Reclaiming (evolutionary) biology! (thinking about what Heather Brunskell Evans said)

they have a disproportionately high rate of intimate partner violence (IPV) against women.

This will be partly influenced by how some of these counties count and report crimes. Every incident is counted separately in Sweden for example, so a man who has subjected his wife to many years of sexual abuse will have those incidences recorded thus (I think, please correct me if I’m wrong.)
That doesn’t mean these counties are perfect or have none of these crimes, but it’s important to control for reporting method when looking at the actual data.

Females 'know' their baby belongs to them, because of the close proximity of dependent infants.

Males OTH cannot be 100% sure if they are the father. (Aside from modern genetics testing,)
Hence marriage and social pressures to take his name.

Mummy's baby, daddy's maybe.
Some men must really hate this truth.

Thank so arran, the rate of violence against women in sweeden and the implied societal sex bias is something I have been able to detect via a bit of google, glad to see something a bit more robust!

PS - can I mention how much I am in sympathy with the shift towards classifying VAWG as a public health epidemic of violence against women ?

Because it really is. To some extent, I think a lot of other issues are interesting but this captures the power structures that create this public health problem. That and economic and social policies that subjugates women and children through poverty and austerity (yes, I'm aware that there are Nordic Paradox arguments that argue an 'over-supportive' welfare system that removes women from poverty is amongst the reasons for the paradox but that tells me that we have a long way to go to understand the entire systems diagram of this public health issue).

If the obesity systems influence diagram looks like this, I strongly suspect that the public health problem of VAWG is even more complex:

www.shiftn.com/obesity/Full-Map.html

Just dropping in to say this is an outstanding thread with brilliant contributions which have me in awe of you women.

The problems with evolutionary psychology are that you can’t really test your theories, it’s used in ways it shouldn’t be and it’s very easy to make up an argument to suit any point you want to make.

So a valid point might be: we have evolved in an environment where being able to infer complex causes from simple patterns/events is key. That rustling in the trees or that shifting of light and shadow might be a predator. So if you react every time as if it is a predator you may be anxious but you're less likely to be eaten. Such stuff is reasonable.

But then the whole field has been hijacked by people and movements who want to prove that ‘the natural order of things is ...’ and when you go down that route, you lose all credibility.

Take the paleo diet. Now fewer refined carbs is good for us all, but paleo basically says ‘the original human diet is thus. And thus this is good for you.’

But... which human diet? From which point in time and space? How far back? To Mesopotamia and the start of agriculture? To arctic populations who have almost nothing but animal products? To pastoralists? To hunter gatherers? Ok WHICH hunter gatherers? Ones living where there’s a lot of shellfish? Bigger game? Smaller game?

Then how far back? They’ve picked an arbitrary point (which plays jnto the Noble Savage fallacy) of when humans were free and manly and whatever. But a bit further forward and we were scoffing plenty of grain and dairy. And further back, we’ll as far as you want. When we were Australopithecenes? Insectivorous mammals? Bony fish?

When you look at it like that it all falls apart.

So it’s mainly used by people who want to make the argument in one form or another that their way is the right and natural way. Funnily, it’s usually alongvtheblines of females being subservient, men being noble unfettered and firmly in charge and steak all round.

The normal hunter gatherer diet is mainly plant based btw. And women and children contribute most of the calories with men finding protein in the form of game - important calories and nutrients, but not the bulk of the diet.

I have heard it said that Soviet Russia evidenced an interesting phenomenon: it became the first country in the world with more women doctors (medical doctors) than men - then the status of medicine as a profession, and its pay, both dropped.

Like the reverse of computing. Computing used to be a low-paid job dominated by women. As computing became more important pay went up and more men entered the field.

I think there’s a stronger feminist argument for increasing the pay and the value paid on work that attracts more women than there is for ensuring an exact split of men and women in any particular field.

But I think I think pay and value more generally needs reassessing. I have no interest in managing other people but I am very good at the job I do. Nobody else in my office knows how to do it. If I am not in then that work doesn’t get done. Yet in the last 10 years I have had half a dozen managers and if a manager is off for one reason or another the office gets on fine without them.

Why is being in charge of someone who does something you can’t do better rewarded than being the person who does that thing you can’t do?

