Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

What has seriously annoyed me about this whole thing is that CN has pulled the "victim card" re alleged verbal abuse thus effectively distracting from the very valid points that Jordan made. She was totally out of her depth and totally outclassed by an academic who has more talent in his little finger than she could ever hope to acquire in a lifetime

I really think there are interesting questions from feminists raised by JP, and don't understand the reluctance to take them on here. C4 and CN felt it was worth challenging, but did a really bad job unfortunately.

Reasons why, IMO:

• Peterson has an online army of flying monkeys who flock to defend him even when they aren't part of a community. This discourages "normal" people from wanting to talk about him.

• Peterson uses gish-gallop style "debating" tactics which are designed to shut down discussion

• Peterson isn't by any means an expert (not like, for example, Pinker or Baron-Cohen could fairly be said to be) on gender inequality. This is totally outside his wheelhouse (his wheelhouse is bloody narrow, to be frank). He's written a pop psychology book of pseudoscience, not a real academic work, and so "taking him down" ala Cordelia Fine isn't very appealing, in the same way that "taking down" any self-help guru isn't.

• When academics in the mainstream do criticise him (many people in his field signed a letter to the U of T asking them to revoke his tenure when he started the pop psychology carry on) he does not take the opportunity to debate but rather hides behind an insistence that criticism is an attack on freedom of speech

It's no surprise to me that women have flooded into medicine. Still a job centered on people = meets gender expectations, whereas tech is still seen as a boy's job. Factor in the belief of 'innate' sex bias (girls are crap at maths - see Cordelia Fine) and you go a long way towards explaining why we see what we see. Even if sex differences in abilities truly exist, it is still worth getting more women in tech (and other professions) for many reasons other than waffley notions of 'gender equity'.

I'm pretty sure that doctors have to be good at maths. It was traditionally seen as a male role until quite recently. It's not exactly a family friendly career. It must be incredibly physically and mentally draining. There must be more to it than just the pink / blue job argument

Well, I think that any comment on it will not be given much validity given that it can only be opinion, not based on many decades of scientific research backed up by impressive publication statistics.

China has close to gender parity in engineering, former Soviet states have much higher rates of women engineers (a hangover from the USSR when women were the majority of engineers). In the US, 50% or just under of all chemistry and maths degrees are awarded to women.

The UK has one of the most appallingly low rates of engineering degrees awarded to women in the world, but that's our failing, not a Fundamental Truth of Womanhood.

All this focus on "people oriented" jobs is just like the silly pseudoscientific justifications that used to be trotted out for girls liking pink and boys liking blue. If women just love people (and hate money!) so much, why are there so many more women chemists than women engineers?

So roughly equal numbers of physicians (doctors of any type, presumably) in the UK and EU as a whole, on average. Is there any point looking at what roles those physicians take, e.g. surgeons, consultants, GPs? Presumably it's roughly equal at all levels and in all areas these days?

AssassinatedB : “What does achieving parity in medicine mean, in detail?”

ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Physicians,_by_sex,2015(%25)_HLTH17.png

It's no surprise to me that women have flooded into medicine. Still a job centered on people = meets gender expectations, whereas tech is still seen as a boy's job. Factor in the belief of 'innate' sex bias (girls are crap at maths - see Cordelia Fine) and you go a long way towards explaining why we see what we see. Even if sex differences in abilities truly exist, it is still worth getting more women in tech (and other professions) for many reasons other than waffley notions of 'gender equity'.

Marquis : "None of its reasonable at all Lee. He's just very good at making it seem like that."

OK, show us where he fooled us.

What did he claim was so that isn't so ?

Interesting to see the respect gap between Jordan Peterson, respected tenured scientist (lol), vs the "boffins".

Also interesting to see the grim libertarian underpinnings of so much of this line of thought (which is also the basis for much of the Scandinavia criticism in the US).

Not that I expect much better from someone happy to handwave away "gas the kikes". How dare we expect poor little Jordan Peterson to scroll down two tweets before endorsing a white supremacist. I expect all the anime pornography distracted him.

What does achieving parity in medicine mean, in detail?

