Does anyone really take this kind of article purporting to analyze why women often conflict with other women in the workplace to be a serious attempt to discern the truth? I know one can’t go very deep in 3 pages but it seems totally transparent to me that the author choose to tell an alarming then comforting sequence of little myths rather than engage in even the most cursory analysis of the issue. Sure, this is low hanging fruit as far as bad arguments go but this article managed to combine thoughtless emotional sloganism about gender interaction with total disregard for the truth and used them as a vehicle to foist her traditional stereotypes about the need for women to be nurturing and supportive on the reader. Frankly it’s one of the most sexist things I’ve ever read on the internet.

The article begins inauspisciously by hanging the whole premise of the article on a blatant fallacy. Do women preferentially bully other women? I don’t know but the study quoted in the article sure as hell doesn’t say so. What it actually says is that women report being bullied by women and men about equally often, and at about the same rate as men report being bullied by men but men report being bullied by women much less. Of course, this is exactly what one would expect to see if men were simply reluctant to admit being bullied by women. So the entire effect could be nothing more then men feeling embarrassed to admit being bullied by a woman.

As if to further refute her own hypothesis the author then informs us that women are taught they should be supporting and nurturing to each other so they feel bad treatment from other women particularly disturbing. But, hmm, wouldn’t that suggest that women are holding women up to a higher standard? Of course the author doesn’t seem to realize this would inflate the women on women bullying numbers nor that, this expectation itself might cause women to retaliate against each other for perceived failures to live up to this higher standard.

After pointlessly observing she knows some women who feel they are bullied more by women the author suddenly jumps tracks to ask why women are less likely to be perceived as leaders. Drawing up the dark cloud of discriminatory/unfair treatment she tells us that women are perceived negatively if they behave as aggressively as the men but can’t get promoted if they don’t. That, indeed, is a worthwhile question to ask but instead we get a heartwarming story about a group of female executives getting together to role-play scenarios and help them discover their political blind spots.

I’m sure that plays well to the majority of readers who (as I often am myself) are more interested in the emotional journey than thinking hard about the right answer but it should also set off a giant flashing red “DANGER” sign in anyone who has been paying attention. I mean at least skip a paragraph or two after observing how unfair it is that women can’t display the aggression men do before telling them you expect them to be more supporting and cooperative. I mean she might as well have suggested women get together every month to bake and let each other know if any of the guys aren’t getting enough of their cooking. Besides, if you are worried, as the author is, about women picking on each other because they see themselves as competing for the same female slots in the cooperation you might want to hesitate before encouraging women to see themselves as female employees. Indeed, the results on stereotype threat would seem to suggest that thinking of themselves as women encourages them to behave more like the traditional gender stereotype. So no, it may not be necessary or desirable for women to be “aware of their shared identity as women.”

As if to make sure she hammered home the point that women had better be cooperative and supportive as their gender dictates the author approvingly includes this view before the end of the article.

Televerde reversed that attitude in Perryville, Ms. Cirocco said, by encouraging women to work for a common cause, much like the environment envisioned by the Canadian researchers. “It becomes a very nurturing environment,” Ms. Cirocco said. “You have all these women who become your friends, and you are personally invested in their success. Everyone wants everyone to get out, to go on to have a good healthy life.” If the level of support found at Televerde were found elsewhere, Ms. Klaus said, it would solve a lot of problems.

I mean this stuff is right up there with (actually far worse since it’s more respectable) the worst of the perversions of evolutionary psychology used to assure the author they were inferior. It masquerades as science and analysis despite lacking anything of the kind while using hackneyed emotional ploys to convince the reader that women need to try even harder to play their traditional supportive and nurturing gender role and worst of all do so subtly enough to be reasonably successful. If people aren’t going to get outrage by this sort of piece they should stop pretending they are fighting gender stereotypes and want to move beyond traditional gender roles and just admit it’s just all about group pride. If your really worried about the culture pushing gender stereotypes onto women here you go. Outrage over this kind of article might actually accomplish something. So if you aren’t going to make a big deal about this kind of article just drop the pose. It’s in the New York Times for crying out loud.

