"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.
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.
And yet many of the things that make men more "successful" are inherently undesirable, which is why they are compensated more. Men are more willing to work in social isolation, move for a career, work in dangerous jobs and work longer hours. Are these unfair advantages or have men been socially brainwashed into thinking their sole purpose in life is to earn as much as possible at all costs? It's easy to flip arguments around. Personally, I think it all comes out in the wash and everything is pretty fair and equal.
I agree and I suspect Arnold does too. I think when he refers to 'no-difference' he means no biological differences. But, I'd be curious to hear it from the man himself.
"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.
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.
The difference between your "empirical truths" is that the former are physical differences, the latter socially determined. Unless you are saying the black male brain in some way makes black males disproportionately more prone to violence. Unless your conflation of the two was intentional.
Isn't that an open question, how much this difference is cultural and how much genetic? Part of a much bigger open question, how much is the propensity for any behavior cultural and how much genetic? We really don't know and certainly won't in my lifetime. A quick way of sabotaging an academic career would be to tell your thesis advisor, "I want to study how much of the crime difference between blacks and Asians is genetic and how much is cultural."
Your contention in #1 is laughable at best. Had you used a qualifier "some men" , I might have bought it but not your sweeping generalization. There are great examples of female athletes who are better than a vast majority of men. Women basketball players tend to be better free throw shooters. Sydney McLaughlin and Abby Steiner would likely win every race against male coders who labor writing apps in their spare time.
Your sweeping statement #2 is dependent on facts that are known only to you. Just look at spousal abuse statistics in majority white areas where there is high poverty.
Nearly every man is better than nearly every woman at athletics, controlling for age. It's definitely not just 'some.' High school boys' sports teams routinely beat Olympic female teams in many sports. As a generalisation, it's as accurate as saying, "men are more violent than women," and I've never known a person to object to that generalisation and insist it's only 'some' men.
Your earlier comment was the laughable one. In any comparison of bell curves between groups with a lot of overlap, the higher scoring top 10% or 1% will be better than the average (and below) and even "vast majority" of the other group.
Perhaps you think it is misogynistic to express true facts about differences in averages that sometimes favors men over women, like the rules of basketball favor the tall over the short?
Or perhaps you think whenever men think of women as a sex object, that means misogyny? Maybe Lowery thinks that after having babies and being 40+:
>>"perhaps because she had reached an age where men in her profession did not automatically treat her as a sex object."
The many stories of being groped show behavior that is rightly considered wrong, even illegal. But an invitation to dinner to be propositioned by a senior who could have helped a career- sort of an economics casting couch (rather than Weinstein). That's certainly unseemly, yet far less than physical groping or harassment.
Having many men ask for sex is part of the inevitable social change from the feminist-led sexual revolution, where women don't need to have a "Fear of Flying," nor of a "Zipless Fuck". Either promiscuity between non-virgins is ok, married or unmarried, or it's not.
The stereotype is that, had the grad student been interested, she would feel complimented even if she chose not to indulge in more than dinner. "He very explicitly wanted me to sleep with him." Yeah, those are the (Man-view) New Rules. It's always OK to ask. But as noted, the (Woman-view) is, unwanted asking is harassment.
One of the biggest sex differences is that for some 80% of men, all attractive women are both people AND desired sex objects - with many men willing to have sex with them without a relationship. It seems only 10-20%, or less(?) of women see all attractive men as sex objects - groupies are promiscuous with discrimination.
If the problem is that men are horny for young attractive women, you should say so, and maybe indicate what kind of change you think would be good, and how to measure that change.
Recently the pregnancy rates of all ages in the USA have been going down. This seems like a desired Feminist goal, more men stopping themselves from trying to sleep with women - stopping from treating them as sex objects (despite the women making themselves up to BE sex objects).
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.
"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.
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.
I think it would be very beneficial to have "male only" seminars or training classes in how to navigate in the world of women in the workplace. I have seen thru the years many male coworkers or managers lose all objectivity when assessing bad or manipulative behavior of a woman. Usually to the detriment of a male coworker.
