Let's assume this theory is the explanation for trends one is determined to reverse. The question is how.
But first consider a strategic problem. Let's say you have to invade an enemy, and its greatest strength is its airspace defense capability. If even a stealthy aircraft merely tries to get close it is sure to get immediately blown out of the sky. Air dominance is such a huge force multiplier that if you are to make any headway at all, you will have to take that capability out.
Looking over your various options, your preferred course of action is to send bombers to blow up the radars. But that's the trouble, you can't use bombers to take out the capability, because that's what that precise enemy capability is best at stopping. You are very reluctant to infiltrate many teams of special forces saboteurs behind enemy lines via ground approach, which is sure to get a lot of them captured or killed, but you don't have any better options and that's the hand you've been dealt. You can't win against an enemy by playing a game at which they have indisputable superiority.
Now, back to the post topic, it seems to me that any attempt to informally influence group norms and social status is ... well, exactly where the enemy is strongest and in which they consistently outclass their rivals and demonstrate indomitable superiority, even 'supremacy'.
One might as well pick a fist-fight with Mike Tyson in his prime.
That suggests that one is better off playing to one's own strengths in terms of imposing hard rules intended to put the lid back on Pandora's box.
I'm skeptical about tying these forms of conflict to gender. The Catholic Church (and other ones) had a good 1,000 years of hidden hostility, subversion and mob hostility and use of conflict under the guise of moral condemnation. It wasn't an especially female institution, and yet these conflicts often played out in ways that are rather explicitly being cast as "female".
This seems like an important point to me, because misidentifying the source seems likely to lead to failures in addressing the problems.
I’m coming late to comment on this post, but just to say I’m uncomfortable with the hypothesis being promoted here. I am typically a big fan of Arnold’s way of thinking, but not in this case. I think men are just as capable of bringing down established institutions through irrationality, scheming, and not playing by the rules. I prefer to see institutional decay as a result of the decline of religion, which in the west had been the primary social structure orienting society toward truth-seeking and pro-social, pro-rules norms. In religion’s place has grown a postmodern “power is the only thing” ethic that doesn’t care about rules and established norms, and Marxism (usually now in the form of critical theory) which is explicitly organized with the goal of tearing down institutions and dividing people. With this new subversive and activist worldview promulgated wholesale in school and university education, I don’t think the gender hypothesis is necessary to explain what is happening.
My wife is a curious hybrid. She chafes at rules. She has the most fun playing a game when she is blatantly violating the rules. She also chafes at rules promulgated by mostly female administrators at her job. On the other hand, she can’t stand the constant backbiting and subversion that some of her female colleagues fling at one another.
It's not unusual, but it does not contradict the generalizations either. There are many cases when people who create a dysfunctional culture among themselves prefer to escape it. It's one big reason for international migration, because countries whose people create a dysfunctional culture among themselves tend to be bad at rule of law, bad at the kind of impersonal trust that seems to be a prerequisite for entrepreneurship, and in consequence have a bad economy. Not infrequently such emigrants do well in more functional host cultures, where their bad tendencies are suppressed, provided their concentration is sufficiently low. In too high a concentration, immigrants recreate their dysfunctional culture in the new place and the cycle repeats again. The "black undertow" and ruin voting are also instances of this phenomenon. It should not therefore be surprising to find women, such as Mr. Brassey's wife, who detest the ophidiarium conditions of female-dominated workplaces despite themselves contributing to the breakdown of rules that suppress the backbiting, subversion etc. to tolerable levels. I should add that men tend to find such workplaces extremely disagreeable and leave if they have options. This evaporation exacerbates the problem - again completely analogously to emigration and brain drain. Unfortunately, while it is in the collective interest of men to defend their rule-based spaces from being overrun by women, it is often in the interest of particular men to put _their_ women first, not to mention the social pressure women can bring to bear on them, so any working arrangements are unstable (as noted by Handle below) and require constant maintenance. The tacit agreement to keep women in the workplace in strictly subordinate roles such as typists, secretaries etc., as well as marriage which forced most women's access to rule-based spaces to be mediated by their husbands, used to limit the extent of the damage to manageable levels for some time. This arrangement has broken down many decades ago, though.
