Gender Essentialism

[vegetariantaxidermy]

I wouldn't expect you to take anything too seriously I might post that isn't peer-reviewed and is done by "Progressive Think Tank Dot Com" or something like that either. This isn't fallacious, more like practicality. We should stick to reputable, published science.

Good enough to save. Love it.

[Immanuel Can]

Where did you get this 5% figure?

Soh, Anderson and Shrier...they all quote it.

Do you happen to remember which papers? I need to see context on the 5% figure.

They're all published books.

Soh's is "The End of Gender," Anderson's is "When Harry Became Sally," and Shrier's is "Irreversible Damage." You might really enjoy Soh's...she's very pro-lesbian, but for scientific reasons, anti-trans. She's the one who makes the argument that transism is potentially a kind of genocide against lesbians.

Also, a lot of these comments seem to be ignoring the research I posted a few posts back.

Like Nobili, Asschemann et al? They all just say, "We don't really know." I didn't find that a particularly helpful research finding.

But I'm also acutely aware how corrupt social sciences studies on questions involving sex are right now. They're almost all being driven by PC conclusions taken in advance, since the penalties for stepping out of line regarding it are absolutely draconian right now. If you want to survive as a social scientist, you can nowadays only repeat the PC talking points, or else look for a new career. Those are the only options.

And also, of course, I don't know what to do with the fact that you dismiss the studies I cited as merely "conservative" propaganda. After all, whether they're "conservative" or not is not a function of what they reveal, one way or the other. If they have good data and treat it the right way, then that doesn't indicate anything wrong. To think otherwise would just be a species of the genetic fallacy, really, or even the ad hominem fallacy.

I didn't dismiss studies as conservative propaganda, just some unpublished/non-peer review stuff written by a highly biased source.

Potato-potahto. Same thing.

The problem is, as I pointed out, that academia itself has become so corrupt on this issue that one is not allowed to publish stuff that questions the narrative. So it's a pretty impossible situation: anything I send to you, you might suppose fails to be "peer reviewed" by the approved "peers." But the approved "peers" do not allow contrary research even to be done. So there's not a lot I can offer you.

This is not a "PC conspiracy."

Actually, it is. It goes back and starts with events in the '40s, actually. There's a whole history on it. It involves a group called "The Frankfurt School."

That women trickle out of STEM isn't in dispute: you mention dwindling numbers in higher mixed classes; but this is the leaky pipeline phenomenon. What's in question is whether there is something essential about being a woman and moving away from STEM or whether there is something more psychosocial going on. I've shown that there isn't any evidence that something biologically essential going on, but there is plenty of evidence that there is something psychosocial going on.

I wouldn't say you have, for a couple of reasons. One is that even supposing there are psychosocial "things going on," it wouldn't tell us whether or not there were ALSO biological-essential "things going on." It can easily be both.

Secondly, psychosocial things don't come from nowhere. Even if there were psychosocioal barriers, it doesn't suggest there's a conspiracy (to use your word) to keep women out of STEM. Rather, social and psychological phenomena can be manifestations of biological realities...indeed, one would not suppose it's easy to say what else they would ever be, if one is a strict materialist.

Thirdly, I don't see the same phenomena you claim. I see an overwhelming effort by people in the STEM fields to get women in and reward them for staying in. So whatever psychosocial barriers there are, it's no longer up to society to do anything about them, since it's done all it can already; it's up to women to "man up" and take the opportunities that are being handed to them on a silver platter. They can't sit around and wait for somebody else to fix their problems: they should do what you did, and just step their game up.

That's where this discussion turned, in some sense: there are at least two views on why there is a shortage of women in STEM.

1) On one view, which we can call the nature view, it's because there is something about being a biological/phenotypic female that leads to personality traits that are less interested in STEM or at least more interested in other things. On this view, you could raise a bunch of women in a vacuum away from the influences of society and they would still not choose to be interested in STEM because that's just the way that they are.

2) On another view, which we can call the nurture view, it's because there is something about the way society treats women (how they are raised, how they are interacted with, what they're encouraged to do, what peer pressures they face, that sort of thing) that lead women to lose interest in STEM. On this view, you could raise a bunch of women in a vacuum away from the influences of society and you wouldn't notice the same "leaky pipeline" effect because the women aren't under the same lifelong gendered pressures.

There could of course be some other explanation. For instance we could consider a hybrid of the two, where there is some mixture of nature and nurture at work (which I think is probably the most likely scenario). It would then be a question as to how much contribution each effect has on women.

Well, so far the evidence for the nature picture being the whole case or a majority of the case doesn't really hold up.

I don't see warrant for that last claim, there. It seems to me it holds up very well, at least on a "hybrid" view, if not on total biological interpretation. And I think it's really up to the people who say it's all "psychological-caused-by-social" to prove what specific elements of the "social" are allegedly causing the situation. And if they can't come up with anything specific, then I see no reason at all for doubting the biological hypothesis has something to do with it. It seems the obvious next possibility, as you suggest with your dichotomy.

You're not yet understanding my objection. It's not to the word "bias." Sure, biases of all kinds do exist...racial, sex, ability, and so on. That's well documented, as you point out.

It's to the adjective "implicit." "Implicit" is a weasel-word, a cheat of the Left. If bias is "implicit," then they don't have to prove it exists at all. For to identify the cause of the bias would make it "explicit," or better, just "bias." And we can deal with "bias" in such a plain form. We just say, "Who's doing it, what's the evidence for it, and how do we fix it?" Problem solved.

But when we add the term "implicit," we're saying, "You can't find this kind of bias, but we're still going to insist it's bias. We're going to assert that it just drifts nebulously 'around' some system." It's ghost-hunting. It's fakery. There's no person culpable, no specific evidence that bias is involved (if there were, it would be "explicit bias"), but still we're supposed to jump to the conclusion that it's bias?

And there's no possibility of solving "implicit" bias. Since it cannot be identified and attributed a specific cause or a specific agent, it cannot ever be cured. So the Left gets a permanent excuse for whining and it's own privilege, but never has to ante up and show that a situation of discrimination or prejudice is actually implicated at all.

What the Left is doing is one of its old tricks: and that is, to use any evidence of disparities between any two groups as automatic evidence of nothing other than bias. It's not allowed to indicate any difference of competence, interest, culture, inclination, intelligence, or for that matter, sex. It has to be bias, prejudice, racism, or some other such evil.

The effect is to distort all the data by receiving only one kind of conclusion and banning the rest. It's utterly unscientific, as you must know, being in STEM.

You say "If bias is 'implicit,' then they don't have to prove it exists at all." Yet, clearly psychologists/sociologists spend a lot of time and effort doing just that...

No, they study "bias" and label it "implicit."

One can never study "implicit" bias, because it's only "implicit." If you make it "explicit," as you have to do in order to identify and quantify it, then it's not "implicit" at all anymore.

The difference between implicit and explicit bias is how consciously aware a person is of the bias. That's all.

That's an outright contradiction of itself.

If the person "isn't conscious" of being "biased," then he/she isn't "biased" at all. He/she is merely "unaware" of something.

Take for instance the examples with the résumés where people rank them as more competent (even when they're 100% identical) if the name on the résumé sounds like a white person or a man. Do you think the people looking at these résumés are racists and/or misogynist? They probably aren't!

Then they're not "biased." And we should go looking for a better explanation of the disparities.

Okay. But if a woman has a specific type of "body," that's an "essence" feature. So without intending to, perhaps, you've started building a definition of "woman" there, beginning with the physiological.

But if there are no physiological differences between a "man" and a "woman" by definition, then there is no excuse for the dearth of female bricklayers and lumberjacks, and no explanation for the proliferation of female nurses and teachers.

Yet we've already been over that there isn't a dispute that there are essential features for the sex context.

Right. So you've just essentialized womanhood. And while it might not be a complete description, it's at least a partial description of what makes a person "essentially" a woman...she has a different "sex context," as you call it, physiologically.

This is true, though in my case I feel like I can hang with the boys pretty well.

That could be one reason why you're comfortable in STEM. If STEM is a field more strongly compatible, or conditioned by (shall we say), the male conversational style or pattern of delivering information (direct, blunt, competitive, debative, factual, impersonal, objective, or whatever), then you would continue to feel able to stay 'in the game' when other women would tend to back out.

And further, it's quite reasonable to think that particular disciplines favour particular conversation styles. For example, in Education or Social Work, they often use pseudo-scientific patter and questionable 'data' from things like "ethnographies" or "deep descriptions" as if they were hard data, or include things under "mixed methodologies" that would be immediately disallowed from STEM. These fields lack a core of methodological discipline that keeps them from being true sciences at all. Such things are much more compatible with a female conversation style, so it wouldn't be surprising that many women feel more comfortable in Education than in STEM.

...

I'm not sure that "feminizing" the style of discourse in STEM would necessarily improve it. There may be good reasons, inherent to the discipline itself and its methods, that a more "masculine" discourse style is advantageous. For example, if factuality and disagreeability are virtues in the formulation of scientific studies, then agreeability and intuitionism would be liabilities there. (That's just an example of the sort of divergence I'm pointing to, not a comprehensive description of if.)

What I'm saying is that these so-called "masculine" and "feminine" ways of speech may be more informed by culture than sex. I am not advocating reducing the analytical, competitive, debating, direct, impersonal, objective nature of scientific conversation by including women. I'm saying that as more women naturally stick with STEM (among other things), this sort of speech will stop seeming gendered at all.

That's speculation, of course. It might not.

But whether it's "seeming gendered" or not, it will be exactly the same. And then we'll see if an unmodified scientific conversation style suits women or not, because they'll continue to elect out of the STEM fields, whether we want them to or not...sort of like what's happening right now....

"Contexts"? Not biologically. The linguistic games the Left wants to play don't alter the facts.

"Gender" just means "behaviour," really. We're talking about a woman "acting like a woman," or "acting like a man." But even to talk that way is to essentialize both. You can't "act like" something that simply doesn't exist!

So we run into the same problem again, immediately: the language of "gender" asks us to believe, at one and the same time, that sex is both essential or basic AND non-essentializable. Logically, there's just no way that works.

Yes, contexts; with one being biological and essential and the other being sociocultural. I don't know how to keep repeating this, though

Because it's still not logical.

You can't mix the language that says "women are essentially biological" with the language that says, "a woman is an unessentializable sociological construct." They cannot both be true. Either "woman" is an essentializable thing, or it is not: end of story. There's no third option there, because even a little "essence" is still an "essence."

So a transer can either not leave his basic sex to "become" an actual "woman," or he can "become" a "woman," but being a "woman" means nothing. Those are the only two rational possible outcomes.

But I've also said this several times and several ways.

An aside: I find it so interesting that you feel compelled to "correct" my use of language as if it were your own. You can't even bring yourself to quote my actual wording, apparently, so deep is the taboo with which you seem to have been drilled about "deadnaming" (which is surely obviously nothing more than a Left-invented propaganda term, one that didn't even exist until very recently). But it is the real identity of [Jenner] that we are debating, so you really can't ask me to concede your usage in such a way that that debate is surrendered before it begins, can you? [/color]

As I explained, I'm not "correcting" anything, I'm just not participating in something I find to be impolite.

You don't have to "participate." They aren't even your words.

I just find it amusing you try to "correct" MY language. If I said anything else you deemed "impolite," I doubt you'd even think to "correct" it.

It all just very much smacks of "silencing" and "censorship" of a rather extreme kind. The fact that Bruce is still Bruce is not to be entertained even as a hypothesis, apparently, and even by somebody who seriously believes it.

But I note that the Olympic Committee still has not erased Bruce's records...transphobes! Instead, they've fallen into the absurdity of saying, "Caitlin Jenner won the men's event, acting as Bruce"

I think people have autonomy over their names

They don't. Naming is a social action. One gets one's name before one can even speak, and it's given by others.

So, we will probably just disagree on whether we should use peoples' chosen names or not. I'm just not going to participate in it though, I do find it jerkish. I'll either not quote bits or mark where edits are made to quotes.

That's interesting.

You're asserting your own autonomy to name "Jenner" what you want, by denying me any autonomy to call him the Bruce I think he is. That's fairly ironic, I have to say. And you're so Victorian about it, that you don't even want to allow me to have said what I have said, but feel the need to correct it, less you become somehow a "participant"?

I can't see how you're "participating." Would you correct the speeches of Mao or Hitler, if you were needing to quote them in order to refute their ideas? Or would the mere quoting of exactly what they said make you a "participant" in the Cultural Revolution or the Shoah?

Heh, well I feel like the guys I know are themselves around me. After all, I'll look at the women right along with them.

That's an interesting question, isn't it? Do lesbians "look at" women in a "male" way? Would a lesbian be as acutely aware of other pulchritudinous females in the vicinity as would an ordinary male? I don't know if anybody would allow anyone to do a study on that, though, because its premise would necessarily essentialize the terms "male awareness," "female awareness," and "lesbian," as if they really referred to objective things.

I doubt that the trans lobby would sit still for any such breach of its protocols. They'd eat you alive if you tried it. So maybe that means we'll never be able to study what "lesbians" think, because for the trans lobby, there are no such essential things in the world, just as there are no essential "women."

Well, I took a few short stabs at finding out by typing a few things into Google Scholar (which obviously isn't a great research methodology, but as I said: short stabs). While I'm not quite sure how I would need to word such a query, don't know any existing authors working in similar things to search by author, etc., I did find a lot of studies looking at differences between lesbians and heterosexual women under a lot of other contexts.

Yes; but of course, those studies are not forbidden.

They don't involve the "essentialism" problem that transism raises, because nobody contets that both heterosexual woman and lesbians are both "women" in all biological senses. So it's only examining a behavioural difference in a single group, rather than positing the existence of in-out groups of "women." But transism cannot make do without both biological essentialism and the denial of essentialism at the same time: which puts transism not only at variance with biology but also with reason and logic.

I hope Chi-town was fun.

It was! Though, I had no idea how expensive it would be just for simple things like parking. I've been all over the map, and Chicago has one of the most monetized parking systems I've ever seen.

I did take your suggestion to try Giordano's. We got the Chicago Classic, and I loved it. Otherwise had a great time at the aquarium, planetarium, field museum, and the show I was originally heading that way to catch in the first place. Good times!

Great choices. I'm glad you had such a good time. And one slice of that pizza...well, that just about does you, doesn't it?

[Astro Cat]

They're all published books.

Soh's is "The End of Gender," Anderson's is "When Harry Became Sally," and Shrier's is "Irreversible Damage." You might really enjoy Soh's...she's very pro-lesbian, but for scientific reasons, anti-trans. She's the one who makes the argument that transism is potentially a kind of genocide against lesbians.

