8 ms·

>This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at cer

>This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case? People are different, sets of people differ along various, sometimes similar parameters. >This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality. It really shouldn't though. Differing from one subset of people should not impact your rights as a human being. 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Am I not getting this?

omonra 11y ago
"'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Am I not getting this?" You're so 10 years behind the ball. Equality now means equality of results. Since everybody [important] knows that women have the same skills & work the same jobs & the same hours as men, their being paid less is only result of misogyny & sexism on part of their employers.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. The GP was being very sarcastic (there's no way he/she actually meant this). What you wrote is what gender equality should be about. However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other.
- mark_integerdsv 11y ago
  I am not a smart man. It is slowly dawning on me that I am missing some not so subtle sarcasm.
  - rorykoehler 11y ago
    If you were a woman however....
- pron 11y ago
  > However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other. Not at all. The idea is that the sexes (and the races) be treated similarly in society, and not have their choices limited -- not just by laws but by hidden biases which translate to social pressure. Most of what you call "gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media" is actually the ideology of gender equality which was formed after studying the results of decades of research. OTOH, most of its opponents base their opposition on nothing but their personal perception of the world, which is, of course, skewed and very inaccurate. Like in some other issues, there's a huge knowledge gap between both opposing sides.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > by hidden biases which translate to social pressure There are two kinds of biases here. Those which are just accidents of history and those which arise from the observable biological differences between sexes. If you deny the existence of the second group, you also have to deny that there are biological differences between sexes (apart from reproductive organs), at which point I'd suggest going outside and taking a look around. Conversely, if you accept that different sexes have different strengths and weaknesses, you should expect nonequal representation of genders in various occupations even in the most perfect, utopian, egalitarian and meritocratic society. My issue with the way gender equality is currently discussed is that people deny the existence of biological differences and their consequences, treating everything as baseless cultural bias that needs to be conquered. (Actually, my real issue is with people who are being assholes about promoting their side. Which happens equally on both sides of the issue, and that makes the whole topic toxic.) And whatever results are of those "decades of research" (I've never personally seen being invoked, by either side), they have to agree with observable reality - otherwise, they're just results of crap research. Given the state of psychology and social sciences, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest (and no, I don't approve or criticize research based on wich side it supports, I view all soft science research with very strong suspicion).
    - 11y ago
- ap22213 11y ago
  Maybe I'm missing a lot of the important media, but I haven't seen what you're describing. Which are the media outlets where you're seeing a fight and push for pretending that biological differences don't exist? Even the original article states that there are differences. Could you provide some examples so that I can see what you're seeing? Most reasonable people that I know, of either gender, understand that the average man is physically stronger than the average woman. That's a clear distinction. But, lots of other traits are not clear at all, even though they are implied without good evidence. And, in most or all cases there is enough overlap in ability (e.g. the strongest woman is much stronger than the weakest man) As others mention, the issue of gender rights that I see is one of opportunity and access. The question that's raised is whether the culture imposes biases, implicit restrictions and even punishments when there should be none.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    > Which are the media outlets where you're seeing a fight and push for pretending that biological differences don't exist? It started in academia, but quickly spread to media, but the Larry Summers kerfuffle at Harvard comes to mind. In an academic context, Summers decides to be provocative and asks if biological differences could account for some gender gaps. He later gets run out of town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_between_the_sexes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b...
    - leereeves 11y ago
      This kind of political opposition might explain why less research exists documenting the existence of sex differences.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      Funny, I was going to use his example to prove the opposite point. How many people in the mainstream media are talking about the underrepresention of women among Fields Medalists? The vast amount of attention is focused on jobs where the distribution of genius-level IQs,[1] is not relevant: programmers, CEOs, business executives, etc. And speaking of Summers, it's hilarious how people will cite him while ignoring his underlying point about aptitude distribution. Almost 40% of kids who have a 700+ math SAT are girls. Using Summers' reasoning we should see a lot more women in programming and engineering. [1] This is leaving aside findings subsequent to Summers' comments that over time the disparity between men and women in IQ scores is narrowing.
