Address to the American Psychological Association on Men (2007)
denisdutton.com
denisdutton.com
(Incidentally, last year we still had a 55% female student population, but 85% of major entrance scholarships went to women. I suppose the argument would now be that girls have gotten that much smarter in the past three years...)
Absolutely nobody who was even tangentially involved thought Summers was forced out primarily for his comments (though many were offended by them, as many were offended by his similarly inartful comments earlier in his career along the lines of “maybe some countries have too little pollution”).
Summers was forced out because he made a long list of enemies picking political fights with numerous people at the university, without first doing the work to understand the status quo, the stakes, or other people’s positions. He fired popular staff members, unilaterally drove big shifts in budget, issued weird ultimatums, rudely disparaged people in public, interjected himself into academic departments’ internal decisions, and so on. In short, Summers lacked the patience, discretion, empathy, humility, and good judgment to be an effective leader in a context like the Harvard Faculty where everyone is at the top of their field and big egos abound.
The comments about women in science were just a convenient public excuse to dump him.
The narrative that Harvard Faculty just couldn’t handle Summers speaking truth to feminist power, or whatever, is a caricature.
I was top ranked in elementary and middle school, and in the top in math and science in high school, but (as you can tell from the trend) didn't care much about grades when I got to college. I was also done with applications and writing essays. I had been doing that stuff for a decade. I just wanted to focus on computer and software engineering, and it worked out pretty well for me. I even made good money doing interesting work in summer internships.
I knew some other guys who treated college similarly (not a surprise we got along), and I also knew girls who were smart, and put in a lot more effort studying, in both high school and college. So, these statistics you present are rather believable. There are gender skews to what people are really motivated to work on, even when there doesn't seem to me to be really significant pressure either way.
In addition to that, the "college admissions" game is an arms race that has advanced in sophistication over the years. You need leadership positions, an instrument, a sport, a foreign aid trip, a good sob story, advanced classes, grades, art, everything to get above the thousands of competitors there are for your slot in the Ivy League. There are a lot more girls putting in the effort to hit all those notes. Guys tend to focus on just a couple of them.
More guys think "parents/colleges/society want me to do all this shit? fuck it, I'll just do my stuff". The result is a different path which can go similar distances in the end.
I couldn't agree more. If we could drop the idea of helping a category of people based on their gender, and rather help a category of people based on the specific criteria, that would be great.
> Why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things?
Moreover, I keep seeing so many newspapers and articles stating the qualities of women as a gender. I'd like, from time to time, to see more articles about men being recognized as useful as a gender. I don't know whether it's a consequence of feminism, but I indeed identify to a gender that's dumb, violent, rapists than to anything positive.
To wit: https://github.com/confcodeofconduct/confcodeofconduct.com should be reevaluated as depicting a prejudice about programmers more than solving problems (which are already forbidden by law).
I think we should stop thinking in that categories and Start thinking:"this One (Wo)men is so dumb!". Categories for humans(behavior) where never a good idea.
EDIT: It may be easy, but easy isn't good anytime. Just take a look at programming. Writing the good old "jump" was easy. Was it a nice idea?
You modern people with your statistics and correlations, that don't remember the good old days before 1861.
:-)
If you take OPs argument of "only consider the individual, never groups of people" one step further, there is no such thing as "one woman" either. She's a collection of trillions of cells. And each cell... trillions of jiggling atoms! The horror.
All life evolved to operate by perceiving the world through efficient abstractions. Photons as shapes, chemicals as smells, cells as individuals, individuals as species, people as societies, whatever. These are all leaky and ultimately unfair generalizations!
But the "exact" alternatives are typically outcompeted by more efficient approximations. It's just too tedious to consider everything in its uniqueness.
Internalizing the right abstractions -- concrete enough to be useful but not too raw to be overwhelming -- is a fine energy-balancing act. There's no reason why the abstraction ladder should suddenly stop at the level of "trillions of cells". That would be very suspicious indeed.
To suggest that the (evolved, leaky) abstractions along the line of sex are suddenly not useful IN ANY WAY is... preposterous.
Do you take yourself as unique or a general version of a men/woman, that follows only the one path that everyone else takes and you feel in every situation as every other human, and you dont even try to be different in your behavior, and your neurons are trained like everyone else?
