering more part-time work for moms.
Can you link an example of one of these codes of conduct? I haven't heard of anything like this.
The most recent example that came to my attention was https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a-core-developer/60250, where Tim Peters was banned from Python for 3 months for not very much.
I think this is the relevant code of conduct: https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/ (although I think this document reads as pretty innocuous)
That's how these things work- they read as bland, innocuous nonsense that make you think "did this really need to get spelled out?" so people agree to it without much thought. Especially the engineers who are focused on programming, not writing legal papers or doing degrees in feminist studies.
But then they put a committee in charge of enforcing those things. And the committee is made up of the sort of person who *does* write legal papers and academic feminist essays. Usually they have an explicit goal of increasing the number of women in tech, which means replacing men with women.
They put in place a system where anyone can report anyone, at any time, to the committee. The committee has broad power to do whatever it wants to enforce the code of conduct, including firing or banning people from life. The accused has no right to a lawyer, or to face his accusor, or even to know the details of what he's being accused of. There is certainly no "innocent until proven guilty." Usually, the number of accusations towards someone is taken as evidence that it must be true.
This has had exactly the sort of chilling effect on discourse that Helen Andrews discusses in her essay. You can't just "be wrong," or "agree to disagree," everyone knows that you can get fired from these things for almost any reason because you pissed off the wrong person.
Great piece! Regarding gender differences in various professional fields—at what point are we ok with the equilibrium that establishes itself through people exercising their free choices, or do we think there should always be efforts to boost representation in fields with a significant skew in one direction or another, and is this good policy? I could see that it might be a good idea to keep up some kind of integrative efforts so that people who are inclined towards opposite-gender-skewed fields don’t give into self-doubt or feeling out of place by pursuing a career more typical of the opposite gender.
My immediate take is to just encourage kids to get involved in things that they like, and support them to that. It's likely true that some professions will regularly slant to 9ne sex or the other, but being supportive and saying that it's fine and good for anyone to cut against that slant seems wise to me.
I think it’s really hard to know how close to gender equilibrium we are—and there is always a danger in assuming the gender norms of today, whenever today is, are an accurate reflection of what’s coded into our biology.
My wife works in tech. She has definitely worked for tech firms where her experience was similar to Matt’s sister-in-law’s as an electrician. How much of the gender skew in tech and electrician work today is about innate abilities and preferences rooted in biology, and how much is about socialized norms both in education and then in the workplace culture of those fields? I’d just be hesitant to give up on pro-integrative efforts when the latter still seems to play a notable role in many, many professions.
My assumption for some of these - like tech firms, is that you have something (NUMBERS MADE UP) like an "ideal" balance of 30% women 70% men(because men are more interested in it). But when you're a woman working for a company that is 30% women 70% men, then, without effort, it may be a slightly less pleasant working environment for you because of gender differences... so 5% leave and you get to 25% women 75% men. And now the skew makes it more likely that one of your male colleagues will doing something borderline and make you feel uncomfortable... so we slip a bit more until only the _most_ dedicated/interested women are still there.
Efforts to lambast people for failing to get to 50/50 will fail (some companies can achieve it but the industry as a whole wouldn't), but efforts to make sure that women at a 20/80 company feel comfortable to work are still important.
In my experience most women prefer a workplace with more men, but I work in healthcare, which is full of estrogen as is.
I'm also a woman who works in tech. I started out in a scientific field despite considering going into tech because the workplace culture seemed like one that was not very pleasant for women. I knew a bunch of guys who were going into tech who would make gross comments about women as if it was no big deal. Think asking a woman they'd just met her bra size and then insisting the woman is overreacting for getting upset. I did not want to work with people like that even though coding was interesting. I also didn't really fit into the nerd culture, so I'd be left out along with a lot of men who weren't into that type of nerd culture. A man would be more likely to shrug and go into tech anyway. A woman is more likely to conclude she's going to be perpetually left out and decide to find another field. Unfortunately, we don't know how much of the underrepresentation of women in tech is due to that rather than simply not being interested in tech in general.
"I don't want to do a job that I'm not good at" vs. "I don't want to do a job because I don't feel welcome there / because my coworkers are assholes" are both free choice. The challenge is to figure out how to leave room for (1) while reducing (2). It would be nice to see, on the one hand, less misogyny or outright harassment in things like construction and electrical work (per Matt's anecdote), and on the other hand, a healthier social context for men with more "feminine" traits (empathy, gentleness, "bedside manner") in things like education and nursing.
