The problem, of course, is that despite lopsided gender ratios, the top 1% in any field are very likely to continue to skew male due to a) men on average being more competitive/ambitious and b) higher male IQ variance. Feminists are well aware of the makeup of the top 1%, but aren't amenable to the idea that this might be a consequence of either a) or b) and thus fall back on the conclusion that the patriarchy is still going strong; therefore, the fight has to go on, and so here we are.
Claims for equal treatment quickly morph into disguised claims for unjustified preference, whether it is a matter of race, sex, or class. Politicians and activists find there is much more power and pelf to be had from supporting the latter. The pretense of the pursuit of equality serves as moral cover for grift. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher: ‘Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.’
Caldwell has an even better line, "One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong."
A lot of what you’re seeing has to do with men not getting four year degrees at the same rates as women and then therefore not entering professions that require graduate degrees. This ‘female takeover’ happened earliest in academic departments in the 1990s and 2000s. One phenomenon we should remember is that men still avoid or quickly leave female-dominated teams and careers and they tend to avoid them. They simply go elsewhere. Entrepreneurship is still as male dominated as ever and is one of the exit points for a lot of professional men who do not want to work on female dominated teams. You have to study shifts across careers to see how rising female dominance simply pushes men elsewhere. Some of this is just shifting, not a March toward female control. Finally, women actually tend to be more gender inclusive until the ratio gets to 80% or more in my experience. Younger men are ready for 60/40 female:male offices.
Last poll result I saw about it, the criterion "are ready for" apparently means "are ready to hate". There is some threshold proportion of straight males that represents a critical mass below which there is a major qualitative transition in the social dynamics, culture, character, and functioning of a cooperative organization, and this has an enormous impact on one's level of satisfaction or misery resulting from working in such organizations. This is analogous to the critical mass threshold in overall size that marks the range of transition from sub-Dunbar to super-Dunbar organizations.
A lot of people are recently noticing and worrying about the failures of two relationship matching markets for young men, those being sexual and professional. Few realize that these are just manifestations of the same, more general phenomenon.
Assuming females now constitute the majority in the younger strata of elite occupations -- I don't know if that is true -- is there a factual basis to suggest a non-meritocratic cause (e.g., admission preferences for females over equally or better qualified males in law or medical schools)? In the past, these types of professions were either not open to, or considered suitable for, women. That has changed. And given that females tend to mature earlier and are likely a bit more studious than their male counterparts, maybe the confluence of these factors explain any lopsided skew that may exist.
I'm a little less worried about this when thinking about it in terms of a really long horizon. Women who work exceptionally long hours in their 20s and 30s will tend to have fewer children on average than other women in their birth cohorts. There will be evolutionary effects of that choice after a few generations.
That makes no sense to me. No matter how many children a woman has, it's near equally likely they will have boys as girls. Where does evolution come to play?
Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? The argument is like that. If exceptionally smart and hard-working women have fewer children on average, then as several generations go by, women with genes that make them more likely to be exceptionally smart and hard-working might be a smaller share of the population than currently.
That's not to say anything about women's average intelligence vs. men in the future. It's also possible that the argument works just as well with respect to exceptionally smart and hard working men.
And it's not written in stone or anything. It's just something that makes me less worried about all of this.
And the smart men who marry smart women have fewer babies than the smart men who marry less smart women -- this is the eugenics argument (in reverse) but is merely natural (?) selection.
It's similar to pro-life women having more kids than pro-abortion women -- and at some point ('72-2022, 50 years) the demographics shift towards the ones having more kids.
We'll continue to see more smart women opt for father-less children, but it will take a few generations before the avg IQ of women is measurably lower than men's.
Unlike races, where there is already a well known difference for avg IQ for each racial group -- but it's considered racist to discuss that issue.
As stu has noted, this pattern is not sufficient to produce a world where "the avg IQ of women is measurably lower than men's". You'd also need the Y chromosome to have a large effect on IQ, and there is no evidence for this being the case.
