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An article was recently published which found that the reason women aren't as represented in leadership roles as much as men are is that they simply do not aspire to leadership roles as much. I cannot describe how annoyed I am at this. Over the past, say, 10 years, the notion that sexism is infused into corporate structures has dominated and been a key battle cry, and it was said that evidence for this was clear using an equity lens (that, simply put, women are proportionately less present in leadership roles which necessarily means that the structure is sexist). How the fuck did no one think to ask 'could it be that women simply do not aspire to leadership roles?' This strikes me as a real face palm moment for feminists. At the outset, it's a valid criticism that the research just hadn't been done prior. But
A. it's a widely known and uncontested fact that testosterone promotes status seeking behaviors. Why was that not the null hypothesis?? I'm not an academic researcher, but I question the intellectual integrity of anyone performing research in this area that failed to extrapolate out such a basic and widely known fact, even at a superficial level.
B. Given that women are, naturally, the most ardent students/researchers in academic studies, how the fuck did none of them, when thinking about the reason there are less women in leadership positions, think to observe the basic fact that they themselves do not aspire to a leadership position??
I think this really highlights the inadequacy of identity lenses and equity as an analytical tool, as they systematically and by design fail to consider endogenous factors. This is a perfect example of why causal forces cannot be easily inferred based on inequitable outcomes. Reverse causation is a serious and, at least conceptually, easily avoidable flaw. This really highlights the risk of low quality research for bodies of thought driven by identity and ideology.
I hate to have this ranty tone, but this is quite literally someone railing against the system for years and years claiming it is corrupt because it will not give them something, while failing to disclose that those people actually don't really want that thing.
James Damore made a similar argument about why women aren't well-represented in technical roles. He was making the point in part because he agreed that women ought to be better represented and that to get there would require different strategies if interest was the problem and not bias. He was hung out to dry.
You can't even be on their side and have ideologically incorrect data.
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In general, empirical psych / social science is not something you can just read a bloomberg article about a meta-analysis and conclude it's accurate. A meta-analysis concluding priming worked or growth mindset worked would've had similarly positive articles written about them ten years ago.
In this case, it's accurate in a sense - although less that 'women aspire to leadership roles less', as women, moreso although like men, aspire to whatever other people think they should aspire to - so if you polled people who are raised to say 'im a woman women can do leadership yay' they might just answer leadership on the poll at the same rate as men (i dont think they do but its possible). But men are generally going to put much more effort and independent effort into anything in general, are more interested in leading / being on top, etc, be more aggressive in getting it, etc.
"status" is not a useful way to approach this, way too general. Women also seek status, status might just ... mean something different than men seeking status. maybe a high status man is shaman or strong warrior, a high status woman is ... desired by many men, the wife of high status man, idk.
well, they did! They were actually quite mad about not having leadership positions, oppression, etc. This doesn't mean the same thing as 'directly and aggressively pursuing it', though. Not that their claims make any sense, but they did think that at least a bit.
A. the research found that women desired leadership roles more in high school and less after college, once they faced the actual prospect of being in leadership positions.
B. it seems like you could apply this 'you only think or desire that because you've been conditioned to' argument to whatever you want endlessly and, by virtue of its nebulous and speculative nature, never have to provide evidence to back it up. At some point evidence that someone genuinely does not desire something has to be enough; who is to decide what someone should and shouldn't desire.
I think it was defined appropriately and to a sufficient specification in the article I linked to. "Testosterone is associated with status-seeking behaviors such as competition, which may depend on whether one wins or loses status, but also on the stability of one's status." I think you have a point, but not to the extent that status seeking is defined as desiring a higher position within a hierarchy.
... well it's literally something that happens. Why do so many kids say they want to be astronauts? Also I didn't say "conditioned", which means what, skinner boxes, positive reinforcement, I said 'what other people think they should aspire to', and also what the most popular / best people do.
and I agree that's happened for women and leadership positions or independent aggressive agency, you can tell just by interacting with one woman for like an hour. Just arguing that social science methodology and the way in which people pursue things is complicated.