How do you do that? Dunno. Maybe we reach that equilibrium after a long-enough time without policy intervention. Maybe the better gentle hand on the scale is through pop culture that tells more stories of empathetic male teachers/nurses or tough/badass women construction workers...?
It’s not even a well-defined problem. Say a man would be fine being a nurse, but doesn’t want to be in a female dominated profession. Is that because (1) he wants to have coworkers like himself, (2) he’s worried he wouldn’t vibe well in a female-dominated environment, (3) he’s worried about his coworkers isolating him or singling him out, (4) he’s worried about the reputational effects of working in a female dominated environment, (5) the idea never occurred to him because of a lack of role models, (6) he’s perfectly happy in another profession and some random assignment pattern differentially affects the genders (say women like the idea of nursing more even if they don’t enjoy it more and aren’t better at it). These and a million other things could cause an observed discrimination pattern, and other than banning overt harassment it’s basically impossible to tease out the “good” and “bad” causes even if we could agree on them (is it a bad thing if nursing advertisements heavily represent the women that work there?)
Most male nurses are gay, but they and their strength are much appreciated on the unit!
I feel like every movie about a teacher reaching out to a class of troubled youth with bad grades features a male teacher. "Let's make action movies/shows with cool female leads who punch stuff" was a running theme through the 90s and 00s. I liked both of these things and I think they made a difference, though they seem to have subsided a little recently. Or maybe they just don't feel as special anymore, I don't know.
My question about this is whether the free choice is actually free. I know a 20-something woman like Matt's electrician SIL. She trained in construction and loved the work and the apprenticeship, but when she got to a "real" job where supervisors weren't working to beef up the number of people going into the profession like in her apprenticeship, she decided the pain and ostracism weren't worth her while. She "freely" chose to move to an office job, and now uses her skills to renovate her and her relatives' houses. This was around 2023, so not old news.
Of the three letters in DEI, inclusion always felt the most obvious to me. Making people feel welcome shouldn't be that hard.
I don't think you can make general rules about whether there should 'always' be efforts one way or the other. In education, for example, I think most people's intuition about kindergarten is that male teachers are not as good or appropriate as female ones (even though I've seen first hand some amazing make kindergarten teachers), whereas I think a lot of people agree that by elementary school age, it's a problem if boys don't get to see any positive male role models. This isn't about 'ability' but just general social senses, norms and expectations. Ultimately I think you have to focus on what you're trying to achieve in a particular area and then consider whether 'efforts to boost representation' would help or not.
This is a great piece! Was it ever explicit though that the education system relied on excellent female expertise? I remember Little House on the Prairie books fondly, and I don't think any system that got 14 yos to teach was relying on anything other than warm bodies!
Edit: Also, did the school system really expect mums to stay at home? State education really kicked off at the end of the 19th century in the UK, and for poorer pupils (most of them), their parents including mum would have been working long hours. Kids were expected to make their own way to and from school even in the era of stay at home mums.
Certainly in places like Germany mums are apparently expected to be at home at 12pm to cook a nutritious lunch for their kids before they head back to school, but that was never the expectation in either the UK or the US to my knowledge!
I can't speak to American education, but an interesting element of the French education system is that it was seen as a real manly man kind of pursuit, because following its full secularization and systematization in 1881 (but also prior to that), there was a pretty explicit ideological imperative to "institute" the Republic (from which the generic term for a schoolteacher, "instituteur") and turn "peasants into Frenchmen." The "teaching as embodying virile civic virtue" framing was quite explicit.
In my teaching I often use the example of Charles Péguy, who was a prominent early-20th century republican intellectual, who wrote an influential essay that uses the metaphor of "hussards noirs" - a badass 15th century Hungarian calvary regiment - to describe the Third Republic's teaching corps (the essay is also incredibly homoerotic - clearly the young Péguy's teachers, uh, made an impression on him).
That's not to say that there weren't a lot of female teachers (edit: there was even a full parallel école normale track for female teachers after 1880), and now the system is something like 2/3 female if I recall correctly. But since it was professionalized and ideologically charged from the beginning, teaching was not traditionally seen as a feminized pursuit.
There are plenty of counterexamples if you go back far enough in American history, to one-room frontier schools, when it was not uncommon for literate men to do stints as schoolteachers, lawyers, ministers, etc., or to other countries like France.