OK. Maybe I can find where they get this 5% figure in literature knowing more about where they quote it at least. I would need to know the context of the figure itself.

The problem is, as I pointed out, that academia itself has become so corrupt on this issue that one is not allowed to publish stuff that questions the narrative. So it's a pretty impossible situation: anything I send to you, you might suppose fails to be "peer reviewed" by the approved "peers." But the approved "peers" do not allow contrary research even to be done. So there's not a lot I can offer you.

I'm not sure about that. For instance, we were just talking about a paper that proposed given more freedom of choice, more women avoid STEM. That was a paper that was published, no "PC police" knocked down the doors. Now the authors of that paper later published a correction and others picked apart some methodological problems, yes; but that's how science works. Nobody stopped them from doing their study in the first place.

This is not a "PC conspiracy."

Actually, it is. It goes back and starts with events in the '40s, actually. There's a whole history on it. It involves a group called "The Frankfurt School."

What's the conspiracy, then? How is it enacted, by whom, to what end?

That women trickle out of STEM isn't in dispute: you mention dwindling numbers in higher mixed classes; but this is the leaky pipeline phenomenon. What's in question is whether there is something essential about being a woman and moving away from STEM or whether there is something more psychosocial going on. I've shown that there isn't any evidence that something biologically essential going on, but there is plenty of evidence that there is something psychosocial going on.

I wouldn't say you have, for a couple of reasons. One is that even supposing there are psychosocial "things going on," it wouldn't tell us whether or not there were ALSO biological-essential "things going on." It can easily be both.

Secondly, psychosocial things don't come from nowhere. Even if there were psychosocioal barriers, it doesn't suggest there's a conspiracy (to use your word) to keep women out of STEM. Rather, social and psychological phenomena can be manifestations of biological realities...indeed, one would not suppose it's easy to say what else they would ever be, if one is a strict materialist.

Thirdly, I don't see the same phenomena you claim. I see an overwhelming effort by people in the STEM fields to get women in and reward them for staying in. So whatever psychosocial barriers there are, it's no longer up to society to do anything about them, since it's done all it can already; it's up to women to "man up" and take the opportunities that are being handed to them on a silver platter. They can't sit around and wait for somebody else to fix their problems: they should do what you did, and just step their game up.

With regards to the first paragraph, I have agreed that it could be both. What I've argued is that we have plenty of indications that psychosocial barriers have a major effect, but we don't really have any strong studies that show some nurture picture element is having a strong effect.

We could also do some poking around into women who have left STEM (as I've previously said, I contribute when I can to a program through my school aimed at women in STEM, so I have also personally seen many of the reasons they leave -- and experienced many myself). As it turns out, nearly everyone reports psychosocial reasons for leaving. For instance, in another cross-industry study in Australia, 66% of women felt their voices were devalued at work, and 41% of women experienced a sexist workplace environment as opposed to 8% of men. This same study shows that 54% of women at least considered quitting their role.

We know that women are interested in STEM (making up a majority of STEM bachelor's degrees). Yet 4 in 10 drop out after having to juggle family life with the systemic barriers they face in full-time STEM work.

The fact that women show so much interest in STEM, yet slowly drop out of STEM citing psychosocial issues and misbalanced gender expectations (being talked over, devalued, paid less, often expected to take a larger role in family life, etc.) seems very reasonably to point towards a larger nurture picture role in the leaky pipeline than a nature picture. On the nature picture (whether pure nature or nature-dominant explanation), we probably wouldn't see as much interest in STEM in the first place -- or reasons given for leaving STEM would gravitate more towards "I was more interested in this other thing" than "I experienced inequality and systemic barriers that were unsustainable and unrealistic to balance with other things in my life."

You say "If bias is 'implicit,' then they don't have to prove it exists at all." Yet, clearly psychologists/sociologists spend a lot of time and effort doing just that...

No, they study "bias" and label it "implicit."

One can never study "implicit" bias, because it's only "implicit." If you make it "explicit," as you have to do in order to identify and quantify it, then it's not "implicit" at all anymore.

I mean, is this just a sematic dispute? Do you disagree that a person can have a bias without being consciously aware that they have a bias, or do you just disagree with what sociologists happen to call that state of affairs? I'm not sure if you're disputing the concept or just what it's called.

The difference between implicit and explicit bias is how consciously aware a person is of the bias. That's all.

That's an outright contradiction of itself.

If the person "isn't conscious" of being "biased," then he/she isn't "biased" at all. He/she is merely "unaware" of something.

It is not a contradiction. Everyone has implicit biases informed by the culture around them, ingroup-outgroup instincts, things like that. As I said, some of the women reviewing résumés in these bias tests were just as likely as the men to automatically rate them more competent and worth more pay if they had a man's name on them (even though the ones with a woman's name were identical). Yet if you talked to any of these people, the men or the women, it's very likely that they're not misogynists: they probably don't hold any explicit, conscious negative thoughts or emotions about women or their capabilities. Subconsciously rating identical résumés with a man's name on them better than those with a woman's name on them is a bias though, albeit not one people consciously knew they even had; a bias that they would probably disagree with (earnestly, too!) if asked about it. That's what an implicit bias is.

You and I both have implicit biases too. You can actually take implicit bias tests online (I am not sure which ones are reputable and which ones are not, though; probably would need to find one attached to an actual researching team). Anyone that lives in a society will have implicit biases. As long as you understand the concept, it doesn't matter what it's called; so if your objection is just semantical, then noted, I don't care what we want to call it (I personally think the name is sensible).

As I explained, I'm not "correcting" anything, I'm just not participating in something I find to be impolite.

You don't have to "participate." They aren't even your words.

I just find it amusing you try to "correct" MY language. If I said anything else you deemed "impolite," I doubt you'd even think to "correct" it.

It isn't a correction; and it does depend on what's said whether I feel like I don't want to repeat something in one of my posts or not. For instance I would also bracket-ize slurs. It isn't an erasure of any kind, the original post would still exist and the link to that post (the little arrow on the first quote of a response) would still be there to point to it. I don't think this is extreme. Maybe eccentric. Some things I just don't want to take part in, that's on me.

I think people have autonomy over their names

They don't. Naming is a social action. One gets one's name before one can even speak, and it's given by others.

OK. We will just have to disagree on this.

Great choices. I'm glad you had such a good time. And one slice of that pizza...well, that just about does you, doesn't it?

Bruh. LOL. Let's just say I'm glad we did a lot of walking. I ate two and thought I was going to die!

[Immanuel Can]

The problem is, as I pointed out, that academia itself has become so corrupt on this issue that one is not allowed to publish stuff that questions the narrative. So it's a pretty impossible situation: anything I send to you, you might suppose fails to be "peer reviewed" by the approved "peers." But the approved "peers" do not allow contrary research even to be done. So there's not a lot I can offer you.

I'm not sure about that.

You can do the study. But you can't get it published. You won't be presenting at any conferences. And when your tenure review comes up, the existence of that study is really going to hurt your chances. On top of that, you can count on the fact that even if you get it published, dozens of others will produce reviews, critiques, exposes, and so forth denouncing your methods, your results and your character. And if you're really unlucky, you're going to end up being a news item, and have pickets set up outside your faculty with protesters screaming what a racist-sexist-homophobe-transphobe (or whatever) you are.

All this has happened already, in the rare cases of people with enough courage to do the sorts of studies that Social Science Orthodoxy currently does not approve.

That's why the only place where you find contrarian data is in books, generally by people whose current position is not dependent on the academy. They don't have to kowtow to political correctness, and can put out the results they actually find. The penalties for them are not nonexistent, but considerably reduced in comparison to dwellers of academia.

Actually, it is. It goes back and starts with events in the '40s, actually. There's a whole history on it. It involves a group called "The Frankfurt School."

What's the conspiracy, then? How is it enacted, by whom, to what end?

Wow. That's a huge, long question to answer. Like I said, this thing has a history that goes back to the middle of the last century.

Maybe the best I can offer you here, at the moment, in such confined spaces, is to point you to something like James Lindsay's book, "Race Marxism." That will give you the whole story. But to be brief, it's neo-Marxism, it was started by the Frankfurt School and has persisted to the present, and the end goal of it is a Socialist revolution by way of factionalism. But those answers are too short to be satisfying, so I think you might have to go to the book for more.

With regards to the first paragraph, I have agreed that it could be both. What I've argued is that we have plenty of indications that psychosocial barriers have a major effect, but we don't really have any strong studies that show some nurture picture element is having a strong effect.

Again, there are studies that just cannot be done. One of them is anything that imputes biological essentials to women. That's been the case since the '60s, really, when the sorts of 2nd Wave Feminism that posited no meaningful difference between men and women was current. Since that time, you might be able to do a study to indicate the superiority of women's experiences in one field or another; but anything that yields results that suggest limitation or incapacity or even difference of interest between men and women have been part of that forbidden sort of investigation.

So is it surprising we have limited studies of biological difference, when we live in an age when a Supreme Court justice is afraid even to define the word "woman" in public? (I would surmise that that justice will not be much of a women's rights advocate if she cannot even locate one.) But you can see, written on her face, the terror of falling afoul of the PC set. She knows very well that the price of truth on that occasion would be very severe.

We could also do some poking around into women who have left STEM (as I've previously said, I contribute when I can to a program through my school aimed at women in STEM, so I have also personally seen many of the reasons they leave -- and experienced many myself). As it turns out, nearly everyone reports psychosocial reasons for leaving. For instance, in another cross-industry study in Australia, 66% of women felt their voices were devalued at work, and 41% of women experienced a sexist workplace environment as opposed to 8% of men. This same study shows that 54% of women at least considered quitting their role.

That women report psychological reasons for leaving doesn't tell us much. It's actually exactly what we should expect, if women find that their natural proclivities are not fitting the ethos of the field of science -- that they would soon begin to feel frustrated or unappreciated, and leave.

But you're positing a different cause, are you not? You're suggesting that there are external factors causing the psychological reasons; and that would be a fine hypothesis if we could pin down exactly what feature of STEM culture, as it currently stands, is antithetical to women...but not to men. What's obvious right now is that in all obvious ways, academia is desperate to get women into STEM, and scholarships, positions and honours are being specially reserved for female applicants. So we should have to ask ourselves, if the externals are all positive, why is something in female psychology now still impeding their progress?

We know that women are interested in STEM (making up a majority of STEM bachelor's degrees). Yet 4 in 10 drop out after having to juggle family life with the systemic barriers they face in full-time STEM work.

Ah! "Family life," you say? That would explain a lot, wouldn't it? But that's a biological reality that causes a psychological effect. That's not something inherent to STEM. After all, nobody owes me or you to pay for our decision to have children instead of advancing a career. And nobody tells anybody they have to have children in order to be fulfilled; so why do so many women insist (barring any reference to biology) that they must have children?

You see, it just doesn't work to eliminate the biological from the reckoning.

The fact that women show so much interest in STEM, yet slowly drop out of STEM citing psychosocial issues and misbalanced gender expectations (being talked over, devalued, paid less, often expected to take a larger role in family life, etc.) seems very reasonably to point towards a larger nurture picture role in the leaky pipeline than a nature picture.

Why? Having a "family life" is totally a woman's choice, right? And it's biological.

But the others..."being talked over, devalued..." those are "grow up" kind of issues. Seriously, you're painting women are pretty fragile there. Men get that stuff all the time, and shake it off.

And as for the "paid less," it's absolutely untrue: it's nothing more than an urban myth drawn by assuming that women who opt out of the work force to have children should receive the same gross wages as men who stay in the workforce. The truth is that young women who do not have children yet are more prized, more privileged and paid more than their male equivalents, by far; and they progress faster in terms of promotion until they hit child bearing age; but once they have children, both their work lives and their attitudes change. They take long chunks of time out of the workforce, and cannot be promoted to roles that cannot sustain that. They miss opportunities, slow their careers, and interfere with their chances at moving up. They're just not worth as much to the corporation or agency for which they work if they choose to work shorter hours and take leaves...which they often do, in order to balance their family responsibilities. But that's a choice: they decided to do that.

As an alternative, what women could do is take the very minimum maternity leave, signing a contract guaranteeing their full return afterward, and then pay a child care worker to take care of their infant. That would hit them in the pocketbook, but it would hit a man equivalently anyway. And it would minimize the disruption and cost to the employer, and the time the women would be out of the workforce. It wouldn't completely eliminate the problem, but it would surely improve it considerably. And if they didn't want to loose career momentum, the answer is simple: don't have kids, don't take leaves, and stop all the talk about "work-life balance." Be more like the men.

And why not? After all, haven't you said there's no biological difference here? So it's behavioural.

But if they choose not to do anything like that, the complaint about "earning less" over a career becomes ridiculous. The answer is simple: stay in the workforce, and don't have babies, and you'll progress ahead of all the men...because there are no affirmative action programs and equality quotas for men, but plenty for women.

On the nature picture (whether pure nature or nature-dominant explanation), we probably wouldn't see as much interest in STEM in the first place

Well, women change. Their lives have phases that men's don't. The childbearing years are the chief example of that. When a woman reaches those years, as you will know, she undergoes psychological and physiological impulses toward different priorities. What may have seemed fine for a girl in her "fun years," in her early twenties, starts to look more lonely and desolate as she's reaching her 30s with no husband or children. Men don't feel that. Even those that would strongly like to have children all along don't feel the "biological clock" experience. And, of course, being in the "provider" role remains primary for them, even if their wife has children, so they are not a liabilty to their own career path or to their employer's functioning and bottom line...just to their own disposable income, which the company they work for has no reason to be concerned about.

"I experienced inequality and systemic barriers..."

Name them. I guarantee they'll be removed, instantly; for just so desperate is STEM for women achievers. But "I wanted a family" is not a "systemic barrier" or "inequality" issue: it's a woman's free choice, which her employer has no obligation to offset for her.

No, they study "bias" and label it "implicit."

One can never study "implicit" bias, because it's only "implicit." If you make it "explicit," as you have to do in order to identify and quantify it, then it's not "implicit" at all anymore.

I mean, is this just a sematic dispute? Do you disagree that a person can have a bias without being consciously aware that they have a bias, or do you just disagree with what sociologists happen to call that state of affairs? I'm not sure if you're disputing the concept or just what it's called.

Both, because "implicit" means that there's a kind of "bias" that nobody knows about, nobody can find, nobody can make explicit, but is real nonetheless. And my point is that "implicit bias" mislabels whatever is going on, and that's very unhelpful to resolving whatever the real problem is.

