This is not something that has been demonstrated to have been true, of course, but that would be the correct way of framing the argument.
Each of your controls could easily be explained by sexism.
Seniority: if men are given promotions when their work was the same quality as women who were passed over, that’s sexism.
Hours worked: if men are given full time employment, women part time, even when both want full time, that’s sexism.
Field and specific profession: if women are encouraged by the exact same mentors to choose different fields, despite having the same credentials as men, that’s sexism.
I’m not saying these factors are the result of sexism, but it’s a bit weird to assume it is, while having data in the original article that indicates all of the above, at least in academic professions, are significantly affected by sexism.
Consider the hypothesis of "sexism against men": society considers all women valuable, but only values men who earn a decent amount of money. Men who earn little find it hard to date and have children.
Wouldn't this "sexism against men" spur men to choose high earning (but maybe not fulfilling) professions, while women would feel more free to aim for personally fulfilling (but lower earning) professions?
By the metric of earnings this might look like sexism against women, but by the metric of life satisfaction, it might look more like sexism against men.
I think it's relevant to how we approach a solution.
If the problem is "discrimination against educated women" then we need to educate people not to be biased against educated women.
If the problem is "discrimination against low earning men", we need to educate people not to be biased against low earning men.
My guess is that if women didn't prefer to date higher earning men, a lot of the wage gap would disappear. The social pressure to find a partner is huge, probably one of the strongest social forces in existence.
Especially because this entire argument is about the various forms of friction women face as they try to climb the professional ladder.
In humans women strongly prefer men who are more successful than them, are the gatekeepers of reproduction, and generally a greater proportion of women are able to pass on their genes than men.
By Darwinian logic this will inevitably result in a subpopulation of men who the most highly accomplished in certain sex selected traits in the species. This isn't excuse making its nature. I am consistently bemused at how the selfanointed intelligentsia of society that pride themselves on their rationality and scientific acumen refuse to accept this. You might as well cry about Gravity and hop up and down hoping you eventually fly up to the moon.
Often it was much more than a 5% difference.
The data comes from this paper: http://www.erinhengel.com/research/publishing_female.pdf
That paper assumes that "higher writing standards" means "simple vocabulary and short sentences".
So you might get a bad score for
> There is a lot of specific data presented in the article, such as that women have higher writing standards, in the form of more revisions to publication.
And a better score for
> The article refers to examples like women writing better, and rewriting their work more.
Whether "simple words" really means better writing for academic journals is not clearcut to me.
Overall, the readability calculator here: http://www.readabilityformulas.com/free-readability-formula-... scored your comment "difficult to read", which the paper would have said meant bad writing, and the OP article would have called a man's "poorly written mush".
I'm not saying this to insult you, but to point out that the article's definition of good writing may not be something you agree with.
For every concrete data point that record a difference between men and women we could argue sexism as the cause. The idea that a higher graduation rate for women in education is caused by a biased education system against men is far from new.
When people talk about sexism as the cause for gender segregation I always look at studies and employment statistics from Sweden. The employment rate between women and men is practically identical, as is the ratio of women and men who work in gender segregated professions. A staggering 85% of women and 85% of men is in a profession that is classified as gender segregated. At the extreme end with higher than 99% gender segregation there is a slight higher number of women, and last year there was one university program where every student was of a single gender (female), but in general it look very similar for both men and women. The small 15% of both genders that work in gender equal professions is quite a small minority.
Arguing sexism as the primary factor for gender segregation is also the claim that both men and women face an identical amount of sexism. The Swedish numbers also support this. Yearly studies on harassment and sexual harassment in the work place show that both men and women face identical harassment when being a minority (down to a few percent variance). The report for 2018 actually marked nursing as the singular worst profession to be a gender minority in, where men reported highest rate of gender based bullying and sexual harassment. If I recall right, construction (women) was the highest the year before that.
But let me introduce an alternative theory to the idea that 85% of the population in Sweden is sexists. An old, about 50 years old study in human behavior that occasionally still get cited in psychology papers claim that most humans who perceive themselves as belonging to the majority group has an increased feeling of safety and confidence, while being in a minority has the opposite effect. This provides for a simple explanation to the gender equality paradox. There more equality and choices there is in choosing a profession, the more likely that the only difference between several professions is which group holds the position of dominance.
The men have not had any such discussions with their superiors.
Additionally, why is assuming there is no sexism and proceeding with the status quo better than the assumption there is sexism and trying to improve the situation?
There is absolutely a moderate level of evidence of discrimination against women.
Though, he said, in most cases it doesn't matter, because the lower ranked candidates who received offers were usually preferred minorities who received several offers from other more desirable schools.
we don't automatically put the assumption that gyms are secret powerplants that exist to siphon off energy to feed space aliens at equal likelihood to its negative. Likewise the existence of sexism, especially at the broad global conspiratorial heights at which it is postulated is the more complicated hypothesis so its up you you guys to provide the compelling evidence.