- mjevans 11y ago
  Speaking of gender equality, neither he/she nor she/he (though I've been told by those who've focused on that in college that both are correct) is equal. True equality is the use of singular they; though they is really a set of any (unspecified) size.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I try to use singular "they" whenever it doesn't sound utterly awkward or doesn't make sentence ambiguous (e.g. "OP went to see the group but they're late"). But singular they is a relatively new concept for me (I haven't heard of it when I was first learning English), so I sometimes default to he/she when writing quickly.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    > True equality is the use of singular they I find rigid rules for language to be Orwellian, and I've always found the singular 'they' to be at least as awkward as the gender-neutral 'he'. An alternate "true equality" would be to generously extend the benefit of the doubt to everyone. And to teach our children to be strong enough to deal with inaccurate pronouns, on occasion. I'd rather my daughter get her strength from better sources than offense and identity politics.
    - yarrel 11y ago
      I find "they" to only be awkward where it's ambiguous (the same as "he"). It's more Shakespearean than Orwellian. ;-)
- Retric 11y ago
  The biological differences between genders are fairly small in comparison to the standard deviation. Consider on average men may have 20% more upper body strength than the average women. But, some men have 1/2 the upper body strength of the average women, and some women have twice the upper body strength than the average man. Further there are lot's of trends that run counter to the biology, for example on average women make better snipers than men.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That's all good. In the case you described, in a perfect egalitarian, meritocratic society you would expect to find more men than women in the army in general, but maybe more women than men doing sniper duty. That's how averages will play out with zero gender discrimination. In other words - just because an industry is not 50/50 men/women, doesn't mean there's sexual discrimination going on. Even if the differences themselves are small, the very fact that they're there mean that women have comparative advantage over men in some areas, while men have that advantage over women in other. We exploit that concept in international trade, and yet many find it wrong to exploit it at the society level. The question we should be asking is: which "social biases" arise from comparative advantage of sexes? Maybe they're ok and we should leave those biases be, while removing those that don't give any utility? Hard-equalizing everything (by e.g. pushing for 50/50 ration of genders in every industry) seems to be an outcome worse for everybody.
    - aianus 11y ago
      Even a small difference in the mean or sd for a given attribute will result in enormous gender imbalances for jobs requiring an extreme value of that attribute. If you select people totally at random (no discrimination!) from the population of people with >130 IQ to work at Facebook and the sd for men in the general population is 11 IQ points instead of 10 for women, you'll wind up with a 70% male workforce at Facebook. Similarly if men had a mean IQ of 101 instead of 99 for women, Facebook would have a 66% male workforce. From R: women <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE) men <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 11, lower.tail = FALSE) scaling <- 100/(women+men) men * scaling [1] 70.28561 women * scaling [1] 29.71439 women <- pnorm(130, mean = 99, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE) men <- pnorm(130, mean = 101, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE) scaling <- 100/(women+men) men * scaling [1] 65.8503 women * scaling [1] 34.1497
- rayiner 11y ago
  > What you wrote is what gender equality should be about. However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other. Gender equality being fought in the media is about presuming that disparities in representation are the result of discrimination unless there is evidence to rebut that presumption. Nobody in the mainstream media is talking about the low representation of women in positions that require lots of physical strength because we have evidence of such differences. The difference is not being willing to accept "oh it's just different preferences" as a reason for observed disparities without evidence.
  - caseysoftware 11y ago
    > Nobody in the mainstream media is talking about the low representation of women in positions that require lots of physical strength because we have evidence of such differences. The hundreds of articles about lack of women in combat positions and in the special forces tend to disagree with you. In both of those areas, pure physical strength is one of the first requirements.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      The articles about women in combat positions are almost all about the military's removing explicit bans on women in combat positions and instituting gender neutral physical requirements.
      - scottlocklin 11y ago
        Which we all know means "lower physical requirements" -which is, as some people like to say, "problematic."
        aninhumer 11y ago