Ff you look at my point, I want to stop the generalization about behaviors in sexes context. Everyone can be dumb. That doesn't need an abstraction to the sexes. As you can obviously see, that doesn't say that you have to stop the abstraction at cells. :P
And: I didn't call "ANY WAY". I called the context BEHAVIOR.(EDIT: as you pointed out yourself :-))
However, as I pointed out in my other comment, specific measures do show considerable, consistent differences in performance between males and females. For example, males and females have had significantly different average SAT math scores since the 70s: http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm...
This is only one measurement, however, and there are many others, with one sex or the other performing better in different areas.
> Imagine if the results were that men were inherently smarter than women. Could you conceive of a way that this would go over well? Nobody (men or women) want to deal with that.
People are individuals. As long as we treat people as individuals and evaluate them based on their merit, and their own behavior and performance, and make opportunities equally available to everyone, it doesn't need to be a problem.
And it won't change, because feminism itself is an expression of female privilege. Stories about rape of women will always have more pull than stories about men being killed. Feminism has found these psychological loopholes (like more empathy for/willingness to help women) and is exploiting them as much as they can.
A man who is being killed was simply too weak and has rightfully been weeded out of the gene pool. Women do always have to be protected and are always victims. That is how society secretly feels. The rest is just confirmation bias.
> historical warped perception of women that created unjust conditions and treatment
then I'd like to see you argue against that premise. Let's take a very specific instance: voting. Historically there have been many countries where men were allowed to vote before women were allowed to vote. Do you think men being allowed to vote, while women are not, is:
a) A clever lie in our history books, where men were allowed to vote, women were also allowed to vote
b) Not unjust
Besides, there were not really that many years when only men were allowed to vote. For most of history, neither men nor women were allowed to vote.
In general, I think a lot of care should be applied when comparing the situation of men and women in the past to the situation today. The demands on people were very different, for example there weren't that many office jobs to go around that were equally suitable for men and women.
Edit: of course picking isolated examples where women are seemingly worse off than men is also a trusted and tried feminist strategy. What if overall there are some metrics where men are better off, and some where women are better off? How do you compare? Of course you apply feminist values and rank the metrics where men are better off as much more important than the metrics where women are better off. That is, for example, why I claim feminism despises motherhood, it is at the very least ranked very low in their value system. The misleading gender pay gap is ranked very highly in the feminist world view, whereas you hardly hear about men missing out of time spent with their kids and family. Spending time with kids is valued with factor 0 in the feminist world view. Or even just spare time - what matters is that men get to work more!
You believe in the premise of your claims so you are part of them - unsurprising you think they are true... :-)
No - the only premise and "ideology" I believe in is that truth should be sought after, suffering should be minimised and happiness should be maximized. I find all other ideologies to be just various attempts to implement this base ideology from different contexts, and granted, not all them are perfect for achieving this. Sometimes, they even achieve the opposite.
You might be surprised to know that there are plenty of things in the way feminism is sometimes interpreted that rub me the wrong way (you even mentioned some of them), but I think you're confusing the implementation with the goal. Feminism is defined as "the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men". This doesn't mean that women should be men. All it means to me is that if any woman as an individual is capable and interested in doing a "man's job" she should have an equal opportunity to do so and receive an equal compensation. Do you really have an issue with that?
Except that feminism is more than that: it is the claim that women are disadvantaged and equality means merely that women's situation has to be improved.
Of course I don't take issue with women having equal opportunities for jobs. I take issue with the claim that they don't have that now. That is the unquestioned feminist assumption here. And I know there are some exceptions, like military, or models and so on - but by and large, women can do whatever they want.
With respect to military, I would also have to say it might depend on women not endangering the mission. I wouldn't deny them the right to get themselves killed, but what if a woman is not strong enough to carry a wounded comrade out of danger? But I think by now they are allowed in the military in most countries anyway?
So the fear was that women would massively vote in favor of war because they didn't have to fight it? As if women aren't affected by war, they lose fathers, husbands, and sons, and if they're on the losing side they have no weapons to defend themselves from an invading army and might get killed or raped. Besides, by that reasoning old and infirm men shouldn't be allowed to vote either. The "women don't go to war" argument sounds more like something made up after the fact to justify a situation than something that was actually considered when the decision was made.
> While you don't have to accept the argument (and in fact history has rejected it), I'd say it also isn't completely without merit.