I’ve never really understood the uproar over steroid¹ use in baseball. Unlike some other sports baseball lacked any actual rule banning steroids or performance enhancing drugs before 2004. True there was a policy (without any penalties) generally banning any baseball player from using or possessing any illegal drug or controlled substance but it’s also a MLB policy now that players can’t drink in their clubhouse. Surely you don’t feel that someone who snuck a beer into the clubhouse after a game would be a cheater do you? What about the players who bummed a valium for a plane flight? Sleep helps you play so it’s giving you an advantage on the field. Remember in the baseball culture of that time the use of steroids wasn’t considered a big deal. Besides, the substances used by the more sophisticated users very well might not have been scheduled, and thus not illegal², at the time.

Taking a broader perspective on the attitude we take to cheating in baseball it’s simply absurd to try and hang your the outrage at steroid use on the notion that it’s cheating. When a pitcher is caught scuffing the ball or applying spit it’s not a big issue the way it would be if they were found to be using steroids. Of course some would argue that steroid use by a player undermines the validity of their records by making it impossible to compare them to the past greats and thus damages the game. Why anyone would think that violating a policy that everyone understood wasn’t a genuine rule of the game should undermine the validity of your record but actually cheating during the game doesn’t count for that much totally baffles me but it doesn’t matter as the whole notion that tis nonsensical. As people have throughly documented past players have unfairly benefited from evils like segregation and rule changes to such a degree that the notion of comparing players from one era to another simply by examining the numbers doesn’t make any sense.

Finally, when pushed on these two arguments the people making a fuss about about steroids usage retreat to the argument that these players are role models and setting a bad example for children. Even if so where is the outrage over players who spend the night carousing, who leave their wives or don’t save enough money? Children see baseball players publicly flaunt all kinds of bad behavior all the time but they only hear about the steroid use because moralizing fans and prosecutors insisting on digging it up. Moreover, while these players certainly take some risk they aren’t desperate body builders, even with the steroids they live a healthier lifestyle than most public figures. In my view we should simply take the use of performance enhancing drugs as just another evolution in the long series of changes to the game.

So if the revelations about baseball players past steroid use hasn’t upset me what has? Government prosecutors threatening to prosecute a man’s wife and mother in law for tax violations just to pressure him into spilling the beans on Barry Bonds.** As I’ve said previously I think it should be illegal (frankly I would add it to the constitution) to threaten someone’s family to secure their testimonty. Even if the practice itself doesn’t seem repugnant to you if the defense can’t (openly) pay witnesses to testify for fear it would bias their testimony why should the prosecution be able to threaten their family with jail time? But even if you accept the practice is sometimes nencessery is the Barry Bonds case really that important?

I can’t believe that the government is threatening to screw over a man’s family just so he will help them prove Barry Bonds lied. That really is a new low.

If you watched so much as one event during this summer’s Olympics you probably heard about the extensive efforts to catch athletes using performance enhancing drugs. Now certainly using steroids, HGH or any other pharmaceutical training aids is cheating and the athletes who use them ought to be stripped of their awards. However, just because something is against the rules doesn’t mean if should be against the rules. So while we ought to chastise cheating athletes who surreptitiously take performance enhancing substances to give them an advantage over their rule abiding competitors does it make sense to have rules against doping in the first place? I think serious consideration reveals the answer is no. Regulations on the type of doping, bans on acute intoxication during competition and other reasonable restrictions make sense but the blanket rule against doping harms both sports and medicine.

In NASCAR (auto racing) the rules often impose a fair number of restrictions on the sort of car that can be driven in a race. When better car designs began pushing races to faster speeds restrictor plates and other design features were mandated to keep the sport (relatively) safe. Thus the rules act to prevent excessive risks to drivers but absent particular reasons to ban or require a practice they allow the teams to modify their cars as they see fit. The net result of this not only maintains the excitement of competitive racing it also encourages engineering advances that bring benefits to society at large. My vision would be something similar for medical enhancement. The rules would ban particularly risky/harmful medications while putting the substantial enthusiasm and advertising money available in sports to generate medical advances. Thus to justify the outright ban on doping one must be able to cite some harm the policy causes that outweighs this benefit as well as the entertainment value of seeing athletes perform even more incredible feets.