I think most people - including myself - don’t instictively understand statistics. We have to think it through. In contrast we have an instinctive grasp of calculus (you might think you don’t but I bet you could catch a ball).

A weighted dice isn’t going to roll a six every time. It doesn’t have to. If it rolls a six more than one time in six you will win in the long run.

When you see a ‘fixed’ roulette table in a movie it might give ‘red 5’ every time but that’s not how it works: it increases the probability of ‘red 5’. If the probability of ‘red 5’ is higher than the odds favouring the house you will win over time.

Preferences don’t determine the outcome for individuals but they do for populations. If men had a 1% advantage in - or just a preference for - one field then there are going to be more men in that field. That doesn’t mean that all men - or even most - are drawn to that field or that all women are drawn elsewhere.

If you look at maths most men aren't drawn to it. Most boys wouldn’t dream of going into maths as a career and it’s considered a low-status subject by most school peers. It’s a subject for nerds. It makes boys a target for bullying.

It’s a subject that only attracts a minority of students of either sex. A small difference in preference for maths between boys and girls is going to effect who goes down particular career paths.

Thanks Arran and Fermat. Interesting!

Take for example primary headships. Despite the rarity of male primary teachers, you get more male heads than females.
In schools with female heads there tends to be a more accepting attitude to job sharing. Anecdotally the female heads I have known have been much more open to suggestions from school gate mums than male heads...

If more women go into paediatrics and more men go into surgery but both were paid the same would it matter? If more women go into family law and more men go into business law?

I have heard it said that Soviet Russia evidenced an interesting phenomenon: it became the first country in the world with more women doctors (medical doctors) than men - then the status of medicine as a profession, and its pay, both dropped.

We tend to see it as a gatekeeping phenomenon - men keep the well paid jobs to themselves where possible. But in fact there's a feedback loop - where women do break into professions the pay drops.

(In my more cynical moments I wonder about that in connection with my workplace - we are making huge strides with women in science, even in science management. But it's government funded, and the pay is lousy - lower than the university sector by quite a way. So I do wonder whether that means men aren't applying in such numbers, leaving the field more open to women.)

Does anyone have a rebuttal for the Nordic paradox?

A rebuttal for the Nordic Paradox, no - because it feels like we need more understanding of the complex variables beyond the obvious legislation. E.g., Intimate partner violence against women and the Nordic paradox

The Nordic countries are the most gender-equal nations in the world, but at the same time, they have a disproportionately high rate of intimate partner violence (IPV) against women. This is perplexing because logically violence against women would be expected to drop as women gained equal status in a society.

A new study published in Social Science & Medicine explores this contradictory situation, which has been labeled the “Nordic paradox.” Researchers believe that gaining understanding of its underlying causes may offer important tools to help curb the worldwide public health epidemic of violence against women.

www.elsevier.com/connect/nordic-paradox-highest-rate-of-intimate-partner-violence-against-women-despite-gender-equality

Abstract here for people who won't click Elsevier: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27058634

Yes I think it does matter, as I think a female leadership can help generate a female-positive atmosphere throughout an organisation that can make a positive impact on many women's lives. I think ideally every organisation should have a balance of male and female leadership.

Does anyone have a rebuttal for the Nordic paradox? Where decades of equality laws and positive discrimination have produced fewer female CEOs for example? I don't have enough time between child wrangling to do detailed reading!

To be honest, if fields that attracted more women than men were equally rewarded, would it matter?

If more women go into paediatrics and more men go into surgery but both were paid the same would it matter? If more women go into family law and more men go into business law?

We are still talking about statistical differences. We aren’t saying, ‘Right, you are a woman - the children’s ward is that way; you men come this way and scrub up.’

About 1% of the population are psychopaths. Most aren’t serial killers, they are just arseholes. But there is a higher incidence of psychopathy in surgeons, pilots and CEOs of large companies. Being feerless and ruthless are considered assets in those fields. I’m not sure that a paucity of female psychopaths reflects badly on women as a group.

I think you have to be very careful to articulate what you mean by "determinism".

"Determine" in the sense of "are one of the material causes of, in combination with a lot of other factors, including environment" = durr, well, yes of course.

But that's not what most people mean when they say determinism. It tends to carry quasi religious overtones (predetermination) of one outcome and one outcome only. So "men are predetermined" to become leaders, women are predetermined to be followers/helpmeets.." kind of thing.