It would at least be consistent if only those who are eligible for military service and those who have served in the military were allowed to vote, but somehow I suspect 'has a penis' was the actual standard used.
> (A counter to this would be to say "but women weren't even allowed to go to war" - true, but again it is debatable who had the shorter end of the stick there. And maybe women at war simply wasn't practical, given the nature of warfare in the past).
Dogs aren't allowed to vote either, and most of them never have to work, have people to take care of them, and don't have to fight in wars. When comparing humans to dogs, it is debatable who has the shorter end of the stick. But I don't know anyone who seriously would want to be a dog. Historically, did many men express a desire to be a woman, so that they could clean the house, birth many children, and be considered too incompetent to vote or otherwise get involved in politics? If not, I guess they didn't actually consider their end of the stick to be the shorter one, regardless of what one might debate today.
> Besides, there were not really that many years when only men were allowed to vote. For most of history, neither men nor women were allowed to vote.
I'm not sure where you are going with this. If up to five years ago women weren't allowed to use electricity, would you also argue that a "historical warped perception of women that created unjust conditions and treatment" didn't apply, because for most of history, neither men nor women could use electricity? I would think that the fact that everywhere where voting was introduced it was at first limited to men supports the argument that there is a "historical warped perception of women that created unjust conditions and treatment". Otherwise we would also expect to see a number of countries where, at first, women were allowed to vote while men were not.
> of course picking isolated examples where women are seemingly worse off than men is also a trusted and tried feminist strategy. What if overall there are some metrics where men are better off, and some where women are better off? How do you compare?
You're absolutely right! If only men and women had equal rights and opportunities, then we wouldn't have to argue about who is better off. If only there was some kind of social movement to accomplish this.
I don't think you have to agree with all (or even most) feminist viewpoints today to admit that historically, women had fewer rights than men, and feminism has done a lot to improve that. You don't have to agree with "all sex is rape" to think that it's a good idea for women to have a right to vote. It looks to me like you're so caught up in the 'us versus them' mentality that you reject everything about feminism to the point where you look as unreasonable as the hard-core feminists you so despise.
If you take the long view, the "fashionable" parts of identity politics will fall away: the various shills, exploiters, and self-serving loud-mouths will begin to be ignored except among a hardcore cadre. But the status quo will have shifted to a situation that's more equitable for men and women.
Polarization and disruption are unpleasant while they're happening, but generally things swing back towards the middle, except that the middle will have moved slightly in a good direction (hopefullY).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKgwczruOSQ#t=40s
Now imagine that with the sexes reversed?
To a large extent progress in sciences like sub-atomic physics depends on ability to (1) simplify the problem down to mathematical laws, (2) conduct repeatable, randomized controlled experiments to rule out hypotheses about them.
Social sciences deal with phenomena that are extraordinarily complex, so hypotheses usually have to be qualitative rather than mathematical, and devising good experiments is very hard. Falsification is hard. Most hypotheses can be "generally true" yet have specific counterexamples in some times and places.
As for empirical data, you can use data to tell a million plausible stories, and many of those probably have some nugget of truth. But without randomized trials, how do you falsify any of these stories? It's hard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research (not a great article IMO but I lack the experience to give a better reference)
This could easily lead to a basis for genocide, people tossing their children with an unwanted gender out right after birth/aborting them. That seems like a pretty awful prospect to me.
Furthermore, discrimination would then just be waiting to happen at an even greater extent, with the stakes not just being yet another minority, but almost half of an entire population. Those are huge stakes, and few want to tread that path.
This problem amplifies itself, as the inability to acquire good data leads to a politicization of the science. Without the ability to perform, replicate or refute experiments, the scientists focus on convincing their peers through prose and essays.
> Continuing an uninterrupted trend that dates back to at least 1972, high school boys outperformed girls on the 2015 SAT math test with an average score of 527 points compared to the average score of 496 for females, see chart above. The statistically significant 31-point male advantage this year on the SAT math test is the same as the 31-point difference last year, and just slightly below the 33.9 point difference over the last two decades favoring boys.
> (...T)here were 165.3 boys with SAT math scores between 700-800 points for every 100 girls with scores in that range. For the next highest 100-point range between 600-700 points for the 2015 SAT math test, there were about 121 boys with scores in that range for every 100 high school girls (55% boys vs. 45% girls).