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If we accept as fact that most women say they don't want to be leaders, then the argument from (the left? SJW? feminists?) will be that this is internalized misogyny, that our culture and the way we raise girls is what causes them to not want to be leaders. If we raised girls (and boys) in a gender neutral/fluid environment, removing their parents' biases as much as possible, then the world would swell with women leaders!
You can probably find research showing that most women want to stay at home, raise kids (maybe), and not work. But I have a feeling that the response from the left wouldn't be 'ok', it'd be "this is the result of the patriarchy."
You can pretty easily find research that's significantly further on that side of the spectrum than the opposite. I don't know that you can find research indicating most women want full on 50's housewife gender roles.
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To go along with the others that say this is not new and this is not a mistake, I recently learned that back in 2002 the National Organization for Women -- one of the top feminist organizations -- actually pressured city bus networks to drop ads that educated women about risks to ferility:
Meanwhile we have a generation of women who are woefully under-informed about how early fertility drops-off and how limited the power of science is to actually extend this. Even women doctors are grossly ignorant of this, often resulting in terrible heartbreak as IVF treatments fail.
That NOW and feminists in general are actively trying to downplay the risks of infertility due to age says everything about whether they really are working for what is best for women.
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You're applying mistake theory reasoning to a position mostly held by conflict theorists. I'm not aware of a paper previously addressing this exact issue, but there have been several over the years that looked at adjacent "problems," such as women being underrepresented in computer science, and that came to similar conclusions — it's mostly lack of interest, not sexism.
In that case, explanations have been developed even further, such as by illustrating the lack of interest is largely mediated by differences along the "people/things" axis, that women tend to be more people-oriented and men tend to be more thing-oriented cross-culturally, and that differences in career choice are actually larger in more gender-egalitarian societies (probably because those societies also tend to be richer and thus career decisions are driven more by interest than income considerations).
Activists using the lack of women in computing to argue for industry sexism don't care. They continue to make their case as if none of these findings exist. When these findings are mentioned, the usual response is to call whoever points them out sexist, usually while straw-manning even the most careful claims about interest as claims about inferiority. If the discussion is taking place in a venue where that isn't enough to shut down debate, and the activists feel compelled to offer object-level argument, they'll insist that the lack of interest (which some data suggests starts at least as early as middle school) must itself somehow be downstream from industry sexism.
You'll see exactly the same thing happen here. Activists demanding more women in leadership positions will not update on these findings. Most will never hear of them, because they certainly won't circulate in activist communities. When these findings are presented, their primary response will be to throw around accusations of sexism. If they engage at the object level at all, it will be to assert that these findings merely prove pervasive sexism in society is conditioning women to be less interested in leadership.
Charitably, activists in these areas see 'equity' (i.e. equality of outcomes between groups of concern) as a valuable end in itself. Less charitably, they're simply trying to advantage themselves or their favored identity groups over others. Either way, they're not trying to build an accurate model of reality and then use that model to optimize for some general goal like human happiness or economic growth. So findings like this simply don't matter to them.
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Other comments have already pointed out the gotcha whereby sexism is also said to be a societal cause that shapes a woman's desires. In this way, a society where everyone is happy can still be sexist!
This is a little odd, but not too odd because otherwise you would be also able to justify American chattel slavery. It's been said that emancipated blacks were unhappier on average etc.
Now, there are some things about being a slave that are, irrespective of being happy, potentially unhealthy. For example, it might be the case that slaves were malnourished or abused. Even if they were happy, keeping someone down and making them happy about it is generally considered bad.
I think feminists are making a similar argument. They don't care if (on average) women are happy being homemakers instead of programmers and CEOs. The feminist believes it is harmful, likely because programmers and CEOs are paid more and so are more financially independent.
I kind of see this angle, because I for one feel fortunate that I enjoy programming, and am good at programming, and I can make a buck while I'm at it. It's one of the few ways I feel like I'm meant for this world, and i suppose it is a little unfortunate (for them) that the median person does not desire this. I suppose women are disproportionately affected by this.
A lot of people don't like beats or brussel sprouts. (I hope I can form a consensus about this!) These people speak as if those foods are gross and icky and wouldn't even want to like them. But I would say, it is probably better to like them. It is inconvenient to be picky. Let us decouple our thoughts on brussel sprouts from our thoughts on liking them.