But as a description of the American public school system in the mid-twentieth century, as it existed at the time of the women's rights movement, it's pretty accurate.
That old insult "those who can't do, teach" really takes on a whole new dimension if you think about it in context of women being barred from professions other than teaching...
Yeah. My grandma’s rural high school in the 1930s had 3 teachers, two of them were men.
I'm just wondering whether it was ever explicit, or rather a happy accident? Like, did anyone sit down and strategise "we are aiming to recruit the top 10% of female talent for teaching"?
Whether or not it was explicit, it may well be that in the 1950s they had a plan of how to make the education system work, and it did work, and then after some time doing the same thing no longer worked, because they no longer had this subsidy they hadn’t realized (of a lot of skilled people having no better paying option than being a teacher, so teaching could get by with low salaries).
Up until at least the 1850s (in America) the school system was decentralized enough that no one could make that decision. I think it was more due to a lack of options; law, medicine and other professional fields were closed to women so unless you were a top-notch writer (your Beechers, Fullers etc) the only white-collar job for educated women was a teacher or tutor.
Counterexamples to what? I'm only talking about the French system in isolation here.
Wasn't a big part of the late 19th-century French push for "civic virtue" and "peasants into Frenchmen" also geared toward getting everyone ready to fight the Germans again? I would assume that especially at that time, having a martial element to your education system would push toward more male educators.
There's a reason WWI was also nicknamed The Teachers' War.
It probably played a role!
I'm not entirely sure, and I think it probably did to some degree. To be clear, the "hussards noir" analogy was not, as far as I know, more widespread than Péguy's essay (though it was itself well-known). And the dynamics I'm describing - masculinized civic virtue channeled into a pedagogical nation-building project - had been developing throughout the 19th century, well before the Franco-Prussian War. But the loss to Prussia / Germany definitely gave it all a kick in the seat of the pants, yes.
Prior to the war, the nation-building struggle had been waged in a low-key way against the church; the story of mid-to-late 19th century France is a long-term bid to gradually loosen the hold of the Catholic Church over education, and then fully yank it away in 1881-1882 with the lois Ferry.
Something really interesting that I found in some random boxes over at the Archives Nationales a few years ago is reports from education inspectors from roughly the 1850s through 1870 (they were still filing reports as, like, the Prussians were marching towards Paris), and they always include a section that says something like "relationship between the State and the Church," and although the handwriting is hard to make out the reports are always comically diplomatic, when reading between the lines it's a bit "these clerical freaks, what a drag."
There were a lot of male teachers in my own country, primarily because of single sex schools at the higher level. I think probably fewer now as the profession has become so feminised. Would need to check out the stats though!
Yeah - likewise in France secondary education for women was established in 1880, but it was a parallel track and a separate, "feminized" pedagogy (i.e. no math and Latin) until 1924.
What country are you in?
Edit: oh, right, the UK - we had a whole conversation about UK HE compared to the US. Sorry!
Ha, no problem! I'm also thinking that no one did expect women to stay at home with their kids - kids would go to and from and school by themselves right from the start, as they still do in other European countries. No one was expecting mum to stay at home and cook lunch in the early 20th century when most parents would both have been working all hours.
I think the American education system should be doing something similar. It should be educating kids and preparing them to be full citizens in a democratic republic.
Giving them the proper understanding of history, economics, constitutional law etc. Along with an appreciation for Western Civilization and modernity and why what we have is so wonderful but also unique and fragile and that it must be protected.
I agree - but I should note several things:
1) This was in the context of progressively imposing a national, centralized, secular education system over a linguistically diverse and largely religious population. A lot of what happened in France would appear downright tyrannical to most Americans. The way the school system is run *today* would probably seem tyrannical - extremely difficult (but IIRC not literally impossible) to homeschool, there is private religious education but it's not fully independent, etc., the whole hijab thing (and if you're not sympathetic to that, also prayer in school would be a complete non-starter).
Edit: homeschooling became much more difficult recently, in 2021 - in a bill pretty clearly at curbing Muslim "separatism" following Samuel Paty's murder. But it affects everyone equally. Now there are very few conditions under which homeschooling is allowed...and religious instruction is very much *not* one of them.
