In a recent post I talked about the sad state feminism in the public consciousness. In that post I merely sought to establish that much of what passes for ‘feminism’ these days isn’t a serious attempt to restructure society in a more fair fashion but merely emotional feelings of sympathy and identification with women. This was something of a joke without a punchline since I didn’t really explain why this was bad. After all almost most people’s political views are more the result of emotions than rational judgment so who cares why people support these ‘feminist’ policies? Well partly you should care because resources distributed out of sympathy for women will at best be hit or miss in bringing about structural change¹. More importantly this attitude actually perpetuates gender stereotypes and reinforces gender roles.

It’s well known to parents that to raise a child correctly sometimes you must suppress your sympathy for your children and punish them or make them deal with the consequences of their actions. Often if we want children to learn to deal with a situation we have to suppress our instincts for sympathy and let them bear responsibility. While I don’t think the affect of female sympathy is quite like that of the over-indulgent parent it has many similar features. A good example is the issue of crying.

It’s a frequent (and likely valid) complaint that women’s tendency to cry more than men holds them back in the workplace. As primates you can’t avoid the fact that we will parse tears as a sign of weakness while swears or more aggressive seeming behavior send a more threatening message². However, speaking as a guy who cries more than most of my female friends I’m pretty sure that our upbringing has a massive effect on our inclination towards tears³. Indeed if we gave girls the same degree of shit we give boys for crying the crying gap would shrink radically if not disappear all together. Of course I do support being less hard on boys for crying but so long as we are inclined to help crying girls (crying guys on the street are ignored) the intrinsic harms of appearing vulnerable will encourage men to cry less⁴.

Crying is really a minor point in the larger picture. A much more worrying instance of this kind of sympathetic sexism is the way we we tend to treat men and women in arguments. Intellectual arguments are the lifeblood of many disciplines and they are especially important to understanding science and math where challenging your friend who got a different answer is often the best way to learn the material but unfortunately the women who come into my office hours for math are way less likely to be engaged in any sort of argument (by other female or male peers) than the guys. If we wanted a more equitable society we would be teaching girls to give as good as they got in an argument and suck it up if they lose like we do boys. However, instead of sending girls the message that they should hold their own like boys the people who feel strongly about women’s issues today are the most likely to attack any man who upsets a woman by arguing with her.

In short ‘feminism’ has decayed into the same kind of ‘respect for women’ mentality that the Victorians used to put women on a pedestal while keeping them from achieving equality. Intuitively we all understand that if people see someone as needing of protection or requiring special gentle treatment they will also see that person as weaker and less capable. Thus if we truly want girls to succeed in the rough and tumble intellectual world of mathematics and physics we have to stop treating them like they were fragile dolls requiring special protections. If we want true gender equality we need to go a lot further. We need to congratulate girls on being competitive and argumentative like we do with guys but we also need to discourage them from asking for help, breaking down or appearing helpless like we do with guys.

I would like to live in such a world (and to some extent do) but I think it’s quite clear that most of society, including most of those who would identify as feminists have no such desire. What most people desire is an updated version of the Victorian pedestal where we tell women they can do whatever they want and write off any statistical differences to unnamed discrimination while at the same time continuing to treat women as fragile objects to be protected. Most people would rather live in a society where ditching your boyfriend beside the road is less bad than ditching your girlfriend no matter who has the black belt. Most women would rather date men who can help them with their homework when they break down rather than men who sob when they can’t get a math problem. ‘Feminists’ especially seem to prefer a society where men get shit for making a girl cry in an argument and the girl receives sympathy even if the guy did nothing but frustrate her by being stridently correct. Ultimately the problem is that most people, ‘feminists’ included like gender roles a great deal but also want perfect (statistical) professional parity. However, you can’t just take gender roles on and off the way you do with hats. The stereotypes and attitudes people form as young children will follow them into the laboratory as well as the living room and bedroom. People need to make a choice about whether they want gender equality of not and if not stop pretending.

So my procrastination tonight started early with this interesting article about the proclivities of infants for racial and cultural bias. It’s a good article but I take a bit of an issue with this paragraph.

Spelke’s studies found baby boys and girls have similar mathematical ability, an incidental finding that was at the forefront of her mind in January 2005 when the former Harvard president Larry Summers suggested that the relative lack of female engineers and scientists was down to innate gender differences. ‘When it comes to the basic modules we are born with, they are pretty much the same,’ says Spelke, who was in the thick of the verbal fisticuffs that followed (Summers was ‘wrong, point for point’). Summers resigned as controversy raged. Spelke does not deny that there are differences in the way men and women think but most of this, she believes, is learnt over time, and down to prejudice and the expectations of society.

Of course it’s always easier to repudiate someone’s remarks when you simply assume they said whatever you are itching to reject. But besides mischaracterizing Summers this paragraph also buys into widespread but fallacious assumption that basic computational skills (adding, subtracting etc..) are the skills needed by scientists and engineers; calculation is easy it is the ability to reason abstractly and construct proofs that is hard. I would normally have simply dismissed this as another instance of sloppy journalism but a few minutes later I found the same errors being made in a respectable summary of an article published in the current edition of science, errors seemingly encouraged by the paper itself and it’s lead author.

Tipping off their hand early the summary begins with it’s own (IMO unethical) misquotation of Summers¹ but quickly moves on to reading the result they want to see into this recent study. The study basically plotted gender differences on math tests in a country versus that country’s level of gender equity and concluded that the more equitable the country the smaller the advantage boys enjoyed on math tests. The message the summary takes from this, with support from the study’s lead author, is that gender differences in mathematics are largely a result of enviornmental effects. Of course latter we are given the following qualification.

