Bloke writes careful, competent, book about the real differences between men and women.
To be clear, when Stewart-Williams argues that there are innate differences between men and women, he is quick to add that this doesn’t imply that one sex is better than the other, that we have a moral imperative to uphold or enforce sex differences, or that they are completely fixed. What he does believe is that if you give people freedom to choose their jobs and lifestyle, men and women tend to gravitate in different directions. Men tend to prefer working with things, women with people, for instance. Men are more motivated by status, women by relationships. Various studies add weight to Stewart-Williams’s claim by finding that many sex differences – from occupational preference to personality traits – are more pronounced in more gender-equal countries.
Very grudging, the Lassie is.
So, she’s got to find something to disagree with:
Stewart-Williams believes an underacknowledged contributor to women’s under-representation in Stem, or in leadership roles more generally, is innate differences in professional ambition and interests. Which I suppose is a more convenient response to the problem of unequal representation than trying to understand how offices, research institutions and leadership roles would be structured if women hadn’t been excluded for much of human history. (I note for example that men’s apparently weaker verbal abilities haven’t held them back in literature.) It’s important to understand the role that nature plays in making us who we are and shaping relations between the sexes – but it’s a small part of a big, complicated story.
Phew! She manages to find something to disagree with!
Note the “it’s a small part”.
No attempt to justify that weighting, no inclination to even attempt to-just a complacent statement that “this is so”.
Attack people’s presuppositions and they get antsy.
I don’t read Literature. It’s a bit short on sex, violence, narrative clarity, intrigue, …. entertainment. Also, unlike women, I don’t claim to have been held back by the working class origins of my distant ancestors. Likewise, I feel no guilt for their (improbable) involvement in slavery.
Jane Austen would constantly gloat over the numbers of slaves that she owned and would go on secret holidays to the Barbadoes for three months of Slave Beating, or as she put it “learning how to quadrille”.
You have to look out for these hidden meanings.
Well it sounds rather milquetoast to me but if it were an accurate summary of the impact radical feminism has had on society as a whole then it would never get published. Feminists like the author
Frankly I would turn over to ISIS so they can find real sexism to complain about.
“… men’s apparently weaker verbal abilities haven’t held them back in literature.”
What have verbal abilities got to do with the written word?
This is what Google AI had to say about female vs. male authors
“The Gender Shift:
Women now make up a vast majority of the writing industry (roughly 69%). In the 1970s, male authors published three times as many books as women, but by 2020, women surged ahead and authored more than 50% of new books.
Sales Volume:
On average, the books published by female writers sell more copies and generate higher revenues than those written by men.
Readership:
Men tend to read significantly fewer books written by women, while women read across both genders.“
Publishing is full of women and almost exclusively the most stupid and vapid ones.
Publishing today doesn’t mean what it did in the 1970s. Any dumbass can get a book published thru Amazon. Today, effectively, publishing is meaningless.
The ease of self-publishing does mean a lot of dross is out there, but it also means that the gatekeepers are no longer gatekeeping. On balance, that’s not a bad thing. I’ll live with the former for the benefits of the latter.
She did say “verbal” not “oral”. So it’s one-nil to the daft bat.
There are no significant differences in “verbal ability” between the sexes, though women do talk slightly more than men and score marginally better on recalling words (ie fluency) than men. Girls read and talk earlier than boys, but boys soon catch up.
yes… and once the women start, they keep on yapping……
…and talking over each other…
As my other half told me:
“This report says that while women speak on average seven thousand words a day, men only speak two.”
“Yes, dear.”
I note no feminists ever try to explain why there are virtually no male primary school teachers or nursery nurses by using the ‘systematic discrimination’ argument.
Look,, when a job is mainly done by women it’s cos they are better than men. If it’s mainly men, it’s cos women are shut out by the patriarchy.
There are exceptions: binmen, factory workers, etc. Basically anything that is physically hard and that wellpaid. And if better paid than “equivalent” female work then salaries should be equalized (see Birmingham)
how offices, research institutions and leadership roles would be structured if women hadn’t been excluded for much of human history.
Offices & research institutions go back how far in history? It’s a reprise of john77 talking about discrimination against women in universities. So feckin what? It’s a middle class obsession with status, not shared across the whole of society. And obsessing about it extremely middle class.
Get over yourself, woman! Get a life.
This notion that STEM is meant to be representative irks. The Ramblers, the political parties, many others moan that the young are under-represented for example. The referees have black and asian under-representation. They’re not meant to be representative organisations for crying out loud, they’re meant to be for people who are interested in rambling, or engineering or refereeing.
STEM subjects are hard. At an IQ of 120, men outnumber women 3:1; at an IQ of 170, men outnumber women by 35:1. So, unsurprisingly, women are under-represented in STEMs. More women than men have IQs in the 95-105 range; and men outnumber women 2:1 in the 50-90 IQ range…
Hence the demands to rename it STEAM and include the Arts, so the numbers will fit the ideology.
Interesting. I hadn’t heard of STEAM.