Another edit: ever wonder why there are no real regional dialects in France, while Germany and Italy have a wide range of dialects (and in the case of Italy, just plain separate Romance languages)? There were, but teachers literally beat them out of students. Now there are really barely even regional *accents.*
2) No, really - the level of coordination and top-down bureaucracy that the French education system operates under is really quite alien in a lot of ways to American sensibilities. This is hard to overstate. Theoretically what you describe is possible in a decentralized system, but much more difficult.
3) I should also really reiterate the whole anti-clerical agenda that animated a lot of the republican reformers who were the most passionate about l'École de la République. No other country in the world has tamed and domesticated its majority religion in the way France did, and it took place over at least 150 years (stretching back to the Middle Ages if you count the Philip the Fair and the Gallician Church tradition) with schooling as the primary battleground.
4) As someone notes above, the sui generis Franco-Prussian War gave this process a serious kick in the ass, as wars and perceived civilizational conflicts (against, say, the Germans) tend to do.
Basically, while the outcome has some admirable aspects, I'm not sure how replicable it is. The education system helped forged a nation in the provinces where before there had only been a state, and a lot of this civic unity was imposed under pretty unique circumstances through what we would see as downright authoritarian means.
agreed, I wouldn't want to exactly copy the system, but I think the overall purpose is correct.
The points about French language instruction are really interesting. I used to think their department of language was silly.
But as we spoken English differs more and more from how it's spelled I'm reconsidering (not enough to advocate for it, but I think they have a point. I would love a real attempt to redo and align English spelling with how it sounds. One that makes clear whether we are making the hard or soft vowel sounds.
"The points about French language instruction are really interesting. I used to think their department of language was silly."
That's a separate thing, and it should be noted that a lot of countries, not just France, have an analogous office (in Finland, they have two: one for Finnish and one for the Swedish spoken in Finland). It of course influences how the language is taught, but the "annihilate dialects" movement (and I'm not exaggerating by using the word "annihilate": see the 1791 "Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens ***d’anéantir*** les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française") has a somewhat different lineage. But the result was that the French in Brest is the same French as in Nice. Compare German, which is less a language and more a dialect continuum.
If you want spelling reform, well...I don't know. Maybe over time, but as a top-down movement I think the ship has sailed, even if there were some "National Office of the English Language" or whatever. Speaking of Finnish, they benefited that Finnish was basically an oral language until the nineteenth century, so the writing system could develop under pretty strict orthographic principles (and mercifully was initially developed under Swedish rule so that it didn't do something ridiculous like adopt a Cyrillic alphabet).
"If you want spelling reform, well...I don't know. Maybe over time, but as a top-down movement I think the ship has sailed"
agreed, but one can dream
It’s just mechanically true that is women are limited to teaching and nursing, you will get alot of incredible female teachers and nurses at relatively low salaries.
If I'm not mistaken, something similar happened with segregated schools. Because so many college educated black Americans were denied the jobs their skills (and degree) suggested they should have, you had a lot of quite frankly way over qualified teachers teaching at segregated schools.
Not entirely sure what the policy response is to this. Despite what Harrison Butker and the ghouls that actually run the White House might tell you, turning back the clock on Civil Rights and feminism to 1950 is not a viable solution.
Think maybe it's just a reminder there is literally nothing that doesn't have some sort of unintended negative consequence, even the most positive developments you can think of. And that maybe concentrating so much on possible unintended consequences can blind you to the overall positives that can come from a policy or social change (my basic reason I find Megan McCardle libertarianism infuriating. But post/rant for another day).
I was with you up to
" find Megan McCardle libertarianism infuriating"
I love Megan and her libertarianism
A lot of her critics don't understand that many libertarians think she's gotten way too squishy in her older age.
Other things constant, known banal consequences are more likely than bad, unintended ones.
That's true, and I'm not disputing that!
I'm just wondering whether anyone at the time recognised that and had it as an explicit aim.
There were certainly antifeminists arguing in the early 1970's that women were natural nurterers and caretakers, justifying traditional employment practices. That, of course, is the argument Andrews doesn't have the guts to actually make, whether she might believe it or not.
BTW Mrs. Crabapple on The Simpsons was in many ways a compendium of pre-workplace equality stereotypes about female teachers.
*Krabappel. (Pronounced cra-BAHP-el). In addition to the humorous pronunciation / spelling play, likely an allusion to Ms. Crabtree of The Little Rascals.
I've been calling her Crandle.
No, Diane Ravitch has an excellent book on this called the education wars and she showed that a lot of education feminization was driven by the fact that they cost less than men.
