Christina Hoff Sommers: Foolishly Seeking Gender Equity in Math and Science

Let all the poisons that lurk in gender feminisim hatch out.

translation: if they won't give it to us because we are so special,
get the corrupt laws we got enacted through legal trickery to make them.

engineering and the rest will head down the path of men's college sports.
gradual elimination.

what they are really saying is "dumb it down to where we can play too".

like this is a game.

obviously feminists and women who think this way have been handed stuff free for too long.
and this is the same type stupidity feminists have been handing out for decades now.

it appears we are all to be considered servants to do whatever is best
for what feminists want ... well, whenever they decide they want it.
no matter the long term consequences. nice.

next they will want monetary incentives to get women to sign up.
free college for all women who participate, and so on. more freebies all 'round.
and when they graduate w/ this lees-than (affirmative action type) degree they were coerced into getting, they won't like the work, won't be good at it because they
got the science-lite degree, and will wind up being the unhappy token wherever they go.

hmmm, maybe this is a good idea after all. ha

Anytime there is a disparity in academic areas and women are "under-represented," the feminists go into hysterics about gender discrimination and male oppression.

I have never had to personally deal with this because both my daughters have genius IQ's and excelled in math and science.

However, they both CHOSE to major in the liberal arts. So they really screw up the feminist argument that young women are being excluded from math and science.

They got A grades and decided to take a different path academically. And I never heard either of them say that the boys tried to push them out or ridicule them.
(Well, they are also supermodel gorgeous, so no intelligent boy majoring in math would be so statistically stupid about his prospects for a date....)

Funny that when there is a gender "disparity" of 99% in the casualties of war, the fems don't make a peep.

I must not be properly comprehending feminist "logic."

Well, why don't they try to open the doors to teaching, nursing and other female dominated subjects. It's a percentage so a transfer will work both ways, funny thing is if the subjects were all equal in gender that females would have twice as many in every class due to the lack of males in college to begin with. The logic is simple PC bitching for money, da wittle princesses are all growed up and the government is sugar-daddy.

manonthestreet

The real concern in this report it that outside the mathematical sciences women are already in the majority, and the momentum is taking this even further. The significance of this is that society is not and has never been 'controlled' by mathematical scientist. Powerful people will always come from the verbal disciplines. Women are already predominant in all the areas (Law, finance, media, education ....) where real social power resides.

She needs to read Moxon's book. The reason men go for science, engineering, etc is mainly because those fields confer higher status than the other fields, and status is what men seek to advance in the male dominance hierarchy, so as to be more attractive as potential mates for women. Since women do not have an intra-sexual dominance hierarchy as such, they do not need to seek status, but are instead judged for mate value on youth and beauty (there is a "weak" form of dominance hierarchy among certain females to be most beautiful).

The dominance hierachy in not inter-sexual - women do not compete with men. All efforts along the line of those mentioned in this article are destined to fail. If the "culture" of the institutions of science, etc. are somehow changed so as to eliminate competition and make them more "female-friendly", all that is going to happen is that we will end up with mediocre engineers and scientists and lose our ability to compete in the global market.

-ax

p.s. Shalala is a feminist pig. That lady scares the heck out of me.

manonthestreet

"She needs to read Moxon's book. The reason men go for science, engineering, etc is mainly because those fields confer higher status than the other fields, "

Not everything can be forced into fitting Moxon's theory. The idea that Science and Engineering are high status jobs would be laughable to many who actually have such jobs. Certainly it is not my experience or those who I have worked with. I am a Mathematician with a Doctorate and have worked for most of my life amongst Engineers. All of them to a man felt themselves down trodden and used. All felt under the control of others who where not Engineers. Non thought of themselves as high status.

I do rather think Moxon's explanation is a bit thin. If nature intended us to seek status in order to be more biologically successful and act as a filter then you would expect the most successful people to produce disproportionately more off spring than the rest of us. This is not obvious the case. Indeed high status people if anything have fewer children, or no children at all, than others who do not have high status. So rather than enhancing the characteristic it becomes diminished. This is counter intuitive to how a filter is supposed to work.

That men are judged by women on their status, for mate value, is a well-researched and documented scientific fact. Moxon does not go about telling us his own "theories", for the most part..he has numerous endnotes to back up the text.