For example, it would be absurd to call women's desire to have children at the cost of their careers an "implicit bias problem." It's not. It's a choice women are making; and absent that choice, any bias is actually in their favour, not against them. Likewise, it would be absurd to call their overall less wages over a career in which they take leaves for long periods of time an "inequality" issue. It's not. It's their choice, again. The only real "inequality" is that young men are less desirable and less advantaged to be hired, promoted, given tenure, given scholarships and preferential admissions, etc. than are young women...at least, prior to women's child bearing years. But nobody cares about that "inequality," so it never even gets mentioned.

Everyone has implicit biases informed by the culture around them,ingroup-outgroup instincts, things like that.

You call those "biases"?

I wouldn't. They are devoid of malice, evil intent or perversity of any kind. Nobody's gulity for having such things, because everybody is born in some location and society. You're just referring to culture: and good luck getting rid of culture.

As I said, some of the women reviewing résumés in these bias tests were just as likely as the men to automatically rate them more competent and worth more pay if they had a man's name on them (even though the ones with a woman's name were identical). Yet if you talked to any of these people, the men or the women, it's very likely that they're not misogynists: they probably don't hold any explicit, conscious negative thoughts or emotions about women or their capabilities. Subconsciously rating identical résumés with a man's name on them better than those with a woman's name on them is a bias though, albeit not one people consciously knew they even had; a bias that they would probably disagree with (earnestly, too!) if asked about it. That's what an implicit bias is.

I think there are better explanations. One might well be that the reviewers know full well what we all know: that the biological reality is that women are not going to be fully in their careers for longer than a decade or so, in most cases; so perhaps they rate women lower because of the long-haul disadvantages women are themselves presenting. Was that hypothesis even considered?

And there could be other reasons, too: if you have male names that suggest stability, like "Tom Block," say, versus "Buffy McCools," then there are certain mental pictures that are likely to be associated with the female candidate that are unlikely to occur in the male case: but that would be the experiment designer's fault. And this has more subtle forms, too: women tend to be higher on the agreeability scale than men -- does the career in question require confrontation and competition, or negotiation and group cohesion? What career is the reviewer picturing in his/her mind? Is agreeability a liability or an asset for that career?

And do women reviewers make the same choices men reviewers do? That would be an interesting question. Why would women not favour the female candidate? What do they know, that the men also know?

They don't. Naming is a social action. One gets one's name before one can even speak, and it's given by others.

OK. We will just have to disagree on this.

Yes, that's fine. The important thing is for us both to realize the other is not evil for having a different view of the question, even if we think he/she is wrong. We can keep disagreeing agreeably, if you know what I mean.

Great choices. I'm glad you had such a good time. And one slice of that pizza...well, that just about does you, doesn't it?

Bruh. LOL. Let's just say I'm glad we did a lot of walking. I ate two and thought I was going to die!

I believe you. Still, it's worth the pain, isn't it?

[Immanuel Can]

OK. Maybe I can find where they get this 5% figure in literature knowing more about where they quote it at least. I would need to know the context of the figure itself.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 32784/full
This one's with boys. For boys, it's 85%, according to this survey.

I understand that with girls, the numbers are currently four times greater than the boys. This seems to be due to the influence of Social Media, according to most experts: because prior to the emergence of the iphone, gender dysphoria numbers were vanishingly small, and almost entirely male. Prior to the iphone, girls just didn't "trans" much. But now they are four times the numbers of the boys.

So take out the number of girls who would straighten out. And take out all the lesbians who may be fooled into transing instead of being lesbians. And what you end up with would be vanishingly small again. Then combine it with the boys' numbers, and you get the final figure.

[Astro Cat]

You can do the study. But you can't get it published. You won't be presenting at any conferences. And when your tenure review comes up, the existence of that study is really going to hurt your chances. On top of that, you can count on the fact that even if you get it published, dozens of others will produce reviews, critiques, exposes, and so forth denouncing your methods, your results and your character. And if you're really unlucky, you're going to end up being a news item, and have pickets set up outside your faculty with protesters screaming what a racist-sexist-homophobe-transphobe (or whatever) you are.

All this has happened already, in the rare cases of people with enough courage to do the sorts of studies that Social Science Orthodoxy currently does not approve.

That's why the only place where you find contrarian data is in books, generally by people whose current position is not dependent on the academy. They don't have to kowtow to political correctness, and can put out the results they actually find. The penalties for them are not nonexistent, but considerably reduced in comparison to dwellers of academia.

Yet finding data in books is a risky affair, especially when people have ideological axes to grind. It would be best to be able to see methodology, assumptions, background, statistics, and whether any findings have been reproduced. Given the option between someone writing a book saying one thing and an actual paper from real literature saying another, I will be able to review the literature and (barring any issues) probably trust that more.

Wow. That's a huge, long question to answer. Like I said, this thing has a history that goes back to the middle of the last century.

Maybe the best I can offer you here, at the moment, in such confined spaces, is to point you to something like James Lindsay's book, "Race Marxism." That will give you the whole story. But to be brief, it's neo-Marxism, it was started by the Frankfurt School and has persisted to the present, and the end goal of it is a Socialist revolution by way of factionalism. But those answers are too short to be satisfying, so I think you might have to go to the book for more.

Well, I don't have time to read books about conspiracy theories; so I suppose any claims you think are interesting enough to bring up will just have to be brought up and evaluated piecemeal.

Again, there are studies that just cannot be done. One of them is anything that imputes biological essentials to women. That's been the case since the '60s, really, when the sorts of 2nd Wave Feminism that posited no meaningful difference between men and women was current. Since that time, you might be able to do a study to indicate the superiority of women's experiences in one field or another; but anything that yields results that suggest limitation or incapacity or even difference of interest between men and women have been part of that forbidden sort of investigation.

So is it surprising we have limited studies of biological difference, when we live in an age when a Supreme Court justice is afraid even to define the word "woman" in public? (I would surmise that that justice will not be much of a women's rights advocate if she cannot even locate one.) But you can see, written on her face, the terror of falling afoul of the PC set. She knows very well that the price of truth on that occasion would be very severe.

There are bazillions of studies that impute biological essentials to women (in the sex context, I feel I must clarify in this particular conversation). On a quick Google Scholar search (again, not a great research method but good for quick 'n dirty things like this) I can find a ton of papers about, for instance, female sex organs and health care in FTM patients (which obviously necessitates talking about aspects of phenotypic femaleness).

There are also tons of papers about the demographics of male to female interest. You've even talked about some of this nature (you brought up something, somewhere, about how women talk differently). It doesn't seem verboten to me.

Now of course I understand some of the chilling effect that you describe. I understand why a SCOTUS justice might hesitate to define "woman," and I understand the reasons why. I'm not denying that there are real effects of trying to be socially conscious. I just doubt that it has as much of a chilling effect to the point of total censorship in scientific literature that you suggest. For instance, I tried to think of a really "pot-stirring" topic that nobody would probably want to touch with a 10 foot pole ("Race and Intelligence") and typed that in to google scholar, guess what? Many, many, many pages of results of studies people have actually done. On your view where "things that aren't 'PC' don't get studied," I doubt that there would be any studies of this nature.

That women report psychological reasons for leaving doesn't tell us much. It's actually exactly what we should expect, if women find that their natural proclivities are not fitting the ethos of the field of science -- that they would soon begin to feel frustrated or unappreciated, and leave.

I am pretty certain that under the hypothesis women want to be nurturers more than analyzers that instead of saying "I was undervalued" they would be saying "A better opportunity came up that better aligns with my interests." But that's not what they're saying: overwhelmingly they cite negativity with the gendered culture and expectations.

But you're positing a different cause, are you not? You're suggesting that there are external factors causing the psychological reasons; and that would be a fine hypothesis if we could pin down exactly what feature of STEM culture, as it currently stands, is antithetical to women...but not to men. What's obvious right now is that in all obvious ways, academia is desperate to get women into STEM, and scholarships, positions and honours are being specially reserved for female applicants. So we should have to ask ourselves, if the externals are all positive, why is something in female psychology now still impeding their progress?

In previous posts, I have referenced copious amounts of explanations for why women experience problems in STEM that men do not (and it has nothing to do with "female psychology"). I refer to previous posts, as I have dropped a litany of research on this already. In short, women experience being undervalued and have to work harder for the same amount of recognition. Women are talked over, condescended to, sexually harassed, hired less, paid less, promoted less, expected to do more at home, expected to do more gendered things that are unpaid (such as providing emotional support to colleagues, even though men are 50% more likely to receive formal recognition for doing the same), and so on.

We know that women are interested in STEM (making up a majority of STEM bachelor's degrees). Yet 4 in 10 drop out after having to juggle family life with the systemic barriers they face in full-time STEM work.

Ah! "Family life," you say? That would explain a lot, wouldn't it? But that's a biological reality that causes a psychological effect. That's not something inherent to STEM. After all, nobody owes me or you to pay for our decision to have children instead of advancing a career. And nobody tells anybody they have to have children in order to be fulfilled; so why do so many women insist (barring any reference to biology) that they must have children?

You see, it just doesn't work to eliminate the biological from the reckoning.

Actually men want children just as much (or more!) than women do, but women are expected to do most of the unpaid home/family labor. We might say "well I guess it could be female psychology to want to do that," but actually, women make it abundantly clear that they generally don't want to have an uneven home maintenance workload, but are expected to by historical gender roles.

But the others..."being talked over, devalued..." those are "grow up" kind of issues. Seriously, you're painting women are pretty fragile there. Men get that stuff all the time, and shake it off.

Sure, in small amounts "suck it up, buttercup" is a perfectly reasonable response. But that isn't what women are experiencing in STEM. Have you been through grad school? Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome? Imposter syndrome is enough to make many men switch careers. Imagine having imposter syndrome magnified by some amount by dealing with gendered issues on top of it. I understand this acutely, and I don't think women that leave STEM are weak at all.

And as for the "paid less," it's absolutely untrue: it's nothing more than an urban myth drawn by assuming that women who opt out of the work force to have children should receive the same gross wages as men who stay in the workforce. The truth is that young women who do not have children yet are more prized, more privileged and paid more than their male equivalents, by far; and they progress faster in terms of promotion until they hit child bearing age; but once they have children, both their work lives and their attitudes change. They take long chunks of time out of the workforce, and cannot be promoted to roles that cannot sustain that. They miss opportunities, slow their careers, and interfere with their chances at moving up. They're just not worth as much to the corporation or agency for which they work if they choose to work shorter hours and take leaves...which they often do, in order to balance their family responsibilities. But that's a choice: they decided to do that.

Actually, as I've posted before, in STEM at least women are paid less from the start, perceived as less competent, and promote far less often than similarly competent male counterparts (it's called the "broken rung" phenomenon, as with a ladder).

As an alternative, what women could do is take the very minimum maternity leave, signing a contract guaranteeing their full return afterward, and then pay a child care worker to take care of their infant. That would hit them in the pocketbook, but it would hit a man equivalently anyway. And it would minimize the disruption and cost to the employer, and the time the women would be out of the workforce. It wouldn't completely eliminate the problem, but it would surely improve it considerably. And if they didn't want to loose career momentum, the answer is simple: don't have kids, don't take leaves, and stop all the talk about "work-life balance." Be more like the men.

And why not? After all, haven't you said there's no biological difference here? So it's behavioural.

But if they choose not to do anything like that, the complaint about "earning less" over a career becomes ridiculous. The answer is simple: stay in the workforce, and don't have babies, and you'll progress ahead of all the men...because there are no affirmative action programs and equality quotas for men, but plenty for women.

I've posted in this response about how women bear more of a burden at home generally against their wishes (but acquiesce because of gendered stereotypes), but it bears repeating here.

Affirmative action programs won't be necessary once unnecessarily gendered biases are ameliorated. As women in STEM increase, it will likely help to break a lot of the gendered stereotypes that are forming some of these negative feedback loops making so many STEM fields "old boys' clubs."

Well, women change. Their lives have phases that men's don't. The childbearing years are the chief example of that. When a woman reaches those years, as you will know, she undergoes psychological and physiological impulses toward different priorities. What may have seemed fine for a girl in her "fun years," in her early twenties, starts to look more lonely and desolate as she's reaching her 30s with no husband or children. Men don't feel that. Even those that would strongly like to have children all along don't feel the "biological clock" experience. And, of course, being in the "provider" role remains primary for them, even if their wife has children, so they are not a liabilty to their own career path or to their employer's functioning and bottom line...just to their own disposable income, which the company they work for has no reason to be concerned about.

Women change, alright: the birth rates are plummeting as more and more women opt not to have kids. I know I don't want kids (despite being a lesbian, that ostensibly wouldn't have stopped me if I wanted to adopt -- which I don't). Each person's reasons are up to them, but I wonder how many women know they won't get too much support, how often they'd be expected to take the brunt of the cognitive labor and home workload because of gendered expectations rather than with a husband that would equalize the workload?

Besides, one problem we have in the US is a miserable maternity leave situation. Women with paid leave are much more likely to return to the workforce.

"I experienced inequality and systemic barriers..."

Name them. I guarantee they'll be removed, instantly; for just so desperate is STEM for women achievers. But "I wanted a family" is not a "systemic barrier" or "inequality" issue: it's a woman's free choice, which her employer has no obligation to offset for her.

The past several threads have named these barriers and provided data in the forms of links and studies, sprinkled throughout. If really necessary I can try to consolidate them, but for now, I will just refer in general to the last 3-5 posts I've made, including this one.

Everyone has implicit biases informed by the culture around them,ingroup-outgroup instincts, things like that.

You call those "biases"?

I wouldn't. They are devoid of malice, evil intent or perversity of any kind. Nobody's gulity for having such things, because everybody is born in some location and society. You're just referring to culture: and good luck getting rid of culture.

As I said, some of the women reviewing résumés in these bias tests were just as likely as the men to automatically rate them more competent and worth more pay if they had a man's name on them (even though the ones with a woman's name were identical). Yet if you talked to any of these people, the men or the women, it's very likely that they're not misogynists: they probably don't hold any explicit, conscious negative thoughts or emotions about women or their capabilities. Subconsciously rating identical résumés with a man's name on them better than those with a woman's name on them is a bias though, albeit not one people consciously knew they even had; a bias that they would probably disagree with (earnestly, too!) if asked about it. That's what an implicit bias is.

I think there are better explanations. One might well be that the reviewers know full well what we all know: that the biological reality is that women are not going to be fully in their careers for longer than a decade or so, in most cases; so perhaps they rate women lower because of the long-haul disadvantages women are themselves presenting. Was that hypothesis even considered?