This pattern should have a visible effect on *memetic* evolution, though.
Noah Smith, in an interview with Brian Chau, says that universities only started promoting women and minorities/immigrants in earnest about ten years ago, jettisoning excuses like "their English isn't very good" etc. even in the sciences.
In other words, this was long overdue and absolutely merit-based?
Here's another thought experiment. Imagine a room filled with a representative sample of people in elite occupations all under 40. Include law, medicine, academia, management in business, government, and non-profits, etc. Then ask how many of those under 40s will be brimful of virtue-signalling bullshit (of one kind or another)?
Emily Dickinson dressed as a man so she could sneak into interesting lectures. Now men masquerade as women to get the benefits that only women get.
Cultural Anthropology Fact: At least in western society, it is acceptable and "normal" for women to dress like men (lapel suits, pants etc.), but still mostly unacceptable for men to dress like women (dresses, skirts, bras, bows in their hair etc.)
A good test case will be provided if the U.S, or other Trans-possessed nation happens to reinstitute the draft. Will transwomen claim exemption? After all, they're women, right? My guess is yes, they will. But will the same claimants then insist that transmen must be drafted? After all, they're men, right? My guess is no, they will not.
In the event of a draft, I'd predict a stampede of military aged males to "discover" they're really women. If the rate at which this happens already seems alarming enough, imagine what if will be when identifying as trans might be the only thing to save your life.
I thought I saw a news item several months ago about trans-identified Ukrainian males of military age trying to flee the country to safety with the women and children. It claimed they were stopped at the border and inducted into the military to defend the motherland. If true, you'd think the trans-friendly western media would have objected, but I can't recall hearing anything more about it.
I'm pretty sure there's an age range, like maybe 25 (don't know), where older adults who become trans are more often MtF, while under that age it's more FtM.
There will soon be a tsunami of lawsuits by adult FtM trans folk who will claim childhood victimhood and be de-transitioning.
Many countries in Europe are stopping surgical changes on women - see J. K. Rowling for some good tweets / activism protecting women.
MtF sports folk seem to be good but not great male athletes who want to win - and can win as a trans.
Completely agree about the lawsuits. They've already begun, but it's mere trickle compared to what's soon to follow. It will be fascinating to observe how the academic, cultural and legal establishments rationalize or deflect the evidence that the policies they championed as an urgent moral necessity amounted to the systemic brainwashing, sterilization, and mutilation of thousands of children, mostly girls. I predict they'll blame it on the patriarchy.
Yes, it's working out the same as the war on racism. The hawks never intended to stop when they achieved equality (or at least, those who did actually did stop then). They want to rule as they imagine their opponents did over their ancestors. The system must stop letting them do it, or lose its credibility.
Just to nitpick, this doesn't apply to elected officials for the most part. Figures for the US are on the 27% - 25% range for representatives/senators and mayors, usually lower for the rest of the world (I'm writing a piece on this so I've been looking at the figures a lot). I don't know if those figures would vary if you select just the younger than 40, but I doubt it.
One possible explanation is career paths. If you aspire to be a top academic, top lawyer, etc... there's a very clear path that you have to take: university studies, graduate studies maybe. You have to grind and be patient, and women are probably better at that.
Elected officials, like top e-sports players, are usually putting in 10-12 hours per day, nearly 365 days per year. Far more men want it enough to pay those dues, than women.
Just like becoming partner in law firms - billable hour differences show top women work fewer hours than top men.
In almost every activity; so the "winner take all" winners are more likely to be men. But this continues to justify to feminists so that more 60% level women get promoted over 70% level men.
Yup, tournaments attract more men, sinecures attract more women.
I don't see either side of this as a problem; our civilization requires plenty of both. In particular, I think James Damore's critical error was drinking the kool-aid and failing to recognize that, in the big scheme of things, it was efficient for Google to become more focused on maintaining its existing properties and for most of the innovative action to move elsewhere.