See, this is my problem. "There are many cases when people who create a dysfunctional culture among themselves prefer to escape it. "
You (and Kling, and the writers he's commenting on) are making an unsubstantiated leap when you suggest women are responsible for dysfunctional cultures.
History is replete with examples of exclusively male or male dominated cultures that were dysfunctional in all the ways you assert are the result of women entering the workplace.
Again, my suggestion is to look deeper for systematic reasons for cultural change rather than to throw one's hands up and say the solution is to keep [women] (and you could insert any other group here blacks/whites/jews/catholics/chinese/etc) in their proper place.
I'm not sure why Benenson's book doesn't suffice for you as substantiation, but ok, then the question is, what would convince you? What kind of evidence would you accept that the presence of females in any sector tends to lead to these sorts of issues?
As for 'dysfunction', I would say that's a loaded term. Most cultures tend towards an equilibrium with strengths in some areas and trade-offs in others. If you are reducing everything to a measure of short-to-medium term market-based innovation, progress, growth, and so forth, then, sure, you can try to analyze any equilibrium in those terms. But there's more to life than that, for example, life itself: family and procreation. A lot of culture which are pretty bad at entrepreneurship and legal wealth creation and equal rights and so on tend to be better at fostering communal solidarity and tighter family relations with kin and clan, not to mention the whole baby-making thing, which, in the end, determines who owns the future.
But just like "personnel is policy", "people are culture".
And if you start with the premise that you are trying to create a system to best achieve a particular function in the most effective or optimal manner, then the universalist conceit is implausible in the extreme: that the set of solutions to such problems is invariant to the particular kind of people you throw into those institutions and the compatibility of their innate dispositions and personalities with the mechanisms and structures best tailored to accomplish those objectives.
Benenson's book doesn't suffice as substantiation because it's evidence that, on average, men and women have different survival and competition mechanisms, not that a workplace that lets in "too many women" is doomed to dysfunction, which seems to be dangerously close to the implication some are making from it.
It's operationally meaningless in the same way that knowing group IQ characteristics is operationally meaningless. Even if I believe Group A has a higher mean IQ than Group B, that doesn't mean all or even most members of Group B are unqualified for a job.
Likewise, even if I believe Group M and Group W tend toward different cultural strategies, I'm not fool enough to assume that particular individual I does.
That doesn't require one to be universalist... rather, it's a rejection of the kind of groupthink that underlies the identity-minded left. One can acknowledge group tendencies without being a slave to them.
Nobody says "doomed". It's (marked) tendencies, the existence of which you acknowledge yourself. It should also be obvious that suppressing or mitigating dysfunctional tendencies is work - it requires constant effort. Now the amount of effort a given society or company or whatever can bring into play is limited - it is a scarce resource - which inevitably means that the problem becomes one of trade-offs: which other ends, and to what extent, are you willing to sacrifice in pursuit of this particular one? It is also obvious that other things being equal, the larger the concentration of the element harboring dysfunctional tendencies, the larger the amount of effort and/or preexisting human/societal capital required to mitigate them, and therefore the more has to be sacrificed in the trade-off.
I don't assert "in all the ways". There are many ways to have a dysfunctional culture. Also I should have added that "dysfunctional" is a value judgment that I make from a particular point of view, without intending to impose it on other peoples - they are welcome to enjoy their cultures as long as I am allowed to defend mine. Chechen culture, for instance, is extremely male-dominated and is by all accounts very dysfunctional for running a modern civilization with, but it is dysfunctional in very different ways from a female-dominated workplace. Chechens do have strict rules that govern their feuds etc., they have a hierarchy of customary courts that publicly enforce these rules and make binding judgments, and they'd rather die on the spot than be passive-aggressive.
> my suggestion is to look deeper for systematic reasons for cultural change
By all means. I am not suggesting that what you say is _the solution_, because it obviously isn't - the arrangement I mentioned above broke down due to these reasons, after all (similarly, universal suffrage didn't happen because every citizen voted for it).