The other thing is to allow for variability within populations as well as acknowledging differences between populations at a mean level. The truism that men are on average taller than women, and that this has a biological cause in terms of genes, hormones, pubertal growth spurt, the role of testosterone obviously does not lead to the conclusion that all men are taller than all women, or that it therefore makes sense to talk about a height of, say, 6'2" being a "male height" while a height of 5'2" is a "female height". And yet that sort of spurious reasoning often seems to be applied to cognitive differences (where such sexual dimorphism as our species exhibits is much less pronounced than it is for height).

The other thing is not to throw out sociological critiques of science altogether (and I say that as a working research scientist who is acutely aware that politics, funding, prejudice all play a part in what questions get looked at and what answers people are looking at). Parts of biology are highly politicised, evolutionary biology particularly so (why do pop accounts of evolutionary biology typically reach for the behaviour of male stags rather than emperor penguins when they want to talk about what is "natural" in human men, for instance?) There's some very good writing out there. I tend to the (liberal) position of a writer like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (who argues that the way to correct this is to get a more diverse group of people doing primatology, her field, so that biases cancel each other out) rather than the (postmodern, Foucauldian?) position of Donna Harraway (also a primatologist by training, I think) who argues that the social seal of approval that stamps a certain set of beliefs with the gold standard of counting as "knowledge" rather than "mere belief" is a political phenomenon, and the answer for feminists lies in wresting political power so that we get to define "scientific knowledge" according to our political concerns. (I really don't buy the Harraway version, but I do think that "realists" about scientific knowledge have to come up with a defensible alternative).

Stereotype threat wouldn’t explain a flatter distribution. A higher or lower mean yes, but for a flat distribution (ie a greater standard deviation) around same mean it would have to impact exactly half the test subjects in one group positively and half negatively.

I should also add that stereotype threat is another of those psychological theories at the centre of the fields ‘replication crisis’. A lot of social psychology - my own field of study when I was a student - is built on very shaky ground.

Does anyone have a rebuttal for the Nordic paradox? Where decades of equality laws and positive discrimination have produced fewer female CEOs for example? I don't have enough time between child wrangling to do detailed reading!

Dropping in Colin Wright's essay on The New Evolution Deniers that covers evolution and biological essentialism that covers some of the issues raised in Heather Brunskell-Evans talk last night (I can't remember HBE's MN user name):

This stance is maintained by the belief that evolutionary explanations for sex-linked behavioral differences are biologically essentialist, which is the fatalistic notion that biology alone directly determines our behavior. Blank Slate psychology, however, is universally rejected by experts, as the evidence for innate sex-linked personality differences in humans is overwhelmingly strong. But experts also universally reject that this view demands we embrace biological essentialism, because the environment does play a role, and observed sex differences are simply averages and overlap tremendously between the sexes. Sex no more determines one’s personality than it determines one’s height. Sex certainly influences these traits, but it does not determine them. For instance, most of us know females who are taller than most males, and males who are shorter than most females, though we are all aware that males are, on average, taller than females. In humans, the same is true for behavioral traits.
...
Despite there being zero evidence in favor of Blank Slate psychology, and a mountain of evidence to the contrary, this belief has entrenched itself within the walls of many university humanities departments where it is often taught as fact. Now, armed with what they perceive to be an indisputable truth questioned only by sexist bigots, they respond with well-practiced outrage to alternative views. This has resulted in a chilling effect that causes scientists to self-censor, lest these activists accuse them of bigotry and petition their departments for their dismissal. I’ve been privately contacted by close, like-minded colleagues warning me that my public feuds with social justice activists on social media could be occupational suicide, and that I should disengage and delete my comments immediately. My experience is anything but unique, and the problem is intensifying. Having successfully cultivated power over administrations and silenced faculty by inflicting reputational terrorism on their critics and weaponizing their own fragility and outrage, one fears whether there was no belief or claim too dubious that administrations wouldn’t cater to. Recently, this fear has been realized as social justice activists attempt to jump the epistemological shark by claiming that the very notion of biological sex, too, is a social construct.