Also, the universities are lying on their counts on male-female class balances (perhaps by fudging when a large portion of the women say that they are "other"). It is worse than they say. A good exercise in any 2023 classroom is to just count row by row. At many law schools, you will count 70:30 female in many doctrinal classes (required for everyone). The effect is more pronounced in graduate school because many of the men who start university will drop out before they graduate. It's harder to do this sanity check with undergrad classes because of gender clustering and the dearth of required classes, but I invite anyone to go to a campus and do this count when they have a free moment.
It also helps to understand the trans-on-campus issue to see what people who generally claim to be an alt-gender actually are. The camera loves the high-effort trans. But the majority on campus are just women who are not particularly photogenic, haven't had any surgeries, and are probably not on any more hormones than is normal for any postmodern woman. The reality is their gender is just "I take SSRIs," and we've had those for decades now; the 90s is calling and they want their Prozac Generation back. But changing the semantic labels creates an illusion of social change and excitement.
I like the gender, "I take SSRIs." It's the new gender without interest in sex, and which doesn't reproduce, but is fine and getting through graduate school, and functioning as an academic, or in some schlocky corporate middle-management job.
It's like watching ice melt. For a long time, nothing happens. Long after the ambient temperature has risen above freezing, nothing happens. And then you see water droplets starting to appear.
Warren Farrell, a former leader of the National Organization of Women (yes, he's a man), wrote about the increasingly many ways in which men - and especially boys - were disadvantaged in our society. He wrote about the many metrics by which, looking back on the previous 20-30 years, we had arguably become much more of a matriarchy than a patriarchy, although he didn't use the term "matriarchy" as far as I recall.
Farrell wrote these things 30 years ago.
It's been a matriarchy for a long time - especially in the home, but also now in the workplace. Cries of "patriarchy" have been a distraction from the reality for a long time - and will be, until they don't work any more to protect the new system (which some women tell themselves is justified because it's 'turn about' - as if that were any justification at all).
Men are more often willing to put in 10-12 practice hours per day on their highest priority, whether it's making their company successful, doing chess or some e-sport (like League of Legends), any pro sport, most rock musical instruments & many classical ones (most?), most art creation, most elective offices.
In "winner take all" competitions, the winners have talent, luck, AND put in huge numbers of hours. 10,000 hours is common - and there are probably far more men who have dedicated most of their productive lives to some pursuit which has, nevertheless, failed to make them the best in the world, or rich & famous.
It's known but not much discussed that avg IQ in men & women is about the same, but the 1% top & bottom of the male distribution is farther from the average. Exceptionally smart AND stupid; talented AND hopelessly helpless.
.
The endpoint is when more matriarchal women have decision making power, perhaps in wildfire prevention in CA, and their decisions result in bad outcomes - so that more folk blame women for the bad decisions. The main power of meritocracy is avoiding bad decisions.
But, as we get richer, the error of too much caution will continue to increase in order to avoid the error of too little caution (too much risk). We're only now talking about Safetyism, which seems to be one of the main problems of the Matriarchy.
Another endpoint might be when college educated women clamor for more men to have more status, but they'll have to be more unhappy than they are so far- they're still blaming men for their unhappiness rather than their foolish support for Dem policies which result in far less happiness for unmarried educated women (despite the Dem claims to be more helpful). Pointing out how unmeritocratic promotion results in less happiness might work, over time. Hasn't yet, tho some conservative women are already noting some of the issues.
The problem, of course, is that despite lopsided gender ratios, the top 1% in any field are very likely to continue to skew male due to a) men on average being more competitive/ambitious and b) higher male IQ variance. Feminists are well aware of the makeup of the top 1%, but aren't amenable to the idea that this might be a consequence of either a) or b) and thus fall back on the conclusion that the patriarchy is still going strong; therefore, the fight has to go on, and so here we are.
The "feminist activists" may not be happy until 50% of the Fortune 500 CEOs, US senators, and US Presidents are women.
Editorial Comment: If that ever happens, western society will really be in a downfall.
