Women's liberation has been one of the outstanding successes of the Judeo-Christian West. In a relatively brief historical moment, women became equal partners in society and all opportunities were opened to them. The removal of legal and conceptual barriers to full participation in society was a triumph that essentially doubled the amount of human intellect available to address our species problems. Unfortunately, removing legal barriers is not the same as dissolving all social inequalities, nor does the removal of legal barriers to opportunity ensure equality of outcome for people with different sets of abilities. This bitter piece of reality has caused endless anguish for those who need to deny that we are born and raised with disparate abilities and has caused endless mischief for our society under the ministrations of those who are deeply troubled by unequal outcomes.
Over three years ago I discussed the Lawrence Summers kerfuffle, in which he wondered aloud whether or not some of the disparity in male and female participation in the highest echelons of science reflected a relative lack of interest by women and "issues of intrinsic aptitude." I wondered about the level of outrage form the left:
... the point of the (Summer's) talk was to raise uncomfortable questions about whether or not inherent attributes of men and women were involved in the relative paucity of women in the sciences. This is not a terribly controversial point of view outside of Academia and such bastions of liberal thinking as the New York Times. Only people as bright and talented as Professors and Newspaper editors could convince themselves there are no innate differences between men and women. Since there is a growing body of data supporting the fact that men and women's brains are wired differently in some fundamental areas, it is hard to see how the question Summers raised could be so distressing.
I concluded that the belief in an absolute equality of abilities between men and women was a religious belief and offered a brief thought experiment:
In effect, the meme suggests that there are no inherent differences (Nature) between men and women and all differences in outcome can be attributed to social influences (Nurture). If you have any doubts that this is a religious belief rather than a fact based opinion, do the following thought experiment. Imagine yourself in a room full of Homosexual activists. Imagine yourself giving a talk in which you suggest that Homosexuality is the outcome of a complex interaction between a child's inherent constitutional make up (Nature), including the structure of his brain, and his emotional development in relation to his early childhood and parenting experiences (Nurture). The idea that Homosexuality is genetic (any time you read that something is "genetic" take it with a large grain of salt; as I once read, genes encode for proteins, not behavior) is a "given", scarcely more open to discussion than the idea that women and men are not equal.
I would suggest that a great many of the core beliefs of the Liberals and the Left are no longer supported by the data available to us in laboratories or in nature (history). Liberalism has become a religious philosophy.
Unfortunately the aftermath of the Summer's affair has been disastrous for reality and science. He lost his job, the Academy seems as bereft of sense as ever, a $50 million diversity center was established at Harvard, and their new President is a champion of "diversity."
It is a curious fact that the diversity police are worried about promulgating their nonsense theories (ie, that there is no particular difference between men and women) even while men and women are increasingly acting like they have been neutered in the West and females are becoming endangered species in much of the East. The one culture where this is conspicuously not so is also instructive.
Lubos Motl offered an interesting take on modern feminism and the sciences in his response to an attack on Richard Feynman, a true giant of 20th century science, by Sean Carroll.
Good science is a slightly macho subject
OK, why is science a macho subject? Could we think about a sentence that succintly summarizes the principle of the scientific method? Open this video and listen to Richard Feynman:
If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.
That simple statement is a key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful it is, how smart you are, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. ;-)
Think about this comment for a while. It sounds cruel, doesn't it? In fact, it is cruel. And it is essential, too. There's no room for compassion or for the promotion of the "enhanced diversity of ideas". Theories that can't agree with experience must be abandoned. It's their death. It doesn't matter whether the author of the theory is male or female, whether he or she had a difficult life, or whether he or she is going to cry. Science doesn't look at these things.
Once again, my experience shows that the girls and women who like science and who are capable of doing it fully appreciate these basic facts. At the same moment, it is important to notice that in the whole society, it is significantly harder for women to accept these principles.
Most female scientists surely realize very well that they significantly differ - and they have to differ - from the average women in many respects and that Sean is fundamentally wrong when he writes: "Providing equal encouragement to everyone entering into science … would make for better science." The female researchers appreciate the freedom of a modern society - including their freedom to join "mostly male" subjects - much like the other women usually appreciate the freedom from the equations (after a few annoying years with equations at school). :-)
The entire memo is worth reading in full.
It is tempting to seek a Psychoanalytic explanation for such beliefs that are so at odds with reality. While penis envy was long ago discredited as the universal and fundamental conflict of female development, it still has applicability on occasion.