And there could be other reasons, too: if you have male names that suggest stability, like "Tom Block," say, versus "Buffy McCools," then there are certain mental pictures that are likely to be associated with the female candidate that are unlikely to occur in the male case: but that would be the experiment designer's fault. And this has more subtle forms, too: women tend to be higher on the agreeability scale than men -- does the career in question require confrontation and competition, or negotiation and group cohesion? What career is the reviewer picturing in his/her mind? Is agreeability a liability or an asset for that career?

And do women reviewers make the same choices men reviewers do? That would be an interesting question. Why would women not favour the female candidate? What do they know, that the men also know?

I provided a link to one of these studies which provides the experimental background, methodology, statistical analysis, etc. just a few posts back.

Your proposed explanation doesn't explain why women are rated with lower competence (not interest) despite having the same résumé. If biases are causing women to drop out, then a bias is formed over biases causing women to drop out, that's just another bias: that would only further my point, not counter it. Biases do tend to have these negative feedback loops whereby they become worse because of biases formed due to the effects of other biases.

OK. We will just have to disagree on this.

Yes, that's fine. The important thing is for us both to realize the other is not evil for having a different view of the question, even if we think he/she is wrong. We can keep disagreeing agreeably, if you know what I mean.

Of course! I'm still enjoying the conversation and your company. I do think deadnaming is jerkish, but that's just the way it is. I still like you overall despite disagreeing with several of your views. We're getting along fine

And yes, the pizza was worth the pain. I've got a float trip now next weekend so it was probably the cheatiest thing I'll eat for a little while, LOL. I got a cute Zelda-themed two piece I need to look good in.

[Immanuel Can]

You can do the study. But you can't get it published. You won't be presenting at any conferences. And when your tenure review comes up, the existence of that study is really going to hurt your chances. On top of that, you can count on the fact that even if you get it published, dozens of others will produce reviews, critiques, exposes, and so forth denouncing your methods, your results and your character. And if you're really unlucky, you're going to end up being a news item, and have pickets set up outside your faculty with protesters screaming what a racist-sexist-homophobe-transphobe (or whatever) you are.

All this has happened already, in the rare cases of people with enough courage to do the sorts of studies that Social Science Orthodoxy currently does not approve.

That's why the only place where you find contrarian data is in books, generally by people whose current position is not dependent on the academy. They don't have to kowtow to political correctness, and can put out the results they actually find. The penalties for them are not nonexistent, but considerably reduced in comparison to dwellers of academia.

Yet finding data in books is a risky affair, especially when people have ideological axes to grind. It would be best to be able to see methodology, assumptions, background, statistics, and whether any findings have been reproduced.

Of course. But when a particular kind of research is banned and penalized in the way balanced sex research is right now, that's not even possible. So you have to make the best of the other kinds of information you can get: and books by reputable authors, using their data, are the best available source.

Well, I don't have time to read books about conspiracy theories;

Wow.

Well, that's a pure assumption...but it also happens to be wrong. James Lindsay is right now probably the most articulate and prominent voice in this field...and he's a PhD. But you won't know if you don't look.

There are bazillions of studies that impute biological essentials to women...There are also tons of papers about the demographics of male to female interest. You've even talked about some of this nature (you brought up something, somewhere, about how women talk differently). It doesn't seem verboten to me.

How many studies can you find that contest the gender-sex distinction, for example? How many current studies are being published on why children cannot transition? Why is the only form of "therapy" now allowable "affirmation therapy," and why is telling a boy he's a boy called "conversion therapy" and banned?

Is it really that these questions are so easy, and all the scientific data is so absolutely favourable to the trans ideology, that there just isn't any contrary data? Or is somebody tilting the table?

I think you know the answer.

Now of course I understand some of the chilling effect that you describe. I understand why a SCOTUS justice might hesitate to define "woman," and I understand the reasons why.

Do you?

Why do you think that she (presumably a woman) can't even bring herself to say what she is? Do you think she doesn't know? Do you think she genuinely can't tell us what a woman is, because "she's not a biologist," as she said? But since she said "biologist," she also is confessing that being a woman must be "biological": if not, then a "biologist" would not be the relevant field of expertise...

Or did she just know she was skating to avoid the penalties?

Again, I think you know the answer.

I just doubt that it has as much of a chilling effect to the point of total censorship in scientific literature that you suggest.

Oh, I've seen it. I assure you that's how it is.

For instance, I tried to think of a really "pot-stirring" topic that nobody would probably want to touch with a 10 foot pole ("Race and Intelligence") and typed that in to google scholar, guess what? Many, many, many pages of results of studies people have actually done. On your view where "things that aren't 'PC' don't get studied," I doubt that there would be any studies of this nature.

I'm glad you brought that one up. I know a case.

The professor in question (who already had tenure, but still nearly lost it) simply did a statistical comparison of racial groups vis a vis raw intelligence. He used standard IQ type tests, not culturally-loaded ones: you know, the problem-solving, pattern recognition, logical extension kind of thing, not anything that requires background knowledge.

Anyway, his results showed a higher performance for Asians, then "Whites" (broadly categorized) and then on down. And everybody went ballistic. The first accusation against him was of "white supremacy" -- odd, in the case of a guy who was arguing for Asians being the top. But after that, it was every other accusation under the sun. You can imagine.

In the end, he held tenure, but was pushed into the academic backwaters. He could not longer get privileges, publicity or publication, and was a total embarassment to his university, and a funding liability. He's gone, now.

But all he did was publish his results.

Be sure of this: if you embarass the university and pose a threat to fundraising, they will get you back. And how honest and diligent you've been, or what your results are will no longer matter.

That women report psychological reasons for leaving doesn't tell us much. It's actually exactly what we should expect, if women find that their natural proclivities are not fitting the ethos of the field of science -- that they would soon begin to feel frustrated or unappreciated, and leave.

I am pretty certain that under the hypothesis women want to be nurturers more than analyzers that instead of saying "I was undervalued" they would be saying "A better opportunity came up that better aligns with my interests." But that's not what they're saying: overwhelmingly they cite negativity with the gendered culture and expectations.

That's perception. What's the reality?

The reality is there's nothing specific. What is this "negativity"? What actual actions and facts account for it? And how can a culture be "gendered," when "gender" is just a social construct, and lacks any objective reality itself? Where are these "expectations"?

And, as I say, I've seen much of the opposite. I've had some excellent female colleagues. But I've also seen shoddy, incompetent female candidates promoted well above competent male ones, merely because they "help" with the quotas and gender-balance expectations. And I can't imagine much more frustrating and alienating to my excellent female collegues than to see these less competent people promoted as their "equals" merely for being female. It throws a shadow on everything they achieve. That would make me annoyed, too: and that's a specific problem, not some vague "implicit" one.

...women experience being undervalued and have to work harder for the same amount of recognition.

I observe the opposite...but then, I'm not in STEM. So it seems that there are "gender biases" of many kinds.

Women are talked over, condescended to, sexually harassed, hired less, paid less, promoted less,

None of these is remotely the case where I am. In fact, if you sexually harass somebody, as a man, your career is done. Even the allegation can kill you. Women are hired more, promoted faster, encouraged much more, and not paid one penny less. And they have quotas, scholarships, mentorships and all sorts of things set aside to advantage them. The equivalent answer to men is inevitably, "Do it yourself, Chuck."

The worm turns on female choice. When women opt for family, they tend to opt out of career. That's just how they roll, it seems.

Ah! "Family life," you say? That would explain a lot, wouldn't it? But that's a biological reality that causes a psychological effect. That's not something inherent to STEM. After all, nobody owes me or you to pay for our decision to have children instead of advancing a career. And nobody tells anybody they have to have children in order to be fulfilled; so why do so many women insist (barring any reference to biology) that they must have children?

You see, it just doesn't work to eliminate the biological from the reckoning.

Actually men want children just as much...

Immaterial. Men will not take time off to have them. And they also don't opt for "life balance" as often as their female colleagues do.

As I said, the issue is not whether or not men and women want equally to reproduce: it's the biological realities of what happens when they do choose that.

Either way, it's not the employer's problem. He has no say over whether or not his employees, male or female, have children, and no stake in paying for them to do so. That choice is a liability to the employer, but it's a choice made at the discretion of the man or woman in question. Since the employer cannot prevent it, he cannot be responsible for it either. What happens, happens.

But the others..."being talked over, devalued..." those are "grow up" kind of issues. Seriously, you're painting women are pretty fragile there. Men get that stuff all the time, and shake it off.

Sure, in small amounts "suck it up, buttercup" is a perfectly reasonable response.

It is. It's what men have to do all the time.

Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome?

What do you mean? I know several phenomena that go under that umbrella.

For example, one manifestation of an "imposter syndrome" is my able female colleagues feeling like the "imposter diversity hires" drag their achievements down. And I don't wonder that they feel that way; and maybe that just means we get rid of the quotas.

Another "imposter syndrome" is when a person feels as if he/she is an "imposter" for taking on a particular job or role. And everybody has that kind of temporary "imposter" feeling whenever they take on a new job; the answer is, either admit you can't do the job, or stick it out and get over it.

So what sort of "imposter syndrome" do you mean?

Actually, as I've posted before, in STEM at least women are [url=https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1211286109]paid less from the start

So there are no equal wage laws in your country?

In mine, any employer who did that would be sued immediately; and the employer would lose every time. It's actually illegal.

As an alternative, what women could do is take the very minimum maternity leave, signing a contract guaranteeing their full return afterward, and then pay a child care worker to take care of their infant. That would hit them in the pocketbook, but it would hit a man equivalently anyway. And it would minimize the disruption and cost to the employer, and the time the women would be out of the workforce. It wouldn't completely eliminate the problem, but it would surely improve it considerably. And if they didn't want to loose career momentum, the answer is simple: don't have kids, don't take leaves, and stop all the talk about "work-life balance." Be more like the men.

And why not? After all, haven't you said there's no biological difference here? So it's behavioural.

But if they choose not to do anything like that, the complaint about "earning less" over a career becomes ridiculous. The answer is simple: stay in the workforce, and don't have babies, and you'll progress ahead of all the men...because there are no affirmative action programs and equality quotas for men, but plenty for women.

...women bear more of a burden at home...

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but in the work world, who cares?

Home life is a negotiation between spouses. If she married a lout, what's that to the employer? If she had children, good for her; but what's that to the employer? The employer has no role or say in any of that. What he pays is what he pays for a person (male or female) who comes to work, does the job, and then goes home and does whatever he/she wants to do. If a woman allows herself to be more responsible for the domestic sphere than she thinks she should be, then that's on her. It has nothing to do with "implicit bias" at work. It's a matter to be worked out in her own home.

So she can find her own solution. She can't blame the work world for her choices.

...I wonder how many women know they won't get too much support...

Men don't ask for support. They expect competence. They pay for results, not feelings. That's reality. And if somebody (male or female) "feels unloved" by that, well, that's just not something an employer can deal with.

...how often they'd be expected to take the brunt of the cognitive labor and home workload because of gendered expectations rather than with a husband that would equalize the workload?

They didn't have to marry. They didn't have to marry that kind of husband. They didn't have to have children. They didn't have to quit work. Their "workload" at home can be as light as they're willing to make it. But that's all on them.

Besides, one problem we have in the US is a miserable maternity leave situation.

Well, "maternity leave" is a weird idea. It penalizes the employer for hiring females. It punishes the tax payer and the employer for choices a woman makes for entirely by herself and for her self. So not surprisingly, it makes middle-aged women a huge liability economically.

What's surprising about that?

If biases are causing women to drop out,

That's a big "if." We have no reason to think it's true, other than their claim that they "feel bad."

As I say, let's locate that "bias" and get rid of it. So what, exactly, is it that's making them "feel bad'? Let's get to specifics, and fix it.

Of course! I'm still enjoying the conversation and your company. I do think deadnaming is jerkish, but that's just the way it is. I still like you overall despite disagreeing with several of your views. We're getting along fine

Agreed...except with the idea that "deadnaming" is even a thing.

I wonder how those female athletes who are today being absolutely pasted by the transers are feeling about "deadnaming" these days...

Matt Walsh interviewed a couple...but one would only agree to speak on camera with her face totally blacked out and her voice altered. Fear is a terrible thing; but she wasn't wrong to be afraid of what would happen.

[Astro Cat]

There are bazillions of studies that impute biological essentials to women...There are also tons of papers about the demographics of male to female interest. You've even talked about some of this nature (you brought up something, somewhere, about how women talk differently). It doesn't seem verboten to me.

How many studies can you find that contest the gender-sex distinction, for example? How many current studies are being published on why children cannot transition? Why is the only form of "therapy" now allowable "affirmation therapy," and why is telling a boy he's a boy called "conversion therapy" and banned?

Is it really that these questions are so easy, and all the scientific data is so absolutely favourable to the trans ideology, that there just isn't any contrary data? Or is somebody tilting the table?

I think you know the answer.

The gender-sex distinction isn't something that can be disputed as it's definitional. If I start wearing a red hat and make a club called the Red Hats and say "I'm a Red Hatter," there's nothing to dispute there. Identifying as a gender is similarly culturally defined. People can elect not to use gender as a social construct as a concept, but it's not something that can be debunked. So we shouldn't expect to see any work on that, and assuming there could be might indicate a fundamental misunderstanding about what gender is proposed to be.

For the ethics of whether children should transition, I very easily found some cautionary work on the matter. This was behind a paywall but I can get it through my uni. The paper notes that research on "gender dysphoric/gender variant" adolescents is sparse, but makes recommendations for future courses (this is normal in science).

It notes that:

For some of these minors, the major issue is crossgender behaviors or identifications; for others, the gender issues seem to be epiphenomena of psychopathology, exposure to trauma, or attempts to resolve problems such as lacking higher social status or other benefits they perceive to be associated with the other gender.

Until children master the capacity for operational thought (between the ages of five and seven), they tend to conflate gender identity with surface expressions of gender.

The gender dysphoria of the majority of children with GD/GV does not persist into adolescence, and when it does not, the children are referred to as “desisters.”

Prospective studies indicate that the majority of those who desist by or during adolescence grow up to be gay, not transgender, and that a smaller proportion grow up to be heterosexual.

GD/GV may be mimicked by gender confusion that occurs as an epiphenomenon of other problems (e.g., gender confusion as the result of sexual trauma or delusions in the context of psychotic disorders).

Since research shows that a relatively low percentage of children persist and that those who socially transition one way may need to transition back to their natal gender, a cautious approach is warranted.

It seems to me that these are difficult questions that, if there were some kind of PC police conspiracy, would never have been committed to paper.