        What paranoid nonsense is this? Gender neutral physical requirements just means you change "men who can lift Xkg" into "people who can lift Xkg". If that still happens to exclude most women, so be it.
pron 11y ago
> Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case? Of course! Especially with the "naturally" part. Biological differences in pertinent cognitive abilities, while they certainly exist, have never been shown to be too big (certainly not big enough to be the major cause for observed differences in representation). It is certainly logical to believe that most observed differences are mostly explained by social causes. > 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Not exactly. Equal rights implies legal rights, and gender equality (as well as racial equality) goes beyond that. The idea is that the sexes (and the races) be treated similarly in society, and not have their choices limited -- not just by laws but by hidden biases which translate to social pressure. The desired result is equal power not equal rights (but, as you correctly note, not "sameness"), as rights alone are a necessary but insufficient condition in the change of the power distribution.
- douche 11y ago
  It's demonstrably true that, while men and women are, on average, about the same in cognitive abilities, it's also true that the distributions are not the same. There are much bigger "tails" for men[2] - you've got more men at the top end of the spectrum, and also more men at the absolute bottom of the spectrum[1]. [1] http://mn.gov/mnddc/parallels2/pdf/80s/82/82-PMR-ARC.pdf http://mn.gov/mnddc/parallels2/pdf/80s/82/82-PMR-ARC.pdf [2] https://www.aei.org/publication/are-there-more-girl-geniuses/ https://www.aei.org/publication/are-there-more-girl-geniuses...
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    I was thinking about this concept abstractly (deviations from the norm evolutionarily). I'm not trying to dispute the data you have here, but rather play the devil's advocate to propose an alternative theory which might contradict the data. I'll preface this by saying I already know the (correct and definitive) rebuttal to this line of thought, but it's fruitful to mention the problem nonetheless. Men are the risky sex, relative to the propagation of the gene lineage. Men have a higher chance of not reproducing either as a result of sexual competition or death, but also the capability of reproducing many times in the proper scenario. Why does it make sense for men to be more variable? Why aren't women the variable sex? Females get a huge advantage in reproduction of their genes: they are the gatekeeper of the gene line. An undesirable female will probably still reproduce, whereas an undesirable male probably won't. Why aren't females extremely variable instead of males? Females could biologically "get away" with extreme (but viable) variation because they're practically guaranteed to reproduce anyway. Males being extremely variable merely results in a lot of detritus at the edges-- wasted energy from the perspective of the parents / gene line. Isn't there an evolutionary pressure against wasteful reproduction?
ewzimm 11y ago
I think the dangerous part is taking something biological and trying to make a direct association with something as vaguely defined as emotional intelligence. This kind of thing is extremely dependent on culture. If you take an American with high emotional intelligence and plant them in Finland, they aren't necessarily going to be able to read people the same way. It's hard to imagine a case where this kind of thing isn't a learned ability. It's like saying men are better at Algebra. Most people are capable of being perfect at Algebra with the right training and focus. It's just a matter of moving numbers around in a very predictable way. Responding to people's emotional cues is similarly something trainable, but because it's cultural and more difficult to define precisely (and what isn't less precise than math?), it tends to acquire a more mystical aura and lends itself to being defined as something gender specific when that might not really be the case at all. Maybe it really is, but we have no hard evidence either way, and any statistics about it have a high probability of being culturally biased. In the long run, I don't think that training new generations of people to respond to emotions will be any more effective than recording successful interactions and using the data to train computers to do the same thing. With a large enough data set, a good enough algorithm that can vary tone of voice in response to emotional cues is going to be more consistent than a large workforce doing the same thing. With humans, you'll get more exceptional talents, but you'll also get more really awful people, and with the state of the Internet, just one awful customer service experience can go viral and ruin a company's reputation. Even if computers aren't as good as the most exceptional people at responding to emotions, I think the jobs will tend toward the computers there too for the sake of protecting against those few employees who aren't good, don't care, or are just having a bad day and take it out on customers. There will still be high-end services where people care about being served by people, but for commodity customer service, computers will win within a few decades (and this applies to managing employees too, particularly in situations like scheduling, but I think middle management will be slower to switch for cultural reasons, since managers actually have some control over keeping their jobs).
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Equality in rights without regard for equality in duties will result in inequality.

