What is the implications of 1/4 female or liberal arts college?
> A very confused sexism.
To an uncritical thinker, it might definitely seem that way.
To address the "liberal arts college" aspect, I mean specifically they're insulated from a lot of the reality of the rest of the world. I specifically mean the Dartmouths, Browns, etc. of the educational world.
I mean people for whom a $200,000 education to have a $35,000 - $115,000 a year job is perfectly reasonable, because after all, they're not the ones paying for it in any capacity. Their family can easily foot the bill, and if they can't, then they end up married to a junior IB / exec type who can easily afford to pay back that pesky student loan.
Obviously this skews more female because of evolutionary dynamics, but you still probably get the occasional male for whom this might be an option of some kind.
So what are the implications of a majority female, thoroughly middle class-to-upper middle class group who attended the same or similar small liberals arts colleges?
Homogeneity. Women are statistically more willing to conform to the group, or rather, they're higher in trait agreeableness if you want to hash it out scientifically. This means a reluctance to champion a book that could cause controversy, much less intense controversy. We're seeing this already with Penguin having to deal with employees demanding that Jordan Peterson's new book not be published.
The second layer of homogeneity is that in order to do well at those colleges - to even be accepted beyond being the 'token' of your specific sub-divided little group - is that you need to speak a certain way, act a certain way, and think a certain way. That gets reinforced and becomes self-selecting. The location of the major publishing houses are all large cosmopolitan cities, cities where the concerns are, "Do I seem culturally accepting enough?", "Am I projecting the 'correct' values?", etc.
You need not take my word for it though. You can find plenty of authors who complain about these sorts of things.
EDIT: I should add... I know these people. I occasionally work with and consult for these people. The certainty of their positions relative to their utter lack of worldly experience is not just staggering, but offensive.
I've travelled all over the world, for over 19 years. I've been to 72 countries, I've lived in 12 different nations for over a year at a time. Women and men with the kind of credentials I've mentioned above are almost always the same. They're utterly convinced of their own moral superiority, whilst also being utterly ignorant of anything outside of their little bubbles.
Now I'm curious. The world you describe seems quite hostile to someone with your beliefs -- how and why are you in it?
That's because I don't have beliefs, I have data. I'm not interested in "beliefs". I'm interested in being able to concretely prove something with varying degrees of certainty, and I won't present my findings and conclusions unless I have the strongest available data to back them up.
To autopsy your assertion even further, you could extrapolate to the entire world. Most people in the world don't really want to know why the world is the way it is, or even why they do the things they do. People don't like that they can be quantified, that they can be predicted if someone, somewhere, with enough knowledge and understanding has enough data about them. Yet Facebook and Google and Twitter and YouTube do this every day, fairly easily nowadays I might add. It only upsets people when its in their face and clearly visible. When they can't turn away from it and deny it.
The nearly wholesale rejection of evolutionary biology, psychology, and the Big Five personality traits by a subset of certain people is hilarious because 1) its anti-science, which is made even more ridiculous given the credence these groups place on science and 2) it not only can be, but often is used against them by researchers who have no moral misgivings about the nature of the science and accept it for what it is - its neither inherently good nor bad, its just how we evolved based on the selective pressures nature placed upon our species.
> how and why are you in it?
The why is probably easier to answer than the how. By their own admission, I bring value to their organizations. When someone asks me what I do, instead of going through a bunch of technobabble and mathematics/statistics jargon I just tell them, "I bring order to chaos." It usually sparks more interesting conversations than talking about R, K-means clustering, Bayesian inference, and all the other jargon surrounding data science that frankly almost no one besides mathematicians, statisticians, and other data scientists will understand anyway. The second part of the "why" is "enormous consulting fees". :)
The how is a very long post that I just don't have time to type up right now.
Please do, I'm very interested.
But there seems to be this idea that I don't like working with these people, but that's not true. Most of these people are really good people who are good at their jobs, who want to be a force for good in the world, and they legitimately think they're on the side of righteousness. They're the modern day version of crusaders, frankly. And much like the crusaders of old their prejudices are borne from ignorance and their certainty is tempered by each other as they self-reinforce.