I was an engineer and software developer for many years, and I do know that my status was higher than, say, that of a male librarian, social worker, art historian, or grocery clerk..it's not an issue of how happy a given man is in his job, or whether he "thinks" he has status. These are instead societal phenomena..everyone knows that a business executive or manager, highly-paid techie, and certain other professionals are more likely to acquire the beautiful young women than a garbage truck driver. Also it is access to these women that is at issue...not the total number of offspring from any given union.

Money is by far the major proxy for male status, and the higher earners thus have higher mate value as viewed by women. Another quality which confers status onto a male is physical attractiveness.

Men do not "seek status in order to become genetic filters", if that's what you're trying to say. Rather, males simply are genetic filters - that is the purpose for the existence of males. Males compete with each other within the intra-sexual dominance hierarchy (DH), for the prize of acquiring the most beautiful women. Those males who come out closer to the top of the DH, having competed successfully due to their superior attributes, are thus more likely to spread their genes; this contributes to the quality of the gene pool. Whereas the majority (or most) males, who are of relatively low-status in the DH, are less likely to reproduce thus tending to isolate an "weed out" less robust genes. Males near the bottom end, such as say homeless mentally ill men, are essentially relegated to reproductive oblivion.

The DH operates mostly at an unconscious level, and thus can only be uncoverd with the tools of scientific psychology. Very recent research from evolutionary psychology and other fields has yielded some astonishing results which are really going to shake things up over the next couple of decades. Below I quote Warren Farrell's review of "The Woman Racket"

"The Woman Racket will fascinate you as it teaches you how social scientists have gotten it wrong and how feminists have gotten it backwards. The Woman Racket is an extraordinarily thoughtful, erudite, well-researched, politically incorrect and courageous journey into why men are the way they are--and why women are the way they are. If you're a student of men and women, prepare to become a scholar; if you are involved in social services or social policy, prepare to become a pioneer."

manonthestreet

For a long time I lived in a mining area in the UK. Miners where well know for having large families. I don't think miners where ever thought of as high status but reproduced prolifically.

Certainly men do act as a filter in the sense that not all men reproduce. But to then make some theory from this and claim that only the most successful men reproduce is to take the augment a step further. Beyond the obvious that women traditionally tend to marry men who can support them, the observation all around is that there are many counter examples to this theory. Again where I use to live was the single mother capital of Europe. These girls where not seeking high status men to mate with but to put it bluntly when doing it with the local unemployed youth. So in what sense was the filter operating? You can of course find another explanation but if you have to keep on doing this for each counter example then may be something is wrong with the theory.

I'm with you Ax on the Moxon book. Great book. Very well researched and his info turns feminism and the ideological social scientists out to pasture. Great quote from Farrell. That sums up the book nicely. Every man should read this book. It is that important.

A couple of points. The status issue of engineers needs to focus not on their status after the fact but on their choice of engineering based on their presumption of status when they were in college. They chose it becuase it ***appeared*** to be a high status option.

I think one of the more fascinating aspects of the book is the research cited that shows men are able to unconsciously detect the relative placement of other men on the DH through a sub-vocal auditory frequency. When that frequency was blocked and men were not able to hear it there was reported to be social chaos between the men as a result. There is so much more for us to learn about men and their unique situations and the Moxon book is a great start.

Effective birth control has also impacted the concept of the DH and women's choice of male partners. It's interesting stuff.

The high end of the DH is where the glamour resides and the lights flash. The high status men and the most attractive females. The DH tries to get those two together in order to have offspring that are products of the best of both male and female. But the genetic filter is not primarily meant to have a greater number of offspring from the best of the women and the best of the men though that is a welcome by-product. My understanding of the genetic filter is that the real work of the filter is to minimize replication error and genetic problems. By filtering these problems to the bottom of the DH and minimizing the liklihood of reproduction of those who have those problems it is keeping the genetic pool protected from the very expensive waste of the limited resource of eggs and the expenditure of energy that might result from added genetic problems into the population.

I'm terrible at describing the genetic filter (and some other things from the book) though I feel I do understand it..in accordance with your own description. It took me a few readings to understand the "cheater detection" mechanism..