Feminism is kind of condescending in that it tells women what they should and should not want. Else, it must defend that the lot of a western woman is like that of a slave. The latter appears to be the more common strategy.
Can you elaborate on that?
Feminism as you describe it purports to represent women's interests, but instead of shaping its actions around what women want, they shape what women want around the actions they would like to take.
I would agree that regardless of whether women actually want to be in leadership roles, there should not be structural bias against it. However, the point here is that feminists claim the gender disparity at management levels is evidence that structural bias exists, which is clearly not the case.
You appear to use "structural bias" as a negative term here, and "actually want" as a neutral term, as if peoples preferences are just the way the world is. (What if preferences are malleable to social engineering?)
Firstly, there are many feminists and they claim different things, so we need to be specific. Secondly, as other comments have alluded to, the structural bias here causes female preferences.
It is common for a feminist to make the above empirical claim about gender disparity, and use "structural bias" in the same way you do. When evidence to the contrary is presented, the feminist interlocutor either ends the conversation, changes the topic, or falls back on a subtly different meaning of "structural bias." I suppose charitably he used this other meaning of "structural bias" the entire time, but I will explain the complications of assuming that charity.
The fallback meaning of "structural bias" require us to read the feminist claim as being tautological, not empirical. "Structural bias" is simply anything socially-constructed which makes men and women different. "Bias" should be read here like statistical bias not "human bias." Since women have a tendency to not be leaders, this is tautological evidence for some systemic bias. I will also explain the complications of the term "socially-constructed."
I originally had a monologue on preferences and meta-preferences, but to keep it shorter: feminism's true preferences are not merely "women are happy" or "women face no discrimination." Feminism's true preference appears to be: "women are not different from men." Since the first two are an easier sell to the public, those are what we hear the most about, but I think those are only stated reasons, not the true reasons. The problem with assuming that feminists always use "structural bias" in the tautological sense is that the layman thinks it means discrimination anyways (Standard motte-and-bailey)
The problem with socially-constructed things is that it is just a synonym for "things." My inflammatory claim that feminism aims to erase all distinction between man and woman seems like it would fly in the face of biology, but we mutate biology all the time. To demonstrate, I will make an even more inflammatory prediction: if artificial wombs become feasible, I would expect feminists to agitate for one or both of these:
men to receive artificial wombs to equally bear the cost of bearing children
an end to all traditional conception
In both of these cases, I would expect feminism to use social engineering to align peoples preferences with this outcome. According to this model, feminism is in the business of world-outcomes, not making people happy. There is another model I alluded to in my original reply that describes feminism as harm-reduction, but that model wasn't as relevant to the quoted text.
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Here's somebody in 2017 proposing this as one probably-significant factor:
That's a quote from James Damore, who got fired for saying it. The fact that he had proposed alternate hypotheses became a huge culture-war scandal, and almost all the news coverage from "respectable" mainstream journalism just straight-up lied about what he said in order to make him sound like a cartoonish caricature ultra-sexist.
When someone is very publicly made an example of, this tends to discourage others.
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It is not a valid criticism that the research hasn't been done prior, since there has repeatedly been research into women and leadership roles which has found little to no evidence of bias against women. This is in politics, not management roles, but it's very similar in focus.
The authors of the book "Sex as a Political Variable" compared the success rates of the men and women who were candidates in general elections for state legislatures in 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, and 1994 and for the U.S. House, U.S. Senate and governor from 1972 to 1994. They find that "Women's success rates were extremely similar to men's over all the years covered in this study".
The book notes on page 85 that "Our research clearly shows that women do as well as men in general elections. It also shows that the reason there aren't more women in public office is that not many women have run. Women have made up a very small percentage of candidates in general elections, particularly at higher levels of office."
https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Sex_as_a_Political_Variable/QmDYbi49p_AC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
And no, it's not a face palm moment for feminists at all, since their refusal to accept female choice as an explanation is entirely wilful and informed by their ideology. My experience is that no matter how much you bring up these types of evidence to them, they repeatedly try to explain away these findings asserting that discrimination exists at other levels.