The article makes some good points. What is not mentioned is that feminist, while acting indignant when there are male only groups, see no problem in forming female only groups to network. Yet, they never get called out by our society. How did this happen? It was usually college educated and indoctrinated young women in the media that screamed the loudest. Male journalist and editors did nothing to stop it. We find that in every aspect of our society. Wherever radical feminists assert themselves, men allow themselves to be shouted down or bullied. It's like a small bird protecting its nest from a large bird. The small bird is joined by others of its type to mob the large bird. Driving it away.
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.
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.
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.
The idea that 'a good manager can manage anything' is less-prevalent than it was 10 or 15 years ago, largely as a result of experience. While it's true that there are many aspects of management that are transferable across domains, it's also important to have some understanding of what you are managing. And this isn't only true in Technical fields...it would be difficult to run a Fashion company, for instance, without some understanding of the industry and the people in it and some feel for the design of successful products.
We still see this belief in government bureaucracies all the time where people get promoted into positions of power where they have limited knowledge. For example, the new head of the department of energy is an ex-politician with a political science background and education who probably doesn't understand the laws of thermodynamics and can't determine which advisor's are spinning nonsense. She has no background in any aspects of the department of energy but is strong in DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) which is a bit irrelevant in the big budget area of nuclear weapons where reality is required.
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.
"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.
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.
And yet many of the things that make men more "successful" are inherently undesirable, which is why they are compensated more. Men are more willing to work in social isolation, move for a career, work in dangerous jobs and work longer hours. Are these unfair advantages or have men been socially brainwashed into thinking their sole purpose in life is to earn as much as possible at all costs? It's easy to flip arguments around. Personally, I think it all comes out in the wash and everything is pretty fair and equal.
I agree and I suspect Arnold does too. I think when he refers to 'no-difference' he means no biological differences. But, I'd be curious to hear it from the man himself.
Yet the vast majority of feminists against social differences choose to do things men don't to do:
wear make-up & lipstick
shave legs & under arms
pluck eyebrows
all to be more attractive sex objects.
Dying hair is now done often by men, too - but still by both to be a more attractive sex partner.
"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.
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.
Not sure I understand your take on boy vs girl behavior. It's empirically certain that boys are far more violent than girls.
The difference between your "empirical truths" is that the former are physical differences, the latter socially determined. Unless you are saying the black male brain in some way makes black males disproportionately more prone to violence. Unless your conflation of the two was intentional.
Isn't that an open question, how much this difference is cultural and how much genetic? Part of a much bigger open question, how much is the propensity for any behavior cultural and how much genetic? We really don't know and certainly won't in my lifetime. A quick way of sabotaging an academic career would be to tell your thesis advisor, "I want to study how much of the crime difference between blacks and Asians is genetic and how much is cultural."
Your contention in #1 is laughable at best. Had you used a qualifier "some men" , I might have bought it but not your sweeping generalization. There are great examples of female athletes who are better than a vast majority of men. Women basketball players tend to be better free throw shooters. Sydney McLaughlin and Abby Steiner would likely win every race against male coders who labor writing apps in their spare time.
Your sweeping statement #2 is dependent on facts that are known only to you. Just look at spousal abuse statistics in majority white areas where there is high poverty.
Nearly every man is better than nearly every woman at athletics, controlling for age. It's definitely not just 'some.' High school boys' sports teams routinely beat Olympic female teams in many sports. As a generalisation, it's as accurate as saying, "men are more violent than women," and I've never known a person to object to that generalisation and insist it's only 'some' men.
Good to see misogyny is alive and well here. Pretty much the same has been an ongoing plague on the economics professions as Annie Lowery explains very well in this Atlantic piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/economics-sexual-harrassment-women-sexism/672239/ Things only change when those who are part of the problem recognize it and change. You might look in the mirror.
