A Hillary- and Sheryl-supporting Facebook friend posted the following:
Let’s let everyone talk about it – open up the HR files and voices. Women have higher IQs, more college degrees, higher grades, but when they join the workplace they are blocked from advancement, wages, credit, and impact… And the millennials according to several studies are far worse in accepting female tech talent than the baby boomers that are now over 65. Studies have shown that millennial men can’t fairly assess female talent. For example this HBR study.
The cited Harvard Business Review article:
The researchers found that male students systematically overestimated the knowledge of the men in their [college biology] classes in comparison with the women. Moreover, as the academic term progressed, the men’s faulty appraisal of their classmates’ abilities increased despite clear evidence of the women’s superior class performance. In every biology class examined, a man was considered the most renowned student — even when a woman had far better grades. In contrast, the female students surveyed did not show bias, accurately evaluating their fellow students based on performance.
In a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, Harris Poll found that young men were less open to accepting women leaders than older men were. Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. (The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.)
If women have “higher IQs, more college degrees, higher grades” and these things can translate into effective higher performance at work, why don’t working-age men recognize this?
Could it be that the women with the highest IQs are not in the workforce at all? “Why Women Are Leaving the Workforce in Record Numbers,” (Fiscal Times, April 17, 2013):
A recent study by Joni Hersch, professor at Vanderbilt Law School, makes that case. She looks at female graduates of our top universities – those presumably who have the best shot at shattering the glass ceiling – and finds that once they have children, they are more likely to quit their jobs than are women who graduated from less selective schools. … Perhaps most astonishing is that only 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time, compared to 66 percent from second-tier schools.”
If we assume that high IQ+good grades leads to “top school,” it would seem that the women who do best in school are the least attached to the U.S. labor force. So men could have a low opinion of women in the workplace because the best women have figured out “The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentle[wo]man … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.” (Cicero) But this can’t explain why men underestimate the performance of their female peers in biology classes.
What about changes in public policy? The HBR study compares men over 65 with their Millennial brothers. Men over 65 grew up in an Equal Opportunity (no discrimination) legal environment. Millennials grew up in an Affirmative Action (“positive discrimination”) environment.
How about changes in media coverage? Men over 65 weren’t exposed to a lot of articles celebrating women for simple achievements (see Are women the new children?). Maybe all of the do-gooders trying to help women by cheerleading are convincing men that women are actually intellectually inferior? Millennials have grown up in an environment where adult women are regularly celebrated for things that 12-year-old boys can do. Wouldn’t this tend to give them the idea that adult women aren’t competitive with adult men?
What about simple organized resistance by privileged white males? They recognize that women are superior and therefore, to preserve their unearned dominance, collude to exclude women from the workplace. This seems tough to square with the fact that the privileged white males welcomed Asian male coworkers (for example, Google, the “Uber standard” of chauvinism, has an Indian CEO). Why would white men allow themselves to be unseated by non-white men but object to being unseated by white non-men?
Idea to test this last theory: do partnerships and male-owned closely held companies hire and promote women at a higher rate than do public corporations and government? A prejudiced manager at a big company or government agency, for example, can preferentially hire less qualified people without suffering any immediate personal reduction in pay. A prejudiced partner or business owner, however, has to pay for any prejudiced hiring decision with lower earnings. (Ellen Pao, of course, was alleging that the Kleiner Perkins partners wanted to make themselves poorer by discriminating against her due to her gender ID.)
[Anecdotal data: As an owner-manager of a small software company I promoted a higher percentage of the female developers to management. I found that the women were more likely to listen to customers and end-users and work toward meeting customer needs as opposed to doing stuff that a programmer might consider “cool,” but that a customer or end-user wouldn’t be able to notice. The women were not necessarily the most experienced, productive, or accomplished software developers per se, but they were, in my opinion at the time, more likely to be effective in the management role than their male peers.]
Readers: How to explain the fact that younger men, who’ve been exposed to a lot more gender equality propaganda, have a lower opinion of women than do older men?
[Separately, I think the post shows at least one gender difference. James Damore, who identifies as a man (as far as I know), cited social science suggesting that men might be more likely to be attracted to the dreary solitary coding jobs that Silicon Valley offers. He was ostracized for his heresy. My Facebook friend, who identifies as a woman, cited social science suggesting that women are more intelligent than men, better educated, and thus better suited to almost every kind of job. Her posting garnered roughly 50 “likes”.]
Related (Department of “The Science is Settled”):
- Women in 4 out of 5 countries surveyed out-score men by 0.5 to 1.5 points (Psychology Today, July 2012)
- “Why Women Are Smarter Than Men” (Forbes, June 2016); women have equal IQs but much higher emotional intelligence. [Just imagine how likely Forbes would have been to publish this piece if the author’s conclusion had been “Despite equal IQs, men are smarter than women overall.”]
- Professor Dimitri van der Linden, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said: “We found that the average IQ of men was about four points above that of women. (Express, July 2, 2017)
What an incredible amount of noisy bullshit.
The facts are simple.
1) There are plenty of smart women, plenty of smart men, and no difference has been found in the average that is reliably reproducible, although subtle disparities allow you to manipulate either sex to come out ahead by changing the weights and giving different cognitive abilities more importance.
2) The male variance is higher so there are more men at the extremes, and men are more likely to devote themselves obsessively to narrow fields which also gives more men at the extremes, but neither of these factors is important at the level of ordinary performance, hiring, and promotion, you get more information about someone’s capabilities from the first 30 seconds of interviewing them than from knowing what sex they are, if you are a good interviewers.