Claims for equal treatment quickly morph into disguised claims for unjustified preference, whether it is a matter of race, sex, or class. Politicians and activists find there is much more power and pelf to be had from supporting the latter. The pretense of the pursuit of equality serves as moral cover for grift. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher: ‘Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.’
Caldwell has an even better line, "One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong."
A lot of what you’re seeing has to do with men not getting four year degrees at the same rates as women and then therefore not entering professions that require graduate degrees. This ‘female takeover’ happened earliest in academic departments in the 1990s and 2000s. One phenomenon we should remember is that men still avoid or quickly leave female-dominated teams and careers and they tend to avoid them. They simply go elsewhere. Entrepreneurship is still as male dominated as ever and is one of the exit points for a lot of professional men who do not want to work on female dominated teams. You have to study shifts across careers to see how rising female dominance simply pushes men elsewhere. Some of this is just shifting, not a March toward female control. Finally, women actually tend to be more gender inclusive until the ratio gets to 80% or more in my experience. Younger men are ready for 60/40 female:male offices.
Last poll result I saw about it, the criterion "are ready for" apparently means "are ready to hate". There is some threshold proportion of straight males that represents a critical mass below which there is a major qualitative transition in the social dynamics, culture, character, and functioning of a cooperative organization, and this has an enormous impact on one's level of satisfaction or misery resulting from working in such organizations. This is analogous to the critical mass threshold in overall size that marks the range of transition from sub-Dunbar to super-Dunbar organizations.
A lot of people are recently noticing and worrying about the failures of two relationship matching markets for young men, those being sexual and professional. Few realize that these are just manifestations of the same, more general phenomenon.
Assuming females now constitute the majority in the younger strata of elite occupations -- I don't know if that is true -- is there a factual basis to suggest a non-meritocratic cause (e.g., admission preferences for females over equally or better qualified males in law or medical schools)? In the past, these types of professions were either not open to, or considered suitable for, women. That has changed. And given that females tend to mature earlier and are likely a bit more studious than their male counterparts, maybe the confluence of these factors explain any lopsided skew that may exist.
I'm a little less worried about this when thinking about it in terms of a really long horizon. Women who work exceptionally long hours in their 20s and 30s will tend to have fewer children on average than other women in their birth cohorts. There will be evolutionary effects of that choice after a few generations.
That makes no sense to me. No matter how many children a woman has, it's near equally likely they will have boys as girls. Where does evolution come to play?
Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? The argument is like that. If exceptionally smart and hard-working women have fewer children on average, then as several generations go by, women with genes that make them more likely to be exceptionally smart and hard-working might be a smaller share of the population than currently.
That's not to say anything about women's average intelligence vs. men in the future. It's also possible that the argument works just as well with respect to exceptionally smart and hard working men.
And it's not written in stone or anything. It's just something that makes me less worried about all of this.
It doesn't change the ratio. Smart women will have less male babies too.
And the smart men who marry smart women have fewer babies than the smart men who marry less smart women -- this is the eugenics argument (in reverse) but is merely natural (?) selection.
It's similar to pro-life women having more kids than pro-abortion women -- and at some point ('72-2022, 50 years) the demographics shift towards the ones having more kids.
We'll continue to see more smart women opt for father-less children, but it will take a few generations before the avg IQ of women is measurably lower than men's.
Unlike races, where there is already a well known difference for avg IQ for each racial group -- but it's considered racist to discuss that issue.
As stu has noted, this pattern is not sufficient to produce a world where "the avg IQ of women is measurably lower than men's". You'd also need the Y chromosome to have a large effect on IQ, and there is no evidence for this being the case.
This pattern should have a visible effect on *memetic* evolution, though.
Noah Smith, in an interview with Brian Chau, says that universities only started promoting women and minorities/immigrants in earnest about ten years ago, jettisoning excuses like "their English isn't very good" etc. even in the sciences.
In other words, this was long overdue and absolutely merit-based?
"Ten years ago" fails the smell test so badly that even an oil tanker of febreeze wouldn't help a bit.