As far as the status of engineers I do of course mean to imply that men seek to become engineers because they believe that will lead to higher status. But philosophically speaking, young men would no longer seek that career path if it did not in fact confer some actual status. Although I suspect you raised this point to be more in line with the original discussion; and re: Hoff-Sommers (or should I say re: Summers!), I'm sure men do in general have a greater natural aptitude for math, engineering etc. than do women (recognizing that men collect at the high and low ends of the scale in many endeavors, I do still believe the average aptitude for these fields is greater in men); and of course this ties in with our previous discussion of types of brain tissue, increased focus in men, etc.

Of course in the long run these things are all tied in together - the natural aptitude and interest, and the systematic methods of learing in these fields..competing and doing well in them leads to relatively higher status jobs which then use those attributes characteristic of men (I think Moxon would say that the average work-a-day engineer or programmer is still a low-status male in the grander scheme of things..which I think is what trotter was getting at. And of course how a given man views himself and feels about his job, whether he considers himself a success, is going to affect the image he presents to potential mates).

I had until a few months ago corresponded somewhat regularly with Rudov..we seemed to agree on a lot of things as far as women, but then when I mentioned Moxon's book and gave a brief description of it, Marc almost flipped out..as I recall he said "[ax], if this guy Moxon wrote what you say he wrote, he has his head up his a**!! Men are free to give women as little or as much as they (men) want to..it's as simple as that. If you're going to believe that other stuff, you have no business looking at my web site!!"

I did look at his web site (www.thenononsenseman.com) once more..to order his book ("The Man's No-Nonsense Guide to Women" or something like that). I got it in the mail a few weeks ago and browsed it - it's essentially a combination of rubbish and common sense. It's obvious Rudov has been very successful with women - in fact he tells us so. So then it suddenly dawned on me - he is a high-status male! (media appearances, successful investor, MBA and engineering backgrounds, handsome, etc..) Writing from that viewpoint, no wonder it's "simple" to him.

Oh well, just a theory. I can't say I agree with much of his politics anyway (just the stuff about women) so I don't miss corresponding with him.

-ax

manonthestreet

Just a few observations on what I have read above. I don't know if men choose engineering because of the status involved. In my over twenty years of teaching engineers I can offer some other explanations. Firstly the entry requirements can be relatively low. That was certainly the case for the courses I taught. There where not enough students and it really wasn't difficult to get a place. Secondly the men wanted to avoid the more verbal subjects which don't appeal to them at all. Thirdly in a former industrial area engineering was seen as a 'male' subject. Of course these reasons might not have been true say 50 years ago but they are true now.

Of the professional engineers I have know who are supposed to have high status most where married but none had a glamorous wife. Some where, not wishing to be unkind, rather gruesome. So the idea that high status men sweep up the glamorous women did not work in these cases.

I think the mechanism that is being described is really a minority activity effecting only the very rich and/or powerful. But this is a tiny part of the whole and really is not a discovery at all but something that has been know for a very long time. I am sure that any of you reading this who won the lottery could soon scoop up a reasonable model. Of course soon after that you wouldn't retain your winnings and would be back to posting on this site.

"Of the professional engineers I have know who are supposed to have high status most where married but none had a glamorous wife"

I'm not sure if by "professional engineers" you specifically mean registered P.E.'s, but even most of them fall into the category I stated above, that of the bulk of males which is relatively low-status (my comment about "work-a-day" engineers). It might have sounded from the beginning like I was saying "engineers are high status", but that would probably have been better-worded as "most engineers occupy a status which is a safe distance from being the lowest-of-the-low" or something. It's not as if there is strictly a two-level caste system.

"the idea that high status men sweep up the glamorous women did not work in these cases"

Again, it is access to the beautiful women which is at issue; that doesn't imply anything deterministic about a given union. Think about Bill Clinton - Hillary's a scag (though maybe not when she was young), but Clinton had access to Gennifer Flowers, the beautiful interns, and whoever else..Elliott Spitzer is an even more "direct" example - due to his high earnings, he had access to the $15k call girls, who are generally better-looking than the street walkers on skid row (also his wife's pretty good looking from what I could tell).

