Why women should rule the world

[SapphosRock]

Interesting article showing the positive response from female leaders to the Coronavirus pandemic. They are literally saving lives while the men (particularly Trump) are in denial and floundering:

[[https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2020/04/13/what-do-countries-with-the-best-coronavirus-reponses-have-in-common-women-leaders/
www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2020/04/13/what-do-countries-with-the-best-coronavirus-reponses-have-in-common-women-leaders/]]

Copyrights and patenting are tools of capitalism and profit, not scientific advancement for the betterment of the people. Right now there are doctors and researchers all over the world sharing data that normally would have been hoarded by copyrights and patenting to work together and find a vaccine for coronavirus, though to be sure some capitalists are still not playing well with others (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is up to some shady self-serving shit).

I can ask how much further along medical advancement we might be if the medicine-for-profit systems men built for growing private wealth on the backs of sick and dying people were shared for the common good, or we can look at the USA's medical system compared to nations with subsidized healthcare and see what played out in real time over the past few decades.

Yes, they are tools for profit. They also accelerated many advancements.

You're arguing in a circle by saying that innovations that spring out of processes you think are negative don't count when the question itself is whether these kinds of imperatives - profit, war, conflict, competativness - can drive innovation.

You are mistaken. My argument is that cooperation (which women exhibit more than men) has gotten people further along as a civilized society than competition (which men exhibit more than women) with less suffering and destruction, not that competition isn't a driver.

I question the many myths men made to support their "might makes right" methods and men's constant denigration of female-pattern empathy that goes in hand with men denigrating everything they attach femaleness to no matter how objectively useful or better it is for all human beings.

Because I have the biggest "FUCK YOU" for how children got out of coal mines, farms, and factory labor in nations where women finally wrestled the vote back from men who tried very hard to keep women from voting because they knew women would vote their kids out of child labor and into schools.

Nicola Sturgeon isn't on that list but she is so much more of a leader on this than Bojo and his cronies. Who knows where we'd be if she was handling the UK response from January.

Because I have the biggest "FUCK YOU" for how children got out of coal mines, farms, and factory labor in nations where women finally wrestled the vote back from men who tried very hard to keep women from voting because they knew women would vote their kids out of child labor and into schools.

Women didn't vote children out of labour, those nasty men did.
There were a series of Factory and Mine Acts limiting child labour from the early 19th Century, decades before women had the vote, although the Children and Yound Persons Act of 1933 was just after women got the vote, this was the final law in a series which men started.
The Education Act was passed in 1870 which was the start of universal education.

Men kept/continue to keep women from full public participation as much as they could, and still women without voting rights worked for the causes they believed in, including an end to black slavery and the opening of public schools.

Women's suffrage was sold to women to women as a way to make their lives and the lives of their families better. Businessmen gave resources to anti-suffrage efforts specifically to protect their business interests, no surprise there.

Misogyny isn't men hating women for no reason, it's about resource extraction and the excuses made to justify exploitation and thievery. Historically in the USA, men used to always get custody of the children after a separation because patriarchy and also because children were financial assets to fathers who put them to work. After labor and school laws made getting custody of children more of a financial liability than asset, the burdens of raising children as a single parent shifted onto women.

So the men with power and influence who ended slavery and child labour don't get any credit, it's the women with no power at all that did it?
OK then.
You can't simultaneously believe that women haven't had any power or influence, and that they were responsible for emancipating slaves and children.

You can't simultaneously believe that women haven't had any power or influence

Women do not claim that we have no influence. We complain that is all we had for too many years.

The difference competition between nation states makes in scientific advancement is one of funding. Only wealthy men have the luxury to dabble in the arts and sciences without a patron. This is mostly true even today. It creates the myth that conflict breeds discovery when all it really breeds is florins.

That's like saying a humanistic desire to push the boundaries of performance is what motivates athletes to push boundaries, and not a spirit of competitiveness or even desire for fame and fortune. They all play a part.

Humans have capacity for all these things because they've been successful strategies for us as a species.

Not remotely like saying something entirely different.