Then we have this paper which links "childhood gender nonconformity" with abuse and PTSD, certainly also not in line with "transition only" lines of trans issue thinking.

I also found this paper that completely shoots down supporting adolescent transitioning as unethical.

I didn't have to try very hard to find these, so I don't think any PC police have that tight of a grip on the science after all -- none of these (and the many more I haven't gone through to personally vet, but saw in search results) support "transition only" ethics. (And, I think these papers are well-researched and have good ethical considerations, to boot!)

I'm glad you brought that one up. I know a case.

The professor in question (who already had tenure, but still nearly lost it) simply did a statistical comparison of racial groups vis a vis raw intelligence. He used standard IQ type tests, not culturally-loaded ones: you know, the problem-solving, pattern recognition, logical extension kind of thing, not anything that requires background knowledge.

Anyway, his results showed a higher performance for Asians, then "Whites" (broadly categorized) and then on down. And everybody went ballistic. The first accusation against him was of "white supremacy" -- odd, in the case of a guy who was arguing for Asians being the top. But after that, it was every other accusation under the sun. You can imagine.

In the end, he held tenure, but was pushed into the academic backwaters. He could not longer get privileges, publicity or publication, and was a total embarassment to his university, and a funding liability. He's gone, now.

But all he did was publish his results.

Be sure of this: if you embarass the university and pose a threat to fundraising, they will get you back. And how honest and diligent you've been, or what your results are will no longer matter.

What was the paper and what was his name? It does depend on the context. There's lies, damned lies, and statistics (as we all know) and it's possible to publish cold, hard data without proper contextualization that would merit being called a sketchy move. The university may have been in the right to call him out on this, but I'd need to see the context to know for sure.

For instance, most papers should have a discussion section where surrounding context really needs to be brought up lest someone take a conclusion and go somewhere nasty with it. In existing "race and intelligence" studies it should always be contextualized with the socioeconomic factors that can lead to cognitive disparities: you can make a study showing that this part of the population will have lower cognitive scores than that one, but failing to contextualize why and just letting readers think that group B "naturally" has a better cognitive bell curve than group A would be sketchy, and a university would be completely in the right to be embarrassed by something like that.

I'll see if you can remember the name/paper and take a look at discussion and methods, etc.

I am pretty certain that under the hypothesis women want to be nurturers more than analyzers that instead of saying "I was undervalued" they would be saying "A better opportunity came up that better aligns with my interests." But that's not what they're saying: overwhelmingly they cite negativity with the gendered culture and expectations.

That's perception. What's the reality?

The reality is there's nothing specific. What is this "negativity"? What actual actions and facts account for it? And how can a culture be "gendered," when "gender" is just a social construct, and lacks any objective reality itself? Where are these "expectations"?

And, as I say, I've seen much of the opposite. I've had some excellent female colleagues. But I've also seen shoddy, incompetent female candidates promoted well above competent male ones, merely because they "help" with the quotas and gender-balance expectations. And I can't imagine much more frustrating and alienating to my excellent female collegues than to see these less competent people promoted as their "equals" merely for being female. It throws a shadow on everything they achieve. That would make me annoyed, too: and that's a specific problem, not some vague "implicit" one.

I have been flooding my past posts with citation after citation of differences in gendered expectations and biases, so I do recommend skimming back through maybe. It is a lot of work to contextualize these citations and I've already done the work once before, I don't want to have to do it again. If you earnestly need me to, I can try to compile things in one spot.

In short though, there are a lot of things women deal with at work and at home that are gendered expectations: women are expected to balance home and work life more, they're expected to perform more unpaid emotional and cognitive labor (as we're expected to just be natural nurturers), they're assumed to be less competent (so get mansplained to, condescended to, talked over, ideas taken and claimed credit for), women are perceived as "cold" and "bossy" while men get approval as being "assertive" for the same behavior, men are three times more likely to interrupt a woman than another man, women are sexually harassed and then victim-blamed for speaking up, women often face stricter grooming and appearance standards in workplaces (and often pay a pink tax in things like clothing and grooming products). Many women suffer problems from jealous partners when they are more successful. The worse the ratio of men to women there is, the more gender discrimination women face. With equally competent contenders, male candidates are hired 1.5 times more often than equally competent female candidates.

I really could go on. I have gone on, again I recommend just glancing through the last several posts I've made where I started dropping citations to back up my points. And I'll have to talk more about it a little bit below.

Women are talked over, condescended to, sexually harassed, hired less, paid less, promoted less,

None of these is remotely the case where I am. In fact, if you sexually harass somebody, as a man, your career is done. Even the allegation can kill you. Women are hired more, promoted faster, encouraged much more, and not paid one penny less. And they have quotas, scholarships, mentorships and all sorts of things set aside to advantage them. The equivalent answer to men is inevitably, "Do it yourself, Chuck."

The worm turns on female choice. When women opt for family, they tend to opt out of career. That's just how they roll, it seems.

I guarantee you're wrong on the stats. Where do you live? You don't have to be too specific, a country would be fine if that's OK with you. I'll find the data and we can see.

Sure, in small amounts "suck it up, buttercup" is a perfectly reasonable response.

It is. It's what men have to do all the time.

I hope you don't seriously propose that men face these issues in the same way that women do. Everybody has different experiences, but the data is clear on how ubiquitous these things are for women. I can anecdotally attest to that, but I don't have to (data is better than anecdote anyway).

I should also comment that what's being said here is that a person doesn't get crushed from some single instance of these topics being brought up. A woman gets interrupted in the conference room, she'll be mildly annoyed. It probably won't even ruin her day. It's that these are large scale trends that both lead to and come from a culture of respecting women less as less competent, more compliant, having less agency, etc. in aggregate which ultimately leads to the sorts of implicit biases I've been talking about where a résumé with a woman's name on it is automatically judged less competent and worth less salary than the same résumé with a man's name on it.

It's when all of these things are taken in aggregate that a large scale, statistical picture emerges. Women are not weak. We aren't going to break down because someone mansplains something to us. But each instance of these things contributes to a culture where women are perceived as weak for having to deal with more to get the same amount of respect (which we may never get, see my recent response where I mentioned the broken rung phenomenon where women are passed over for promotions before they can even make it to a glass ceiling!)

...women bear more of a burden at home...

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but in the work world, who cares?

Home life is a negotiation between spouses. If she married a lout, what's that to the employer? If she had children, good for her; but what's that to the employer? The employer has no role or say in any of that. What he pays is what he pays for a person (male or female) who comes to work, does the job, and then goes home and does whatever he/she wants to do. If a woman allows herself to be more responsible for the domestic sphere than she thinks she should be, then that's on her. It has nothing to do with "implicit bias" at work. It's a matter to be worked out in her own home.

So she can find her own solution. She can't blame the work world for her choices.

The question we're addressing is "why aren't there more women that stay in STEM?" The answer to that question goes beyond work life to women's home life, which itself is saturated in gendered expectations. That's the point.

Yes, a woman can make sure she marries someone that will be equitable about sharing home life responsibilities: but a lot of women don't know to do this, because the thing about cultural expectations is that the people that get the short end of the stick end up following those expectations too. She may take on more of the household duties than her husband because of course she's going to, she's a woman, isn't she? But this is exactly the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I say that gendered cultural expectations have less to do with a woman's nature as a woman and more to do with how a woman was nurtured as a woman. So this combination of gendered expectation and culture affects women in and out of the workplace, contributing to fewer women in STEM.

...I wonder how many women know they won't get too much support...

Men don't ask for support. They expect competence. They pay for results, not feelings. That's reality. And if somebody (male or female) "feels unloved" by that, well, that's just not something an employer can deal with.

That particular sentence was in the context of having children, and I meant to imply "support" at home with the home life.

[Immanuel Can]

The gender-sex distinction isn't something that can be disputed as it's definitional.

It's not. It's a totally invented distinction, one that serves the interests of the Left, but not of their skeptics. Propaganda terms are always disputable, to say the least.

People can elect not to use gender as a social construct as a concept, but it's not something that can be debunked.

Sure it can. It refers to nothing real. The right term is "sex."

"Gender" is fa word stolen from grammar, a term for verbs and adjectives in languages wherein they're "gendered." It has no apt application to human beings.

For the ethics of whether children should transition,

I thought we agreed that people who are too young to know who they are should not "transition." Did we not settle that?

Then we have this paper which links "childhood gender nonconformity" with abuse and PTSD, certainly also not in line with "transition only" lines of trans issue thinking.

There's also good research to suggest it's foisted upon people who suffer with spectrum conditions like Asperger's Syndrome, and Soh thinks it's being peddled to lesbians, too.

I also found this paper that completely shoots down supporting adolescent transitioning as unethical.

Funny, then, that "affirmation therapy" is now the only approved response allowed therapists, teachers and other child-care people in some countries. it seems this research isn't being taken very seriously.

What was the paper and what was his name? It does depend on the context.

Rushton. You can look him up. You'll find no end of detractors and character assassins...but I've looked at the actual paper, and you should too.

For instance, most papers should have a discussion section where surrounding context really needs to be brought up lest someone take a conclusion and go somewhere nasty with it.

That's a strange thought. Why wouldn't a person just let the data speak?

I have been flooding my past posts with citation after citation of differences in gendered expectations and biases,

Yes, there are many in Social Sciences who want to interpret everything as "gender bias." But whether they're just responding to political correctness or actually identifying causes is the key.

My asking is quite simple: what specific things, located in the system itself, not in feelings, are causing women not to continue in STEM? All I see is everybody eager to get women into that field. But you say there are "implicit" problems that keep them out. I say we make them "explicit" so we can fix them.

So what are they? Just list a few, and we'll see what it would take to fix them.

In short though, there are a lot of things women deal with at work and at home that are gendered expectations: women are expected to balance home and work life more,

No, that's domestic. It has nothing whatsoever to do with work. It's on them to change that.

they're expected to perform more unpaid emotional and cognitive labor

"Emotional and cognitive labour?" Specifically what?

...they're assumed to be less competent

By whom? Let's identify the perp here.

That should give us enough to work with. And we can do the rest of the list after we've addressed these allegations.

Women are talked over, condescended to, sexually harassed, hired less, paid less, promoted less,

None of these is remotely the case where I am. In fact, if you sexually harass somebody, as a man, your career is done. Even the allegation can kill you. Women are hired more, promoted faster, encouraged much more, and not paid one penny less. And they have quotas, scholarships, mentorships and all sorts of things set aside to advantage them. The equivalent answer to men is inevitably, "Do it yourself, Chuck."

The worm turns on female choice. When women opt for family, they tend to opt out of career. That's just how they roll, it seems.

I guarantee you're wrong on the stats.

I promise you, I'm not wrong about how things are here. They're bending over backward to accommodate women here...and men, well, they are just assumed to fend for themselves.

Which is fine: we will. But there's no reason a competent woman shouldn't do the same.

Sure, in small amounts "suck it up, buttercup" is a perfectly reasonable response.

It is. It's what men have to do all the time.

I hope you don't seriously propose that men face these issues in the same way that women do.

Not the same issues, no. But equally bad ones, and sometimes issues that are much worse. But they complain a great deal less.

For example, men are practically guilty-until-proven-innocent if anybody, even an anonymous accuser, alleges impropriety, or racial discrimination, or even "microaggessions." There doesn't have to be stitch of truth to the allegations, and they'll still run the accused through the politically correct wringer. Men also work much more dangerous jobs than women do, have more health problems, have a much higher suicide rate (women make more attempts, but succeed less), and die younger than their female counterparts. And don't even crack the lid on divorce/custody settlements...

But nobody feels sorry for men. We don't ask it. We expect to handle things. That's what men do.

I should also comment that what's being said here is that a person doesn't get crushed from some single instance of these topics being brought up. A woman gets interrupted in the conference room, she'll be mildly annoyed. It probably won't even ruin her day.

Men always talk combatively to each other. They interrupt, contradict or challenge as they feel necessary. Maybe that's just the world she's in, and she should toughen up.

...each instance of these things contributes to a culture...

Each everything "contributes to" some "culture." What we need are specifics. What, exactly, is presently being done, that we can rearrange, so that women can no longer be underrepresented?

There's no "glass ceiling" that women themselves don't put there. Women who behave like men do actually get promoted ahead of the men, to satisfy the quotas that are not even available to men. But few women want to behave like the men do.

...women bear more of a burden at home...

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but in the work world, who cares?

Home life is a negotiation between spouses. If she married a lout, what's that to the employer? If she had children, good for her; but what's that to the employer? The employer has no role or say in any of that. What he pays is what he pays for a person (male or female) who comes to work, does the job, and then goes home and does whatever he/she wants to do. If a woman allows herself to be more responsible for the domestic sphere than she thinks she should be, then that's on her. It has nothing to do with "implicit bias" at work. It's a matter to be worked out in her own home.

So she can find her own solution. She can't blame the work world for her choices.

The question we're addressing is "why aren't there more women that stay in STEM?" The answer to that question goes beyond work life to women's home life,

But that has nothing to do with work, or with STEM. That's her domestic choices. She's got to fix those herself.

Look at it this way: nobody (in our society, anyway) is forcing women to marry and have children. It's 100% in their own control what domestic arrangements they make. But if they make bad ones, they can't visit that on employers or tax payers. That's not fair.

Yes, a woman can make sure she marries someone that will be equitable about sharing home life responsibilities: but a lot of women don't know to do this...

Seriously?

I can hardly believe you wrote that.

She may take on more of the household duties than her husband because of course she's going to, she's a woman, isn't she?

What does that mean? You mean there's some biological imperative that makes women take on "more household duties"?

So this combination of gendered expectation and culture affects women in and out of the workplace, contributing to fewer women in STEM.

I have to say, I honestly find that explanation far too simplistic and far too vague. If this is actually a serious problem, it deserves a very precise diagnosis, so we can deal with it.

So I have to ask again: what is it, this "culture" these "expectations" that you say women suffer under? Who is doing the "expecting," what are they "expecting," and why can't women simply choose what they want to do, and do it?

After all, it seems you did, didn't you?

...I wonder how many women know they won't get too much support...

Men don't ask for support. They expect competence. They pay for results, not feelings. That's reality. And if somebody (male or female) "feels unloved" by that, well, that's just not something an employer can deal with.

That particular sentence was in the context of having children, and I meant to imply "support" at home with the home life.

Again, "home life" is a thing the woman herself controls. The employer does not. And it's not reasonable to ask an employer to make any concessions to the private choices the woman herself has made. That's on her. She's got to sort her own domestic stuff out.