omonra 11y ago

"'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Am I not getting this?" You're so 10 years behind the ball. Equality now means equality of results. Since everybody [important] knows that women have the same skills & work the same jobs & the same hours as men, their being paid less is only result of misogyny & sexism on part of their employers.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. The GP was being very sarcastic (there's no way he/she actually meant this). What you wrote is what gender equality should be about. However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other.

mark_integerdsv 11y ago
I am not a smart man. It is slowly dawning on me that I am missing some not so subtle sarcasm.
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  If you were a woman however....
pron 11y ago
> However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other. Not at all. The idea is that the sexes (and the races) be treated similarly in society, and not have their choices limited -- not just by laws but by hidden biases which translate to social pressure. Most of what you call "gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media" is actually the ideology of gender equality which was formed after studying the results of decades of research. OTOH, most of its opponents base their opposition on nothing but their personal perception of the world, which is, of course, skewed and very inaccurate. Like in some other issues, there's a huge knowledge gap between both opposing sides.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > by hidden biases which translate to social pressure There are two kinds of biases here. Those which are just accidents of history and those which arise from the observable biological differences between sexes. If you deny the existence of the second group, you also have to deny that there are biological differences between sexes (apart from reproductive organs), at which point I'd suggest going outside and taking a look around. Conversely, if you accept that different sexes have different strengths and weaknesses, you should expect nonequal representation of genders in various occupations even in the most perfect, utopian, egalitarian and meritocratic society. My issue with the way gender equality is currently discussed is that people deny the existence of biological differences and their consequences, treating everything as baseless cultural bias that needs to be conquered. (Actually, my real issue is with people who are being assholes about promoting their side. Which happens equally on both sides of the issue, and that makes the whole topic toxic.) And whatever results are of those "decades of research" (I've never personally seen being invoked, by either side), they have to agree with observable reality - otherwise, they're just results of crap research. Given the state of psychology and social sciences, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest (and no, I don't approve or criticize research based on wich side it supports, I view all soft science research with very strong suspicion).
  - 11y ago
ap22213 11y ago
Maybe I'm missing a lot of the important media, but I haven't seen what you're describing. Which are the media outlets where you're seeing a fight and push for pretending that biological differences don't exist? Even the original article states that there are differences. Could you provide some examples so that I can see what you're seeing? Most reasonable people that I know, of either gender, understand that the average man is physically stronger than the average woman. That's a clear distinction. But, lots of other traits are not clear at all, even though they are implied without good evidence. And, in most or all cases there is enough overlap in ability (e.g. the strongest woman is much stronger than the weakest man) As others mention, the issue of gender rights that I see is one of opportunity and access. The question that's raised is whether the culture imposes biases, implicit restrictions and even punishments when there should be none.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- humanrebar 11y ago
  > Which are the media outlets where you're seeing a fight and push for pretending that biological differences don't exist? It started in academia, but quickly spread to media, but the Larry Summers kerfuffle at Harvard comes to mind. In an academic context, Summers decides to be provocative and asks if biological differences could account for some gender gaps. He later gets run out of town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_between_the_sexes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b...
  - leereeves 11y ago
    This kind of political opposition might explain why less research exists documenting the existence of sex differences.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Funny, I was going to use his example to prove the opposite point. How many people in the mainstream media are talking about the underrepresention of women among Fields Medalists? The vast amount of attention is focused on jobs where the distribution of genius-level IQs,[1] is not relevant: programmers, CEOs, business executives, etc. And speaking of Summers, it's hilarious how people will cite him while ignoring his underlying point about aptitude distribution. Almost 40% of kids who have a 700+ math SAT are girls. Using Summers' reasoning we should see a lot more women in programming and engineering. [1] This is leaving aside findings subsequent to Summers' comments that over time the disparity between men and women in IQ scores is narrowing.
