Why Men Don’t Believe the Data on Gender Bias in Science

Sorry, I misread that word.

> Excellent, so you've finally come around to Damore's point of view. So where did all the opposition and vitriol come from?

Huh? Like virtually everyone (including feminists!), I've never doubted that there are biological cognitive differences between the sexes (why would I?). But that is not Damore's point of view, though; that is virtually everyone's point of view. Damore, using a kind of reasoning clear only to him, somehow uses that irrelevant premise to conclude that diversity programs at Google are useless. That is his point of view. Also, his point of view is that women are inherently inferior and/or less interested when it comes to technology, which is also not the conclusion of the sources he cites. Rather he takes some flights of fancy to deduce that.

To the best of my knowledge, not a single expert claims to know the relative strengths of biological differences compared to social dynamics, and the overwhelming consensus is that this is simply not known. Therefore, to get from his premise to his conclusion, he either needs to manufacture knowledge we don't have (the relative strength of causes; some definite results about the fitness of women to technology), contradict evidence we do have (the prevalence of sexism), or use some strange logic (to reach his conclusion from an irrelevant premise).

> No, that is not the hypothesis here.

What is the hypothesis?

If by "very soon" you mean after decades of intense feminist political action, stronger than any feminist action we have now. But in any event, what does this have to do with the hypothesis? The hypothesis is that women have been marginalized relatively to men, not that some men have never been marginalized as well. Of course they have -- the prime example is men of color, at least in the past few centuries.

> Voting rights were extended to common women very soon after they were extended to common men (compared to the time no-one was allowed to vote), and with no such requirement attached.

This is factually incorrect. E.g., in the US, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1869. Women were given the vote only 50 years later. BTW, the abolitionist movement and the feminist movement in the US has been very intricately tied, and feminists/abolitionists were very strongly correlated, and yet it took women another 50 years to get the vote (of course, the vote was only given to blacks de jure, and they continue to face suppression to this day).

You may claim that fifty years isn't a long time, but it was fifty years of a feminist action of stronger intensity and longer duration than the action you see now.

> And of course, since women are statistically smaller than men, all evidence you present for the marginalization of women is evidence for the marginalization of smaller people.

This is not true, because short men were allowed to study, practice a profession and vote. And we haven't even discussed cultural marginalization. Even when legal barriers against women were removed, society still discouraged women from practices that were considered masculine; this did not extend to short men.

> In fact, there is strong evidence that small men are in fact one of the most marginalized groups of all, far more than women, except they don't get treated as a group.

This is incorrect. The problem isn't just the existence of marginalization, but its extent. The extent of the marginalization of women (with respect to education, work and political rights) did not extend to short men.

So it is very much possible that the marginalization of short people is a real problem requiring redress, but it is no doubt a smaller (no pun intended) problem than the marginalization of women. It should be noted (as above), however, that the feminist movement has long been associated with adressing many different kinds of marginalization (e.g. slavery and now abelism), so it's not as if we ignore other problems of a similar nature, even if they are of a smaller extent. On the contrary, feminists have often allied and even led other struggles (abolition in the US is a prime example).

> She is not marginalized.

What? And Oprah Winfrey is both powerful and rich, ergo, no marginalization of blacks and/or women? I don't understand how you tie the evidence to the hypothesis. There is no hypothesis of "all women are less powerful than all men".

The fact that Merkel is still almost alone among heads of state (even among the Western countries) shows that this marginalization still exist, even if some exceptionally talented and persevering women do manage to break through (unless you think that German women are biologically superior to other women).

> then lack of representation in the present is evidence of male marginalization in the present (see overall rates of college attendance).

While women education (at least in the West) has improved considerably due to a long struggle (which, BTW, has been opposed constantly with claims that women are less naturally adept at intellectual pursuits), and things are not as bad as they used to be by any means -- feminism has had a lot of hard-earned success -- this improvement does not change the current state of affairs which is that overall women still have significantly less power than men, even though they have gained (again, through hard struggle) some pockets of considerable success.

That's a nice general statement, but it's unclear to me what you think I've been trying to establish and why you think I failed to do that. Anyway, all I tried was to provide some examples that clearly demonstrate the existence of social marginalization of women; not to exclude additional causes nor to present the complete theory.

> First establish a theory.

We have.

> Then use theory to predict the world.

That's not quite the methodology in some intractable fields. In some intractable fields we prefer to explain historic events rather than try to make future predictions. It's less rigorous but it's the best we can do, both because of inherent intractability and because of time-scales and human scales (i.e. number of people) involved and other problems that make lab experiments difficult.

> Show data that support that given a starting point and a influence you end up with data similar to current, and then address potential problems.

Done.

> Finally compare the theory to other theories that also can correctly predict and see which one is better.

Yep. That's precisely most of the work being done.

> Only if all fails should you get into camps and start the ideological battle like the one you are doing

I haven't even started the ideological debate, and the theory I presented is so mainstream that I doubt any serious scholar contends it at all, and therefore did not know it requires further support here in addition to the mountains of evidence we've accumulated over the years, and is available to anyone who's even slightly interested in the subject with a simple Google Scholar search. However, you are very wrong about how ideology find their way into science, as the article we're discussing demonstrates: scientists judge the quality of a research based on how well it conforms with their ideology. This is something we just have to acknowledge, and yet one more problem these fields of study have to contend with that others, like physics, don't (or, at least, not to a similar degree).

And look, I am quite familiar with both scientific methodology and historiographical methodology. What you want is either already most of what's being done or not the correct methodology. If you've actually read the scholarly debates, you'll see that the methodology is not too far from where we'd want it to be (sure, there are places where it can be more rigorous, but the same goes for medicine). It appears that you base your criticims based on some mental image you have that doesn't quite square with reality. It's as if you haven't actually looked at social scholarship at all.

Also, it's unclear to me what hypotheses (for example, for the cause of women being denied the vote or attending university) do you think are being dismissed.

Finally, it's unclear to me why you think that the political action you're hinting at depends on a very specific causal explanation. What hypothesis for the cause of women being denied entrance to universities would negate the political action that has brought us to where we are today? In other words, the only hypothesis that would make political action ineffective (and bear in mind that historically it's been very effective) is that 1. there are no significant social causes in the marginalization of women and 2. the effects are such that social action cannot change them (actually 2 subsumes 1). Otherwise, political action is both justified and necessary. What supportable hypothesis of that kind would you propose?