One of the arguments that I see levelled a lot is that female candidates are often treated worse than male candidates in the press and by the electorate, and the claim is that this differential treatment makes running for office more complex and complicated for women than men, even if it does not ultimately preclude their electoral success. However:
"Our examination of media coverage and voters’ evaluations of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives reveals no systematic gender differences. The detailed content analysis of newspaper coverage during the 2010 midterms found not only that news outlets devoted a comparable number of stories to men and women running for office, but also that those articles looked the same. Male and female candidates were equally likely to receive mentions of their gender and they were associated with the same traits and issues. Our analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Study data indicates that voters were just as unlikely as journalists to assess candidates in traditionally gendered terms. Instead, partisanship, ideology, incumbency, and news coverage—long identified as important forces in congressional elections—shaped voters’ evaluations. Candidate sex did not. These conclusions emerged from a study of unusual depth and scope, encompassing media and survey data from nearly 350 House districts involving more than 100 female and 500 male candidates."
The authors of the study claim that these results conflict with much of the existing literature, but in fact there is a fairly large body of research which has been largely ignored that is in line with the findings of this study.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/nongendered-lens-media-voters-and-female-candidates-in-contemporary-congressional-elections/C4867845111ABCBA0921E4E0B933914F
Full text: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1017/S1537592714003156
Another claim which gets made repeatedly is that women are not encouraged enough into political office and that this is the reason why they run less. Of course, this is an argument that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Is men being more encouraged to run for political office causing men to be more interested in running than women? Or is men demonstrating a greater interest in running causing them to be encouraged to do it more? I think the latter is more likely - people typically don't encourage others to pursue a certain career if they don't seem cut out for the role or express disinterest in running in the first place.
The assumptions regarding the direction of the causation seem to be based on absolutely nothing, and the more you delve into the topic and refute their claims about discrimination against women, the more they appeal to a Patriarchy Of The Gaps: regardless of how much evidence there is of the gap being caused by female choices, there is still something lurking in the social fabric causing oppression.
The fact that feminists have neglected female-choice explanations for the disparity is no accident at all, it is ideologically-driven. They're invested in a narrative of female oppression, and contradictory results that suggest oppression is nowhere to be found don't matter to them.
Female hypoagency at its finest. And that is not intended as a smear against women, only that it appears that our society often fails to assign agency to women whereas men are seen as hyperagentic.
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The problem is not that ideologues are ideological, the problem is that ideologues are being relied upon as experts and primary sources, and their expertise is being used to alter institutions at a structural level.
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If you follow the links in your link, the article is here. It is behind a paywall, but note that the abstract does NOT say that bias is not a major contributor to discrepancies in leadership roles, and it does NOT say that differences in preferences is a larger contributor than bias. All it says is that differences in preferences contribute in some degree to the differences in leadership roles. Indeed, the finding, as stated in the abstract, is quite modest: "there is a small but significant gender difference in the predicted direction."
So, unless the body of the article says something more, it might be a bit premature to get that upset.
How dare you actually read the
paperabstract instead of participating in the circle jerk? Hilarious that the one comment actually superficially discussing the content of the paper gets fewer upvotes than a half-dozen substanceless posts.We need to do better.
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Fair point. It does need to be noted that the authors found a 'small but significant difference'. The article said the influence of preference was 'Hedge's g = 0.22' and I don't know what that means. I'm not saying that bias is irrelevant, but it should not be the null hypothesis. The influence of status seeking behavior is natural and obvious enough that it should have been explored before bias was considered. The research should have started with this assumption; it should not be a surprise that is only revealed right now, which to me suggests that the researchers in this area are to some extent not starting from a point of indifference.
I don't want to risk overstating the role preference has here, but I don't know how to regard the phrase 'small but significant difference' and I don't know what Hedge's G is. But reading the Bloomberg article and how the author of the study commented on this, it seems that the influence of preference is prominent enough to necessitate a shift in thought.
The ultimate point here is that equity lenses lack the explanatory power they are alleged to have.
"Small but significant" usually means statistically significant, rather than practically significant.
Re Hedge's g, this says that a rule of thumb is "Small effect (cannot be discerned by the naked eye) = 0.2," so 0.22 sounds pretty small.
However, I obviously agree that the study implies that previous studies which did not control for preferences must have overstated the effect of bias somewhat. But that seems to me to be a much more modest claim than what was made originally.
