You ask evo-psych why we have a problem, and evo-psych provides the answer. The gender that has a biological reason to pursue low risk strategies—shockingly! - tends to not show much interest in weird, high-risk, high-payoff looking things like saving the world.
Ask evo-psych how to solve the problem then. We already know that women tend to like doing highly visible charitable activities (for signaling reasons). Maybe we should provide a way for people to make little sacrifices of their time and then make it visible over the web. I am thinking of a rationalist social network that allowed people to very prominently (perhaps even with a publicly visible part here on LW) show off how many hours they had volunteered next to a picture of themselves. I once attended an amnesty international letter writing group that was 90% female, for example.
This brought up an anecdote that I experienced recently.
I’m part of the swing/blues dancing community in DC. At a dance a few weeks ago I noticed that all of the volunteers for helping out at the door taking cash were women. Considering that this is DC—a heavily politicized area—and the vast majority of the dancers are liberal/feminist, I wondered why that would be. I made a comment about it to someone and they noticed that it was weird as well, and then I mentioned (as a pretty obvious counterpoint to our liberal community) that the same phenomenon happens in churches; women volunteer a lot more than men do.
This may not even be evo-psych, but an overall Western/socialization thing, where women—liberal or conservative—are subliminally primed into being more helpful. If that’s the case, then using the tools of Western socialization to encourage more women to join LW (as well as other male-dominated fields) might be a solution.
One of the original commenters wrote:
This brought up an anecdote that I experienced recently.
I’m part of the swing/blues dancing community in DC. At a dance a few weeks ago I noticed that all of the volunteers for helping out at the door taking cash were women. Considering that this is DC—a heavily politicized area—and the vast majority of the dancers are liberal/feminist, I wondered why that would be. I made a comment about it to someone and they noticed that it was weird as well, and then I mentioned (as a pretty obvious counterpoint to our liberal community) that the same phenomenon happens in churches; women volunteer a lot more than men do.
This may not even be evo-psych, but an overall Western/socialization thing, where women—liberal or conservative—are subliminally primed into being more helpful. If that’s the case, then using the tools of Western socialization to encourage more women to join LW (as well as other male-dominated fields) might be a solution.