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Nov 26, 2022·edited Nov 26, 2022Liked by Arnold Kling

"In my experience, 100% of these software engineers who also do coding in their spare time are men. Are there any women who do it? Probably there are, but I have yet to meet one."

Wave! wave! wave! So where do we meet? :) And I agree with you that the institutions are in danger, particularly because women have done an extremely poor job of identifying how evil women typically behave ... where what Kathleen Stock and Rosie Kay were submitted to at elementary school is only a start. Too many of them are working out of a 'women cannot be evil, therefore I cannot be evil because I am a woman' mindset.

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Nov 26, 2022Liked by Arnold Kling

This way of drawing the distinction between difference and no-difference feminism papers over an important distinction. All the feminists I know are difference feminists by your definition--they think there *are* differences between men and women on average. It's just that most of them think these differences are (to a large extent) the result of women and men being socially indoctrinated in different ways. And (they would add) the way men are indoctrinated tends to give them the motivation and the tools to improve their social standing and their material circumstances, much more than women.

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"Difference feminism" is really just "have your cake and eat it too" feminism. It will struggle to find purchase both because it, too, refuses to accept differences between men and woman that aren't to women's advantage (e.g., that more men are highly skilled at math or that the earnings gap isn't caused by discrimination). It also has little appeal to the half of the population that isn't women. I honestly find feminists who believe there are no differences - deceived as they may be - less annoying than 'difference feminists' who tell me that men are biologically more violent, anti-social, narcissistic, and short-lived than women, but that the only reason 50% of Fields medallists aren't women is because of sexism. Until they - and you - realise that most of the alleged bias against women in society isn't really bias, it's nature, it won't be consistent with reality.

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When I was growing up, my mother had a line for whenever I or a friend complained that "some person who is as qualified as me has an advantage".

"There is no excuse for you to be comparable to that person".

It seems to me that systems would benefit from a similar orientation: instead of pretending people are equal, give greater weight to metrics of individual inequality. This are the changes that fought back against anti-jewish and anti-asian racism. If better metrics of ability are available for low cost, there is less reason to use vague heuristics such as sex or race.

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Not sure I understand your take on boy vs girl behavior. It's empirically certain that boys are far more violent than girls.

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One underpinning of modern "no difference" feminism is the tacit acceptance that the male structures are valued and the female structures are not. So to be a successful woman you must be indifferentiable from a successful man.

Your example of software is an interesting one as James Damore didn't say women couldn't code, he just suggested they might not want to code like nerdy white males. Yet it was accepted that coding like nerdy white males was the ultimate success and therefore women who didn't want this or the suggestion that they might not want this, created an uproar. But how antifeminine is that? To force women's success to be the ability to be better than a man in worlds designed by, and for men.

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"project managers"...there are also individuals whose roles require both managing people *directly* AND coordinating the efforts of people who don't report to them but whose work is vital for the project. This requires classical people-management skills (including hiring and firing) as well as the 'diplomatic' skills required for the indirect (matrixed) management. Rarer than pure PM skills.

I've had two women (at different times) would very good at this combined task. I'm confident that either could have successfully sought much higher-level positions, but they both eventually chose to devote more time to family and other personal interests.

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Women bully other women in ways both in similar and different ways as men bully men. Men sometimes, but women usually, bully using words & insults & ostracism from the In Group; and women are far less likely to be Lone Wolves, or even "Lone Herbivore". (Is there any herbivore that is stereotypically both in a group and sometimes solitary?). W & M should both be calling out and objecting to bullying when they see it. Almost all bullying includes a group against an individual.

>>" we should try to minimize bias against women in our society."

Yes.

Or perhaps only maybe - what if the choice between standard A1 & standard A2 means there will be an advantage to avg men in A1 but an advantage to avg women in A2? Each standard or norm in society rewards some behavior over other behavior. Impersonal rules, like "rule of law", gives a small advantage to avg to men over avg women. I think that standard is better for men AND women in society, but it gives less power to those W & F folk in power and to the personal, discretionary way avg women use power.

For many, maybe most, important measurable aggregate results, the claim that "women and men have the same average" is false: height, strength, speed. The Bell curve results. For some results like IQ, the average might be the same, but the shape of the curve is such that more men are in the top 1% and bottom 1%.

It has long been the case that men are more successful at committing suicide when they try. Men are also more successful at obsessively making money, when that's all they care about, or what their highest priority is most of the time - like Buffet or Bill Gates.

As the middle class economics changed to support, and push, women into making money (instead of making babies), as women compete with men the avg man at the Director of VP level, or law firms, puts more hours into making money/ his work, than the similarly educated woman with similar positions. The extra work should, and does, result in extra cash in the meritocracies.

That's a norm that is "good", but it advantages the obsessive over the balanced, and women are on avg more balanced. It's reasonable to question each norm in our society.

And the giving of status based primarily on "how much money" you make is probably one the most difficult to change yet also to women's disadvantage. Of course, the fact that so many rich men find that beautiful women are more interested in them, sexually, because of their wealth means ... men will continue to compete for money as part of their competition for sex mates.

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This is delusional because you're interpreting the arguments in favor of Feminism at Face Value.

If you are a man of math and science, you should ignore the moral rhetorical justifications that are used to cloak power grabs, and simply measure actions.

Men are not evolved to understand women — this knowledge is extremely painful.

But you need to "adjust your priors" if you want to understand what's going on.

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This discussion is awfully stunted without including the bias that favors women in regard to their visual attractiveness. A typical woman with no explicit training has developed skills at combining an attractive personality with their visual attractiveness to succeed at people problems. Consumer purchases of clothes, shoes, jewelry, cosmetics and elective surgery are not heavily skewed toward women by accident.

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In coding and many STEM areas, a high focus on technical details is required and that property is more common in men. The details can be critical.

I can't entirely agree with project management favoring women all the time. You are implying that project management only requires a good manager and a good manager can manage anything. Government and Harvard business school seem to believe that a good manager can manage anything, but in highly technical areas that concept doesn't work. A good manager can only manage what he can understand. As a project manager, you will have two people with different views on a technical detail come to you and if you have no knowledge about the technical details you can't make a rational decision. Among real technical genius types, I have noticed little correlation between the quality of the idea and the ability to present those ideas to a lay (manager) audience.

I agree that women PMs could be better at people interactions on projects that are within their technical knowledge area.

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Arnold writes, "I think that among high-level executives, men are more likely to view an organization in terms of its systems, and women are more likely to view it in terms of its people. Men think that they can solve problems by changing the organization chart, updating the policies and procedures, rolling out a training program, changing the compensation system, or adopting new technology. Women think that they can solve problems by removing the impediments to better teamwork, and they can spot the individuals who are the main source of the trouble."

Here's a possible empirical test of the above hypothesis. (I'm thinking out loud, so might not have constructed the test quite correctly in this first blush.) Consider a collection of leaders and measure whether certain types are more successful than others, not in absolute terms but relatively speaking, analogous to "wins above replacement" (or "WAR") as in basketball or baseball. In fact, consider college basketball coaches as the universe of leaders. Coaches frequently move from one team to another, so there should be plenty of data about how much a coach improves or deteriorates over his or her predecessor and whether a given coach is successful (or not) consistently from one team to another.

I don't think many women coach men's teams, but a good number of men have coached women's teams, so one could even control for the league (men's or women's) where the coaches are working. Are men on average more successful coaches (based on a WAR type of statistic) than women? This experiment fails to control for important variables since different teams might need different types of coaching - Martian or Venusian - but the sample size could be large and just might reveal some patterns.

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