Noah Smith is a professional propagandist and none of his claims should be trusted or repeated without independent verification.
Ah. In any case, when are you going to start blogging again Handle? Handle's Haus was great
Here's another thought experiment. Imagine a room filled with a representative sample of people in elite occupations all under 40. Include law, medicine, academia, management in business, government, and non-profits, etc. Then ask how many of those under 40s will be brimful of virtue-signalling bullshit (of one kind or another)?
This all might help explain the recent surge of male humans who identify--and insist you identify them--as women. Why not defect to the winning team?
Emily Dickinson dressed as a man so she could sneak into interesting lectures. Now men masquerade as women to get the benefits that only women get.
Cultural Anthropology Fact: At least in western society, it is acceptable and "normal" for women to dress like men (lapel suits, pants etc.), but still mostly unacceptable for men to dress like women (dresses, skirts, bras, bows in their hair etc.)
A good test case will be provided if the U.S, or other Trans-possessed nation happens to reinstitute the draft. Will transwomen claim exemption? After all, they're women, right? My guess is yes, they will. But will the same claimants then insist that transmen must be drafted? After all, they're men, right? My guess is no, they will not.
In the event of a draft, I'd predict a stampede of military aged males to "discover" they're really women. If the rate at which this happens already seems alarming enough, imagine what if will be when identifying as trans might be the only thing to save your life.
I thought I saw a news item several months ago about trans-identified Ukrainian males of military age trying to flee the country to safety with the women and children. It claimed they were stopped at the border and inducted into the military to defend the motherland. If true, you'd think the trans-friendly western media would have objected, but I can't recall hearing anything more about it.
Except I'm pretty sure more women are identifying as men.
I'm pretty sure there's an age range, like maybe 25 (don't know), where older adults who become trans are more often MtF, while under that age it's more FtM.
There will soon be a tsunami of lawsuits by adult FtM trans folk who will claim childhood victimhood and be de-transitioning.
Many countries in Europe are stopping surgical changes on women - see J. K. Rowling for some good tweets / activism protecting women.
MtF sports folk seem to be good but not great male athletes who want to win - and can win as a trans.
Completely agree about the lawsuits. They've already begun, but it's mere trickle compared to what's soon to follow. It will be fascinating to observe how the academic, cultural and legal establishments rationalize or deflect the evidence that the policies they championed as an urgent moral necessity amounted to the systemic brainwashing, sterilization, and mutilation of thousands of children, mostly girls. I predict they'll blame it on the patriarchy.
You might be right, which would hurt my hypothesis. Do you have statistics though?
Yes, it's working out the same as the war on racism. The hawks never intended to stop when they achieved equality (or at least, those who did actually did stop then). They want to rule as they imagine their opponents did over their ancestors. The system must stop letting them do it, or lose its credibility.
Just to nitpick, this doesn't apply to elected officials for the most part. Figures for the US are on the 27% - 25% range for representatives/senators and mayors, usually lower for the rest of the world (I'm writing a piece on this so I've been looking at the figures a lot). I don't know if those figures would vary if you select just the younger than 40, but I doubt it.
One possible explanation is career paths. If you aspire to be a top academic, top lawyer, etc... there's a very clear path that you have to take: university studies, graduate studies maybe. You have to grind and be patient, and women are probably better at that.
Elected officials, like top e-sports players, are usually putting in 10-12 hours per day, nearly 365 days per year. Far more men want it enough to pay those dues, than women.
Just like becoming partner in law firms - billable hour differences show top women work fewer hours than top men.
In almost every activity; so the "winner take all" winners are more likely to be men. But this continues to justify to feminists so that more 60% level women get promoted over 70% level men.
Yup, tournaments attract more men, sinecures attract more women.
I don't see either side of this as a problem; our civilization requires plenty of both. In particular, I think James Damore's critical error was drinking the kool-aid and failing to recognize that, in the big scheme of things, it was efficient for Google to become more focused on maintaining its existing properties and for most of the innovative action to move elsewhere.