A 28 year old woman came for therapy because of longstanding feelings of inferiority and intense sibling rivalry with her older, much more successful, bother. She had a petite mal seizure disorder from childhood and a history of unstable relationships and wild mood swings, though not significant enough to warrant a diagnosis of a Bipolar Disorder. She had unstable self and object representations, which tended to split under pressure. (In other words, she would idealize someone to extremes and then, once disappointed, devalue them thoroughly. Under pressure the person went from the perfect, all-good man/friend/parent/therapist to a worthless, often malevolent, all-bad man/friend/parent/therapist.)
During her therapy, themes around her envy of her bother, and indeed of all men (who were stronger than her, able to do things she couldn't do, and able to live independently without needing anyone) were constant. I tentatively suggested that she might have wished she had been born a boy and she readily agreed. Being a boy meant strength and freedom.
During her therapy the question of further neurological evaluation of her seizure disorder (which had been incorporated into her sense of herself as defective and deficient) arose and she pursued a work-up. Part of the evaluation was a CAT scan of her head, which discovered a benign, thumb shaped lesion sitting atop her temporal lobe. Her reaction to the news was instructive. She declared, "I knew it. I always believed I has a penis and there it is!"
She had spent her life actively denying her status as a devalued female, devalued by herself for lacking male genitalia. She created a compensatory fantasy of a hidden penis which secretly gave her the same power she imagined boys and men had. Giving up the fantasy and finding value in herself as a woman was difficult and she was ultimately only partially successful.
I am reminded of this woman whenever I hear people insist there is no difference between men and women. To believe such a thing requires believing in hidden penises and other fantasies which serve to ward off unacceptable realities. (Rarely do such feminists value a woman's procreative abilites, so unique to women and the source of much unconscious male womb-envy.)
Even while our Academic feminists spend their time and energy railing against the "sexist pigs" of the world who insist that women are underrepresented in science in part because they choose not to be in science and in part because at the highest strata there are less women with the exquisite combination of mental facilities required, real women in the real world are suffering from catastrophic epidemic massacres.
Mark Steyn, in his comments about Hillary being a victim of sexism, Sexism, not Obama, beat Hillary, notes the real damage being done to women (and potential women) in much of the world today:
Sex-selective abortion is a fact of life in India, where the gender ratio has declined to 1,000 boys to 900 girls nationally, and as low as 1,000 boys to 300 girls in some Punjabi cities. In China, the state-enforced "one child" policy has brought about the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun– "bare branches." If you can only have one kid, parents choose to abort girls and wait for a boy, to the point where in the first generation to grow to adulthood under this policy there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. In practice, a "woman's right to choose" turns out to mean the right to choose not to have any women.
And what of the Western world?
From 2000-05, Indian women in England and Wales gave birth to 114 boys for every 100 girls.
A similar pattern seems to be emerging among Chinese, Korean and Indian communities in America. "The sex of a firstborn child in these families conformed to the natural pattern of 1.05 boys to every girl, a pattern that continued for other children when the firstborn was a boy," wrote Colleen Carroll Campbell, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former Bush speechwriter, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the other day. "But if the firstborn child was a girl, the likelihood of a boy coming next was considerably higher than normal at 1.17-to-1. After two girls, the probability of a boy's birth rose to a decidedly unnatural 1.51-to-1."
It is fascinating that abortion, meant to liberate women from the tyranny of their gender, may be having the unintended consequence of differentially aborting more female than male infants. This is tragic on so many levels, not least that when societies have a large number of young men with little prospect of gaining status and access to young women (their lack of access being related to the actual lack of women), serious problems ensue.
Of further interest and concern, the cultures in which women are held to the lowest degree of freedom, where they are often considered nothing more than vessels for incubating babies and carrying honor, are doing quite well demographically.
It is hard not to connect the radical feminist tendency to deny reality by focusing on their minor inequalities in the West to the exclusion of the real inequalities in the Arab World (and the damage caused by abortion to global demographics), even while they ally themselves with the most misogynistic people on the planet, with some unmetabolized penis envy. Perhaps if they truly valued women more they wouldn't worry so much that few women want to become scientists.
For the record, my daughter just finished her second year of Medical School. She does quite well and the summer after her first year was offered a prestigious research fellowship. After a summer doing research, at the end of which she met her fiancee, she determined that she did not have the drive or dedication needed to do research. She was not consumed with the idea of pursuing a Nobel Prize and did not want a lifestyle in which an 80 hour weekly commitment to the lab was de riguer. She wants to work in a field she finds fascinating, work reasonable hours, and have a family and home life. She did not lack for encouragement to be a scientist but lacked the peculiar collection of mental faculties most conducive to such a pursuit. At the end, after spending a summer and part of the fall in a wonderful lab, she chose not to continue the research. She had the opportunity and chose not to take it, in part, because she prefers a future more usual for women in Medicine. She is a happy and well adjusted beneficiary of women's liberation, delighted in her choices, and happy to be an extraordinary young woman.
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