As a biologist, it is hard to understand how anyone could believe something so outlandish. It’s a belief on a par with the belief in a flat Earth. I first saw this claim being made this year by anthropology graduate students on Facebook. At first I thought they mistyped and were simply referring to gender. But as I began to pay closer attention, it was clear that they were indeed talking about biological sex. Over the next several months it became apparent that this view was not isolated to this small friend circle, as it began cropping up all over the Internet. In support of this view, recent editorials from Scientific American—an ostensibly trustworthy, scientific, and apolitical online magazine—are often referenced. The titles read, “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic,” and “Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum.”

quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/

I dunno about the chess or CEOs when you have systemic cultural barriers for women which explain the gap.

At the moment, it's impossible to tell how nature/nurture (biology/socialisation + structural sexism) affects those distributions.

From a practical POV, we don't need to unravel that before framing laws etc affecting the rights and responsibilities of individuals.

For instance: there are graphs showing distributions of mathematical ability, with the male one being a bit broader and flatter than the female one. More men at the top and the bottom. We don't know how how much of this is due to education, stereotype threat etc and whether that leaves a genuine biological difference in distribution at the population level. In practice: we should implement education that allows each individual to achieve their full potential. We should have laws which prohibit sex discrimination when hiring someone for their maths ability. We should have a societal rejection of stereotypes which tell girls they may not be good at maths - and conversely, tell boys they should be, that it's a manly attribute. If the final outcome of all that (oh, and leaving aside for a moment the impacts of motherhood on career paths) is that there are more women doing jobs which require mathematical literacy but fewer women than men winning the Fields medal - well, that would be fine.

Put it this way: if you accept the spectrum model of autism - or any other condition for that matter - you accept that everyone is somewhere on that spectrum - it’s just that most people are clustered towards the ‘neurotypical’ end.

But even at that end there’s a natural variation in autistic traits. Some people are innately better at reading emotions than others. Some people are innately better at processing sensory information than others. Some people have an innate preference for the routine than novelty. It’s simply insulting to insist that they are not trying hard enough or that they weren’t socialised properly.

But if you can accept there are natural variations at birth then you have to accept the blank state model is wrong.

We can debate how these statistical variations map onti sex and how gendered expectations feed into socialisation but I can’t accept that those expectations act upon an empty vessel and I haven’t met anybody else qualified in psychology who does.

Acknowledging a biological basis for behaviour isn’t the same as excusing it.

I don’t believe for a second that human beings are unique in being born with entirely empty brains because I don’t believe for a second human beings are an exception to nature. The belief that we stand outside nature is a fundamentally religious one.

We each have innate abilities and predispositions that can be shaped by society and othe environmental conditions but it beggars belief that the most complex structure we have - the human brain - is an empty vessel empty at birth.

I know I have innate differences to most people because I am autistic. Those differences began in the womb and were present in me at birth. I have been shaped by society but that shaping acted upon a brain that had a material reality. I am not some floaty presence occupying an organ but independent of it. For all intents and purposes I am that organ and all the electrochemical inputs feeding into it.

I dunno about the chess or CEOs when you have systemic cultural barriers for women which explain the gap.

However physical differences do have a big impact, for example, I notice that Germane Greer, as a tall woman, seems incapable of understanding certain physical vulnerabilities other women feel. She doesn't realise that her height means she is treated slightly differently by everyone. Its like a close male friend is absolutely enormous, yet has no awareness about how this is read by others and they modify their behaviour. No one 'starts on him'. I see it. I notice that a lot of men walk about subconsciously sizing themselves up against other men, then slightly 'give way' to someone bigger and my friend is totally oblivious. He even has a slight delusion of vulnerability because of his abusive father when he was a kid.

I think humans have a very crude thing going on, where they do things simply because they can and no one can stop them. Male violence and domination is I believe rooted in this.

Also, there’s a big difference between evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. The latter, as Fine says, involving a lot of guesswork and prejudice.

I suspect that's it's ultimately impossible to unravel the nature/nurture discussion. As a bit crapper says, the physiological differences between men and women are clearly an element in our behaviour - but they are certainly not completely defining - for example, some women are bigger and stronger than some men while some men (and not necessarily the smaller weaker ones!) are gentler and less aggressive than some women. But I do think it's foolish to dismiss the idea that our biology has a part to play in shaping behaviour - and that boys and girls alike need to learn how to treat others with respect and as equals.