Nice post, Arnold. I couple things I would add, though:
1. I think there's an important factor that Heying doesn't really discuss, which is that in female hierarchies there seems to be (for whatever reason) a greater expectation of conformity and emphasis on group cohesion, and thus there is less room for disagreement and argumentation. IE, Dissent can only be aired in certain circumstances, and once the group has chosen a course of action, that's that; no more dissent is acceptable. Criticism of ideas is often mistaken for personal criticism or provoking a personal conflict. I do not know exactly why this is, exactly, but it's a problem in mixed sex groups.
2. As a guy, it is tempting to simply declare the stereotypically male way of doing things as better, given some of the problems you and HH describe with female competition modes. That said, the part about ultimate frisbee rings true to my ears, as it reminded me of some unpleasant memories of hockey teams I played on in my younger days where 3-4 guys decided (usually not incorrectly) that they were far and away our best players and therefore tried to avoid passing the puck to anyone not in that group; often times, it seemed to me, to the team's detriment. In fact, I'm getting irritated now just thinking about it, and this happened 10-15 years ago in intramural/rec leagues where there was precisely nothing at stake.
3. At least in my experience, I think men and women have kind of an innate or implicit recognition that they don't always play by the same rules. For example, when groups of women interact, there are times when it seems as though everyone is talking at once and no one is really listening at all. These same women don't seem to do this to men or in mixed company, as talking over someone is, in male ettiquette, a sign of disrespect, and this for whatever reason just isn't true in female social interaction. This makes me think that one way to smooth out some of this friction would just be to remind people that men and women often have different rules for how they relate to one another, and tailor their response accordingly. This happens all the time in other contexts. For example, in my industry we have widely varying expectations for different people, based on their experience level. Work assigned to a newer associate that I would expect to take, say, 4-6 hours might get a more experienced person reprimanded if they spent that much time on it.
A cancellable comment: if the best example of fruitful mixed gender institutions that Heying can come up with is Ultimate Frisbee, the co-ed empire is in big trouble. There should be at least one other better example to use for propaganda purposes. Here's a suggestion: if co-ed is to endure as an institution, they should integrate the military as quickly as possible and then declare serial wars against small, weak countries for no other reason than to produce inspiring propaganda. If this results in a big war with an unintegrated major power, the test will be if the co-ed empire wins. Perfunctory integration is not enough, because even the second Gulf War is not considered as an example of the victory of a gender integrated US military.
If that is too warlike, perhaps the next trillion dollar startup should be begun by a female founder with a perfectly representative racial and gender composition from the board on down to every division of the workforce. This should be easier to accomplish with the lax regulation on private securities markets. Just slosh the shares around at an inflated price, but at least then you have a solid proof of concept that is better than ultimate frisbee. Just make a Slack clone, but with a Benneton workforce, backed by tacit agreements to manipulate the share price upwards to make actual company performance irrelevant.
When I was in junior high and newly arrived in the school district, I was an extremely uncomfortable male who longed to know the unwritten rules. Were these unwritten rules paramount because the female students ruled? I doubt it.
It's a matter of domain. If you think back, you'll remember that the girls *did* rule in some areas, did they not? And where they ruled, the game was played in either in the female style with intrigue and low cunning, or according to female unwritten and vague 'rules', judgments, preferences, and rankings.
The key thing to keep in mind is that, as an immediate consequence of Goodhart's Law, some games cannot be played with written, explicit rules at all, because judges and choosers need a way to assess merit that cannot be easily 'gamed', which is the immediate consequence of explicit articulation, and what keeps the best tax lawyers and accountants in a perpetually lucrative business. Feargal O'Rourke's development of the Double Irish arrangement is one of the most consequential examples of this of all time.
Whatever criticisms one may have of the college admissions process and offices - and I would agree with you on most of them and more - one frustrating but also somewhat forgivable aspect of it is the purposeful evasion of explicitly announcing or articulating any hard and fast rules (even if, in truth, there are such rules, internally) and the obfuscation of the 'real' selection criteria. If you give people a well-defined target that is a proxy for what you are really looking for, they will just get into a rat race to allocate all possible efforts at grinding (and cheating) to maximize their score on the target, which isn't actually what you were looking for. Of course, people can also try to hold you accountable from deviating from your 'own rules', and you don't definitely don't want that, either! Flexibility and wiggle room and discretion are just different words for power, and thus also cover for abuse of power.