“The State of Minnesota's three-decades-long, largely successful effort to eliminate structural pay inequality among thousands of State employees (an interesting counterpart to Scandinavia).”

Er, this is not a counterpart to the Scandinavian experience. Even a little bit. The Scandinavian experience is that even if you try quite hard to create equal opportunities for men and women to go for any job they want, they still seem to want to sort themselves – to some extent – into different sorts of jobs. (Note that the evidence for this isn’t simply Scandinavia. So once upon a time there were social barriers blocking women from getting into and advancing in all sorts of professions. When these institutional barriers are lifted – do women want to become engineers ? Well, it turns out, no, not very much. But perhaps that’s just social attitudes changing at a molasses type rate. So how come the molasses rule doesn’t apply to medicine ? How come women have achieved parity and beyond in medicine, but engineering is still in the stone age?)

Anyway the Minnesota effort seems to be about government jobs, not private sector jobs – so nothing whatever to do with the wages being set in a market. Just wages set via the political process. And the Minnesota experience still shows men and women sorting themselves into different jobs ! And to the extent that the pay gap between men and women has narrowed it’s the result of “equal pay for equal work” rules. But of course what the “equal pay for equal work “ rules actually mean is “equal pay for different work.” Various boffins get together and decide that this sort of job is of “equal value” to that sort of job. But since all the sums are done at a desk by boffins, and not in an actual market, we don’t know that these jobs actually have equal value. Or rather since the same boffins often attempt similar exercises in the private sector to try to demonstrate discrimination we know that their sums do not hold water. Because they find that private sector jobs that get paid different amounts in a real market are of “equal value.”

So the Minnesota experience indicates that the government can narrow the difference between the pay of men and women in its employ by choosing to pay the women the same as they pay the men, whatever jobs they’re doing. Yup, the government can do that. The government can also finance the building of a bridge over a river. This doesn’t show that left to their own devices, bridges naturally grow over rivers.

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I'm with you Marquis. Madness. The alt-right love the ad hominin accusation. They do not like admitting that people who spout stuff they agree with may have an agenda. In the fake news world we live in, reputation actually speaks more truth than words. If you live your beliefs then that is recommendation of the sincerity of your views. If you say you want the advancement of women yet campaign long and hard for the opposite...well, you're justified in coming up with a damning conclusion.

I haven't demanded anything at all. I have politely clicked on a few links you have posted.

As you are so persistent that I'm not wasting your time a read through that report and this was the closing statement

To close the lingering 11 cents gender wage gap, not only will more women have to go into
traditional male occupations, but more men will have to go into traditional female occupations. If
office/clerical jobs were held equally by men and women, and skilled craft jobs were held equally by
both genders, the state government wage gap would decrease to 2 percent, no longer a significant
difference.

I really don't understand what point you are trying to prove with the links but it's not doing your argument much good unless you have a different interpretation for the above

his house is full of paintings of Lenin

psml. One of those moments when you think "nah, that can't possibly be true" and then you google it and... yeah. It's true.

It's like the Dilbert Persuasion Man (another pseudoscientific charlatan making money exploiting sad young men on social media) living in a giant castle shaped like Dilbert's head.

Oddballs, the lot of 'em.

That's a State report, not "journalism".

You're going to have to make the effort to actually click through to the scientific studies linked from the Harvard article.

It isn't really on to repeatedly demand scientific refutation of Peterson's pseudoscience, then when you are directed towards some, refuse to read them.

None of its reasonable at all Lee. He's just very good at making it seem like that.

I can't believe I'm having this debate on a feminist forum. The world is all upside down at the moment.

That was for Holdme regarding the second link

Sorry but that is in no way informative other than to give women a crap wishy washy way of negotiating. It doesn't say anything about the difference in negotiating with men or women. It's bad advice actually.

I didn't read into it that article that women expect to be penalised as bitchy and pushy. I read that as make sure you pretty up your words when you negotiate and use empathy, otherwise your awful assertiveness might make people dislike you. Fuck that

Was going to click on the top link but I can't deal with any more shit journalism today