Wow - Diane Ravitch. Now there's a name I've not heard in a long, long time.
I wonder if WW1 and WW2 sped up the process, as so many male teachers were called up. My impression from media from that time is that there were a lot of men in teaching. Post WW2 many soldiers were recruited straight into teacher training programmes in the UK to fulfil the new Labour government's expansion of 13+ education.
I've always wanted to learn more about how war changes societies in this regard after it's over, especially given that, tragically, it usually results in a lot of men that are prematurely killed.
I read an excellent book about single women after WW1 who were unable to marry as so many young men were killed. In a dark way, I wonder if it improved social mobility, at least in the UK; so many aristocratic young men were killed.
I wonder if the process of recruiting men led to a big increase in the number of men teaching in the primary and preschool levels. I’m guessing that the nursery schools and kindergartens remained female dominated.
My grandfather's teacher and my father's teacher in primary school were both men. n=2 but there were plenty of men in primary schools; nurseries I think probably more female dominated as lower prestige and more childcare orientated (or with a more play based pedagogy?).
edit: grandad at school from 1913; father at school from 1957.
But we DO spend a lot more per capita on education than in the past. It would certainly have been possible to make K12 teaching a remunertive profession for men.
Starting from where we are (not in utopia) isn't there an argument for affirmative action for men in teaching and nursing.
Cost disease will always make any labour intensive industry more expensive. What benefits would affirmative action bring in those industries? I think we should have a high bar for affirmative action in any direction.
Dunno how strong the evidence is but there are definitely studies claiming that having a Black male teacher has large positive impacts on the academic achievement of Black boys in particular.
Black boys in the UK are actually pretty high achieving in primary school. I think one of the highest achieving groups: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9023/CBP-9023.pdf
Right, but Black British people are a different group than Ancestral Black Americans, I'm pretty sure if you break out Americans with ancestry in the former British colonies in the Caribbean you'd see something similar.
Can you be clear about what you mean, because people often say similar things when I point out that Black Britons are healthier, live longer & have better educational attainment than white people in the UK, but they never clearly outline what is different and why it would result in such different outcomes.
If I'm honest, the only real difference I can think of between black Americans & black Britons is that black Americans have substantially more European ancestry as they've been in the US for longer & there was so much sexual assault during slavery.
"Whatever you think of some of the excesses of the #MeToo era, Harvey Weinstein’s crimes were real — and he was an extremely influential man in Hollywood! Do you think his presence, and that of the men who looked the other way, has zero implications for how many women got a shot at directing ambitious projects or at moving up the ladder in production roles?"
The people who "looked the other way" is probably not best described as "men". This was apparently an "open secret" for many years, joked about on sitcoms and award shows and people of all genders still lined up to work with him.
The reality is if there are 3,000 qualified applicants for every good job, a powerful sexual harasser will get plenty of women who go along with it and plenty more afraid to take him on. That's what sustains the casting couch (which BTW has not gone away past Weinstein).
Glenn Close made this point explicitly after Weinstein was brought down.
The sad truth of all tournament jobs with extremely high demand that outstrips supply, in so many different directions, too.
Yeah we had an example in law in Professor Joshua Wright, who I did a couple of podcast appearances discussing.
Do you have a link to those podcasts? I'd be interested in listening if I can find some time later.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://open.spotify.com/episode/0YIBA8AD8gIigRwEfk8nsa&ved=2ahUKEwifsJj1qsSQAxXfTTABHWLVD8UQFnoECCUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2IZ2R-13EE4fmqV7x9ZlTu
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://reason.com/volokh/2024/06/10/strangers-on-the-internet-podcast-ep-62-dilan-esper-follow-up-on-joshua-wrights-lawsuits/&ved=2ahUKEwifsJj1qsSQAxXfTTABHWLVD8UQFnoECCcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2TF1c-PWJWI521YZO_Jy5g
Thanks.
Yes, so the category of people "who looked the other way" is quite large among people working in Hollywood.
Glenn Close also claimed she had never heard about Weinstein before the Times wrote about it.
Weinstein didn't predate much on boomer actresses so I believe her.
The rumors were broadcast at the Oscars.
The rumors were that he was a creep/pervert, not a full-on rapist. Obviously post Me Too, neither would be acceptable anymore. But it is also true that the full extent of the truth was not what was being openly joked about.
They were but that doesn't mean they registered with Close.