The standard objection to allowing doping is that it would make new records and achievements meaningless since modern athletes would be competing with the assistance of chemical compounds while the past greats had no such help (or maybe they weren’t caught). However, most of the emotional force of these arguments is really based on a misconception about how doping works. Somehow people imagine that they could just pop some steroids and go compete in olympic weightlifting next summer but this is simply not true. Sure doping can help athletes become stronger faster, recover from injury quicker and so forth but it doesn’t substitute for the insane dedication and time spent practicing. Moreover, since all the serious competitors will be doping it will still come down to the same factors it always has: luck, dedication, talent etc..

So putting aside the idea that somehow the striving and hunger to win that we love about sports would become irrelevant how much sense does this objection make? Not much really. The idea that somehow modern athletes and those of days past had comparable tools is pure fantasy. Take someone with the same amount of ‘natural’ talent and let them train using techniques from the 50s and modern techniques and their isn’t much of a question about who will win the event. Just the fact that modern athletes grew up with all the benefits of modern medicine and nutritional knowledge is enough to give them a huge leg up over the competitors of a generation ago. As if this wasn’t enough advances in equipment design certainly contribute to world records. The new seamless Speedo swimsuits supposedly shaved a significant amount off race times but that didn’t make watching Phelps compete any less exciting. Maybe you could avoid things like the new speedo swimsuits but even changes like using deeper pools can change race times.

Another common argument is that sports are somehow supposed to push the limits of human performance and that if doping was allowed we would no longer be seeing what the ‘natural’ human body could achieve. However, modern athletes already don’t reflect what a ‘natural’ human could achieve. These athletes were given antibiotics to recover from sickness as children, broken bones were set and they were generally kept in better physical shape than the people of just several generations ago. Moreover, there is simply no principled line that can be drawn between doping and the scientific analysis used to select appropriate vitamins and nutrients for athletes. Trying to insist on a no doping rule for athletes will become even more ridiculous as we develop compounds for the general public that make them more fit and healthy without the need for unpleasant time in the gym.

The final and last objection is that somehow doping would pose too great a risk to the athletes or they would no longer provide good role models for children. Given that we allow sports like NASCAR and let girls start training for gymnastics at super young ages this extreme concern about athlete health seems a bit disingenuous. Moreover, as I pointed out above these risks can be reduced and often these doping compounds can be used to speed recovery from injury. Given the potential medical benefits to society at large shouldn’t we try and only retreat to a total ban when we find that it’s impossible to retain a reasonable degree of safety. Moreover, by reducing the risks from surreptitious doping it may also make many athletes safer. The role model argument is outright circular. The only reason to think kids ought to believe that the managed use of medications under a doctor’s supervision for athletic training is wrong is because we’ve decided that’s it’s wrong. Sure we don’t want high school kids to use steroids so they don’t feel like a dweeb but that’s no more of an argument against the professional managed use of enhancing medications than the fact that we don’t want kids to speed is an argument that NASCAR should impose a 60mph speed limit.

In case you hadn’t heard Judge Kozinski just decided to recuse himself from the obscenity trial of Ira Issaacs because of the controversial pictures found in a (mistakenly) publicly accessible directory on his website. Reading the LA times article I linked above might give you the impression someone stumbled across his porn stash but an email from his wife and the comments in response to the Volokh Conspiracy coverage reveals that it wasn’t so much porn as crude humor. The most offensive content seems to have been either a man trying to relieve himself forced to flee from an aroused donkey or a (likely faked) picture of a young man fellating himself captioned with a spoof on the mastercard ‘priceless’ commercials. Hardly hard core content and even if it had been so what? The judge’s material was hosted on a private computer (possibly uploaded by his son) and (with the exceptions of minor copyright violations) there is no serious argument that he is guilty of any crime.

