In my last two posts I talked a bit about gender fairness. At least to some readers what I said wasn’t very clear so I thought I would take the opportunity to clarify my thoughts on the subject. I’m still working out my opinions on some of these issues so don’t assume my views here are set in stone.

Hopefully we can all agree that absent exceptional circumstances, we should strive for a society that treats men and women fairly. However, it would be a mistake to think that the only sort of unfairness that matters is gender inequity. It’s unfair¹ that tall people and pretty people earn more money than average. Hell, it’s unfair that more personable individuals are more likely to get hired/promoted even for jobs where these skills aren’t essential. Human interactions are rife with unfairness. We make generalizations based on the clothes people wear, the language they use and the objects they own. As decisions about jobs and pay require humans judgment they are infested with with all kinds of unfairness.

Of course, other things being equal, it would be better if we could eliminate the endemic unfairness in human interactions. The fact that women are socially incentivized not to negotiate is just one example of inequitable treatment. It may be unfair but no more so than the well known fact that people who are shy or dislike demanding raises get paid less². So if society was trying to address the endemic unfairness in jobs or human interactions more generally I would be much less skeptical. However, choosing what unequal treatment we will try to mitigate in an unprincipled fashion, e.g., whether or not it affects a politically anointed group, can itself be unfair as well as scuttling more universal solutions. Unfortunately by allowing the politically influential calls for greater fairness to be bled off in group specific fixes when a substantially greater harm for that group hasn’t been shown often results in a failure to achieve a general solution.

Still I can appreciate the argument that the historical context makes gender unfairness particularly galling³ so let’s accept that for the moment and think about what could be done to rectify it. What I was trying to say in my previous posts is that we have pervasively different expectations for men and women. Given this fact it seems obviously in error to ‘fix’ individual symptoms of this pervasive effect without considering the broader context. Not only would it be pragmatically impossible to mandate men and women treat the two genders the same at work when they are subject to entirely different social expectations there is no reason to believe it would serve the overall cause of fairness. So either we need to genuinely try to eliminate differing social expectations based on gender everywhere or we need to accept the fact that we men and women are going to occupy different social roles.

Assuming that we are going to spend more resources on gender equity my bias is towards first trying to apply the same (or at least more similar) social standards to men and women. It might turn out that biological differences or sheer social inertia make this impossible and evidence on these points could change my naive view. However, all other things being equal it seems likely that people will be more happy if they aren’t straight jacketed into a role based on their gender no matter how equal the roles are. Besides, then I would no longer get shit for arguing just as aggressively with women as I do with men. However, if this is our aim we need to stop focusing on the effects of gender roles in business and concentrate on the way we treat our friends and relatives. Also, if we want this to have any hope of working we can’t just let women cherry pick the opportunities that equality provides while still being able to avail themselves of the protections their ‘weak’ status brought in an earlier age. This is a purely pragmatic concern not a matter of fairness. It’s just not psychologically plausible to view someone as vulnerable and deserving of protection or deference without thinking they are less capable. If men are expected to stand up in an argument and give as good as they get but women are not attacked as vigorously and allowed to duck out this sends the message that women aren’t expected to be as capable in intellectual combat as men.

Unfortunately, it’s my sense is that almost everyone is totally unwilling to give up gender based social roles in their private lives. Most women, including most self-described feminists, still expect to be treated less (intellectually) aggressively by men than men treat each other and have greatly differing expectations for their male friends and dates than they do for their female friends and men are no better. If we, as a society, decide that we prefer to have subtly distinct social norms for different genders (or give up on changing them) that’s fine but we can’t reasonably accept pervasively different social standards for men and women and then complain when we discover that one gender experiences a disadvantage in one particular area. If the woman is the breadwinner for the family and the man stays home to care for the children it doesn’t follow that it’s unfair for the man to do more housework. His extra housework may be compensated for by the woman’s work at her job.

Now just because we might choose to accept differing societal expectations for men and women doesn’t mean we can’t (or shouldn’t) fight classical discrimination or other forms of gender inequity. We just need to realize that the way women were treated up through at least the 70s and in some places/situations even today wasn’t/isn’t unfair merely because in some circumstances, e.g., job applications for ‘male’ work, men and women were evaluated differently but because overall the kind of benefits society offered women in the 50s and 60s didn’t even come close to making up for the harms of discrimination. Many people would claim that the same is true today and it may well be⁴ but we would need to factor in all the costs and benefits of our social expectations for women and men from dating, to raising a family to job opportunities to figure this out. Looking at one narrow aspect of life tells us almost nothing about overall gender equity.

Of course we shouldn’t let concern with gender equity (or racial, religious or whatever) blind us to the fact that inequity is pervasive and occurs for many other reasons as well. We should only focus our attention on gender issues when we have a good reason to believe that is a better use of our resources than addressing other sorts of unfairness. In short we should insist on a principled justification of these policies rather than buying into the default narrative or our emotional reaction to the situation. After all those are the very same things that lead people to resist giving women the vote or equal pay.