I enjoyed the talk, and I agree with some of what he says. My real problem with the talk is that isn't testable - it makes an observation, then goes back into the facts to justify it. I'm not seeing enough of the hypothesis-testing approach that is the cornerstone of real science.
I don't want to seem like I'm being too hard on the guy. After all, some questions just can't be approached this way. We can measure the effectiveness of a new drug on blood pressure through hypothesis and testing, but it would be very difficult, maybe impossible, to use this approach to determine why the first world war was fought. Sometimes you just have to go back through the facts and construct a plausable case. But it isn't science anymore.
Aside from that, I agree (for what it's worth) with much of what he has to say, but I still think he has understated the degree of exclusion women have experienced from male networks. It's really damaging.
Suppose that it's true, as the author stated, that men are more likely than women to be wired for risk. Sounds reasonable enough. But that might still mean that for every 5 people with the ability and inclination do do something risky (say, found a startup), 4 are male and one is female. But the way males form networks often excludes the women - even in the modern day. I don't think it's on purpose, and there's rarely any malice, but it's just as damaging.
You generally pick friends for your startup. The people you get drunk with, stay up all night completing the compiler class with, cram into a hotel room in vegas with... and you tend to do these things with close friends who are almost always other guys. If 4/5 are guys, then the odds that a man will find like-minded buddies is much higher than it is for women.
I double majored in Math and English. It was a trip. I'd count the ratio of men to women in each class, and it was usuall between 5:1 and 10:1. And in the math class (sorry to say it), many of the women were planning on becoming math teachers.
This means that the women with the ability and inclination to do startups have to break into the boys club or they'll be left in the cold. So far, they're usually left in the cold. If this weren't the case, I have no doubt we'd see far more women in fields that require a high degree of risk, creativity, and collaboration.
A cornerstone of the male networks the author describes are put downs, and in my conversations with women who have technical degrees, they often say they couldn't handle the culture not because of the work but because of the constant jockeying for status.
The author overstates some of his claims. For example, European women made excellent contributions to herbal medicine -- the only medicine around -- until the rise of 'scientific' medicine, which caused as much as harm as good for much of its early history. The author claims that medicine was all men's doing.
This tendency to overstatement manifests as a pervasive one cause fallacy. There are many reasons for womens' and mens' relative different status -- some long term and unchanging (the politics of birth), some short term and malleable (prejudices relating to relative intellectual capacities), many in between these extremes. The author acknowledges the manifold causes of gender differences only to dismiss them -- and the motivating factors for women's cultural creation are left unexplored.
"What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed very unequally. Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society values."
I'm not sure that men's willingness to make things that people want really sets them apart from women. Across cultures, women play an important (and often exclusive) role in the economy -- drying fish or tending sheep or what have you.
Women rarely played a role in the macro-economy, true enough; but for much of history, trade within a village was for more valuable than trade between villages or nations. It's misleading to suggest that the present worthlessness of small scale trade implies the past worthlessness of women as economic engines.
I'm surprised no one caught the rather bad statistics mistake:
"Today's human population is descended from twice as many women as men... To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced. "
If you really had only half as many men reproducing as women, you'd get the twice-as-many-women-descendants after a single generation. For the ratio to be 2:1 over the whole of human history implies that it was a much milder, but still systemic, bias. It may or may not be anything evolutionary, though.
This article is more informative for what it implies about the writer/audience than its actual contents. It dabbles in a mess of pseudoscience (plus a generous dose of bolds and underlines) and ends up drawing an absurd amount of conclusions out of paragraphs smaller than a fist.
If anything, this article just plays on the what we already know/read to pander some trite preconceptions.
I don't mean to imply that I think all the points the article makes are bogus because there are some insightful things that are said, especially near the conclusion.
I do think the format is extremely poor, granted that it's an opening speech, and not a real paper. My only concern is that when people just see the abbreviated version (like what we have here), it can breed as much haywire logic as something blatantly false.
Also, in my shameless defense, here is a (not/credible) blurb about the value of psychology, which is a separate topic.
I remember reading an article by a woman (I believe it was an early 1950s style feminist, ie, a pre-feminist) who laid out the problem very simply: Every field, even fields such as dressmaking, dancing, and interior design, have men at the top producing the greatest work. There are no female-dominated endeavors [1]. I think the (also ironic) title of the essay was "Woman is a failed sex" or something like that.
[1] No longer true. A few things, such as the book publishing business are almost completely ruled by women. Not that "rulership" is necessarily "achievement".
I don't want to seem like I'm being too hard on the guy. After all, some questions just can't be approached this way. We can measure the effectiveness of a new drug on blood pressure through hypothesis and testing, but it would be very difficult, maybe impossible, to use this approach to determine why the first world war was fought. Sometimes you just have to go back through the facts and construct a plausable case. But it isn't science anymore.
Aside from that, I agree (for what it's worth) with much of what he has to say, but I still think he has understated the degree of exclusion women have experienced from male networks. It's really damaging.
Suppose that it's true, as the author stated, that men are more likely than women to be wired for risk. Sounds reasonable enough. But that might still mean that for every 5 people with the ability and inclination do do something risky (say, found a startup), 4 are male and one is female. But the way males form networks often excludes the women - even in the modern day. I don't think it's on purpose, and there's rarely any malice, but it's just as damaging.
You generally pick friends for your startup. The people you get drunk with, stay up all night completing the compiler class with, cram into a hotel room in vegas with... and you tend to do these things with close friends who are almost always other guys. If 4/5 are guys, then the odds that a man will find like-minded buddies is much higher than it is for women.
I double majored in Math and English. It was a trip. I'd count the ratio of men to women in each class, and it was usuall between 5:1 and 10:1. And in the math class (sorry to say it), many of the women were planning on becoming math teachers.
This means that the women with the ability and inclination to do startups have to break into the boys club or they'll be left in the cold. So far, they're usually left in the cold. If this weren't the case, I have no doubt we'd see far more women in fields that require a high degree of risk, creativity, and collaboration.