In fact I find it downright worrisome that judges can be forced to recuse themselves from an obscenity trial because they have tastes that some people find offensive. In effect if we demand that judges who are known to like risque pictures recuse themselves from obscenity cases we bias the pool of judges in a puritanical direction, much like death qualifying a jury biases them towards conviction. Now some might argue that a judge is obligated to recuse himself in a situation like this on the grounds that it demonstrates a conflict of interest but that argument is easily shown to be flawed.

Presumably the reason one might think there is a conflict of interest is that if Kozinski likes looking at risque photos he might feel greater affinity for the defendant or want to keep such images legal. However, if valid this argument would apply equally strongly to the judge who doesn’t like looking at risque pictures or finds them disgusting/offensive. After all if you find porn objectionable you probably have an even stronger motivation to find for the prosecution than someone who found some risque pictures amusing had to find for the defense. But of course no one would dream of demanding a judge recuse themselves because they dislike pornography.

If you still think Kozinski is obligated to recuse himself try replacing a pornography with death metal and check if the arguments still holds. Imagine that the government brought an obscenity prosecution against a band for playing some offensive kind of rock and roll back in the 50s or 60s (suppose Slayer was teleported back in time). Should judges have to recuse themselves in this case because they have been observed by members of the public rocking out in their car? Or most realistically suppose there was an obscenity prosecution over a book depicting child sexuality. Should a judge who read Lolita in college have to recuse themselves? What if they publicly admitted it was their favorite book thereby prompting a public outcry?

Ultimately judges are what stands in the way of tyranny by the majority (or minority who shames the majority into submission) and it’s harder for them to do that if they can be shamed into recusal because they aren’t sufficiently prudish. Unfortunately, because pornography is a sexual taboo there is an unfortunate tendency against defending it. Despite the vast numbers of people who consume internet porn no one wants to tell a news reporter they do, or even vigorously defend the practice lest their mom or aunt or whoever read this in the paper. This let’s people get away with ridiculous errors in logic that would be obviously absurd in any other context. Just in searching for background on this subject I ran into several articles that cast the general tendency of people to get bored with stuff they have already seen/done as if it was akin to drug addiction in the case of pornography. This situation with judge Kozinski is just another example that would never have happened if people didn’t shut off their brains when the issue of pornography came up.

I know I’m beating this issue to death so I will try to keep this post short but reading slashdot today I ran across this awful article from the Wall Street Journal Blogs saying women write better code than men. Now in and of itself the idea that statistically women write better code than men is neither absurd nor offensive but this article might as well have been ripped out of a 1950s era stereotype about women’s inferiority at math¹.

Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers–insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.

This remark is shortly followed by an equally over broad statement to the effect that men are too interested in showing off how clever they are to write readable code. Now while it’s certainly possible that (of the people who program) women are somewhat more likely to write better code (though I know of no evidence to this effect) this article adopts the sweeping tones of stereotype and bias to suggest that individual hiring decisions should favor women on these grounds. It is exactly this sort of unwarranted assumption that group characteristics make a difference even after individual factors (like say looking at previous code they have written, interviewing them) that distinguishes outright prejudice and discrimination from mere scientific hypothesizing. Well that plus the tendency to offer totally unsupported explanations that play into gender stereotypes (women are more touchy-feely).

If the conclusion had been the other way around and suggested that women were too touchy-feely to program well this vice-presidenty would probably quickly find themselves out of a job. This is why I blame faux feminism for this sort of attitude. It is exactly the confusion of feminism with the idea that we should cheer on women like they were a sports team that creates the impression this kind of harmful remark is reasonable. Despite obviously validating the idea that we should hire people based on unproven stereotyped generalizations about their gender instead of individual accomplishment this remark is seen as ‘ok’ because it favors hiring women. Another good example of this effect is how acceptable it has become to advocate for single sex education when coached in terms of helping women, even when the underlying theory would make Larry Summers cringe.

