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)
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