3) Women are more people-oriented than men on average, so on average more of them will choose people-oriented occupations (especially if you count raising children as people-oriented) and fewer of them will choose thing-oriented technical jobs
4) Not. All. Differences. Are. Differences. Of. Value. The correct response of an emotionally mature adult to being informed of 1), 2), and 3) is “So what?”. The correct response to someone who finds 1), 2), and 3) to be intolerable hatefacts is “you are a stupid crybaby”. There is no shortage of enlightened liberal companies who will raise absolutely no career barriers to women for being women, and they will be expected to prosper at the expense of less enlightened companies who prevent themselves from hiring the best people, and failing to acknowledge this and using a statistical disparity to browbeat even enlightened modern liberal corporate executives is an indication that you yourself are probably a jealous, incompetent, and nasty person, and failure by an enlightened modern liberal corporate executive to ignore such an unpleasant and incorrect person is an indication of either stupidity or cowardice.
Another factor to consider: when you go around constantly telling some group of people how much you hate them, you probably shouldn’t be too surprised if some of them start to hate you back.
Agreed with Ken above. Young women almost reach levels of man-hate that retired menopausal women have for decades. Maybe young men are tired of being baselessly regarded as rapists and slackers by their privileged princess peers.
How millenials have changed since their days of “being awesome”. The fear of getting sued for sneezing, new tax brackets which penalize men, the long hours worked because of coworker incompetance, have all come of age. Are we on the verge of, heaven forbid, the first millenial republican?
“no difference has been found in the average that is reliably reproducible”.
No difference in the average you say, huh ? Riddle me that, Batman, then:
“high school boys outperformed girls on the 2016 SAT math test with an average score of 524 points compared to the average score of 494 for females”
http://www.aei.org/publication/2016-sat-test-results-confirm-pattern-thats-persisted-for-45-years-high-school-boys-are-better-at-math-than-girls/
I’ve witnessed hostility towards women while contracting in Fortune 500 tech companies. The hostility did come from millennial men, but more specifically it came from, uh lets say, “recent arrivals from cultures where women’s rights are still emerging” (PC enough?). The hostility was obvious and cringe-worthy to see, but if I dared to report anything I’m pretty sure I (white male engineer) would have been the one berated by someone from the human resources dept.
I gave up on tracking down the link when I had to submit things to download. But “comfortable” is a fairly ambiguous term for a survey? A couple of other thoughts:
Several large tech corporations (including mine) are trying to get to gender parity ASAP – which greatly impacts millennials looking to get a job, but probably not the over 65 group (senior managers or retired). Middle management feels that burden too in promotions. If the time average of discrimination =0, that’s the same as no discrimination!
If we believe IQ says women are smarter than men, does that mean we believe what it says about difference between other groups? Especially when they are a lot larger than the male/female difference?
Ivan, that’s a math subtest. I was talking about *general* intelligence differences, across enough subtests that you can’t make either group come out ahead by manipulating weights. Between sexes, unlike with races, no such results are reliably reproducible.
Joe:
1. You are moving goalposts –that’s not kosher. In your original statement, you did not use the word “general”, you stated that “*no* difference has been found in the average that is reliably reproducible”. The SAT math scores directly contradict your original statement.
2. Presumably, good math SAT scores are likely a necessary precondition for a career in STEM, at least.
3. If by “general intelligence you mean IQ scores, then results are inconclusive. According to one of the references above, the latest measurements indicate there’s about a 4 point difference in the IQ scores which is about the same, i.e. 1/3 SD, as it it is with the math SAT scores.
Ivan: Everyone doesn’t take the SAT, so greater variation among males could explain the difference in SAT scores even if there is no average difference in math ability between males in females in the general population.
Neal:
If you look carefully at the results, the difference exists precisely in the average. The SD difference is also present although is not as substantial as popularly believed: 116(f) vs 126(f). So the right-most part of the female high-scorers is affected by both the shifted average and the variance.
Interestingly, the gap in the averages has been virtually unchanged for many years despite all the herculean efforts to reduce it.
@Ivan: The higher SD for males suggests that there will be a few more males in the right tail which would pull up the male average relative to females. In the general population, they would be balanced by a few more males in the left tail, but those individuals don’t take the SAT.
>despite all the herculean efforts to reduce
herculean efforts?
“Perhaps most astonishing is that only 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time, compared to 66 percent from second-tier schools.”
Women with elite degrees attended school with men who earn elite degrees. They then get married, and don’t need to worry about work.
@Neal:
The hypothesis that the SAT takers are mainly right-curvers coupled with the male greater variance is a plausible math gap explanation. It was suggested, among others, by Larry Summers (the sin he was excommunicated from Harvard for as I recall).
There is research contradicting the hypothesis, however. The research shows that a 0.29 SD math skills gap in the mean , slightly less than the math SAT score gap, exists across the entire high school population. Furthermore, a gap of 0.205 SD arises as early as in the third grade:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/an_empirical_analysis_of_the_gender_gap_in_mathematics.pdf
The study fails to resolve the mystery.
philg, “is that only 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time”. MBA degree is no qualifier for smartest people. Brief look at MBA programs requirements shows that it has lowest undergraduate GPA requirement of all graduate studies.
gn 6, not sure what you were afraid of to report to HR but I doubt it would have any effect. There seems to be such subculture and “stupid blond” jokes seem to proliferate. From my experience this is a misconceptions that does not pass reality test but somehow the jokes seem to be culturally acceptable.
Dsgntd – “Women with elite degrees attended school with men who earn elite degrees. They then get married, and don’t need to worry about work.”
Given they have the same education, why would the women not have to worry about work? Do the men not get the same pass on worrying?