Children, husband, whatever...it's on her. She made them, or chose him, and she has to make better choices if those choices interfere with her work life. Or else she can stop complaining. But she isn't entitled to make it her employer's problem, or a problem of the professional field she elected to enter. She's got to handle her own private life.

[Astro Cat]

For the ethics of whether children should transition,

I thought we agreed that people who are too young to know who they are should not "transition." Did we not settle that?

We did, I was responding to the accusation that this would never be published in the literature by pointing out that it is.

What was the paper and what was his name? It does depend on the context.

Rushton. You can look him up. You'll find no end of detractors and character assassins...but I've looked at the actual paper, and you should too.

Ok, so I'm assuming that it's this one. You are right, there are many detractors (I don't care about character assassins), and it looks like the detractors had good reason as nearly everything I can find are methodological problems, omitted research with contradicting conclusions (or produced misleading conclusions, e.g. on cranial data), and weak grasp of the concepts on the forays into interdisciplinary fields (e.g., he didn't stay in his lane as we millennials like to say).

One detractor had this to say, which is a much more eloquent way of saying what I was getting at in my last post:

Rushton complains of a "double standard" being applied to judgments of the quality of his research. If there is a double standard, it reflects common sense and careful science. There are several reasons why a research program like Rushton's requires unusually high standards of investigation. First, Rushton has undertaken to use an ecological model that demands considerable ecological sophistication for its proper application. Second, he has attempted to generalize his findings to large, widespread groups of humans. These characteristics render his research program articularly ambitious, and it demands correspondingly sophisticated research methods. The procedures suggested in Points 1 and 3 under "Implications for Rushton's research" are, in fact, minimal standards for the problem that Rushton has chosen. The design of his research
does not meet these standards.

Rushton's choice of research demands high standards of investigation for a third reason as well. When research has the potential to be misused or to cause harm to people, it is perfectly appropriate to apply more stringent standards to its publication, as we do routinely in setting standards for drug testing or food preparation, depending on whether the product is to be used by humans or animals. Rushton himself does not deny that racial comparisons have in the past been abused. Contrary to Rushton's contention, however, it is generalizations about characteristics of visibly different or subordinate groups that lead to institutionalized violence and exploitation, not environmental or genetic arguments.

With these grave considerations in mind, investigators, reviewers, and editors have a special responsibility when dealing with research of this sort, to make sure that it is published only when it is of the highest quality. The job is all the harder when the research in question crosses disciplinary lines.

I have also now seen Rushton's back-and-forth between colleague (ostensibly? They were at least at the same university) Z. Cernovsky, who began by trying to make Rushton aware of this ethical onus.

Yeah, in this case I don't really blame the university or the scientific community for distancing themselves from this.

For instance, most papers should have a discussion section where surrounding context really needs to be brought up lest someone take a conclusion and go somewhere nasty with it.

That's a strange thought. Why wouldn't a person just let the data speak?

Have you met people? The data would still speak as having a discussion doesn't alter data. Discussion contextualizes things for people because in science, not everyone that reads our papers are within our disciplines or knows how to interpret our data. Now in this particular case, I saw that Rushton did hold a rather lengthy discussion -- in support of racist views, which detractors have debunked his methodology and reasoning for reaching this conclusion. But in general, discussion sections are important to have in most papers that aren't reviews.

My asking is quite simple: what specific things, located in the system itself, not in feelings, are causing women not to continue in STEM? All I see is everybody eager to get women into that field. But you say there are "implicit" problems that keep them out. I say we make them "explicit" so we can fix them.

So what are they? Just list a few, and we'll see what it would take to fix them.

Seriously, just read over my last few posts as I've said a couple of times now. I have given so many citations citing so many problems. It takes effort to do this and I've already put in that effort only to feel like it's not being read or understood. However, I think you help by narrowing questions to three things below, so let's look at that.

In short though, there are a lot of things women deal with at work and at home that are gendered expectations: women are expected to balance home and work life more,

No, that's domestic. It has nothing whatsoever to do with work. It's on them to change that.

Again, to answer why there is a shortage of women in STEM we have to look at their lives, not just their workplace. Contributing factors exist in both.

they're expected to perform more unpaid emotional and cognitive labor

"Emotional and cognitive labour?" Specifically what?

Emotional labor is something I've already linked above in a workplace context (Men are 67% more likely to receive formal recognition for emotional support for team members: because this is expected of women).

Cognitive labor is usually used in a household context and covers everything from remembering which groceries are needed to how a birthday party needs to be planned. Cognitive labor is split, but there are usually gendered expectations that put most of the cognitive work anticipating needs and monitoring outcomes (while identifying problems and decision-making cognitive work are usually more evenly shared). Doing most of the cognitive labor has real effects.

Despite the fact that women aren't better multitaskers than men, women are still expected (socially, culturally) to take on the brunt of the cognitive labor because of gendered stereotypes when couples were asked.

...they're assumed to be less competent

By whom? Let's identify the perp here.

That should give us enough to work with. And we can do the rest of the list after we've addressed these allegations.

Consider that you're told about a hypothetical CEO by the name of Morgan. Morgan "tends to offer opinions as much as possible," and compared to other CEOs, "talks much more." People were asked how they feel about this CEO, except with a twist: some where told about "Mr. Morgan" while others were told about "Ms. Morgan." Despite having the exact same description, people rated the male version more competent, while those who heard the female version rated her less competent.

As the author of the study notes,

Results from this study are informative for multiple reasons. First, these results suggest that high-power women are in fact justified in their concern that they will experience backlash from being highly voluble: a female CEO who talked disproportionately longer than others was rated as significantly less competent and less suitable for leadership than a male CEO who was reported as speaking for the same amount. Second, this effect did not interact in any way with participant gender in that both male and female participants were equally likely
to exhibit backlash effects. This result lends further support to the status incongruity hypothesis and the notion that backlash effects result in beliefs about existing gender hierarchies that are shared among both male and female perceivers.

A woman's assertiveness is more likely to be interpreted as anger rather than strength (an assumption of incompetence: that forcefulness must just be a moody woman). Women become acutely aware of this, which may force them into toning down their assertiveness due to the unequal perception. Women's perceived competency drops far more than men's when they're perceived to be assertive or forceful (and therefore "angry"). People attribute anger in women to their internal lives ("she is just an angry person") whereas they attribute anger in men to external factors ("he is angry at the situation").

Since women are automatically assumed to be nurturers, they're perceived as being less suitable for leadership roles that require making tough decisions. Stereotypes women seek to avoid present a catch-22 whereby they either must weaken themselves, conform to the gendered stereotypes they wish to avoid, or sometimes experienced "stereotype backlash" whereby holders of the gendered stereotypes increased stereotyping in response to stereotype challenging and/or avoiding. Positive traits are less likely to be remembered (while negative traits are more likely to be remembered) by an employee when a manager happens to be a woman.

I could go on, as I said. I have gone on (I have posted citations to many different aspects of this sort of thing in previous posts, I hope they are not going unheeded).

The point is that you are very optimistic in thinking that shining a light on these things makes them easy to address: the very nature of implicit biases are that they are unconscious/unintentional, and so very difficult to address. The only sort of address that can be made is cultural, and so (and this is crucial) must extend beyond the workplace.

I promise you, I'm not wrong about how things are here. They're bending over backward to accommodate women here...and men, well, they are just assumed to fend for themselves.

You said women were hired more, promoted faster, and paid the same. Which country? I'll show you the data. If you prefer not to say, then I advise you to look up the data. It's not that hard to find.

Not the same issues, no. But equally bad ones, and sometimes issues that are much worse. But they complain a great deal less.

For example, men are practically guilty-until-proven-innocent if anybody, even an anonymous accuser, alleges impropriety, or racial discrimination, or even "microaggessions." There doesn't have to be stitch of truth to the allegations, and they'll still run the accused through the politically correct wringer. Men also work much more dangerous jobs than women do, have more health problems, have a much higher suicide rate (women make more attempts, but succeed less), and die younger than their female counterparts. And don't even crack the lid on divorce/custody settlements...

But nobody feels sorry for men. We don't ask it. We expect to handle things. That's what men do.

Actually, feminists do feel sorry for men (in terms of the real and valid reasons you've brought up, as well as other things such as the relative lack of support for men in abusive relationships). It's a common topic in feminist circles (at least I can say anecdotally from the billions of them that I'm a part of). Those are all things the culture should seek to change, too.

Men always talk combatively to each other. They interrupt, contradict or challenge as they feel necessary. Maybe that's just the world she's in, and she should toughen up.

I've put in too much effort already to go back to drop the citation again, but please refer to where I mentioned men are three times more likely to interrupt a woman than another man.

Yes, a woman can make sure she marries someone that will be equitable about sharing home life responsibilities: but a lot of women don't know to do this...

Seriously?

I can hardly believe you wrote that.

But it's true, this is the nature of implicit biases, this is what it means to accept gender stereotypes. When I say "a lot of women don't know to do this" I mean a lot of women just accept the stereotype that culture hands to them. After all, stereotypes can have very negative consequences in aggregate while only being experienced very mildly by some individuals. Women might not even know they're doing more cognitive labor for instance (as the very study and its follow-up I cited showed, in fact!)

She may take on more of the household duties than her husband because of course she's going to, she's a woman, isn't she?

What does that mean? You mean there's some biological imperative that makes women take on "more household duties"?

My tone was facetious

After all, it seems you did, didn't you?

I'm a privileged woman. My parents were upper middle class, they were able to provide for my needs so I could focus on intellectual pursuits, I've never had to worry about children, I've never had to worry about a partner holding unfair gendered expectations of me. I've had more mental spoons to deal with everything.

[uwot]

...in the irony void between Mr Can's ears:

Why wouldn't a person just let the data speak?

I personally like you and think that you're a good guy,

I used to think the same of you. It's why I supported your point in the first case...

[Immanuel Can]

...it looks like the detractors had good reason as nearly everything I can find are methodological problems, omitted research with contradicting conclusions (or produced misleading conclusions, e.g. on cranial data), and weak grasp of the concepts on the forays into interdisciplinary fields (e.g., he didn't stay in his lane as we millennials like to say).

You won't know unless you check the paper. Detractors throw around all kinds of vague allegations that simply aren't true, in the hope that some of it will "poison the well," even when they have nothing to say.

For instance, most papers should have a discussion section where surrounding context really needs to be brought up lest someone take a conclusion and go somewhere nasty with it.

That's a strange thought. Why wouldn't a person just let the data speak?

Have you met people? The data would still speak as having a discussion doesn't alter data.

"Having a discussion" would be fine. But warning people off conclusions simply because a person thinks somebody might "go somewhere nasty with it" is a good deal more than that. It's deciding in advance what the data is even allowed to "say," when it is properly discussed.

My asking is quite simple: what specific things, located in the system itself, not in feelings, are causing women not to continue in STEM? All I see is everybody eager to get women into that field. But you say there are "implicit" problems that keep them out. I say we make them "explicit" so we can fix them.

So what are they? Just list a few, and we'll see what it would take to fix them.

Seriously, just read over my last few posts as I've said a couple of times now. I have given so many citations...

Yes, you've given lots. But they don't get to the heart of the matter, I have to say. They attribute things to "implicit bias." That means they have no actual diagnosis, but instead, send us on a ghost hunt.

But that's okay: citations are not necessary anymore. I'll grant the point. I'm conceding the possibility of your point being true...though I can't say for sure it is, yet.

But I'm pointing to the solution: because to say something like, "there's an unfriendly culture" tells us absolutely nothing useful. We can't locate a "culture" or a "feeling." And we have no way of knowing, without specific causes being implicated, whether or not we can change anything about this alleged "culture" or the people creating it. We need to know who is doing it, how, and what measures we need to take to change it. If we have none of these things, then to say, "an unpleasant culture is there" leaves us incapable of fixing it.

So let's get down to brass tacks: what, in specific, is the cause of this "culture"?

We can use your own experience in STEM, perhaps to say this. What has made you uncomfortable, and who is responsible for it?

In short though, there are a lot of things women deal with at work and at home that are gendered expectations: women are expected to balance home and work life more,

No, that's domestic. It has nothing whatsoever to do with work. It's on them to change that.

Again, to answer why there is a shortage of women in STEM we have to look at their lives, not just their workplace.

Maybe. But if the answer is "their lives," then it's their problem. They make their own lives.

they're expected to perform more unpaid emotional and cognitive labor

"Emotional and cognitive labour?" Specifically what?

Emotional labor ...formal recognition for emotional support for team members: because this is expected of women.

"Is expected?" By whom? Certainly not competent men, who don't need "emotional support," and who is this "team," and who is doing this "expecting"?

Cognitive labor is usually used in a household context

Then that's 100% the women's problem, and doesn't fall on the employer, the taxpayer, or the culture of STEM. Women choose their own "householding" practices.

...they're assumed to be less competent

By whom? Let's identify the perp here.

That should give us enough to work with. And we can do the rest of the list after we've addressed these allegations.

Consider that you're told about a hypothetical CEO by the name of Morgan. Morgan "tends to offer opinions as much as possible," and compared to other CEOs, "talks much more." People were asked how they feel about this CEO, except with a twist: some where told about "Mr. Morgan" while others were told about "Ms. Morgan." Despite having the exact same description, people rated the male version more competent, while those who heard the female version rated her less competent.

Okay, let's say that's the case. The woman is viewed as less competent. We haven't answered why that's happening.

There are multiple possible explanations. One, you've kind of implied yourself: that women tend to have less controlled domestic lives, and this erodes their performance at work. If that's the case, then it would be quite natural for any pool of test subjects to suppose that a female candidate is likely to be less effective than a male one...and they'd be right, on a gross basis, if not on an individual one.

Now, I don't say that's true. But it could be. "Work is biased" isn't an obvious or necessary explanation there. It might be no more than past experience being used to interpret the situation.

Is it true that women are more messed up by their domestic lives? You say it is. But then, you can hardly blame the employer for noticing it -- it hits her bottom line. She pays in hard cash for the disorder in her employees lives. So if she would rather hire a man (who will never get pregnant, will work the 80 hour week, and will not be distracted by the domestic burden, presumably) than a woman, it makes perfect sense. You would, too.

I promise you, I'm not wrong about how things are here. They're bending over backward to accommodate women here...and men, well, they are just assumed to fend for themselves.

You said women were hired more, promoted faster, and paid the same. Which country?

I keep my location to myself, so unfortunately, I prefer not to be specific on that. All I can tell you is that there are countries in the world where, if you look this up, you'll find it's the case. But it's primarily in Western, advanced democracies that women are prioritized, and my country has been accused of being highly "feminized"...with some justice, too...so that should give you enough to go on.