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So... Bias is supposed to be the null hypothesis for some reason?
? The OP's entire point is that the article supposedly disproves the bias argument.
His argument is that the people pushing for the bias hypothesis, didn't bother to check if it was something else. Your argument seems to be that they could still be right, because it wasn't positively proven that bias has absolutely no impact.
Not that it wasn't positively proven, but rather that it was not addressed by the study, one way or the other, at least based on the abstract. The study certainly implies that previous estimates of the effect of sexism are overstated, but there is no way to determine how much, based on the abstract.
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It must be the null hypothesis if they hope to get through peer review.
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The purpose of academic feminism is to advance the position of women as defined by leftists elites. As feminists might say, you are implicitly accepting a highly male autistic notion of truth that you think can exist outside of existing power dynamics, and even if we grant that everything you say is "true" this truth is an information hazard (feminists wouldn't use this exact term) whose promoting will do far more harm than good. From my own viewpoint, while yes the last sentence makes feminism look bad to rationalists, the feminists are acting as normal humans do in avoiding promoting beliefs that help their near enemies and cut against their cherished beliefs.
I agree that that is the case, but it's problematic given that academic feminsts are ostensibly the experts on this. Whether they should or should not be relied upon as authorities, they are. and the entire field being set up to prove ideological points, and I do believe that is the case, is problematic because it necessarily indicates that they are designed to provide one side of things, even though they are regarded as having a descriptive focus which seeks to just explain things as they are. This is further problematic because who in academia is providing the counterpoint? how are we supposed to get the whole picture.
It's things like this that provide strength to conservative accusations that academia is biased to the left to the point that it cannot be entirely trusted, which lends itself pretty easily to the distrust of all institutions that characterizes the right. It's problematic that the people we rely on to explain certain parts of existence to us get into their field in the first place because they have adopted a stance, and spend their entire career trying to prove it.
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Relax, it's also sexism if they don't want to. First time?
Women don’t have agency, as can be seen in the article itself. These women don’t make decisions, they are “plagued by midcareer derailing”, “have not been properly prepared”.
How is it sexism if they don't want it? Sexism means the reason they are not in these positions is that external forces prevent them from doing so. To allege that the inner wiring of their brain has been corrupted by malicious social forces is conspiratorial and ignores that to some extent it is going to be the natural consequence of women having less testosterone. More testosterone = more status seeking = more desire to rise up the organizational hierarchy. So if they lack testosterone, less representation in management is an obvious outcome.
Honestly I can't tell if your message is sarcastic or not.
I don't know about sexism, but a principal component of feminism is that society asserts gender norms that can affect, usually negatively, both women and men. Eg when my aunt went to law school 80 years ago, there were 3 women in her class. Now, women made up more than half of law students. Similarly, male nurses were almost unheard of years ago. Those changes were the result in part of changes in preferences, but those preferences were, and are, shaped in part by norms.
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No, not according to feminists. Ever heard of internalized sexism?
If you managed to prove that discrimination was non-existent or even favoured women in some cases, which has been done, they would retreat to this position. Even if men were absent or every single act of sexism was performed by women, feminist theory would still stand tall. Because it's an unfalsifiable castle in the air, floating above dozens of nested baileys.
As I alluded to, according to me and other critics, the deeper belief at the heart of feminism, is that women have no agency: they are either acted upon directly, or, if they act, someone else (men) made them act. Accordingly, all blame always devolves to men, no matter the circumstances. This tactic, of course , can prove the 'oppression' of any group one cares to name.
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This is not a theory no one ever thought about. It is very old news. It used to be phrased as "women do not ask for promotions" (which became "women do not ask for promotions and that is men's fault.")
Women not aspiring to higher positions is not a corollary of women not asking for promotions. Women not asking for promotions can easily be caused by the systemic forces that feminists allege.
The point is not that my observation isn't obvious, it's that the consensus which has been absorbed into our institutions and collective thought did not consider this as the default explanation.
Consider that our institutions and collective thought did consider this as the default explanation but discarded it as being incorrect. Now consider that not only is your observation obvious, it's evident, and then consider the credibility of our institutions and collective thought when it comes to determining true things.
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