If you put it that way, I may ) and still 42.7% of the graduates there are female.
I think there was a formatting issue here and would like the read what you had originally planned to write, as your comments are invariably interesting.
Dammit! Couldn’t Markdown just spit out the stuff it doesn’t understand unchanged, rather than deleting it altogether? (And couldn’t I look at my comments after submitting them for stuff like that?)
I definitely sympathize; trying for coherent formatting online is hard enough even when it’s just an issue of uncooperative html tags.
As to your points, I’d agree that a hard reset to 1700, or even 1900, on gender would do more harm than good and that we would need to be careful to create norms which don’t waste our human capital. Perhaps a natural solution would be class-based gender norms; upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide, while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability. That way we don’t have to worry about losing future Rosalind Franklins / Marie Curies without utterly fracturing our society to do it.
On the exact numbers of women graduates, I’m not too attached to any one figure as an ideal given how wonky the male-female gap gets at the right ends of the curves and how different the score breakdowns look. The main thrust is this; if there is a .33sd gap in general, and a 1sd gap on spatial relations specifically, and men have wider variance at the edges, then why should we expect anything but inequality in fields which rely on exceptionally high IQ and solid spatial reasoning skills? You need to know the exact numbers to see what the exact difference ought to be, but it’s unreasonable not to expect one at all.
upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide
There are more normal (i.e. less Brave New World-reminiscent) ways to make it easier for people with a career to have kids (though of course the future needn’t be normal) -- paid maternity leaves exist pretty much everywhere in the world except the US and so do paternity leaves in a few countries, France has a 35-hour working week and the sky hasn’t fallen there, etc.
while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability
Before solving this problem, shouldn’t you ask who is doing the forcing? It’s not like being a stay-at-home mum is illegal, so why are they working outside the home for money if they’re less happy that way? Once you answer this question, then you can think of possible solutions. (The reason for poor people may be different from that for rich people, and the solutions that would most help the former may be quite different from the ones you’ve thought of so far.)
The main thrust is this; if there is a .33sd gap in general, and a 1sd gap on spatial relations specifically, and men have wider variance at the edges, then why should we expect anything but inequality in fields which rely on exceptionally high IQ and solid spatial reasoning skills?
On the other hand, on fields that require average-or-higher (but not necessarily extreme) cognitive skills other than spatial ones, we would expect inequality the other way (and in some cases that’s what we already see, most school teachers being female); do we really want most of those people to stay at home because of social norms that developed long ago, when said cognitive skills were less important than today and manual labour more so?
As to your points, I’d agree that a hard reset to 1700, or even 1900, on gender would do more harm than good and that we would need to be careful to create norms which don’t waste our human capital. Perhaps a natural solution would be class-based gender norms; upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide, while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability. That way we don’t have to worry about losing future Rosalind Franklins / Marie Curies without utterly fracturing our society to do it.
Putting aside the question of aptitude, this sounds likely to be dysgenic given that increasing educational attainment in women tends to decrease birthrate. Plus, “increased societal stability” in this case also amounts to decreased class mobility in cases of exceptional aptitude.
I think there was a formatting issue here and would like the read what you had originally planned to write, as your comments are invariably interesting.
Fixed.
Dammit! Couldn’t Markdown just spit out the stuff it doesn’t understand unchanged, rather than deleting it altogether? (And couldn’t I look at my comments after submitting them for stuff like that?)
I definitely sympathize; trying for coherent formatting online is hard enough even when it’s just an issue of uncooperative html tags.
As to your points, I’d agree that a hard reset to 1700, or even 1900, on gender would do more harm than good and that we would need to be careful to create norms which don’t waste our human capital. Perhaps a natural solution would be class-based gender norms; upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide, while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability. That way we don’t have to worry about losing future Rosalind Franklins / Marie Curies without utterly fracturing our society to do it.
On the exact numbers of women graduates, I’m not too attached to any one figure as an ideal given how wonky the male-female gap gets at the right ends of the curves and how different the score breakdowns look. The main thrust is this; if there is a .33sd gap in general, and a 1sd gap on spatial relations specifically, and men have wider variance at the edges, then why should we expect anything but inequality in fields which rely on exceptionally high IQ and solid spatial reasoning skills? You need to know the exact numbers to see what the exact difference ought to be, but it’s unreasonable not to expect one at all.
There are more normal (i.e. less Brave New World-reminiscent) ways to make it easier for people with a career to have kids (though of course the future needn’t be normal) -- paid maternity leaves exist pretty much everywhere in the world except the US and so do paternity leaves in a few countries, France has a 35-hour working week and the sky hasn’t fallen there, etc.
Before solving this problem, shouldn’t you ask who is doing the forcing? It’s not like being a stay-at-home mum is illegal, so why are they working outside the home for money if they’re less happy that way? Once you answer this question, then you can think of possible solutions. (The reason for poor people may be different from that for rich people, and the solutions that would most help the former may be quite different from the ones you’ve thought of so far.)
On the other hand, on fields that require average-or-higher (but not necessarily extreme) cognitive skills other than spatial ones, we would expect inequality the other way (and in some cases that’s what we already see, most school teachers being female); do we really want most of those people to stay at home because of social norms that developed long ago, when said cognitive skills were less important than today and manual labour more so?
Putting aside the question of aptitude, this sounds likely to be dysgenic given that increasing educational attainment in women tends to decrease birthrate. Plus, “increased societal stability” in this case also amounts to decreased class mobility in cases of exceptional aptitude.
Are you using “upper class” to mean “high IQ” and “lower class” to mean “low IQ”? Because that’s not what it usually means...