Near-hysterical insults like "misogyny" don't help solve an otherwise poorly defined problem. Here's one list on
>>How to recognize misogyny:
Expressing hatred for women
Catcalling or harassing women
Favoring men at the expense of women
Strong belief in rigid, traditional gender roles
No respect or regard for women's time and effort
Ignoring or speaking over women
Rejecting women's ideas
Stealing ideas from women but refusing to credit them
Frequently interrupting women when they are speaking
Blaming women for conflict and expecting women to maintain social harmony
Punishing women for calling out discrimination and sexism
<< https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-misogyny-5076055
I don't see any of these behaviors here.
Your earlier comment was the laughable one. In any comparison of bell curves between groups with a lot of overlap, the higher scoring top 10% or 1% will be better than the average (and below) and even "vast majority" of the other group.
Perhaps you think it is misogynistic to express true facts about differences in averages that sometimes favors men over women, like the rules of basketball favor the tall over the short?
Or perhaps you think whenever men think of women as a sex object, that means misogyny? Maybe Lowery thinks that after having babies and being 40+:
>>"perhaps because she had reached an age where men in her profession did not automatically treat her as a sex object."
The many stories of being groped show behavior that is rightly considered wrong, even illegal. But an invitation to dinner to be propositioned by a senior who could have helped a career- sort of an economics casting couch (rather than Weinstein). That's certainly unseemly, yet far less than physical groping or harassment.
Having many men ask for sex is part of the inevitable social change from the feminist-led sexual revolution, where women don't need to have a "Fear of Flying," nor of a "Zipless Fuck". Either promiscuity between non-virgins is ok, married or unmarried, or it's not.
The stereotype is that, had the grad student been interested, she would feel complimented even if she chose not to indulge in more than dinner. "He very explicitly wanted me to sleep with him." Yeah, those are the (Man-view) New Rules. It's always OK to ask. But as noted, the (Woman-view) is, unwanted asking is harassment.
One of the biggest sex differences is that for some 80% of men, all attractive women are both people AND desired sex objects - with many men willing to have sex with them without a relationship. It seems only 10-20%, or less(?) of women see all attractive men as sex objects - groupies are promiscuous with discrimination.
If the problem is that men are horny for young attractive women, you should say so, and maybe indicate what kind of change you think would be good, and how to measure that change.
Recently the pregnancy rates of all ages in the USA have been going down. This seems like a desired Feminist goal, more men stopping themselves from trying to sleep with women - stopping from treating them as sex objects (despite the women making themselves up to BE sex objects).
This seems to be bringing in other problems.
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.
"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.
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.
I think it would be very beneficial to have "male only" seminars or training classes in how to navigate in the world of women in the workplace. I have seen thru the years many male coworkers or managers lose all objectivity when assessing bad or manipulative behavior of a woman. Usually to the detriment of a male coworker.
The article makes some good points. What is not mentioned is that feminist, while acting indignant when there are male only groups, see no problem in forming female only groups to network. Yet, they never get called out by our society. How did this happen? It was usually college educated and indoctrinated young women in the media that screamed the loudest. Male journalist and editors did nothing to stop it. We find that in every aspect of our society. Wherever radical feminists assert themselves, men allow themselves to be shouted down or bullied. It's like a small bird protecting its nest from a large bird. The small bird is joined by others of its type to mob the large bird. Driving it away.
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.
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.
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.
The idea that 'a good manager can manage anything' is less-prevalent than it was 10 or 15 years ago, largely as a result of experience. While it's true that there are many aspects of management that are transferable across domains, it's also important to have some understanding of what you are managing. And this isn't only true in Technical fields...it would be difficult to run a Fashion company, for instance, without some understanding of the industry and the people in it and some feel for the design of successful products.
We still see this belief in government bureaucracies all the time where people get promoted into positions of power where they have limited knowledge. For example, the new head of the department of energy is an ex-politician with a political science background and education who probably doesn't understand the laws of thermodynamics and can't determine which advisor's are spinning nonsense. She has no background in any aspects of the department of energy but is strong in DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) which is a bit irrelevant in the big budget area of nuclear weapons where reality is required.
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.