You're right that a lot of this stuff seems like common sense, but due to decades of being hood-winked by feminists, social scientists with all their armchair theorizing, and a host of other ideologues, we've all been seduced into believing the proverbial "black is white" (or at least to pretend we believe it). It takes a firm sceintific hand to reverse or supplant all this.
-ax

"I am sure that any of you reading this who won the lottery could soon scoop up a reasonable model. Of course soon after that you wouldn't retain your winnings and would be back to posting on this site"

That reminds me of guys who stop posting here for a couple years - perhaps they started going with someone..but as sure as I'm sittin' here they'll be back!

-ax

Ax - Yes we agree on all points. My comments were more pointed towards the other poster who seemed to be dismissing Moxon based on the idea that engineers were not high status. I was trying to point out that the "business end" of the DH was the low end, not the high end. It is at the low end where the filtering takes place. How many women want to have babies with a homeless man? duh.

manonthestreet

"How many women want to have babies with a homeless man? duh."

Well may be but it's not what Moxon said during a 45 minute interview with an Australian Men's Rights radio show/podcast. In that discussion the only examples where of successful men getting the most attractive women.

But to take your point about the bottom end of the spectrum. It's not true that women will not have sex with homeless men. What they won't do is marry them. They will also have children with them provided they can support the child by other means. This happens time and time again. So there is no genetic screening taking place and no filter is working in such circumstances. The example of the single mother with several offspring by multiple fathers can not be one that is totally unfamiliar or unconvincing to you. The fathers in such cases may well be homeless in the sense that they have no home of their own. So if these thing are happening it means that the idea of a filter is at best a limited explanation of what if any are the mechanisms governing such behaviour.

Yes, I would agree that poor low status women are capable of having sex with low status men and having babies as a result. I think that this scenario has been acutely worsened by our own lawmakers who have replaced the father's role as provider and protector so that women now depend on uncle sam as the alpha high status male who will provide and protect. This is a fairly recent phenomenom. The DH worked pretty well up until about 50 years ago when we started having an explosion of out of wedlock babies. Fifty years ago women were shamed for having babies out of wedlock. We had special places of shame for them to go to ("homes for unwed mothers") to have the child. Society worked unaware of their role in the DH but they worked just the same. That is now a thing of the past with young women being supported in having out of wedlock babies and knowing that their bills will be payed by a government sugar daddy. This is largely our own doing. Matters are made worse with the advent of effective birth control and higher status families having fewer babies.

manonthestreet

Yes what you say Tom is so. But what it shows is that the filter mechanism is at least in part a social phenomena rather than some intrinsic natural process, since it changes with circumstances. It is difficult to be certain what the natural situation really is. There may in fact not be such a thing at all no matter how convinced one might be. What there can be is a firm belief in what one would wish to see and what one would prefer. On that point we probably would be as one.

Yes, there is always an interplay of the biological with the social. No way around it. This does not negate the importance of either. We have lived in a culture that has made the bogus, one-sided and damaging claim for 40 years that everything results from the forces of socialization. This has been used to batter men for not being "as good as" women and used as evidence that there is something WRONG with men etc etc. This must stop. We need to see the biological side and honor its impact.

The question is further complicated by human consciousness. The DH is much easier to see and to study in animal populations. The big horn sheep are an obvious example where the sheep who have the biggest horns and can best the others in their ramming contests are the ones who are allowed to mate. Bird populations are not so dissimilar. When you mix in human consciousness and decision making based on desires/attachments etc then you will never have as clear a DH as you have with the animal kingdom. But this does not mean that there is no such thing as a DH in humans. It just dictates that it is different and less obvious. Like it or not, we are critters too.

A number of interesting "popular science" books have come out recently, describing in new form the "nature vs. nurture" debate. These books are written by actual scientists who frame the whole issue in new terms - most if not all of them say such a dichotomy is a chimera. But there's no question that more and more aspects of human behavior are being found to be due to genetics, as these authors will convince you beyond doubt.

The one author I'd highly recommend is Matt Ridley, "Nature via Nurture" (later under the title "The Agile Gene"). (He wrote another book called "The Red Queen" which I haven't read yet so can't really comment on it). Another is Steven Pinker, MIT psychologist "The Blank Slate" - a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

There are others..LeDoux, Gazzaniga, Damasio..

One thing to keep in mind, at least when reading Ridley, is that he seems to consider "nurture" to be in part the immediate environment such as the womb. Some emphasis on childhood learning, but he doesn't seem to talk about "socialization" much, at least not under that nomenclature.
-ax