This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think I specified male engineers. (And in all fairness, many of the older ones I interact with IRL are great people; it's mostly the remarks one sees from nerd-id'd young and middle-aged men on sites like this that have recently made me feel very sorry for the young women trying to work in those spaces.)
However, we weren't discussing whether current male engineers should feel bad about their character, their social skills or their workplace culture. I was questioning your reasoning above that because somewhat fewer women than men currently choose to enter engineering as a profession (an observation consistent with a wide variety of underlying causes, including that talented women have more options or that the current cohort of men in the field is unpleasant to interact with), therefore we can conclude (a) engineering is inherently, as you term it, a "men's role", (b) that biological females can't do engineering, and an all-female society would have inadequate personnel to complete its necessary engineering tasks. (That's setting aside the broader claim you were trying to support, which was, if I read it correctly, that since engineers are also so incredibly valuable, the current gender balance of engineering partly justifies the existence of patriarchal social norms.) Could you say more about the reasoning that you feel justifies (a) and (b), if I'm getting those correct?
You specified "plumbing and engineering". Engineering, enough women could do if push came to shove -- most engineering fields in the US are 20-30% women last time I looked, but that's not so overwhelming. It's easily enough to suggest that there's something masculine about engineering, though.
Plumbing, no. 3.5% of plumbers are female. That's overwhelming. Without some sort of artificial bar keeping women out (which there does not appear to be), there's something very strongly masculine about the job itself.
No, but you clearly want to push that idea. You pushed it in the very message I'm quoting here. It's nonsense on stilts, unless you believe that male engineers are somehow the worst -- worse than male doctors, worse than male lawyers, worse than the mad men of Madison Avenue. It's not worth entertaining without extraordinary non-circular evidence.
The problem is the odd presumption that the only possible reasons for not performing an activity must be (a) artificial bar, or (b) innate incapacity. But again, a glance at virtually any other big group difference highlights how silly that is.
For instance, you haven't responded to the point about >3:1 F:M ratios in pediatrics or SLP; can I take it that you agree men are inherently incapable of delivering language therapy?
The US produces only 1/10 the steel that China does; presumably that's because metallurgy is a strongly Asian pursuit, and without their help we would have to build most of our skyscrapers out of mud?
Only 15% of bartenders are people with a college degree. So it seems, given that no law prohibits B.A.s from taking bartending positions, that something about college must erode one's ability to create mixed drinks? Populate a luxury space station with a bunch of Ivy League grads, and they'll all be flailing around smashing the vodka bottles and trying to drink from the soda sprayer.
Re: engineers, like I said, I know some lovely older engineers, so I don't want to rag on the profession too much. I can speculate that low-EQ professions would be canaries in the coalmine for for any kind of emerging populationwide issues with male socialization, though, much more than e.g. medicine or law, where men go through more of a filter for social competence; and some of the truly hair-raising comments by self-professed engineers on themotte and elsewhere make me worry that this is happening. But the gender disparity could equally well be explainable by engineering being a profession with only middling salary and declining prestige, limited flexibility and autonomy, and low levels of evident connection to the values that women are currently socialized to care about (like "contributing to the community" and "helping the less fortunate").
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link