mjevans 11y ago
Speaking of gender equality, neither he/she nor she/he (though I've been told by those who've focused on that in college that both are correct) is equal. True equality is the use of singular they; though they is really a set of any (unspecified) size.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I try to use singular "they" whenever it doesn't sound utterly awkward or doesn't make sentence ambiguous (e.g. "OP went to see the group but they're late"). But singular they is a relatively new concept for me (I haven't heard of it when I was first learning English), so I sometimes default to he/she when writing quickly.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  > True equality is the use of singular they I find rigid rules for language to be Orwellian, and I've always found the singular 'they' to be at least as awkward as the gender-neutral 'he'. An alternate "true equality" would be to generously extend the benefit of the doubt to everyone. And to teach our children to be strong enough to deal with inaccurate pronouns, on occasion. I'd rather my daughter get her strength from better sources than offense and identity politics.
  - yarrel 11y ago
    I find "they" to only be awkward where it's ambiguous (the same as "he"). It's more Shakespearean than Orwellian. ;-)
Retric 11y ago
The biological differences between genders are fairly small in comparison to the standard deviation. Consider on average men may have 20% more upper body strength than the average women. But, some men have 1/2 the upper body strength of the average women, and some women have twice the upper body strength than the average man. Further there are lot's of trends that run counter to the biology, for example on average women make better snipers than men.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  That's all good. In the case you described, in a perfect egalitarian, meritocratic society you would expect to find more men than women in the army in general, but maybe more women than men doing sniper duty. That's how averages will play out with zero gender discrimination. In other words - just because an industry is not 50/50 men/women, doesn't mean there's sexual discrimination going on. Even if the differences themselves are small, the very fact that they're there mean that women have comparative advantage over men in some areas, while men have that advantage over women in other. We exploit that concept in international trade, and yet many find it wrong to exploit it at the society level. The question we should be asking is: which "social biases" arise from comparative advantage of sexes? Maybe they're ok and we should leave those biases be, while removing those that don't give any utility? Hard-equalizing everything (by e.g. pushing for 50/50 ration of genders in every industry) seems to be an outcome worse for everybody.
  - aianus 11y ago
    Even a small difference in the mean or sd for a given attribute will result in enormous gender imbalances for jobs requiring an extreme value of that attribute. If you select people totally at random (no discrimination!) from the population of people with >130 IQ to work at Facebook and the sd for men in the general population is 11 IQ points instead of 10 for women, you'll wind up with a 70% male workforce at Facebook. Similarly if men had a mean IQ of 101 instead of 99 for women, Facebook would have a 66% male workforce. From R: women <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE) men <- pnorm(130, mean = 100, sd = 11, lower.tail = FALSE) scaling <- 100/(women+men) men * scaling [1] 70.28561 women * scaling [1] 29.71439 women <- pnorm(130, mean = 99, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE) men <- pnorm(130, mean = 101, sd = 10, lower.tail = FALSE) scaling <- 100/(women+men) men * scaling [1] 65.8503 women * scaling [1] 34.1497
rayiner 11y ago
> What you wrote is what gender equality should be about. However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other. Gender equality being fought in the media is about presuming that disparities in representation are the result of discrimination unless there is evidence to rebut that presumption. Nobody in the mainstream media is talking about the low representation of women in positions that require lots of physical strength because we have evidence of such differences. The difference is not being willing to accept "oh it's just different preferences" as a reason for observed disparities without evidence.
- caseysoftware 11y ago
  > Nobody in the mainstream media is talking about the low representation of women in positions that require lots of physical strength because we have evidence of such differences. The hundreds of articles about lack of women in combat positions and in the special forces tend to disagree with you. In both of those areas, pure physical strength is one of the first requirements.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    The articles about women in combat positions are almost all about the military's removing explicit bans on women in combat positions and instituting gender neutral physical requirements.
    - scottlocklin 11y ago
      Which we all know means "lower physical requirements" -which is, as some people like to say, "problematic."
      - aninhumer 11y ago
        What paranoid nonsense is this? Gender neutral physical requirements just means you change "men who can lift Xkg" into "people who can lift Xkg". If that still happens to exclude most women, so be it.

