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davywavySome of you may have read this story on recently reported comments by veteran BBC newsreader Michael Buerk regarding the gender division and his opinion that the ‘traditional male virtues’ of reticence, stoicism and single-mindedness are being sidelined by modern society. These comments were greeted by sections of my female friends list with outcry, stamping of feet, and a departure to buy shoes and chocolate.*
I'd be interested to hear what any of you think of this***, but it seems to me that there are several factors at work here, not all of which can be blamed on the political issue of "gender roles”.
In pursuing my chain of reasoning I’ve made a large assumption, which is this:
The people who are good at skills traditionally seen as ‘hard’ sciences, as a section of population, are in the main less good at relating to other people than the population as a whole.
That’s a big assumption, and I know there are a lot of exceptions – but as a rule, it may well be true.
Now, the pro-'men are cleverer than women' lobby tend to use the undeniable fact that scientific geniuses throughout history have tended to be male (Curie and Byron aside, off the top of my head), and that men, per head of population, produce more first class university degrees than women. True enough, but what is also usually conveniently glossed over is that men, per head of population, also produce more third class degrees than women – not to mention that the male population also produces more examples of what kids in the schoolground call ‘scopers’. That is, the mentally subnormal.
Why might this be? You can argue socialisation, but I’m not so sure – whilst a hundred years or more ago you can understand a lack of education amongst women keeping nascent geniuses amongst them back, I’m not so sure how true that is today, especially within our society.
But what of what Michael Buerk said of ‘traditional male virtues’? Life experience has taught me that you most certainly do not have to be male to be reticent or stoic any more than one has to be female to be a foot-stamping prima-donna. Surf livejournal on the random button for a half hour and you’ll find that the incidence of non-stoic whining seems to be pretty evenly spread throughout the population, so my opinion is that Michael Buerk has got wrong what the ‘male strengths’ are. Instead, looking at history, it strikes me more that those ‘male strengths’ more of an ability to quickly deal with complex data at an abstract level according to set rules; that is science, maths, even things like military strategy. The mindset that allows this also results, in accordance with the assumption above, in difficulties relating to others – or, to put it another way, appearing reticent and stoical.
Why should this be? Well, my idea is that it comes back to our old pal, the ‘Y’ chromosome.
The XY chromosome pairing is nature’s playground. In the XX pairing, mutations, recessive characteristics and sports on one chromosome are less likely to be expressed due to the tempering effect of the other. In the XY, these mutations and recessions are less tempered and restrained meaning that extremes are more likely to be expressed. These extremes can manifest as genius, but they’re also just as likely to manifest as drooling imbecility or complete bonkersness. It doesn’t take many men expressing a successful genetic tic to maintain a population (for example, if 150 people have me listed as a friend, then it’s statistically likely that a couple of them are descended from Genghis Khan), so evolution can afford to muck about with the XY pairing to see if it throws up anything interesting much more than it can the XX.
If men are more likely to express extremes, then if we draw bell curves of the male and female populations in any field we are likely to see that that female bell curve is steeper than the male with the male one expressing more extremes at each end.
You might have gathered by this point that I’m not grounded in genetic theory and I’m making this up as I go along. Bear with me.
What this means is that men are more likely to fall outside the ‘normal’ curve of the population. By falling outside the ‘normal’ curve, then the experiences and world views of other people are more likely to be incomprehensible to them; this, I think, has two effects.
1) They are drawn to rules-based systems as these systems make sense in a way which much of the world does not.
2) They become reticent and stoic.
If this is the case, then why are ‘male skills’ becoming obsolete?
That’s one is easy – we’ve out-invented them. I’ve got a calculator which can multiply two seven digit primes in seconds. I’ve got a stock-tracker programme which picks share movement patterns. I’ve got a chess programme which can out-play 99.9% of the population. Rome:Total War can trash professional military tacticians. Technology has rendered obsolete a large swathe of the rules-based data manipulations which used to be the male preserve.
What is even more interesting in this is that the ‘hard’ sciences, of which so much of the work can now be done at the touch of a button, were the easy things to replicate digitally. Rules + Data = programming challenge. Many of the great expressions of human genius, of calculation and data use, can be done on a PC. You might need a Newton to invent calculus, but you no longer need an army of semi-autistic clerks scribbling over ledgers to do the legwork with it, rendering those clerks obsolete – or at least turning them into C++ programmers.
What has proven difficult to replicate through programming are the ‘traditionally female’ ‘soft’ skills. As a result of being more likely to fall within the ‘normal’ population curve, I theorise that women are more likely to be able to relate their own experiences and viewpoints to others; to be able to ‘map’ themselves onto others, to use computer jargon.
This mapping has proven impossible to achieve in a meaningful way through attempts to replicate human cognitive processes on a computer. Sums? Dead easy. Empathy? No chance.
I find it oddly interesting to conclude that the traditional ‘male skills’ of stoicism, reticence, and difficult sums can be so easily replicated by a lump of silicon the size of a pinhead whilst the traditionally female skills which are usually derided are comprised of such flexible rules and intuition that they’ve thus far proven impossible to programme.
When Michael Buerk said that men are becoming more like women he’s probably right but that’s because, by staying like men, they’ve been out-evolved by the pocket calculator.
I'd be interested to know your thoughts.
*I’m joking here, ladies. Please don’t harm me too badly. I like my internal organs where they are.**
**Surrounded by the thick layer of blubber at the moment. Curses.
***A first, I know.
I'd be interested to hear what any of you think of this***, but it seems to me that there are several factors at work here, not all of which can be blamed on the political issue of "gender roles”.