I actually have a draft essay somewhere where I flesh this out in detail, and I should try to find it and dust it off. The big picture is that we are stuck in a kind of tragedy of the human condition in which we cannot reach high levels of progress and civilization without being able to rely on the functions of certain social institutions which, by their very nature, are akin to games of this sort in the sense that their mechanisms rely on human actors making judgments on the basis of precisely these kinds of necessarily and unavoidably fuzzy and inarticulable 'rules'. The trouble is that it is these circumstances precisely which not only the easiest to corrupt (or 'pwn' if you will) with plausible deniability, but also the most damaging if they do get pwned. We can't do well without them, it's hard to secure them, and there is no good way to mitigate this issue with a comprehensive list of well-defined rules. At the end of the day there is no adequate substitute for the virtue and character of those human beings authorized to make judgment calls fairly, and any society and culture which fails to make the cultivation and encouragement of such qualities its top priority is inevitably doomed to sclerotic mediocrity at best.
As for areas in which the males rules, as an anthropological universal, when boys get together to play competitive games, there is naturally always lots of discussion and negotiation and refinement of 'the rules' which usually have all the characteristics of 'law' (in Lon Fuller's "The Morality of Law" sense). If there is disagreement about an arguable case, it is never about whether there should *be* a rule to cover it (i.e., that instead of a rule people should "just get it") but what the right rule would be, which of course would be explicit and communicated to all. Over time the set of rules tends to become detailed and comprehensive to maximize fairness and fun while minimizing uncertainly and, especially, the opportunity for abuse of judgment authority to play favorites. Whatever adaptive purposes such instincts served in prehistoric environments, by happy coincidence, they happen to be very useful for scaling up human cooperation in an identity-blind, universalist, rule-of-law based - dare I say 'proto-liberal'? - order. Keep in mind that if rules are applied equally and fairly, then equal justice under the King's laws - however 'authoritarian', is not all that different from equal justice under democratic law, or whatever source of law one thinks more legitimate.
But again, even in the boys-games world, there is no good way to avoid the need for good and fair referees or umpires.
"no adequate substitute for the virtue and character of those human beings authorized to make judgment calls... no good way to avoid the need for good and fair referees or umpires."
Yeah, and it helps if you have the means to (fairly) scrutinize the conduct of refs and umps, like exist in sports' instant replay Reviews.
As a counterpoint, Donald Trump employs rule shifting and ostracism quite aggressively. I'm cherry picking there, but the broader integration of sub-Dunbar dynamics into super-Dunbar systems could be an alternative or supplemental explanation. Thinking here of points that Arnold and Martin Gurri have made about the illusion of closeness/proximity brought by modern communication technology.
I don't think of Mr. Trump as competing in a feminine style. He stands out in terms of having a lot of Dark Triad traits--narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. It turns out that if you want power, those traits can be helpful. Most recent Presidents have been high in Dark Triad traits, in my view.
Right, however, it's both interesting and a kind of unmentionably ugly truth that there is definitely some overlap, and that similar behaviors are assessed differently according to identity, what in the female context is seen as typical and 'communal' in encouraging consensus (or at worst merely annoying) is, in the male context, recognized as manipulative and psychopathic. And rightly so! But best not to think too much about the implications.
An important observation that bolsters this view is the fact that Dark Triad types are much more attractive to women, in large part precisely because they "flip the script" on women, and treat them like, ahem, a woman treats the average male suitor. That is, in a kind of inscrutably frustrating, confusing, probing, and emotionally volatile way in which one knows one is being judged for and must demonstrate sufficient value, but can never quite tell what the other person is really thinking or feeling or what they really want.
Let's assume this theory is the explanation for trends one is determined to reverse. The question is how.
But first consider a strategic problem. Let's say you have to invade an enemy, and its greatest strength is its airspace defense capability. If even a stealthy aircraft merely tries to get close it is sure to get immediately blown out of the sky. Air dominance is such a huge force multiplier that if you are to make any headway at all, you will have to take that capability out.