So: what is excluded from “STEAM”?
Football?
Humanities, one hopes.
When I was at school Humanities was part of the “Arts” side.
When people make the “arts vs science” distinction, it’s common to put the humanities under the arts. But arguably it should be vice versa. And some academic institutions view them as separate and have eg a faculty of “arts and humanities”.
Traditionally humanities was basically the classics and languages, as opposed to “divinity” for the study of religion. These days humanities is generally defined to include all studies of human thought, culture, society, creativity etc that lie outside the sphere of “social sciences” (economics, sociology etc). So includes stuff like the study of religion, literature, history, philosophy. With visual arts and performing arts often getting lumped in with that – which makes sense since “linguistic arts” like poetry and creative writing are there too.
Obviously many of the divisions are arbitrary, and some of the subjects too (where can you really put “geography” – different fields of it fall under humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences).
Good post:THanks
Men, on average, tend to be more interested in maths and so on average understand the meaning of concepts like averages and distribution curves.
That would be a consequence of them being *less scared* of maths
… men and women tend to gravitate in different directions. Men tend to prefer working with things, women with people …
This is true to a standard deviation. For a man to as interested in other people as the average woman is, he has to be more attracted to other people than 85% of other men. Likewise for women being interested in things rather than people.
… if you give people freedom to choose their jobs and lifestyle, men and women tend to gravitate in different directions.
Again, true. It’s been government policy in Sweden for decades to remove all social barriers that might prevent citizens from becoming whatever they want to be. And the result, men and women chose careers in the usual male/female professions.
Which I suppose is a more convenient response to the problem of unequal representation than trying to understand how offices, research institutions and leadership roles would be structured if women hadn’t been excluded for much of human history. (I note for example that men’s apparently weaker verbal abilities haven’t held them back in literature.)
But we now understand how things are structured under “equal representation”. It hasn’t improved anything. Women have stopped having babies, but they haven’t stopped the endless complaining. Feminism hasn’t made them observably happier, but it is an ongoing danger to human survival as a species.
We were told by another woman yesterday why women produce very little first rate writing: it’s because so many girlies write carefully manicured paragraphs for themselves, as if in a diary. That’s boring and solipsistic. Little boys prefer to tell you stories about spaceships, wizards and dinosaurs for your entertainment. That’s how we got Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.
Combined with the flatter masculine Bell Curve, and you get more Tolkiens and Shakespeares than you will Austens. Because male genius is like the monkey born from a stone egg seeped in rare moistures – irrepressible! The appropriate feminine response to this should be, not feminism, but gratitude.
I wonder why she equate STEM (*not* Stem) subjects with leadership in general: because it suits her argument regardless of reality. Churchill (OK, a masculine leader) said “the expert should be on tap, not on top”. Being good at maths and science does not, of itself, qualify one to be a leader (I should know).
For most of history women were not excluded from leadership roles because they were women but because they weren’t good enough at fighting (and because they didn’t fancy being wounded, crippled or killed – the normal fate of heroes). The handful of “shield-maidens” are evidence that women could join the fight – *if they wanted to*.
Nature plays a very big part in what we are capable of doing (ask any basketball player), the environment merely helps us to achieve our potential or prevents us doing so: it cannot make a blind man see, a cripple break a high-jump record. or turn someone with an IQ of 90 into a genius.
The modern style is for initialisms like ECHR to be capitalised, while acronyms (which can be pronounced – Nato, Stem) aren’t. I don’t like it, because while Nato is unambiguous, if the acronym forms a real word it’s not immediately clear whether I’m referring to a group of academic subjects or part of a plant. My spellchecker prefers NATO 🙂
Non-capitalising of acronyms that can be pronounced while capitalising those that cannot is perverse. It’s equivalent to writing Polish as polish. A sensible practice would be to capitalise STEM subjects while Echr is not going to be confused with a real word.
A really consistent rule would be to capitalise where the words themselves are proper nouns, because the expanded acronym would properly be exactly that, with the proper nouns having capital first letters.
Except most languages write Polish as polish. Capitalising languages & nationalities is a perverse english thing..
German capitalises every noun.
It’s nor perverse, a proper noun should be capitalised. (john77 is not a name, it is merely an internet identifier)
What does ‘unequal representation’ mean? Why is it a ‘problem?’
Personality disorder: lack of ‘representation’ is somebody else’s fault. ‘Excluded’ . . . not “chose not to.” ‘Leadership roles would be structured’ how? No responsibilities? She thinks they would be structured differently. Betterly? Freedom to pick what you want to do is bad if it results in ‘unequal representation.’
Ms McBain’s ignorance is inexcusable. Yakking about things that are easily researched. First rule of lying: Don’t say things that can be easily checked.
Kuhn, Wolter 2022
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268122003201
This isn’t new. Su, Rounds. 2009:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Things_Women_and_People_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Sex_Differences_in_Interests
Journalist who can just about grasp the concept of average is flummoxed by the concept of distribution. More at ten.