In pursuing my chain of reasoning I’ve made a large assumption, which is this:
The people who are good at skills traditionally seen as ‘hard’ sciences, as a section of population, are in the main less good at relating to other people than the population as a whole.
That’s a big assumption, and I know there are a lot of exceptions – but as a rule, it may well be true.
Now, the pro-'men are cleverer than women' lobby tend to use the undeniable fact that scientific geniuses throughout history have tended to be male (Curie and Byron aside, off the top of my head), and that men, per head of population, produce more first class university degrees than women. True enough, but what is also usually conveniently glossed over is that men, per head of population, also produce more third class degrees than women – not to mention that the male population also produces more examples of what kids in the schoolground call ‘scopers’. That is, the mentally subnormal.
Why might this be? You can argue socialisation, but I’m not so sure – whilst a hundred years or more ago you can understand a lack of education amongst women keeping nascent geniuses amongst them back, I’m not so sure how true that is today, especially within our society.
But what of what Michael Buerk said of ‘traditional male virtues’? Life experience has taught me that you most certainly do not have to be male to be reticent or stoic any more than one has to be female to be a foot-stamping prima-donna. Surf livejournal on the random button for a half hour and you’ll find that the incidence of non-stoic whining seems to be pretty evenly spread throughout the population, so my opinion is that Michael Buerk has got wrong what the ‘male strengths’ are. Instead, looking at history, it strikes me more that those ‘male strengths’ more of an ability to quickly deal with complex data at an abstract level according to set rules; that is science, maths, even things like military strategy. The mindset that allows this also results, in accordance with the assumption above, in difficulties relating to others – or, to put it another way, appearing reticent and stoical.
Why should this be? Well, my idea is that it comes back to our old pal, the ‘Y’ chromosome.
The XY chromosome pairing is nature’s playground. In the XX pairing, mutations, recessive characteristics and sports on one chromosome are less likely to be expressed due to the tempering effect of the other. In the XY, these mutations and recessions are less tempered and restrained meaning that extremes are more likely to be expressed. These extremes can manifest as genius, but they’re also just as likely to manifest as drooling imbecility or complete bonkersness. It doesn’t take many men expressing a successful genetic tic to maintain a population (for example, if 150 people have me listed as a friend, then it’s statistically likely that a couple of them are descended from Genghis Khan), so evolution can afford to muck about with the XY pairing to see if it throws up anything interesting much more than it can the XX.
If men are more likely to express extremes, then if we draw bell curves of the male and female populations in any field we are likely to see that that female bell curve is steeper than the male with the male one expressing more extremes at each end.
You might have gathered by this point that I’m not grounded in genetic theory and I’m making this up as I go along. Bear with me.
What this means is that men are more likely to fall outside the ‘normal’ curve of the population. By falling outside the ‘normal’ curve, then the experiences and world views of other people are more likely to be incomprehensible to them; this, I think, has two effects.
1) They are drawn to rules-based systems as these systems make sense in a way which much of the world does not.
2) They become reticent and stoic.
If this is the case, then why are ‘male skills’ becoming obsolete?
That’s one is easy – we’ve out-invented them. I’ve got a calculator which can multiply two seven digit primes in seconds. I’ve got a stock-tracker programme which picks share movement patterns. I’ve got a chess programme which can out-play 99.9% of the population. Rome:Total War can trash professional military tacticians. Technology has rendered obsolete a large swathe of the rules-based data manipulations which used to be the male preserve.
What is even more interesting in this is that the ‘hard’ sciences, of which so much of the work can now be done at the touch of a button, were the easy things to replicate digitally. Rules + Data = programming challenge. Many of the great expressions of human genius, of calculation and data use, can be done on a PC. You might need a Newton to invent calculus, but you no longer need an army of semi-autistic clerks scribbling over ledgers to do the legwork with it, rendering those clerks obsolete – or at least turning them into C++ programmers.
What has proven difficult to replicate through programming are the ‘traditionally female’ ‘soft’ skills. As a result of being more likely to fall within the ‘normal’ population curve, I theorise that women are more likely to be able to relate their own experiences and viewpoints to others; to be able to ‘map’ themselves onto others, to use computer jargon.
This mapping has proven impossible to achieve in a meaningful way through attempts to replicate human cognitive processes on a computer. Sums? Dead easy. Empathy? No chance.
I find it oddly interesting to conclude that the traditional ‘male skills’ of stoicism, reticence, and difficult sums can be so easily replicated by a lump of silicon the size of a pinhead whilst the traditionally female skills which are usually derided are comprised of such flexible rules and intuition that they’ve thus far proven impossible to programme.
When Michael Buerk said that men are becoming more like women he’s probably right but that’s because, by staying like men, they’ve been out-evolved by the pocket calculator.
I'd be interested to know your thoughts.
*I’m joking here, ladies. Please don’t harm me too badly. I like my internal organs where they are.**
**Surrounded by the thick layer of blubber at the moment. Curses.
***A first, I know.
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Socialization
Date: 2005-09-09 11:29 am (UTC)Also, secondly, it's now far more socially acceptable to be detached from past social self checks. I'd say the decline in religious instruction would have a massive impact on later behavior. Schools are also an integral part of adaptation and can be youth war zones without the discipline.
Re: Socialization
Date: 2005-09-09 11:31 am (UTC)This leads to other extremes - such as detonating on busses - which women are less likely to do than men as well.
Re: Socialization
Date: 2005-09-09 11:39 am (UTC)