Now if the only harm these attitudes inflicted was a bit of discrimination against men you might reasonably think it wasn’t a huge deal². However, you simply can’t train people to accept traditional gender stereotypes and discriminate based on those only when it gives a certain kind of result. If you convince people to hire women for coding jobs because they are more touchy-feely you can’t avoid the fact that they are going to turn around and favor men for jobs in math, physics or the military where being touchy-feely is perceived as a negative (perhaps with some justification). Hell, even being good team players and leaving clear directions are going to be negatives for some job.

In fact I think what we are seeing right now is the harm of being touchy-feely about gender equality. The point is that deciding what views/people are good based on who sounds like they are on your side might have been fine when discrimination was primarily overt but when the primary concern is the affect of societal gender roles and semi-conscious stereotypes the greatest danger comes from the people encouraging that type of thinking and behavior, especially if they do so while claiming the `feminist’ moral high ground.

So in a recent post I argued that we really shouldn’t care at all if there are innate gender differences because such differences would be irrelevant to our judgments about any individual’s ability. In that post I simply took it for granted that the presence of innate gender differences really shouldn’t affect our judgment of people’s ability but now I see this is a point I need to explore at greater length. In particular I think there are three major fallacies that people fall into which leads them to assume that the question of whether there are innate statistical differences in men and women’s proclivity for math and science makes a difference in people’s daily lives. These fallacies lead people to think that the existence of innate gender differences would somehow justify gender discrimination and bigoted stereotypes. Of course not liking the consequences of a theory is no reason to reject it but in this case it’s certainly worthwhile to repudiate the fallacious thinking that makes people care so much about this issue.

The three fallacies that I’ve noticed are the following.

1. The confusion of small statistical differences with our intuitive notion of a valid generalization.
2. The belief that innate factors are somehow set in stone while cultural or social effects are temporary and thus justify different inferences.
3. Failure to appreciate the power of conditionalization.

The first fallacy is pretty obvious but very hard to correct. Most people don’t have good quantitative skills, much less experience with statistics so tend to translate claims about small statistical differences into simple stereotypes. Even people who should know better often don’t apply their quantitative training to this domain. This is why you see people respond to claims about innate statistical differences as if someone had claimed that women simply couldn’t do math and science. Once you get beyond this point you tend to run into the second fallacy.

Unfortunately both sides in the nature vs. nurture debate encourage the notion that innate differences are simple matters of ability and social effects are easily overcome issues of confidence. This leads to the fallacious conclusion that somehow innate differences call for a policy of denying women positions in math/science while nurture effects simply call for more encouragement. This couldn’t be further from the truth. One of the largest determiners of math/science achievement is interest and any possible innate differences could just as easily be differences in interest as they are differences in ‘ability.’ Moreover, it’s totally unclear to what extent differences in experience and exposure at young ages make. Thus it’s easily possible that the current gender gap could be the result of some innate difference that makes girls less interested in science as currently presented but small tweaks in science education could grab their attention. Alternatively it’s surely possible that the gender gap is the result of deep cultural forces that are nearly impossible to change and can’t be compensated for by our educational system, e.g., the type of behavior that attracts male romantic interest biases girls away from math and science. Quite simply there is no simple moral or effect on our judgment that one answer to the nature/nurture debate should have as opposed to the other.

The third and last fallacy is perhaps the most problematic, particularly in light of the second fallacy. People tend to assume that if women statistically tend to be worse at task X this is reason to lower their estimate of some particular woman’s (perhaps themselves) ability at task X. Counterintuitively this just isn’t the case. Conditionalizing on the standard information we gather about virtually anyone we meet can eliminate or even reverse the effect that gender should have on our estimation of someone’s ability. If you’ve taken any probability courses you’ve probably seen this point made using the example of the famous berkeley discrimination case. If you haven’t let me give you a simple example.

It’s undoubtedly true that statistically men are worse at nursing than women. This isn’t a claim about innate ability just a simple observation following from the fact that more women than men are nurses hence fewer men have received nursing training. Thus if you know nothing about someone other than their gender you should expect men to have a lower nursing ability. However, this doesn’t entail that you should trust male nurses less than female ones. Nor does it entail that men who aren’t nurses are somehow worse at nursing than women who aren’t nurses. It could even be that men who choose to become nurses despite the stereotypes have particular talent for it and thus conditionalizing on profession reverses the effect gender should have on your expectation of someone’s nursing ability.