There's quite a lot of data out there. I suspect there's not a lot of research into the topic because it's so politically charged.
http://www.aei.org/publication/2015-sat-test-results-confirm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
The data isn't politically charged, but the interpretation can be.
Here's the freaking problem, from tfa:
But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as __"an abstract system that competes against rival systems"__ (emphasis mine).
Why! Why is everything a bloody competition. This Baumeister character can't even escape this construct.
The problem is that we are told that live evolved by natural selection and survival of the fittest by out competing other rivals in it's niche. Or at least that's how the popular story goes.
And we've internalised this as a structure and caused it to permeate every bloody thing we do.
Why is everything a competition? Until we develop and internalise a world-view that sees that life thrives where it cooperates we will continue to decimate everything on this planet in an effort to out-compete our rivals. We will turn everything into a competition between everyone, the Left & Right sides of politics, male against female, all competing for limited resources.
It comports extremely well with my experience of the world. Women are risk averse, and their intelligence distribution is compressed. Most of the brilliant people I know are men, and so are most of the idiots.
It'd be interesting to see this studied in more detail, because it really seems to explain quite a bit in a nice way.
On average :)
To summarize my main points: A few lucky men are at the top of society and enjoy the culture’s best rewards. Others, less fortunate, have their lives chewed up by it. Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them in somewhat different ways. Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has.
Most of the day, Males saying femals arenz better or worse than men, are called Old angry White men in my filterbubble.
Edit: wanted to say, there could be a good discussion about it.
Posting the summary of the main points as you've done there is to do a massive disservice to the carefully considered, and thoughtfully presented arguments and evidence within the article.
It's not a short article, to be sure, but if you want complex concepts reduced to a single sentence then you're in the wrong universe.
Traditional carrots used in history can not compete with modern forms of entertainment. In past it took major war to shake things down, but thats not possible today.
Feminism was great for liberating men. No more self-sacrifice, disposability, gallantry and marriage.
One thing is missing though, imho: in the past, men have actively hindered women to pursue "male" activities, like getting an education or joining the armed forces, against the women's will.
The reason behind that could be that the competing large groups of men required soldiers, and lots of 'em. Less soldiers meant your neighboring tribes could defeat you, or you couldn't conquer the world. So instead of allowing women to become independent, study and possibly bear less children, they enacted policies to ensure "maximum womb utilization".
This is and was oppressive, and should not be forgotten.
I'm not aware that other regions handled things very differently, apart from a few outliers, but happy to learn about them.
One interesting example is Israel, where women had serve in the army since the foundation of the the state. Even more interesting when considering the huge loss of life due to the holocaust.
Men also have a higher deviation. There are a lot of geniuses and a lot of idiots among men. But in either case, as long as we live in today's society filled with "feel-good" and "political correctness" ideas, you won't see any definitive study being conducted because people in reality don't want to know the results. Because the moment it's recognized that blacks are dumber than whites or that women are dumber than men, this will change the society profoundly and people are just not ready to accept "the ugly truth".
This is really keeping back all of us. Science should be above all this PC bullshit... and yet, here we are...
That goes against my/common knowledge. Off to Wikipedia [0]. The higher variability of intelligence for males is undisputed. If there is a difference between the averages is an open discussion. A revealing quote:
> Most standard tests of intelligence have been constructed so that there are no overall score differences between females and males
So genders have equal intelligence by definition. It seems consensus that men have better visual–spatial abilities. Since tests can balance this out, women must be better in other areas (which?).
Ultimately, the problem is the definition of "intelligence". Just like with AI.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
In 100 years society might decide that some other kind of intelligence is more important and men and women will reverse their roles in terms of "intelligence".
Also, I think it doubles by the fact that mens are really encouraged (one can even say "forced") to do extraordinary stuff, to get money, wife, respect and other social approval. For women, they will literally never be ashamed for the life outcome.
That matches my experience with math contests from 6th grade up through high school. Lots of girls were there in "24 Game" contests, but they disappeared. Another thing I noticed was that the relative ranking of boys moved around quite a bit. I had a couple of classmates that were quite competitive with each other in middle school -- but then starting in high school, one moved way up in the rankings, the other didn't. All I can say to explain it is, puberty activated something.