Not the same issues, no. But equally bad ones, and sometimes issues that are much worse. But they complain a great deal less.

For example, men are practically guilty-until-proven-innocent if anybody, even an anonymous accuser, alleges impropriety, or racial discrimination, or even "microaggessions." There doesn't have to be stitch of truth to the allegations, and they'll still run the accused through the politically correct wringer. Men also work much more dangerous jobs than women do, have more health problems, have a much higher suicide rate (women make more attempts, but succeed less), and die younger than their female counterparts. And don't even crack the lid on divorce/custody settlements...

But nobody feels sorry for men. We don't ask it. We expect to handle things. That's what men do.

Actually, feminists do feel sorry for men (in terms of the real and valid reasons you've brought up, as well as other things such as the relative lack of support for men in abusive relationships).

Yes, some do. Most do not. But a noteworthy exception would be somebody like a Bettina Arndt. Warren Farrell has also done good work on the boy crisis, but gotten a lot of flack as if that means he's only "shilling for his own team." The proof is available...but I don't see a lot of women's equity programs or women's marches taking up concern for their male children or their husbands as part of their agenda.

But of course, "women's march" is essentialism. It implies we all know what a "woman" is.

It's a common topic in feminist circles (at least I can say anecdotally from the billions of them that I'm a part of). Those are all things the culture should seek to change, too.

Well, I believe you, and I'm glad. At the same time, you'll notice that part of being a man is not complaining about other people abusing you. Men are supposed to "man up" and "take it." And much of the time, that's exactly what we do. But that doesn't mean we're not being mistreated; it means we don't look to "society" or to the collective to fix things for us.

And maybe that's why men kill themselves at a much higher rater than women do.

...men are three times more likely to interrupt a woman than another man.

Not surprising, really. Women's protocols are that you have to listen, and they're much higher (as a group) in agreeability than men are. Men have verbal protocols that include things like interruption, contestation, debate, adversarial positions, and so on. So that men would interrupt and women would tend to shut down when they do is very likely.

But this is the important point: what's to be done about it?

Yes, a woman can make sure she marries someone that will be equitable about sharing home life responsibilities: but a lot of women don't know to do this...

Seriously?

I can hardly believe you wrote that.

But it's true, this is the nature of implicit biases, this is what it means to accept gender stereotypes.

Women have "internalized their oppression," as the Feminists like to say?

Then they should make it explicit, and shed it. What else can we suggest? That they keep doing the same counterproductive things?

After all, stereotypes can have very negative consequences in aggregate while only being experienced very mildly by some individuals.

That's true, of course. But where are these "stereotypes" coming from?

Here's an obvious observation. On the cover of any traditional "men's magazine," what are you likely to see? A car? A fishing rod? A motorcycle? Or maybe, on the back-rack magazines, a picture of a semi-nude woman?

What do you see on "women's magazines"? Maybe domestic stuff like house interiors or flower arrangements. But overwhelmingly, it's pictures of pretty women.

Why is that? If the stereotypes are coming from the males, why do women's magazines (notoriously, as they are, interested in capturing female eyes and female dollars) have more images of women, and more stereotypical images, than the men's magazines do? If the men were the source of the stereotypes, you would expect every men's magazine to be decorated with a nubile female...but aside from biker mags and the porn in the back row, most men's magazines illustrate things: airplanes, hobbies, scientific discoveries, motorcycle racers, carpentry tricks, hot cars...

Why is that? Has the magazine industry simply misunderstood their audience? Or are women choosing to spend much more energy generating and perpetuating female stereotypes than the men are?

My tone was facetious

Sorry. "Tone" is hard on a typed forum.

After all, it seems you did, didn't you?

I'm a privileged woman. My parents were upper middle class, they were able to provide for my needs so I could focus on intellectual pursuits, I've never had to worry about children, I've never had to worry about a partner holding unfair gendered expectations of me. I've had more mental spoons to deal with everything.

I'm glad for you. Sincerely. That's great. That certainly doesn't parallel my own experience, but that's irrelevant here. It''s not about me.

I don't diminish your achievement in getting into STEM, and I trust you don't, too. You aren't so "privileged" that you can take no credit for your achievement, are you? Or were your parents VERY rich and influential? Did you overcome no hardships on that road? But if you did overcome hardships, why shouldn't you expect other women to do the same? Did you really have so many "spoons" that you can look down on other women and say, "Well, poor dears; they can't possibly do what I've done?"

I think you can ask more of them. And talking to you, I think you can take more credit for yourself.

[Astro Cat]

You won't know unless you check the paper. Detractors throw around all kinds of vague allegations that simply aren't true, in the hope that some of it will "poison the well," even when they have nothing to say.

I skimmed the paper and looked at what a few of the response papers had to say about it, they were not "vague" at all. If we need to start a separate debate about the subject we can if we must, if you want to defend Rushton.

But if you do defend Rushton, I would expect you're already intimately familiar with Anderson's cross-disciplinary critique?

You must already be familiar with the works that Rushton cites, and Cernovsky's criticisms about how they are misinterpreted or, in some cases, their conclusions that contradict Rushton outright ignored? It must have taken you a great deal of time and effort looking into this. Do you research in a related field? What caused your interest in Rushton's work in the first place?

But that's okay: citations are not necessary anymore. I'll grant the point. I'm conceding the possibility of your point being true...though I can't say for sure it is, yet.

But I'm pointing to the solution: because to say something like, "there's an unfriendly culture" tells us absolutely nothing useful. We can't locate a "culture" or a "feeling." And we have no way of knowing, without specific causes being implicated, whether or not we can change anything about this alleged "culture" or the people creating it. We need to know who is doing it, how, and what measures we need to take to change it. If we have none of these things, then to say, "an unpleasant culture is there" leaves us incapable of fixing it.

So let's get down to brass tacks: what, in specific, is the cause of this "culture"?

We can use your own experience in STEM, perhaps to say this. What has made you uncomfortable, and who is responsible for it?

The solution to an unfriendly culture isn't easy and there are a lot of papers asking exactly that ("so what do we do about it?"). Some things that are known to work are to break negative stereotypes in various cultural ways.

For instance, representation is important. Little girls that see women in positions of power, authority, strength, and respect can help to prevent them from forming the belief that women can't do those things. There have been more women in media doing exactly that, and I think that's been an overall good thing.

Awareness is another thing that can help. This is why feminists do a lot of the things that they do, drawing attention to these kinds of issues. If you recall, in the studies done on cognitive labor, a lot of the women in the study had no idea they were even taking on a majority of the cognitive labor. A lot of the women, when they found out, gave explanations such as "well I'm just naturally a good multi-tasker" or "well my husband works odd hours." (And some of these responses were valid on an individual level, and sometimes equity was found in other ways, and that's great: but we're just focusing on the times that it wasn't). In the follow-up studies though, a lot of the women -- now that they were aware of the inequality -- had worked to improve their cognitive workload with a more fair system with their spouses.

The point is that women often don't know that they're living in a culture with these implicitly unfair expectations of them. So awareness is one thing that could improve that. Of course, some women like traditional feminine roles and will choose to be, for instance, a housewife. That's perfectly fine and valid (just as it is perfectly fine and valid when men choose to be househusbands). But many women would choose otherwise, and I think as more do, the implicit cultural expectation will diminish.

Awareness goes both ways. As I've pointed out a few times, many of the people engaging in this implicit misogyny aren't actual misogynists. As with the "Mr. Morgan vs. Ms. Morgan" scenario, even the people that rated Ms. Morgan with much less competency sheerly because she was a woman didn't generally espouse misogynistic beliefs and didn't consciously think women were less capable than men. That's the insidious part about implicit biases, and obviously why they're so hard to tackle. But if people were made aware of the sorts of implicit biases that exist, they might be able to catch themselves when participating in them: "Ok, I know it's a common implicit bias to interpret an assertive woman as being angry instead of powerful, and I know that it's a common implicit bias to interpret a woman's anger as internalized about her person rather than about her external circumstances. I just saw Janet forcefully tell Susan that she needs a project completed by Friday. Maybe my initial gut reaction that she's just a bossy bitch is unwarranted. Would I feel the same if a male boss did that?" (And of course, sometimes people will just be bossy bitches, male and female alike. But wouldn't it help if people were aware to double check their potential biases? Might they perceive things differently sometimes, catch more instances where a woman is just being assertive rather than a bitch, not misinterpret the scenario as often?)

None of these negative and unequal biases will change until the culture changes. It already has, to some degree, thanks to some good efforts. Culture is a difficult thing to work with.

Emotional labor ...formal recognition for emotional support for team members: because this is expected of women.

"Is expected?" By whom? Certainly not competent men, who don't need "emotional support," and who is this "team," and who is doing this "expecting"?

By the culture. Since the culture believes that women are just essentially nurturing, it's taken for granted that they will be. So if a woman goes above and beyond her duty in some workplace or school setting to see to the emotional comforts of her colleagues, this is just expected of her. When men do this, they receive more formal recognition.

Don't get me wrong: this isn't about wanting formal recognition for making sure employees or teammates are comfortable, or really complaining that men do get recognition for it (I'm glad they do, because making sure your employees and teammates are comfortable is a good thing). This was originally brought up just to show that gendered expectations in the workplace lead to different perceptions about people which can have actual work-related impacts.

By the way: you say "Certainly not competent men, who don't need 'emotional support." Just a bit further below you lament the high male suicide rate, though. Now ostensibly I imagine your position might be that men that commit suicide aren't "competent men" (I said might be your position, not is: but I hope it's not, because I don't think that's a good position to have). But in general, do you think it's incongruent to say men don't need support yet lament that men suffer suicidal ideation?

Cognitive labor is usually used in a household context

Then that's 100% the women's problem, and doesn't fall on the employer, the taxpayer, or the culture of STEM. Women choose their own "householding" practices.

No, it's society's problem to an extent. When the problem is that the culture has negative gendered stereotypes (for men and for women) that are more about culture than phenotypic reality, that's everybody's problem. Some man out there may fail at becoming the best nurse their region has ever seen, some woman out there may fail at becoming the best engineer.

I'm not asking the workplace to change a woman's home life, but I will ask employers not to discriminate against women on the off chance they "might" have home life inequalities just because they're a woman. I will ask employees not to discriminate against their coworkers for being women because their implicit biases drive them to perceive her differently than they would a man solely because that's how they're socially conditioned to perceive her.

Is it true that women are more messed up by their domestic lives? You say it is. But then, you can hardly blame the employer for noticing it -- it hits her bottom line. She pays in hard cash for the disorder in her employees lives. So if she would rather hire a man (who will never get pregnant, will work the 80 hour week, and will not be distracted by the domestic burden, presumably) than a woman, it makes perfect sense. You would, too.

I would not, because it's unethical. Workplace discrimination on the basis of sex or gender is unethical and in most cases illegal de jure. It's not de facto illegal though because it still occurs due to these implicit biases that cause phenomena like the broken rung, the glass ceiling, and so on. But that is why it's the case that yes, workplaces do have some onus to do something about the situation. As I've mentioned before, awareness helps: workplaces already try to raise awareness about consent and harassment for instance.

The lack of representation is also everyone's problem. It's everyone's problem that a lack of representation causes a negative feedback loop that just reinforces the negative biases contributing to the lack of representation in the first place.

It's a common topic in feminist circles (at least I can say anecdotally from the billions of them that I'm a part of). Those are all things the culture should seek to change, too.

Well, I believe you, and I'm glad. At the same time, you'll notice that part of being a man is not complaining about other people abusing you. Men are supposed to "man up" and "take it." And much of the time, that's exactly what we do. But that doesn't mean we're not being mistreated; it means we don't look to "society" or to the collective to fix things for us.

And maybe that's why men kill themselves at a much higher rater than women do.

This goes back to toxic masculinity: if a man is convinced that his masculinity is defined by doing something toxic to himself or others (like not seeking help if he needs it, or not to expressing himself, or not to cry, etc.), that's toxic masculinity. If we're saying things like "men don't speak up if they're mistreated" and then in the next breath lament that men suffer from higher suicidal ideation rates, it's obvious that the culture has a problem. Feminists are interested in helping men, too. I know I am.

...men are three times more likely to interrupt a woman than another man.

Not surprising, really. Women's protocols are that you have to listen, and they're much higher (as a group) in agreeability than men are. Men have verbal protocols that include things like interruption, contestation, debate, adversarial positions, and so on. So that men would interrupt and women would tend to shut down when they do is very likely.

Put the picture together though: the implicit biases are that assertive women are "angry", and then also that "angry" women are less competent than angry men. So some women reasonably try to control their assertiveness to avoid pushback due to these unfair biases. But that just causes these other problems: it's a no-win situation for women!

Women have "internalized their oppression," as the Feminists like to say?

Yes, quite often! That also covers your valid point about feminine gossip magazines. The problem is the culture. And the original point -- to bring this all back together -- is that the problem is the culture, not something essential about being a woman.

My tone was facetious

Sorry. "Tone" is hard on a typed forum.

I know, but it sure is fun to give you shit (As long as you're taking it in the spirit it's given: playfully)

I'm glad for you. Sincerely. That's great. That certainly doesn't parallel my own experience, but that's irrelevant here. It''s not about me.

I don't diminish your achievement in getting into STEM, and I trust you don't, too. You aren't so "privileged" that you can take no credit for your achievement, are you? Or were your parents VERY rich and influential? Did you overcome no hardships on that road? But if you did overcome hardships, why shouldn't you expect other women to do the same? Did you really have so many "spoons" that you can look down on other women and say, "Well, poor dears; they can't possibly do what I've done?"

I think you can ask more of them. And talking to you, I think you can take more credit for yourself.

I have done a lot of work, yes; but I don't think other women are weak for not having the same set of circumstances I do. I don't have some kind of superhuman iron will or anything, though I do think on an individual level I have an above average determination. That shouldn't matter, though. There are some reasons to be optimistic, because some of these things are changing for the better. But in order for that to happen, we need more awareness to help morph the culture. We need, as I am now, to hold up claims like that these biases exist because of something essential to women up to the light and examine them very carefully: I don't think they hold water, and they're dangerous precisely because people are more willing to believe them because of the implicit biases. It's part of that negative feedback loop.

[Immanuel Can]

You won't know unless you check the paper. Detractors throw around all kinds of vague allegations that simply aren't true, in the hope that some of it will "poison the well," even when they have nothing to say.

I skimmed the paper and looked at what a few of the response papers had to say about it, they were not "vague" at all. If we need to start a separate debate about the subject we can if we must, if you want to defend Rushton.