I just checked. According to the Google AI, she was only in one Miramax film when she was around 40, but the Wikipedia entry for that movie (Dangerous Liaisons) doesn't mention Miramax and only mentions Warner Brothers, so I'm not even sure if Miramax was actually involved. There's a good chance she never actually worked with Weinstein and never met him beyond seeing him quickly at public industry events.
It is possible that she is saying a true thing.
I see, perhaps encouragingly, that I will not be the only commenter today who does not think it is entirely churlish to lament the fact that we now seem to live in an era when far-right-edgelord crap like the Helen Andrews screed draws enough water that the likes of MY and Damon Linker feel compelled to rebut it, instead of ignoring it in the same way sane people once ignored crazy stuff in The Minuteman or letters to the editor from the hometown crank or mimeographed brain spasms (no, young fella, Jerry Ford is not a communist and water fluoridation is not the work of Satan) distributed by obscure and obscurantist local right-fringe-breakaways from the college YAF chapter. Yes, please, bring back the gatekeepers!
The main thing the Andrews piece reminded me of is that for all the problems and disagreements I have with progs, I'm still basically on their side because the other side is so much worse.
Maybe Lyndon LaRouche was making great points but THEY didn’t want you to find out the truth?
Aliens… bio-duplication… nude conspiracies… oh my god, Lyndon LaRouche was right!
I want to believe.
Queen Elizabeth II always did have that slightly shifty drug kingpin look that LaRouche identified . . .
Especially when she, Mikhail Gorbachev, and William Weld conspired to try to assassinate LaRouche…
Incidentally, I have a suspicion that somehow the LaRouchies managed to infiltrate the Chinese Belt-and-Road initiative. They both share the same fascination with huge development successes through weird infrastructure projects, and I see them mentioned together in a bunch of contexts.
For instance, here is an essay about a joint plan for Gaza: https://brixsweden.org/a-soultion-for-gaza-and-palestine-in-the-context-of-the-belt-and-road-initiative/
And here is one about LaRouche’s wife’s contacts with Belt-and-Road: https://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2017-08/25/content_31087759.htm
Love the shoutout to YAF, the head of my alma mater's chapter is now an ambassador. Great to see that founding a local YAF chapter in response to the CRs not doing enough to mock gay people's inability to get married at the time sets you up for success in the present day!
Great article overall, but the fact that "[t]ons of companies underrepresent women in their workforces" does not disprove the claim that "civil-rights law makes it literally illegal to underrepresent women". It really isn't even evidence against it. Law isn't automatic or self-executing.
It’s illegal to discriminate. It’s not illegal to simply have a disparity.
There’s a lot of complications over the extent to which you can infer discrimination from statistical disparities (see: Richard Hanania’s work before his face turn). It’s a balancing act between acknowledging it’s very hard to prove discrimination in individual cases absent written evidence with the obvious-but-until-recently-verboten fact that statistical disparities can reflect actual differences in ability or interest between groups rather than unfair treatment.
Absolutely. Having said that, I think Andrews would say that's a distinction without a difference, though no doubt it matters in the court of public opinion. "Underrepresent" sounds more defensible than "discriminate". On the other hand, disparate impact still guides a substantial (but dwindling?) minority of civil employment actions and does not require proving discrimination.
And having said *that*, Matt's original statement was weak, bordering on silly in an otherwise solid article.
If it were literally illegal, surely anyone from an underrepresented demo who was denied a job offer could get a summary decision? You don’t hear about too many people being fired for getting pregnant, or new builds that aren’t ADA compliant — some laws are pretty close to self executing.
Are you making a distinction between "illegal to underrepresent" and "illegal to discriminate"?
Yes? One of them is true (it is illegal to discriminate) and the other is not. If it were illegal to underrepresent women the same way it’s illegal to fire somebody for being a woman, we would live in a very different world, because any woman who wasn’t hired in a disproportionately male company would get a summary judgement.
The disparate impact standard muddies the waters, because it infers discriminatory intent from disproportionate hiring levels.
Cases guided by DI are dwindling, but still a substantial minority of title VII judgements: until thats no longer the case, I think it's fair to say underrepresentation is illegal.
That argument aside, Matt's claim was wrong: even if Andrews' claim was false.
The mere fact that disparate impact is used as a piece of evidence doesn’t at all mean that it is illegal.
Lawyers can correct me (it would be a relief), but my understanding is that nowadays, disparate impact is really only used when no other evidence is available. In those cases it is not "a piece of evidence" but approximately all the evidence. In those cases, it is correct to say that it is illegal to underrepresent some group.