If you knew that men were on average 5 IQ points lower than women (which is not what he says, and probably not true, but whatever), it wouldn't be very useful information for actually making choices. Male student underperforming in class? That's 'cuz men are dumber. Emerging gender-skew in medical school students towards women? That's 'cuz men are dumber. Etc etc.
But the specific point made seems sound to me. The hypothetical 5 point difference would not be a sufficient explanatory factor for most scenarios.
> If someone told me that a certain
> truth is not useful, I would be
> inclined to disbelieve them
A truth is useful. A given person's knowledge of that truth, not always, especially given that not all truths are simple enough to be understood by the layperson -- how else did we get to a place where evolution is "humans are descended from monkeys"?
If knowledge of distributions isn't useful, then why did you rely on knowledge of distributions to make a blanket judgment about articles like this?
An example is much, much different than that.
Gender-skew of over 10%? That's more than expected given the IQ distributions of men and women. Let's look for what causes that.
Or isn't that the sort of point you were going for?
Or am i wrong?
This list of data sets [1] seemed promising. But a general-population data set with standardized test results is needed. College student data sets have too much pre-selection bias. The National Longitudinal Surveys data ought to be useful, but is restricted.[2]
[1] http://www.isironline.org/resources/collaboration-and-data-s... [2] http://www.bls.gov/nls/home.htm
Firstly: Equality is not a zero-sum game, nor does it mean treating everyone equally (yeah).
To address the first component of this – the effects of feminism for women do not need result in a net-reduction of freedoms and happiness for men. Patriarchy[1] screws both men and women, each in different ways.
Patriarchy is why for a long time I felt compelled to be the strong supportive male and hide my weaknesses, despite the unhappiness these roles caused me. In other men it can manifest differently, perhaps undirected anger at the world, but not really knowing why. Or perhaps a numb feeling that you’re just doing what you’re ‘supposed to do’.
I strongly feel that feminism and masculism (?) stand side-by-side. They are different entities fighting mostly the same enemies. Sometimes they will need to have talks and make compromises with each other, but it can still be a cooperation.
I get the impression that much of the male disquiet with feminism is coming for a place of, ‘yes, but what about me’. And this is totally reasonable. However, the answer is not to criticise feminism. If you’re envious of your neighbour’s new car, the rational response is not to attack it with a baseball bat. Rather it is either a) deal with your feelings and be happy for your neighbour, or b) work hard, earn some money, and get your own awesome car.
AFAIK we have nothing like option ‘b’ presented above[2], whereas women have been on this for c. 150 years now.
If you want this, then get on it.
To address the second component of my opening statement: Equality does not mean treating everyone equally.
This may sound pretty ridiculous at first glance, and it also somewhat goes against the meritocratic principles often found in the tech world.
Rather than treating everyone equally, I feel that equality should mean we strive to raise everyone to the same base level. To offer everyone the same basic opportunities should they choose the pursue them. Yes there are limits to our realistic capabilities in this regard [3], but most situations lie within these limits. Should we offer jobs to those who are unqualified? No. Should we allow people the opportunity to earn those qualifications? Probably.
Maybe it is true women have a bias towards doing X and men have a bias to towards doing Y, maybe it is not. I don’t think I really care. If I – being suitably qualified – want to be a primary school teacher I should be able to do so without feeling I’m being given sideways glances for being male. Likewise, a suitably qualified woman should be able to be a construction worker without having to fight against harassment.
Moreover, my housemate[4] should also be able to go to our local corner shop without a 90% chance of being harassed and a 25% chance of being followed home (we have the data).
In my eyes, the original article has quite a lot of shaky logic and rather dodgy assumptions. I strongly encourage people to read it critically (for example, “But it has worked”? Maybe for the author, less so for my housemate and billions like her).
However, I like that the article concludes that different motivations drive different behaviours between the genders, and that this situation is not necessarily moral or desirable. But I think this is only the start of the story. Why do these different motivations still exist today? To what extent are these motivations inherent, and to what extent are they socially received? I strongly suspect they are mostly socially received, and we therefore have it within our ability to offer change should it be desired.
[1] I do believe patriarchy is both a thing and a useful concept, but I do not believe it is a conspiracy. Rather I believe it is systemic – an emergent property of the social system we arrived at.
[2] The MRA is the baseball-bat-to-the-car approach, so not them.
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
[4] With her consent: She’s on here: hjfantaskis
EDIT: God damn, I spend an hour writing this and then the post gets flagged!