The same could very well be true for skill at math/science. Even if there is some innate factor that makes women statistically worse at math/science it’s quite possible that those women who do pursue math/science tend to be more skilled than their male counterparts. In other words once you know that someone is interested in pursuing math/science finding out that individual is a woman might increase the expectation of her ability despite the fact that statistically women were worse than men at math/science. Since we tend to gather all sorts of information about someone we meet or consider for a job it’s totally unjustified to use statistical facts about men vs. women in the general population to reach conclusions about a particular individual.

The issue of nature vs. nurture really, really doesn’t matter that much. It’s almost never justified to use weak group characteristics like this to judge an individual and it’s equally unjustified to take mere statistical differences in a profession as proof of discrimination. So aside from pure scientific curiosity we should forget about nature vs. nurture and concentrate on applied questions like: Does science education unnecessarily make girls feel marginalized or less able? Would greater exposure to female role models in science make more women satisfied with their choice of career? Does rote memorization at the middle school level create barriers that discourage more studious individuals from pursuing math and physics?

In the post before last I pointed out that despite the spin a recent study in science was actually better evidence for biological effects in mathematics ability than it was for the environmental hypothesis. In short showing that girls get better at both math and reading as gender equality increases without shrinking the gap between their math and reading scores is most of the hypothesis that girls simply gain some general academic advantage over boys (for instance they study more) in cultures that don’t oppress them. If this was straightforwardly a matter of discrimination or stereotyping we would expect women’s math and reading scores to equalize as gender equality increased.

Now it was bad enough when some random science summaries spun the study in this fashion but it’s even worse to see ars technica running stories saying things like this about the study:

But a new study suggests that, when it comes to math, we can forget biology, as social equality seems to play a dominant role in test scores.

Ughh, what is it about this topic that causes people to check their reasoning ability at the door? I mean I can understand that the general public might think the suggestion of a statistical difference amounted to a claim that women were incapable of doing math/science but people with a science background should know better. There is no serious doubt that the variation inside the genders is vastly larger than any possible difference in averages. Moreover, once you actually have some evidence about a person’s mathematical/scientific ability (like you’ve talked to them) their gender isn’t relevant. That is we should expect conditioning on actual evidence about someone’s ability should screen off any impact of their gender.

I write about this topic for the same reason I write about other topics. I find fallacious reasoning to be infuriating, especially when it seems to be motivated by a desire to reach certain comforting beliefs. However, it really should be a minor scientific curiosity. It doesn’t matter one jot what the cause of observed differences in gender performance might be. What matters is the effect these differences have on society and what actions we can take to minimize any harms that result from them.

I mean (hypothetically) suppose it turns out that the gender gap in math/science is caused entirely by social conditioning that makes women prefer some disciplines and men others but that those women who do choose to do math/science face no discouragement and those who don’t are made genuinely happy by their choices. In that case there is no compelling reason to force a change to the gender ratio in the sciences, especially if that change could only be brought about by painful social reorganization and reeducation (say by actively punishing women who pursue stereotypical careers to stop them from being role models for next generation).

On the other hand (hypothetically) suppose that the gender gap is the result of some innate difference in cognition but a simple change in the way science is conducted or taught would let many women who want to be scientists contribute productively to the field instead of having their dreams frustrated. Then obviously we should make that change regardless of the fact that the an innate difference was underneath the gender gap.

In short this issue really doesn’t fucking matter but it really really bothers me when I see people, especially scientists, spinning studies so heavily to reach the conclusions they find pleasant to believe. The roots of the gender gap are clearly complicated and almost certainly result from some complex interplay of innate and environmental factors but just think about how differently we would approach this problem if we were studying another species. Instead of prematurely trying to announce the death of either theory we would say the issue was still murky, explain the competing evidence and leave it at that. Why can’t we do that here too?

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.