Looking over your various options, your preferred course of action is to send bombers to blow up the radars. But that's the trouble, you can't use bombers to take out the capability, because that's what that precise enemy capability is best at stopping. You are very reluctant to infiltrate many teams of special forces saboteurs behind enemy lines via ground approach, which is sure to get a lot of them captured or killed, but you don't have any better options and that's the hand you've been dealt. You can't win against an enemy by playing a game at which they have indisputable superiority.
Now, back to the post topic, it seems to me that any attempt to informally influence group norms and social status is ... well, exactly where the enemy is strongest and in which they consistently outclass their rivals and demonstrate indomitable superiority, even 'supremacy'.
One might as well pick a fist-fight with Mike Tyson in his prime.
That suggests that one is better off playing to one's own strengths in terms of imposing hard rules intended to put the lid back on Pandora's box.
I'm skeptical about tying these forms of conflict to gender. The Catholic Church (and other ones) had a good 1,000 years of hidden hostility, subversion and mob hostility and use of conflict under the guise of moral condemnation. It wasn't an especially female institution, and yet these conflicts often played out in ways that are rather explicitly being cast as "female".
This seems like an important point to me, because misidentifying the source seems likely to lead to failures in addressing the problems.
It's a more collectivist form of competition. Catholics tend to be more collectivist.
https://psyarxiv.com/pkmsx
Women also tend to be more collectivist.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-management-and-organization/article/abs/gender-individualismcollectivism-and-individuals-propensity-to-trust-a-comparative-exploratory-study/F8BEFF93EF931F0D84D7C5AF25724771
But I agree that we should treat people as individuals when choosing who to work with.
"It used to be that requirements for climbing the status hierarchy were merit-based and constant. Now the game has deteriorated."
When was this?
I’m coming late to comment on this post, but just to say I’m uncomfortable with the hypothesis being promoted here. I am typically a big fan of Arnold’s way of thinking, but not in this case. I think men are just as capable of bringing down established institutions through irrationality, scheming, and not playing by the rules. I prefer to see institutional decay as a result of the decline of religion, which in the west had been the primary social structure orienting society toward truth-seeking and pro-social, pro-rules norms. In religion’s place has grown a postmodern “power is the only thing” ethic that doesn’t care about rules and established norms, and Marxism (usually now in the form of critical theory) which is explicitly organized with the goal of tearing down institutions and dividing people. With this new subversive and activist worldview promulgated wholesale in school and university education, I don’t think the gender hypothesis is necessary to explain what is happening.
My wife is a curious hybrid. She chafes at rules. She has the most fun playing a game when she is blatantly violating the rules. She also chafes at rules promulgated by mostly female administrators at her job. On the other hand, she can’t stand the constant backbiting and subversion that some of her female colleagues fling at one another.
Maybe she's not unusual and the generalizations here are just wild suppositions masking as well thought out academic findings.
It's not unusual, but it does not contradict the generalizations either. There are many cases when people who create a dysfunctional culture among themselves prefer to escape it. It's one big reason for international migration, because countries whose people create a dysfunctional culture among themselves tend to be bad at rule of law, bad at the kind of impersonal trust that seems to be a prerequisite for entrepreneurship, and in consequence have a bad economy. Not infrequently such emigrants do well in more functional host cultures, where their bad tendencies are suppressed, provided their concentration is sufficiently low. In too high a concentration, immigrants recreate their dysfunctional culture in the new place and the cycle repeats again. The "black undertow" and ruin voting are also instances of this phenomenon. It should not therefore be surprising to find women, such as Mr. Brassey's wife, who detest the ophidiarium conditions of female-dominated workplaces despite themselves contributing to the breakdown of rules that suppress the backbiting, subversion etc. to tolerable levels. I should add that men tend to find such workplaces extremely disagreeable and leave if they have options. This evaporation exacerbates the problem - again completely analogously to emigration and brain drain. Unfortunately, while it is in the collective interest of men to defend their rule-based spaces from being overrun by women, it is often in the interest of particular men to put _their_ women first, not to mention the social pressure women can bring to bear on them, so any working arrangements are unstable (as noted by Handle below) and require constant maintenance. The tacit agreement to keep women in the workplace in strictly subordinate roles such as typists, secretaries etc., as well as marriage which forced most women's access to rule-based spaces to be mediated by their husbands, used to limit the extent of the damage to manageable levels for some time. This arrangement has broken down many decades ago, though.