There is no end to the march of "progress", unfortunately.
Also, the universities are lying on their counts on male-female class balances (perhaps by fudging when a large portion of the women say that they are "other"). It is worse than they say. A good exercise in any 2023 classroom is to just count row by row. At many law schools, you will count 70:30 female in many doctrinal classes (required for everyone). The effect is more pronounced in graduate school because many of the men who start university will drop out before they graduate. It's harder to do this sanity check with undergrad classes because of gender clustering and the dearth of required classes, but I invite anyone to go to a campus and do this count when they have a free moment.
It also helps to understand the trans-on-campus issue to see what people who generally claim to be an alt-gender actually are. The camera loves the high-effort trans. But the majority on campus are just women who are not particularly photogenic, haven't had any surgeries, and are probably not on any more hormones than is normal for any postmodern woman. The reality is their gender is just "I take SSRIs," and we've had those for decades now; the 90s is calling and they want their Prozac Generation back. But changing the semantic labels creates an illusion of social change and excitement.
I like the gender, "I take SSRIs." It's the new gender without interest in sex, and which doesn't reproduce, but is fine and getting through graduate school, and functioning as an academic, or in some schlocky corporate middle-management job.
I just checked some top under 40 lists.
ABA rising young lawyers has 20 females and 20 males.
Chronicle of philanthropy young leaders list has 20 females and 21 males.
The Fortune under 40 list and Becker's Hospital Review Health Care Leaders under 40 had substantial majority of males.
men are the carriers of status
if men are leaving a profession that profession is no longer an elite profession
the real interesting question is WHERE ARE THE <40 MEN AT ?
where ever they are at those are the REAL high status occupations
It's like watching ice melt. For a long time, nothing happens. Long after the ambient temperature has risen above freezing, nothing happens. And then you see water droplets starting to appear.
Warren Farrell, a former leader of the National Organization of Women (yes, he's a man), wrote about the increasingly many ways in which men - and especially boys - were disadvantaged in our society. He wrote about the many metrics by which, looking back on the previous 20-30 years, we had arguably become much more of a matriarchy than a patriarchy, although he didn't use the term "matriarchy" as far as I recall.
Farrell wrote these things 30 years ago.
It's been a matriarchy for a long time - especially in the home, but also now in the workplace. Cries of "patriarchy" have been a distraction from the reality for a long time - and will be, until they don't work any more to protect the new system (which some women tell themselves is justified because it's 'turn about' - as if that were any justification at all).
Men are more often willing to put in 10-12 practice hours per day on their highest priority, whether it's making their company successful, doing chess or some e-sport (like League of Legends), any pro sport, most rock musical instruments & many classical ones (most?), most art creation, most elective offices.
In "winner take all" competitions, the winners have talent, luck, AND put in huge numbers of hours. 10,000 hours is common - and there are probably far more men who have dedicated most of their productive lives to some pursuit which has, nevertheless, failed to make them the best in the world, or rich & famous.
It's known but not much discussed that avg IQ in men & women is about the same, but the 1% top & bottom of the male distribution is farther from the average. Exceptionally smart AND stupid; talented AND hopelessly helpless.
.
The endpoint is when more matriarchal women have decision making power, perhaps in wildfire prevention in CA, and their decisions result in bad outcomes - so that more folk blame women for the bad decisions. The main power of meritocracy is avoiding bad decisions.
But, as we get richer, the error of too much caution will continue to increase in order to avoid the error of too little caution (too much risk). We're only now talking about Safetyism, which seems to be one of the main problems of the Matriarchy.
Another endpoint might be when college educated women clamor for more men to have more status, but they'll have to be more unhappy than they are so far- they're still blaming men for their unhappiness rather than their foolish support for Dem policies which result in far less happiness for unmarried educated women (despite the Dem claims to be more helpful). Pointing out how unmeritocratic promotion results in less happiness might work, over time. Hasn't yet, tho some conservative women are already noting some of the issues.