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

[Feministme]

Lots of food for thought from LAWS last night, but one thing that really struck me was Heather B-E's plea to "reclaim biology".

Evolutionary biology and 'biological essentialism' often seem like dirty words in feminism because they are used as lazy justification for inequality and oppression: "men rape because of a natural urge", "there are more men in positions of power because they are natural leaders", "women are natural homemakers" etc...

So feminism has tended to shy away from seeking biological explanations (eg for male violence) and to say its all about conditioning/social constructions of gender.

But we shouldn't mistake "natural" for "good". Cancer is natural. Dementia is natural. Children dying of measles is natural. Everything about the world of biological beings must be explainable by evolution through natural selection (unless we invoke "souls" etc...). The evolutionary pressures on males (capable of fathering many offspring, but never certain which ones are theirs) and females (capable of mothering a limited number of offspring, with certainty but at great personal cost) are quite different. So we would expect males and females to be different (on average) in behavioral traits.

This whole fight against transgenderism has been about protecting the definition of women as a biological reality.... it's brought us back to thinking about biology in relation to feminism.....

Just wondered what others think?

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?

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

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.)

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...

Thanks Arran and Fermat. Interesting!

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

Oh people are saying things much better than me. The above chimes with what I've recently realised about the way language often fails to make statistics transparent.

Sorry, this isn't very articulate, but let me chuck it in anyway and hope it makes some sort of sense.

The following sentences look the same:
a) Men have penises
b) Men are better at maths than women
c) Men are rapists

But sentence (a) refers to almost 100% of men (or did uncontroversially till recently – but leave that aside).

Sentence (b)... Well, on a recent thread a male poster was defending this or a similar proposition with a graph showing two bell curves which overlapped except for the 0.1% at either extreme.

Supposing this graph were correct, and that it did indeed reflect biology not some other biasing factor, that would still leave ability in maths not having any correlation with sex except in some tiny proportion of the population (which NB blatantly didn't include that particular male poster!).

Sentence (c)... Blokes line up to yell NAMALT about that one. Though not so much about (b).

In (a) "men" = "all men".
In (b) & (c) "men" = "a tiny minority of men".

It's struck me that the language enables someone to say, "I'm a man so I have a penis; I'm a man so I'm better at maths than women," without experiencing any jolt as they shift from one assertion to the other.

Adding NAMALT occasionally doesn't seem to dislodge this mental elision of the two different uses of the word "men" from the discourse.

(And obviously the same is true of the word "women" and of any other word for a group.)

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?

Some companies solve this quite well by having different career 'ladders' - in my company we used to have a management ladder and a scientific ladder, for instance - so an expert could be appropriately valued, but might report to a manager lower on the management ladder. Since being bought by a larger company, we don't have this any more so I'm now graded as a 'senior manager' (same as my manager) - despite having zero management responsibilities.

I guess this helpful model may exist more in science where (historically, at least) there would be a much higher m:f ratio on the science side than the admin, FA/HR side...

As an aside, a comment on the 'paleo diet' ... and what was their life expectancy? How many ancient human remains show signs of malnutrition, parasites.....

Some companies solve this quite well by having different career 'ladders'

I wish that were true where I am. I do most of the IT in my office. In order to get a promotion I’d have to become a manager - in which case I’d be doing a management job, not an IT job: I might just as well becone a manager in the personnel department or the estates management department.

There’s simply no career progression in my department that leads from an IT job to a better IT job.

Anyway, sorry about the derail, though I suppose it might be relevant. Say you are a great teacher. You love working with kids. But the only way to progress your career is to become head teacher - and you’ll no longer be teaching kids. You might as well get a bank manager or a supermarket manager.

We don’t bat an eyelid if a film star is payed more than their director. We don’t think it’s ludicrous if a footballer earns more than their manager. Not all pay structures reflect management and organisational skills.

Of course, I’m biased, having the people skills of a bonobo.

I'm not a great fan of evolutionary psychology, but the 'paleo diet' has about as much to do with evolutionary biology as 'flat earth theory' has to do with geology. Using it is a bit of a blatant straw man.

I agree Aspie. There are far too many management roles, and many of them are overpaid. It is a culture of valuing hierarchy over expertise.

TLDR; we live in a society that values management skills over either technical or care skills.

The higher up the ladder you get the further you are from the reason you joined that organisation in the first place.

If you became a doctor or a teacher because you care about people then that’s going to deter people who joined that field from seeking promotion.

On the other hand it’s not going to deter people who see their job as just an instrumental means of earning money.

And whether it’s innate, or due to socialisation, I think this is leading to more men at the top. It’s not unusual for a school where almost all the teachers are women to have a male head.

I get what you mean, (and paleo is evo biol marketed not psychology marketed) but paleo IS marketed with evolutionary biology. There’s a kernel of good stuff in it (eat stuff that’s not been fucked around with is a sensible idea) but the marketing is very much ‘this is the natural/original way to eat.) they’ve picked the meat heavy diet (too meat heavy for most hunter gatherer populations) because the idea was that eating meat led to the increase in our brain capacity etc and that we somehow stopped evolving at that specific point so out vodies can’t cooe with what we eat now.

But that’s just not true. We’ve evolved in a way that we can cope with dairy for example.

I agree Aspie. There are far too many management roles, and many of them are overpaid. It is a culture of valuing hierarchy over expertise.

I really like my manager. She has been very supportive. But even she will admit that most of her job is feeding information upwards and passing instructions down. I suspect we have whole layers of middle managers who exist just so that senior managers have someone to blame if something goes wrong.

But that’s just not true. We’ve evolved in a way that we can cope with dairy for example.

More so in Europe. The fact this is a recent adaptation is a reminder we haven’t stopped evolving and there’s no reason to suppose an adaptation that was advantageous (pre)historically will continue to be so.

An important question is whether feminism is about the equality or equity model of fairness. What does the feminist utopia look like? Does it lead to equality of outcome for men and women, or does it lead to them continuing to play different roles, but now equally valued?

The issue of biological differences is contentious because it seems to inevitably push feminism towards one of those two options. If there substantial innate differences between the sexes (even if these are only expressed as group trends) then equality of outcome seems a hopelessly unrealistic aim. On the other hand if the innate differences between the sexes are minor, the accepting a 'different but equal' outcome seems to entrench the very sexism that feminism is meant to oppose.

What does the feminist utopia look like? Does it lead to equality of outcome for men and women, or does it lead to them continuing to play different roles, but now equally valued?

My feeling is with us being amazingly adaptable as a species and our brain plasticity will make it pretty impossible to delineate between what is 'natural' and 'unnatural' as sex classes.

Our feeling of what is 'unnatural' in our socialisation and environment is only really known by what aspie describes. If we meet with too much aversive stimuli we feel our lives are unnatural and become depressed.

Does it feel unnatural and oppressive because of gender, because of where we sit between NT-AS or being extrovert, introvert, etc? All we can say is that it just feels fucking unpleasant and makes you want to scream if you are forced into living a life where too many experiences are aversive.

We are adaptable and I would argue that the prevalence of maternal death in childbirth and whole groups of men bumping each-other off in battle means that men have always had to adapt and pitch in and help with 'woman's work' and women have had to adapt and pitch in with the 'men's work' for the best chance of group survival.

The important thing is removing barriers for one group and preventing the hoarding and abuse of power by the other.

Trying to pin down traits is going to lead to the unbearable suffering of those who don't fit the norm.