No, I only brought him in as an example of research that gets "tabooed." I have no particular interest in his thesis beyond the question of how academics are treated when they publicize politically-incorrect data.

But that's okay: citations are not necessary anymore. I'll grant the point. I'm conceding the possibility of your point being true...though I can't say for sure it is, yet.

But I'm pointing to the solution: because to say something like, "there's an unfriendly culture" tells us absolutely nothing useful. We can't locate a "culture" or a "feeling." And we have no way of knowing, without specific causes being implicated, whether or not we can change anything about this alleged "culture" or the people creating it. We need to know who is doing it, how, and what measures we need to take to change it. If we have none of these things, then to say, "an unpleasant culture is there" leaves us incapable of fixing it.

So let's get down to brass tacks: what, in specific, is the cause of this "culture"?

We can use your own experience in STEM, perhaps to say this. What has made you uncomfortable, and who is responsible for it?

The solution to an unfriendly culture isn't easy and there are a lot of papers asking exactly that ("so what do we do about it?"). Some things that are known to work are to break negative stereotypes in various cultural ways.

For instance, representation is important. Little girls that see women in positions of power, authority, strength, and respect can help to prevent them from forming the belief that women can't do those things. There have been more women in media doing exactly that, and I think that's been an overall good thing.

Okay. "Increase representation" is your first idea.

How do we achieve that? What specific policies do we need to put into place to make that happen? Or is it more a matter of women having to change their own attitudes? I'm open to suggestions of all kinds.

Awareness is another thing that can help.

To vague. Who needs to be "made aware," and how?

If you recall, in the studies done on cognitive labor, a lot of the women in the study had no idea they were even taking on a majority of the cognitive labor.

It's irrelevant. That has to do with the domestic sphere, which is no province of either the employer or STEM. Only the women themselves make decisions in that realm.

The point is that women often don't know that they're living in a culture with these implicitly unfair expectations of them. So awareness is one thing that could improve that.

Oh. So you mean, "Make the women more aware they've been making bad choices?"

Awareness goes both ways. As I've pointed out a few times, many of the people engaging in this implicit misogyny aren't actual misogynists. As with the "Mr. Morgan vs. Ms. Morgan" scenario, even the people that rated Ms. Morgan with much less competency sheerly because she was a woman didn't generally espouse misogynistic beliefs and didn't consciously think women were less capable than men.

That's what I was saying, though: there are multiple possible explanations for that phenomenon, and many of them have nothing do to with "bias," whether "implicit" or actual.

Emotional labor ...formal recognition for emotional support for team members: because this is expected of women.

"Is expected?" By whom? Certainly not competent men, who don't need "emotional support," and who is this "team," and who is doing this "expecting"?

By the culture.

No, that's not an answer. "Culture" is a ghost. Which PART of the "culture"? You obviously don't mean the art galleries or the sanitation engineers. So what part of the "culture" is the problem here?

Since the culture believes...

Well, cultures don't "believe" anything. "Culture" is a collective abstraction, devoid of any volition of its own. Only people do. And we can identify those people, presumably.

Are any of them women? You seem to say that some are.

By the way: you say "Certainly not competent men, who don't need 'emotional support." Just a bit further below you lament the high male suicide rate, though. Now ostensibly I imagine your position might be that men that commit suicide aren't "competent men" (I said might be your position, not is: but I hope it's not, because I don't think that's a good position to have). But in general, do you think it's incongruent to say men don't need support yet lament that men suffer suicidal ideation?

I think men and women have different burdens. And they react differently to those burdens. But in the society we now have, men are massively discriminated against, though largely, they do not complain because complaining is not a masculine mode. So there are many men under all kinds of stresses, who could use lots of help, but do not ask for it because asking is a kind of defeat.

On top of that, they have no reason to expect any sympathy at all from a culture as feminized as ours clearly is. In fact, in the media and the academy, they've already been told that just for being born male, they're "complicit in oppressive patriarchy." They can't expect any help from people who accept that version of things, can they?

Cognitive labor is usually used in a household context

Then that's 100% the women's problem, and doesn't fall on the employer, the taxpayer, or the culture of STEM. Women choose their own "householding" practices.

No, it's society's problem to an extent.

They're giving society a problem, alright. But they should just stop.

Unless they want to surrender their domestic choices to "society," they can't expect "society" to jump up and fix what they are causing.

I'm not asking the workplace to change a woman's home life,

Good.

...but I will ask employers not to discriminate against women on the off chance they "might" have home life inequalities just because they're a woman.

Fair enough, at least on an individual basis.

On the other hand, if the majority of working women continue to get pregnant, have bad home-life balances, work shorter hours and take too many leaves, you can't blame the employers for hedging their bets. They never know, going into a job interview, whether the woman they're looking at will turn out to be a work dynamo or a "fertile Myrtle" in a year or two. With the male candidates, they have a much higher chance of getting a worker that will not be leaving soon. But there are never any guarantees, of course.

Now, I'm not saying women are wrong for working less. I don't say they're wrong for having children. I don't even make them out to be wrong if they have an uneven balance of domestic duties. That's their life choice. It might even be a good one: Lord knows many men work far too much, and don't give enough psychological energy to the family. I believe that.

But I do say that if women are complaining about the work world, they cannot use their domestic decisions as a reason.

Is it true that women are more messed up by their domestic lives? You say it is. But then, you can hardly blame the employer for noticing it -- it hits her bottom line. She pays in hard cash for the disorder in her employees lives. So if she would rather hire a man (who will never get pregnant, will work the 80 hour week, and will not be distracted by the domestic burden, presumably) than a woman, it makes perfect sense. You would, too.

I would not, because it's unethical.

Then you'd be out of business. If you can't keep your employees, your competition will eat you alive. There's a limit to how much damage, done by women's domestic priorties, your business can sustain. You'd better hedge against that, or you won't be around long.

The lack of representation is also everyone's problem.

Well, back to the question of how to fix it...

It's a common topic in feminist circles (at least I can say anecdotally from the billions of them that I'm a part of). Those are all things the culture should seek to change, too.

Well, I believe you, and I'm glad. At the same time, you'll notice that part of being a man is not complaining about other people abusing you. Men are supposed to "man up" and "take it." And much of the time, that's exactly what we do. But that doesn't mean we're not being mistreated; it means we don't look to "society" or to the collective to fix things for us.

And maybe that's why men kill themselves at a much higher rater than women do.

This goes back to toxic masculinity:

Ugh. What a prejudiced phrase.

Masculinity is not "toxic." Some forms of behaviour performed by some men are bad. Just like some women are bad. They're differently bad, maybe; but they're both bad.

Much that is masculine is very good. It's different from the feminine, but it's a good thing it is. Women don't like feminine men.

...men are three times more likely to interrupt a woman than another man.

Not surprising, really. Women's protocols are that you have to listen, and they're much higher (as a group) in agreeability than men are. Men have verbal protocols that include things like interruption, contestation, debate, adversarial positions, and so on. So that men would interrupt and women would tend to shut down when they do is very likely.

Put the picture together though: the implicit biases are that assertive women are "angry", and then also that "angry" women are less competent than angry men. So some women reasonably try to control their assertiveness to avoid pushback due to these unfair biases. But that just causes these other problems: it's a no-win situation for women!

Perhaps. But again, what's the solution? To make women more angry?

Women have "internalized their oppression," as the Feminists like to say?

Yes, quite often! That also covers your valid point about feminine gossip magazines. The problem is the culture. And the original point -- to bring this all back together -- is that the problem is the culture, not something essential about being a woman.

No, that's not right. The "culture" is an expression of what the women are choosing. Why they are choosing it, they will have to say.

My tone was facetious

Sorry. "Tone" is hard on a typed forum.

I know, but it sure is fun to give you shit (As long as you're taking it in the spirit it's given: playfully)

It's all good.

[Astro Cat]

No, I only brought him in as an example of research that gets "tabooed." I have no particular interest in his thesis beyond the question of how academics are treated when they publicize politically-incorrect data.

Gotcha. Ok, point ceded, to an extent. Yet I can understand why people were up in arms. Some did it more eloquently by pointing out how the way he went about it was problematic. Of course there are going to be people that don't react so well, sure.

Okay. "Increase representation" is your first idea.

How do we achieve that? What specific policies do we need to put into place to make that happen? Or is it more a matter of women having to change their own attitudes? I'm open to suggestions of all kinds.

One way that this is being done is that the media picks up stories about women breaking out in fields. In a perfect world the response should be "so what," but for right now, I think it's a good thing.

Women appearing in entertainment in more diverse roles is already being done as well, and I think that's helping.

At the same time though, I'm not a policy-maker for a reason. I don't know what sorts of policies should be done. My interest in this thread has been to answer the questions, "why are there fewer women in STEM, and is there something essential about being a woman that shoulders the bulk of the blame?"

My answer to the first has been because of the unequal psychosocial hardships women endure thanks to implicit biases in the culture both at home and at work. My answer to the second is that it sure seems a lot more like cultural aspects are more at play than anything essential to being a woman.

As I have argued before, I don't even outright reject the possibility that being a biological, phenotypic woman skews some kind of temperamental curve and might serve as a seed for the emergence of the biases that harm women overall. Maybe x out of y women, raised in a vacuum, would prefer a nurturing field over a STEM field, compared to some lower x out of y men that would prefer the same. I don't know. Yet I don't think the nature side of the effect is dominant, I don't think that on its own it would nearly account for the sorts of cultural biases that we see. My evidence for this is that many women show an initial interest in STEM, but something causes them to back out. My evidence includes the fact that they don't report they're leaving for greener pastures (answering some feminine call to nurture instead of analyze, so to speak): they report they're leaving because of workplace/school place gendered hostilities, both implicit and explicit. My anecdotal experience aligns with this interpretation.

So my goal here isn't to come up with some panacea for gendered issues in the workplace (though the vague ideas of representation and awareness certainly couldn't hurt). I have no choice but to leave that to people that know a lot more about policies and their effects than I do. My goal here is simply to combat the idea that nature plays a more significant role than nurture in the gender gap in STEM, and to point out that in theory, even though I don't know how to do it, the nurture aspects can change if the culture changes: it isn't set in stone, and so the problem doesn't for the most part stem from anything essential about being a woman -- that if there is some nature aspect to the problem, its impact is probably low or inscrutable; and a good solution will focus mostly on the nurture aspect of the problem.

Oh. So you mean, "Make the women more aware they've been making bad choices?"

Yes. But also the men. These implicit biases are held by both women and men. Women need to be more aware that they're making bad choices and men need to be more aware not to hold the biases themselves. This is really complicated though. A common problem I've noticed in heterosexual relationships is that men sometimes aren't straightforward about what kinds of beliefs they hold about women, or it just doesn't come up, or whatever, until the couple is emotionally invested when it finally rears its head.

Relationships are tough because nobody's ever perfect. You have to kind of decide what negative things about your partner aren't dealbreakers in any relationship. So I can understand maybe how to some women, if a man holds some of these biased gendered beliefs while she does not, she may tolerate them. I think it's hasty to call her stupid or weak because of that. So none of this has a really clear cut answer.

I think men and women have different burdens. And they react differently to those burdens. But in the society we now have, men are massively discriminated against, though largely, they do not complain because complaining is not a masculine mode. So there are many men under all kinds of stresses, who could use lots of help, but do not ask for it because asking is a kind of defeat.

On top of that, they have no reason to expect any sympathy at all from a culture as feminized as ours clearly is. In fact, in the media and the academy, they've already been told that just for being born male, they're "complicit in oppressive patriarchy." They can't expect any help from people who accept that version of things, can they?

These different burdens are often cultural, though. I know many fantastic men that could and would speak up about injustices towards men. I would join in with them. There is nothing un-masculine about addressing injustice: but cultural norms sure can make a man feel like it's un-masculine. It doesn't have to be that way. It isn't that way for many men.

On the other hand, if the majority of working women continue to get pregnant, have bad home-life balances, work shorter hours and take too many leaves, you can't blame the employers for hedging their bets. They never know, going into a job interview, whether the woman they're looking at will turn out to be a work dynamo or a "fertile Myrtle" in a year or two. With the male candidates, they have a much higher chance of getting a worker that will not be leaving soon. But there are never any guarantees, of course.

Now, I'm not saying women are wrong for working less. I don't say they're wrong for having children. I don't even make them out to be wrong if they have an uneven balance of domestic duties. That's their life choice. It might even be a good one: Lord knows many men work far too much, and don't give enough psychological energy to the family. I believe that.

But I do say that if women are complaining about the work world, they cannot use their domestic decisions as a reason.

We have a choice to either live in a society that oppresses women by allowing discrimination on the basis of gender or sex (which is already illegal in much of the Western world, though as I have said this is only de jure), or to live in a society where women are able to have good careers because they aren't discriminated against unfairly based on a perception of what they "might" do, even if (for a time) they are "more likely" to do it.

They will be less likely to do it if efforts are made by the society to weed out the implicit biases: women with more awareness will have a more balanced home life, for instance. The problem takes care of itself. (Or, if not, the problem enters a negative feedback loop and just gets worse. Fewer women in the workplace -> increased biases against women -> fewer women with home/work balance -> fewer women in the workplace).

I like to think that society can step up to the plate and do what needs to be done to break the negative feedback cycle. Ostensibly society already tries when it made discrimination on the basis of sex de jure illegal, after all: the idea was already there.

This goes back to toxic masculinity:

Ugh. What a prejudiced phrase.

Masculinity is not "toxic." Some forms of behaviour performed by some men are bad. Just like some women are bad. They're differently bad, maybe; but they're both bad.

Much that is masculine is very good. It's different from the feminine, but it's a good thing it is. Women don't like feminine men.

It's not a prejudiced phrase (though I notice: you have detected what you feel is an apparent injustice. Aren't men supposed to be silent and manly/stoic when confronted by this? I'm of course just teasing you again, but does it make you wonder whether that's really true?)

Indeed, masculinity is not toxic.



As the meme notes, not all masculinity is toxic. Not even most masculinity is toxic. We've spoken elsewhere about how there is toxic femininity as well, and I wouldn't be arguing femininity is toxic either, being a mostly feminine person myself.

I have a plethora of friends that are men. Some of them are gay, some of them are more feminine (and those two don't always overlap, and that's OK! My male friends that aren't super macho or have more feminine traits still identify as men, and they are fine, wonderful men!), but most of them are masculine or very masculine. All of them, though, do not exhibit toxic masculinity. Their masculinity isn't any kind of problem.

Perhaps. But again, what's the solution? To make women more angry?

Well, now that you say it out loud. Maybe women should be a lot more pissed about this.