My argument is that cooperation (which women exhibit more than men)

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5635125/

This is quite an interesting paper on the matter, I was dissatisfied with the game theory-based papers because, while that's easy to quantify, they're a little synthetic so the less cooperative (in the sense that they were playing to win) performance exhibited by women may have been because there was nothing at stake. In this paper, academics are asked for a copy of the scientific paper they are working on. It also delves down into sex pairings (which are particularly edifying).

I just wanted to add, the above paper isn't all doom and gloom; the majority of academics, even in high cost situations, were willing to share their research.

To decide whether women are ‘better’, you need to define ‘better’.

The lazy stereotype (ok, less lazy than just saying women are ‘better’) is that women are more risk averse. In my experience, this is probably true. Testosterone explains this in part, as does socialisation, which tends to reinforce the innate bias.

In a pandemic, it may we’ll be that most careful is ‘best’, although it remains to be seen whether we all end up embracing unlocking and getting through this with a giant Boris-style Corona party in the long run.

However, being less risk averse has its advantages at different times. The medics who experiment on themselves for examples, are mostly men, extremely foolhardy but has led to important discovery. Equally, in the past, the charismatic military leader or businessman has achieved great things.

Arguably we may be coming into a more interconnected era where the lone scientist or businessman working all hours are likely to achieve far less than teams of people co-operating well throughout the world. And throwing nukes around is clearly a bad idea! So, maybe this is ‘the age of women’.

However, it is hard to argue that gender is a social construct and that, simultaneously, women are ‘better’, unless the social construct is one you believe to be positive?

Personally I believe that people work best in teams diverse as to both sex and age.

Yes, 50:50 would be best if within that mix women had an equal voice.

A few comments above regarding the fact that the Belgian PM has been removed from the list because Belgium "isn't doing so well".

Just wanted to mention that Belgium only appears to be doing less well because they report both suspected and confirmed Covid deaths, including those that don't occur in hospitals.

The number of confirmed deaths is less than half the total reported. Big difference with many other countries. Belgium now feels that it is being vilified around the world for its more honest reporting approach, and is looking into reviewing the counting method so as to be more comparable to other countries.

I personally am happy with the PM's approach here, very honest and decent.

Brilliantly put, larrygrylls

ByGrabtharsHammerWhatASavings

What a great post. That was definitely my experience growing up. My brother was in a set below me and constantly getting bad grades yet I persisted in thinking that he was cleverer than me and that my academic success was down to hard work, when in reality I didn’t work that hard and the main difference between us was confidence.

He was very much a believer in male superiority as were many teachers and adults at that time. I remember a close family member telling me that it was to be expected that men were more intelligent as they had slightly bigger brains. When I discovered that the configuration of women’s brains and their neural connections was such that this made no difference I was so happy but so sad that I’d been made to believe in my inferiority.

The point of this blurb is to say that we will never know what women and men are truly capable of and the ways in which they are similar or different until we remove such attitudes and beliefs that effectively limit women’s potential.

If there is a male/female divide in risk-taking, or in competition vs cooperation, it would not be an absolute one. To borrow a much-abused term, it would be "non-binary". Two overlapping bell curves, like height.

In the current crisis, risk-averseness and cooperation are positives. In a different type of crisis, they might be less so.

In terms of best leaders in a pandemic, it seems that we have Trump and Bolsonaro at one extreme of effectiveness, with Merkel and Ardern on the other end. Johnson would fall towards the Trump/Bolsonaro end, with Varadkar much closer to the Merkel/Ardern end. So women do seem to be "winning" this one, but it's not an absolute.

Arguably we may be coming into a more interconnected era where the lone scientist or businessman working all hours are likely to achieve far less than teams of people co-operating well throughout the world.

I've seen an interesting argument by a scientist that the lack of really independent scientists has become something of a disadvantage, because it tends to mean that there aren't people who are taking really different approaches, not too dependent upon outside funding or approval of large institutions. So you get a tendency to have a lot of people working within a similar frame, who often aren't very accepting of ideas from outside that frame, or ideas that aren't from approved institutions.