It's no more complicated than the hypothesis of the existence of false accusations of sexism, especially at the broad global conspiratorial heights at which it is postulated. Beginning with the assumption that sexism is not a big problem only gives the appearance of neutrality.
In reality, we probably all agree that sexism exists and false accusations exist, and we're trying to determine how prevalent each is. That is an extremely difficult task.
BTW, the 'false accusation' movement in sofar as it exists is a drop in the bucket compared to the sexism victimhood industry.
This is your hypothesis, which illustrates my point perfectly. You are not merely refuting the existence of a certain degree of sexual harassment, but you're hypothesizing that a "sexism victimhood industry" exists. The fluff about "hypothesis" and "scientific thinking" is just useful subterfuge.
The first being that women have to work harder than men for recognition, and that they benefit less from co-authored papers with men (because it's assumed that the man did most of the work). There's also feeder labs with male PIs that are less likely to hire women in addition to sexual harassment potentially stymying professional growth.
So while none of these are directly responsible, each individual piece contributes to the systematic sexism women face and can potentially explain the gap.
One way this occurred was in discussions about sex-differentiated choices. So, for example, a big problem the department had (has?) was (is?) groups of male faculty deciding that the choice to have children is a choice against a career. The implied assumption was that women stay home, and men have no reason for family leave or any impact on their working. This eventually led to sex discrimination lawsuits by men as well as women surrounding family leave and promotion policies surrounding tenure, but the problems didn't entirely go away.
The far biggest problem that I saw though was what I'd call indirect sex biases, where the biases were against sex-differentiated interpersonal styles. So the bias wasn't against gender per se, but against traits that females differed from males in on average. This struck me the most clearly when we were hiring faculty one year; the female faculty candidates tended to be more polite, calm, and deferential in research talks, but no less competent; the male candidates tended to be more aggressive and dominant. The hiring faculty in the audience, though, would see the female interpersonal style as a sign of weakness, and become more aggressive in their questioning, later concluding that the female candidates were less competent, when they were subject to much more stringent questioning the male candidates were never subject to, solely because the male candidates were more aggressive in their responses. This came up in other ways as well, such as in promotions; the department lost a sex discrimination lawsuit after women who were objectively more accomplished were less successful in tenure promotions primarily because they were seen as not socially dominant or attention-seeking enough.
I could go on and on.
We are seeing a lot of evidence that academics is increasingly a narcissistic pissing contest. I suspect a lot of women just get out while they can because they see it for what it is, and are on the losing end of a game whose rules they disagree with to begin with. Some of it is outright sexism, but some of it is bias that affects women differentially because of average group differences.
This creates and easy explanation/scapegoat for a problem rather than trying to actually figure out all variables involved.
It very well could be that when taking into account all the variables, it is systematic sexism/racism or whatever the claim may be. However one should be careful to jump on the ship that claims sexism/racism first without looking at all the other reasons and factors that could be at work. (Biological differences, family vs career importance, instances of sexism/racism, instances of reverse sexism/racism [helping an individual solely based on their race/sex], subjective influence, personal upbringing etc.)
He certainly doesn't help that impression with the florid language he uses:
"THE QUOTIDIAN MACHINERY of patriarchy functions as a complex of many moving parts. The same mechanisms that pull women down are the ones that push men up, compensating for the latter’s initial lack of numbers in undergraduate studies until they become an overwhelming majority among the academic elite. All these various parts, some seemingly innocuous and others quite abominable, operate together, defeating attempts that remediate only a single aspect of the patriarchal machine."
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_315.10.a...
If IQ correlates to academic success (which I believe studies have shown it does) then this would lead one to reasonably conclude there should be more female undergraduates and graduate students, and an equal number (or possibly slightly more) male assistant professors; we'd also expect a greater proportion of full professors who are male. This is in fact what is observed.
I'm not a biological determinist, and it's certainly possible the IQ test itself is sexist/ not unbiased, but this is one possible explanation where we can observe what we do without the presence of sexism.
It's also certainly possible there IS sexism preventing women from becoming professsors, I'd just need to see more compelling evidence than what's presented here.
Well perhaps because of the persuasive evidence the article cites from peer-reviewed journals. For example, in the paragraph below from the article:
"In one experiment, reported by Corinne A. Moss-Racusin and her coauthors in PNAS, 127 US scientists were asked to hire an undergraduate lab assistant and decide on a salary based on fictional CVs of equally qualified men and women. The scientists were more likely to offer the position to men as well as more hours of mentorship, and gave a lower salary to women, about eighty-eight cents to the dollar."