See, this is my problem. "There are many cases when people who create a dysfunctional culture among themselves prefer to escape it. "
You (and Kling, and the writers he's commenting on) are making an unsubstantiated leap when you suggest women are responsible for dysfunctional cultures.
History is replete with examples of exclusively male or male dominated cultures that were dysfunctional in all the ways you assert are the result of women entering the workplace.
Again, my suggestion is to look deeper for systematic reasons for cultural change rather than to throw one's hands up and say the solution is to keep [women] (and you could insert any other group here blacks/whites/jews/catholics/chinese/etc) in their proper place.
I'm not sure why Benenson's book doesn't suffice for you as substantiation, but ok, then the question is, what would convince you? What kind of evidence would you accept that the presence of females in any sector tends to lead to these sorts of issues?
As for 'dysfunction', I would say that's a loaded term. Most cultures tend towards an equilibrium with strengths in some areas and trade-offs in others. If you are reducing everything to a measure of short-to-medium term market-based innovation, progress, growth, and so forth, then, sure, you can try to analyze any equilibrium in those terms. But there's more to life than that, for example, life itself: family and procreation. A lot of culture which are pretty bad at entrepreneurship and legal wealth creation and equal rights and so on tend to be better at fostering communal solidarity and tighter family relations with kin and clan, not to mention the whole baby-making thing, which, in the end, determines who owns the future.
But just like "personnel is policy", "people are culture".
And if you start with the premise that you are trying to create a system to best achieve a particular function in the most effective or optimal manner, then the universalist conceit is implausible in the extreme: that the set of solutions to such problems is invariant to the particular kind of people you throw into those institutions and the compatibility of their innate dispositions and personalities with the mechanisms and structures best tailored to accomplish those objectives.
Benenson's book doesn't suffice as substantiation because it's evidence that, on average, men and women have different survival and competition mechanisms, not that a workplace that lets in "too many women" is doomed to dysfunction, which seems to be dangerously close to the implication some are making from it.
It's operationally meaningless in the same way that knowing group IQ characteristics is operationally meaningless. Even if I believe Group A has a higher mean IQ than Group B, that doesn't mean all or even most members of Group B are unqualified for a job.
Likewise, even if I believe Group M and Group W tend toward different cultural strategies, I'm not fool enough to assume that particular individual I does.
That doesn't require one to be universalist... rather, it's a rejection of the kind of groupthink that underlies the identity-minded left. One can acknowledge group tendencies without being a slave to them.
Nobody says "doomed". It's (marked) tendencies, the existence of which you acknowledge yourself. It should also be obvious that suppressing or mitigating dysfunctional tendencies is work - it requires constant effort. Now the amount of effort a given society or company or whatever can bring into play is limited - it is a scarce resource - which inevitably means that the problem becomes one of trade-offs: which other ends, and to what extent, are you willing to sacrifice in pursuit of this particular one? It is also obvious that other things being equal, the larger the concentration of the element harboring dysfunctional tendencies, the larger the amount of effort and/or preexisting human/societal capital required to mitigate them, and therefore the more has to be sacrificed in the trade-off.
> all the ways you assert
I don't assert "in all the ways". There are many ways to have a dysfunctional culture. Also I should have added that "dysfunctional" is a value judgment that I make from a particular point of view, without intending to impose it on other peoples - they are welcome to enjoy their cultures as long as I am allowed to defend mine. Chechen culture, for instance, is extremely male-dominated and is by all accounts very dysfunctional for running a modern civilization with, but it is dysfunctional in very different ways from a female-dominated workplace. Chechens do have strict rules that govern their feuds etc., they have a hierarchy of customary courts that publicly enforce these rules and make binding judgments, and they'd rather die on the spot than be passive-aggressive.
> my suggestion is to look deeper for systematic reasons for cultural change
By all means. I am not suggesting that what you say is _the solution_, because it obviously isn't - the arrangement I mentioned above broke down due to these reasons, after all (similarly, universal suffrage didn't happen because every citizen voted for it).
