Social Learning Links, 5/21/2025

Alice Evans on patriarchy in India; Ceci, Kahn and Williams on patriarchy in science; Erik J. Larson on urban decay; Aaron Renn on decay of values

Alice Evans writes,

In India, only 25% of urban women work. Rates are highest among Christians and Buddhists, lowest among Muslims and Sikhs.

Overseas, Hindu and Sikh women usually work. This is not just a response to greater economic opportunities. As early as 1979, before Singapore got rich, Indian female economic activity was on par with Chinese and Malays.

Today, 70% of British Indian women work! These rates are especially high among Sikhs and Hindus Over in the US, 89% of Hindus say female employment is a ‘change for the better’. When considering the “honour-income trade-off”, the Hindu and Sikh diaspora evidently prioritises income!

…Here is my hypothesis. When Muslim rulers conquered India and established their administrations, they idealised female seclusion. Hindu elites likewise adopted purdah to gain patronage and prestige.

Stephen Ceci, Shulamit Kahn, and Wendy Williams write,

our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science.

Pointer from Steve Stewart-Williams, who emphasizes the hiring data.

What emerges time and again is that, although fewer women apply for tenure-track jobs, those who do apply are more likely to be interviewed and more likely to get offered the job.

And note that according to David Rozado, hiring bias carries over to the chatbots.

Erik J. Larson writes,

Portland championed the “20-minute neighbourhood”, built out light rail, restricted urban sprawl through its urban growth boundary, and launched the Smart City PDX initiative with a focus on using data to achieve equity and sustainability. It was a city that planned to do everything right.

And yet, the results on the ground tell a different story.

Property crime in Portland has surged in recent years. Car thefts, vandalism, and break-ins remain common. In 2024, a dysentery outbreak swept through its homeless population — an ancient illness made modern again by a failure to provide basic sanitation. As of early 2025, Multnomah County reported nearly 15,000 individuals experiencing homelessness, with approximately 6,800 living unsheltered. You can walk past smart kiosks and traffic sensors and still see people collapsed on the sidewalks, too sick or high or hungry to move.

Perhaps this is the future of Montgomery County, Maryland.

Aaron Renn sermonizes writes,

It should not be surprising that as we’ve transitioned towards a religious zero state, bourgeois values have decayed and finally collapsed. Public discourse often overemphasizes sexuality, overshadowing other cultural shifts. If you look at the post-2014/15 world that I label the “Negative World” and Todd calls the zero state, we see things like the rapid proliferation and cultural normalization of gambling, the legalization and social acceptance of drugs (and the opioid crisis), and widespread adoption of tattoos. The elimination of usury laws, the proliferation of payday loan stores, the growth of consumer debt, and more predate this but not by a huge amount. Along with this we also see a decline in the work ethic properly so-called, one that affects both white and blue collar workers. The growth in the number of prime working age men who are not in the labor force or school is an example of this. And of course we have declining family formation and birth rates.

…restoring bourgeois values is a challenge to say the least.

Later in the essay:

All of these people, from industrial titans to small shopkeepers to farmers, were a kind of bourgeoisie. They owned their own business or livelihood, of whatever scale. This began to breakdown in the 1920s, through the Depression and then the war. In the post-World War 2 era, America had transitioned from being a nation of people who worked for themselves, to a nation of people who worked for others. While this was a slow gradual shift that can’t be dated to specific moment in time, I’d argue that there’s a significant difference between in 1920 (still primarily or heavily bourgeois) and 1950 (predominantly managerial).

…it produces a loss of a sense of agency, as people feel at the mercy of large, impersonal forces and institutions they cannot understand or control.

substacks referenced above:

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The Strange Behavior of LLMs in Hiring Decisions: Systemic Gender and Positional Biases in Candidate Selection

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The End of Bourgeois Values

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Rethinking Sexism in Science

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Beyond Caste: How Migration Enables Love & Economic Prosperity!