Doubt anyone will see this since it's comment like 300 but I was just thinking about how this sort of overlaps with the related concern that the U.S. is becoming "feminized" because we don't build anything.
This is kind of baked into the "abundance" framework, in the idea that we used to be a society that builds stuff, now we mostly are lawyers who make regulations.
Because we've undergone the conversion from an industrial economy to a service-driven economy where the primary exports are software and financial services, I think it's easy to associate this with women entering the workforce. But if you compare us to countries that lie somewhere else on the growth curve, you see that women also enter the workforce at very high rates even in countries that emphasize heavy industry (Germany and the US have basically identical female labor force participation rates).
Even across the Muslim world, women are a large majority of science and engineering students. I won't pretend to know the cultural impact the rise of educated women has had in Germany or Iran or something. But the U.S. conversion to a country that is very service/finance/tech driven instead of heavy industry and infrastructure seems coincidental to the change in gender roles, not something that was driven by it.
The merits of our conversion to a less heavy industry focused economy are obviously enough content for another entire blog post. But I think even if we still had the exact industry mix as we did in 1965, we'd still have seen the same change in gender roles.
This is a really good point.
Yeah. Worked on a factory floor from 2005-2007, it was 50/50 men/women
Both these pieces elide the more mundane fact that some small, subset of women treat the professional, corporate workplace like an elementary school classroom, and that this behavior will be, on average, more annoying to men in that workplace than to other women.
Is this behavior more annoying to men, on average?
My experience of bad female bosses has been that their negative attentions were directed at female subordinates, and that men in those workplaces largely either avoided that negative attention or just kind of mentally checked out.
The way I would put it is that some small subset of men also treat the professional corporate workplace like an elementary school classroom, except that instead of playing the role of the school-marmy teacher, they play the role of the out-of-control kid with psych issues.
Yeah bad bosses are annoying no matter the gender.
Bad male bosses are also annoying in their own way. When I've worked in male-dominated offices, hearing puffery about their sex lives was very annoying.
...what on earth!?
My wife's boss has complained to her about how the Victoria's Secret models aren't as hot as they used to be now that they are inclusive last week. Many such cases
"She tells us that the existence of female professors, journalists, lawyers, and judges is an existential threat to civilization, then claims she has no desire to take any opportunities away from anyone — she just wants to curb the bad employment-discrimination policies that she says give women an unfair leg up."
Why not call a spade a spade--Andrews is a hack. There is a pattern of intellectually vapid right wing 'thought' that is more or less vibes and catering to a base of people who have already come to a conclusion before the argument is made. This person seems no different in that regard.
I remember the Larry Summers controversy but I still think the guy is a windbag, for other reasons.
Also bonus points, Matt, for using the word 'defenestration'.
Yeah, I mean if she really felt that strongly about "The Great Feminization" of society, she should do the obvious thing and remove herself from the workforce, instead of taking away publishing opportunities from male authors who are clearly more deserving by virtue of their gender. But obviously she hasn't done that. Because there's good money to be made as a female Uncle Tom for conservative men.
I think put that way alone the point is a little cheap, a pure hypocrisy argument, and hypocrisy arguments are always weak.
But the key is not only does she not call for the elimination of her own job, but also doesn't call for any sort of real de-feminization of the workplace generally. Because she knows how unpopular that would be.
I mean, can’t it be true that she doesn’t think we need to remove females from the workforce to de-feminize workspaces? Isn’t that just, maybe, a nuanced thought?
When people made workspaces more friendly to women, they didn’t accompany those moves with calls to remove men from the workplace.
She's pretty explicit in her belief that the number of women in the workforce is too big!
It's hard to know what the actual rule changes would look like given she doesn't really tell us.
Or if she thinks femininity is so awful, she could always adopt he/him pronouns
Larry Summers is, I think pretty obviously, not a wind bag. He’s a smart and very successful economist with thoughtful views.
You calling him a windbag degrades my view of your credibility, and undermines your assertion that Andrew’s is a hack (though she may be if this article is representative).
Someone can be a smart and successful economist and also a windbag on many topics.
You are familiar with his comments he made about female students while he was a at Harvard right? Also I’m an anonymous commenter on a blog, I have no credibility!
Don’t sell yourself short!