Nice post, Arnold. I couple things I would add, though:
1. I think there's an important factor that Heying doesn't really discuss, which is that in female hierarchies there seems to be (for whatever reason) a greater expectation of conformity and emphasis on group cohesion, and thus there is less room for disagreement and argumentation. IE, Dissent can only be aired in certain circumstances, and once the group has chosen a course of action, that's that; no more dissent is acceptable. Criticism of ideas is often mistaken for personal criticism or provoking a personal conflict. I do not know exactly why this is, exactly, but it's a problem in mixed sex groups.
2. As a guy, it is tempting to simply declare the stereotypically male way of doing things as better, given some of the problems you and HH describe with female competition modes. That said, the part about ultimate frisbee rings true to my ears, as it reminded me of some unpleasant memories of hockey teams I played on in my younger days where 3-4 guys decided (usually not incorrectly) that they were far and away our best players and therefore tried to avoid passing the puck to anyone not in that group; often times, it seemed to me, to the team's detriment. In fact, I'm getting irritated now just thinking about it, and this happened 10-15 years ago in intramural/rec leagues where there was precisely nothing at stake.
3. At least in my experience, I think men and women have kind of an innate or implicit recognition that they don't always play by the same rules. For example, when groups of women interact, there are times when it seems as though everyone is talking at once and no one is really listening at all. These same women don't seem to do this to men or in mixed company, as talking over someone is, in male ettiquette, a sign of disrespect, and this for whatever reason just isn't true in female social interaction. This makes me think that one way to smooth out some of this friction would just be to remind people that men and women often have different rules for how they relate to one another, and tailor their response accordingly. This happens all the time in other contexts. For example, in my industry we have widely varying expectations for different people, based on their experience level. Work assigned to a newer associate that I would expect to take, say, 4-6 hours might get a more experienced person reprimanded if they spent that much time on it.
A cancellable comment: if the best example of fruitful mixed gender institutions that Heying can come up with is Ultimate Frisbee, the co-ed empire is in big trouble. There should be at least one other better example to use for propaganda purposes. Here's a suggestion: if co-ed is to endure as an institution, they should integrate the military as quickly as possible and then declare serial wars against small, weak countries for no other reason than to produce inspiring propaganda. If this results in a big war with an unintegrated major power, the test will be if the co-ed empire wins. Perfunctory integration is not enough, because even the second Gulf War is not considered as an example of the victory of a gender integrated US military.
If that is too warlike, perhaps the next trillion dollar startup should be begun by a female founder with a perfectly representative racial and gender composition from the board on down to every division of the workforce. This should be easier to accomplish with the lax regulation on private securities markets. Just slosh the shares around at an inflated price, but at least then you have a solid proof of concept that is better than ultimate frisbee. Just make a Slack clone, but with a Benneton workforce, backed by tacit agreements to manipulate the share price upwards to make actual company performance irrelevant.
When I was in junior high and newly arrived in the school district, I was an extremely uncomfortable male who longed to know the unwritten rules. Were these unwritten rules paramount because the female students ruled? I doubt it.
It's a matter of domain. If you think back, you'll remember that the girls *did* rule in some areas, did they not? And where they ruled, the game was played in either in the female style with intrigue and low cunning, or according to female unwritten and vague 'rules', judgments, preferences, and rankings.
The key thing to keep in mind is that, as an immediate consequence of Goodhart's Law, some games cannot be played with written, explicit rules at all, because judges and choosers need a way to assess merit that cannot be easily 'gamed', which is the immediate consequence of explicit articulation, and what keeps the best tax lawyers and accountants in a perpetually lucrative business. Feargal O'Rourke's development of the Double Irish arrangement is one of the most consequential examples of this of all time.
Whatever criticisms one may have of the college admissions process and offices - and I would agree with you on most of them and more - one frustrating but also somewhat forgivable aspect of it is the purposeful evasion of explicitly announcing or articulating any hard and fast rules (even if, in truth, there are such rules, internally) and the obfuscation of the 'real' selection criteria. If you give people a well-defined target that is a proxy for what you are really looking for, they will just get into a rat race to allocate all possible efforts at grinding (and cheating) to maximize their score on the target, which isn't actually what you were looking for. Of course, people can also try to hold you accountable from deviating from your 'own rules', and you don't definitely don't want that, either! Flexibility and wiggle room and discretion are just different words for power, and thus also cover for abuse of power.