pron 11y ago

> Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case? Of course! Especially with the "naturally" part. Biological differences in pertinent cognitive abilities, while they certainly exist, have never been shown to be too big (certainly not big enough to be the major cause for observed differences in representation). It is certainly logical to believe that most observed differences are mostly explained by social causes. > 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Not exactly. Equal rights implies legal rights, and gender equality (as well as racial equality) goes beyond that. The idea is that the sexes (and the races) be treated similarly in society, and not have their choices limited -- not just by laws but by hidden biases which translate to social pressure. The desired result is equal power not equal rights (but, as you correctly note, not "sameness"), as rights alone are a necessary but insufficient condition in the change of the power distribution.

douche 11y ago
It's demonstrably true that, while men and women are, on average, about the same in cognitive abilities, it's also true that the distributions are not the same. There are much bigger "tails" for men[2] - you've got more men at the top end of the spectrum, and also more men at the absolute bottom of the spectrum[1]. [1] http://mn.gov/mnddc/parallels2/pdf/80s/82/82-PMR-ARC.pdf http://mn.gov/mnddc/parallels2/pdf/80s/82/82-PMR-ARC.pdf [2] https://www.aei.org/publication/are-there-more-girl-geniuses/ https://www.aei.org/publication/are-there-more-girl-geniuses...
- cryoshon 11y ago
  I was thinking about this concept abstractly (deviations from the norm evolutionarily). I'm not trying to dispute the data you have here, but rather play the devil's advocate to propose an alternative theory which might contradict the data. I'll preface this by saying I already know the (correct and definitive) rebuttal to this line of thought, but it's fruitful to mention the problem nonetheless. Men are the risky sex, relative to the propagation of the gene lineage. Men have a higher chance of not reproducing either as a result of sexual competition or death, but also the capability of reproducing many times in the proper scenario. Why does it make sense for men to be more variable? Why aren't women the variable sex? Females get a huge advantage in reproduction of their genes: they are the gatekeeper of the gene line. An undesirable female will probably still reproduce, whereas an undesirable male probably won't. Why aren't females extremely variable instead of males? Females could biologically "get away" with extreme (but viable) variation because they're practically guaranteed to reproduce anyway. Males being extremely variable merely results in a lot of detritus at the edges-- wasted energy from the perspective of the parents / gene line. Isn't there an evolutionary pressure against wasteful reproduction?

ewzimm 11y ago

I think the dangerous part is taking something biological and trying to make a direct association with something as vaguely defined as emotional intelligence. This kind of thing is extremely dependent on culture. If you take an American with high emotional intelligence and plant them in Finland, they aren't necessarily going to be able to read people the same way. It's hard to imagine a case where this kind of thing isn't a learned ability. It's like saying men are better at Algebra. Most people are capable of being perfect at Algebra with the right training and focus. It's just a matter of moving numbers around in a very predictable way. Responding to people's emotional cues is similarly something trainable, but because it's cultural and more difficult to define precisely (and what isn't less precise than math?), it tends to acquire a more mystical aura and lends itself to being defined as something gender specific when that might not really be the case at all. Maybe it really is, but we have no hard evidence either way, and any statistics about it have a high probability of being culturally biased. In the long run, I don't think that training new generations of people to respond to emotions will be any more effective than recording successful interactions and using the data to train computers to do the same thing. With a large enough data set, a good enough algorithm that can vary tone of voice in response to emotional cues is going to be more consistent than a large workforce doing the same thing. With humans, you'll get more exceptional talents, but you'll also get more really awful people, and with the state of the Internet, just one awful customer service experience can go viral and ruin a company's reputation. Even if computers aren't as good as the most exceptional people at responding to emotions, I think the jobs will tend toward the computers there too for the sake of protecting against those few employees who aren't good, don't care, or are just having a bad day and take it out on customers. There will still be high-end services where people care about being served by people, but for commodity customer service, computers will win within a few decades (and this applies to managing employees too, particularly in situations like scheduling, but I think middle management will be slower to switch for cultural reasons, since managers actually have some control over keeping their jobs).

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Equality in rights without regard for equality in duties will result in inequality.