His expertise is in economics, not evolutionary biology, so I give him slack on those issues, but I am given to understand that he hypotheses that population level differences or interest, especially at the high end, might help explain the gender gap in math and science. Then everyone freaked the hell out and he got fired.
I think the resulting freakout over some pretty mild speculation is in fact why we are forced to endure pieces like Andrew’s’. To coin a phrase, if it is considered disgraceful sexist hackery to speculate on population level gender differences outside of blank slate assumptions, then only sexist hacks will be writing about population level gender differences.
Yea, I think that episode really is illustrative and makes Andrews hard to completely dismiss, in spite of an otherwise over the top hyperbolic framing. If a well tenured academic can't politely speculate about something like this in an expressly academic setting with seemingly sound research in hand then... well who can?
I feel like making broad pronouncements about areas where you lack expertise (as someone with enough of a platform for those pronouncements to matter, as Summer was at the time) is pretty much the definition of a windbag, regardless of how well he may have performed in his actual discipline.
You articulated the point I was trying to make about Summers. Smart guy, yes, but overreached. He also thought in 2022 we’d have to suffer a massive recession to defeat inflation. He certainly wasn’t alone in his wrongness but he kind of doubled down.
That’s a reasonable definition, though to me it also implies a certain foolishness and pomposity, but I do not think it fits the facts in this case.
Matt's courses in European history did not go to waste. :)
> The heft of Andrews’s piece comes from the prospect of widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms.
Is this true? I would say the heft of her piece comes from the prospect of re-establishing classically liberal, American norms in all these areas - politics, journalism, academia, corporate workplaces, medicine, etc. - proactively, rather than simply assuming that The American Way will sort of naturally re-assert itself by default.
> But even at Peak Woke, no major tech companies were fielding 50-percent-female engineering teams.
Well, they tried. For real. Illegally. Talk to any hiring manager in tech during that period and they’ll tell you that “diversity goals” were cover for explicit minimum quotas.
Which would be closer to “true merit-based hiring” in tech: pre-feminist exclusion of women from the field altogether, 2018-era illegal quotas, or forced 50/50 representation? I don’t know, but I would lean towards 2018-era practices being closer to true meritocracy than the pre-feminist status quo. But I wouldn’t say that this constitutes an “extremely large share” of feminization of the SWE occupation.
> [What we know about sex differences]
Your point about facial dimorphism cuts both ways. I will give an example: researchers in obstetric medicine and maternal public health have, for about a decade, been going ham with the “finding” that American women are far more likely to experience maternal mortality than women in other developed countries. We’ve all seen countless news articles on the paper making that claim. Most of us have probably also seen the debunking: turns out this is all an artifact of different data collection practices. The paper was, in fact, obviously total garbage. And yet it animated the entire field for the better part of a decade.
Is it a coincidence that such obvious failure occurred in the sub field of medicine dominated by women both as practitioners and patients? Let’s recall your classic “overlayed normal distribution” graphs, where small shifts in the mean can drive large shifts in the prevalence of outlier events. I’m going to say no: I think the probability of a similar failure occurring in urology is roughly zero.
Does that mean I want to ban women from the field so that they can go back to being caregivers and teachers? Well no: my wife is an OBGYN, I worked extremely hard during her residency raising our son and working full-time so that she could train as one (and so that we could afford it), and she’s a great doctor. A (very disagreeable) female colleague of hers, who happens to be a close friend of ours, pointed out the problem with this paper and the associated press coverage to me about 5 years before the news did. But this goes back to my main point: we can’t simply assume that the norms with respect to free speech, pursuit of truth, and The American Way will simply assert themselves by default; one vector for failure is indeed feminization - even if women bring plenty of other good qualities to the table that outweigh the bad. And more importantly - even if they didn’t, excluding women on this basis would be a fundamental betrayal of those classical liberal values!
I think that some sort of cultural fix is in order in women-dominated professions and institutions, the same way Me Too ushered in massively necessary cultural fixes in male-dominated professions and institutions (not least of which is, as you note, that people don’t scream in the office anymore). Similarly with respect to fertility and developed-country birthrates, how you get this cultural fix to occur - I don’t know. But if you take (or replace) that as the unspoken goal of Andrews’ piece rather than somehow banning women from all walks of life outside of teaching and childcare, then this is a problem worth taking seriously. Exactly as you did yourself with respect to the havoc feminism wreaked on the American education system - without concluding that women need to be sent back to the classroom en masse.