Having linked social structures to the math gender gap from country to country, Sapienza wonders whether this result rules out biological influences entirely. The answer is no. The biological hypothesis suggests that an average boy would score higher in mathematics than in reading, while for girls the reverse is true. This pattern does not change in more gender equal societies hinting that some aspects of academic performance may be innately different between boys and girls.
Sapienza and colleagues found that boys, regardless of the country and social environment in which they live, typically do better in math than in reading. Similarly, girls are usually better in reading than in math, regardless of the degree of gender equality in their society. As a result, in more gender equal societies, girls will gain an absolute advantage relative to boys.

In short an uncritical reading of either the paper in science or the summary would leave the reader with the impression that we now have even stronger evidence that boys don’t have an innate advantage at mathematics but there are still a few issues that need to be worked out about reading ability. Except the study really shows exactly the opposite. Ignoring for a moment the implicit (but false) assumption that these math tests are good measures of the skills needed to enter math and science professions just try and think about what theory would best explain the fact that cross-culturally boys are better at math than they are at reading while girls are better at reading than they are at math? Seems pretty clear to me that this evidence best supports the idea that their is an innate gender based attraction to math or reading and that in societies with greater gender equity women just perform better in school generally.

Now I don’t actually endorse that theory. It overly simplifies the complex interactions of culture and innate traits and it would be silly to just rely on this evidence while ignoring other evidence supporting larger cultural effects. However, the point remains that the evidence provided actually points in the exact opposite direction of the spin that is provided. Ultimately the point that I take from this is that if you want to have any idea about what’s plausible in this area you really can’t trust anyone’s (except mine of course :-) ) interpretation, even that of the scientists doing the study. You really have to go read the actual papers with a skeptical eye to get something other than spin. In short I worry that their is a bias in the spin given to papers and opinions on this stuff because you get a lot more flak for strident support of one side than the other.

My recent post about feminism and Hillary Clinton was probably a bit obscure. Certainly I think it’s sad that the public accepts the claim that Clinton’s female supporters whining about her loss is feminism but the reason I think it’s worthy of attention is that it’s part of a larger trend: the confusion of (simplistic) emotional sympathy for women with feminism. Now in a certain sense one might be able to identify feminism with concern for women as a class but it’s the confusion of feminism with sympathy for individuals as women that I think is so sad and misguided. In the abstract this distinction may seem quite subtle, even pointless, but a few quick examples should make it clear that there is an important difference between the two attitudes.

Whether or not US women are blocked or discouraged from achieving high political office is certainly a valid feminist concern. After all the existence of a systemic bias against voting for a woman to be president is a harm to woman as a class. On the other hand strong support of a particular candidate because she is a woman and as such you identify/sympathize with her is not a feminist issue. It’s just another example of the same type of sexism women fought so hard to eliminate in the workplace¹. This isn’t to say there is no acceptable reason to vote for a female candidate because of her gender; you might think this was the only/best way to overcome anti-female bias. However, it’s pretty clear that most of the women trying to suggest Hillary’s loss is the result of rampant gender discrimination² aren’t doing so because they thought out the issue in the abstract and came to the conclusion that this was the most effective way to advance the cause of equality. After all if this was the result of that kind of strategic thinking about the aims of women as a group you would think they would find plenty of reasons not to publicly tie gender equity to Hillary Clinton³ or even decide that the interests of racial equality outweighed those of gender equality here. Rather, these women are driven by their empathetic sympathy for Hillary as another woman (enhanced by the perception of gender based slights in the campaign) and have let that distract them from any interest they may have had in really achieving equity for women as a class.

Another good example is the attitude of women in various graduate programs toward the admission of women and affirmative action for women. Now one might be able to put together some pretty reasonable arguments justifying offering women special incentives to enter math and science programs but I suspect the best such arguments would all direct our resources toward the college years and below where the gender gap gets created. Yet the strongest support is often for programs that offer female graduate students priority in admissions, cash incentives or special mentoring programs despite the fact that the primary effect of these expenditures is probably on the choice of school of female graduate students. If the support for these programs really resulted from a desire to achieve gender equity you would at least expect the question of efficacy to be of supreme interest and any support of these programs to be openly conditioned on empirical support for their efficacy. However, it is quite evident that these programs enjoy strong emotional support prior to any thought or analysis about their larger effects on society’s attitude toward women.

It seems evident that the real psychological motivation behind the support for these programs is simple sympathy and identification. No one sat down and decided to support these programs because they thought they would accomplish some goal. They supported them because they felt emotional empathy towards women so they want to support women. In other words it’s the emotional pull of group allegiance/support that motivates these policies not rational analysis of their likely effect. If you are still skeptical consider the different way we treat the (assumed) subtle social pressure discouraging women from entering certain fields from that pressuring them into entering other fields. In other words why don’t we take measures to counteract the social forces pushing women into a traditional field like teaching or nursing. If our interest was in undoing the sexist stereotypes that society has packed into girls then we should be equally diligent in discouraging women from being nurses, teachers or primary care givers as we are in encouraging them to enter traditionally male fields. On the other hand if people were really just reacting to a vague feeling of sympathy it makes perfect sense why they would only offer women encouragements.

Maybe I’m mistaken but my strong sense is that feminism used to be something much more noble, even if sometimes silly and misguided. People would be genuinely troubled about engaging in traditional feminine roles since they saw that encouragement could perpetuate stereotypes just as much as discouragement. However, women (and men) eventually decided they weren’t really interested in rejecting most of our gender stereotypes and assumptions and the visible aspects of feminism decayed into mere group affinity and sympathy for women. In a future post I will explain why I think this decayed version of feminism does so much harm to the cause of gender equity but enough blogging for today.