I actually have a draft essay somewhere where I flesh this out in detail, and I should try to find it and dust it off. The big picture is that we are stuck in a kind of tragedy of the human condition in which we cannot reach high levels of progress and civilization without being able to rely on the functions of certain social institutions which, by their very nature, are akin to games of this sort in the sense that their mechanisms rely on human actors making judgments on the basis of precisely these kinds of necessarily and unavoidably fuzzy and inarticulable 'rules'. The trouble is that it is these circumstances precisely which not only the easiest to corrupt (or 'pwn' if you will) with plausible deniability, but also the most damaging if they do get pwned. We can't do well without them, it's hard to secure them, and there is no good way to mitigate this issue with a comprehensive list of well-defined rules. At the end of the day there is no adequate substitute for the virtue and character of those human beings authorized to make judgment calls fairly, and any society and culture which fails to make the cultivation and encouragement of such qualities its top priority is inevitably doomed to sclerotic mediocrity at best.
As for areas in which the males rules, as an anthropological universal, when boys get together to play competitive games, there is naturally always lots of discussion and negotiation and refinement of 'the rules' which usually have all the characteristics of 'law' (in Lon Fuller's "The Morality of Law" sense). If there is disagreement about an arguable case, it is never about whether there should *be* a rule to cover it (i.e., that instead of a rule people should "just get it") but what the right rule would be, which of course would be explicit and communicated to all. Over time the set of rules tends to become detailed and comprehensive to maximize fairness and fun while minimizing uncertainly and, especially, the opportunity for abuse of judgment authority to play favorites. Whatever adaptive purposes such instincts served in prehistoric environments, by happy coincidence, they happen to be very useful for scaling up human cooperation in an identity-blind, universalist, rule-of-law based - dare I say 'proto-liberal'? - order. Keep in mind that if rules are applied equally and fairly, then equal justice under the King's laws - however 'authoritarian', is not all that different from equal justice under democratic law, or whatever source of law one thinks more legitimate.
But again, even in the boys-games world, there is no good way to avoid the need for good and fair referees or umpires.
"no adequate substitute for the virtue and character of those human beings authorized to make judgment calls... no good way to avoid the need for good and fair referees or umpires."
Yeah, and it helps if you have the means to (fairly) scrutinize the conduct of refs and umps, like exist in sports' instant replay Reviews.
As a counterpoint, Donald Trump employs rule shifting and ostracism quite aggressively. I'm cherry picking there, but the broader integration of sub-Dunbar dynamics into super-Dunbar systems could be an alternative or supplemental explanation. Thinking here of points that Arnold and Martin Gurri have made about the illusion of closeness/proximity brought by modern communication technology.
I don't think of Mr. Trump as competing in a feminine style. He stands out in terms of having a lot of Dark Triad traits--narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. It turns out that if you want power, those traits can be helpful. Most recent Presidents have been high in Dark Triad traits, in my view.
Right, however, it's both interesting and a kind of unmentionably ugly truth that there is definitely some overlap, and that similar behaviors are assessed differently according to identity, what in the female context is seen as typical and 'communal' in encouraging consensus (or at worst merely annoying) is, in the male context, recognized as manipulative and psychopathic. And rightly so! But best not to think too much about the implications.
An important observation that bolsters this view is the fact that Dark Triad types are much more attractive to women, in large part precisely because they "flip the script" on women, and treat them like, ahem, a woman treats the average male suitor. That is, in a kind of inscrutably frustrating, confusing, probing, and emotionally volatile way in which one knows one is being judged for and must demonstrate sufficient value, but can never quite tell what the other person is really thinking or feeling or what they really want.
In other words, like a psychopath.
"It turns out that if you want power, those traits can be helpful. Most recent Presidents have been high in Dark Triad traits...."
Not just Presidents, but also other politicians, & bureaucrats (e.g. J. Edgar, Fauci).