Fighting discrimination against women requires more than unions, thundering rhetoric, and empty hopes. It requires understanding how present day sexism has subtly leveraged some real differences in psychobiology.
Even absent gross gender discrimination, women tend to be more self-effacing, less loudly ambitious, while doing the steady hard work. Whereas men are more inspirational rather than dedicated to what needs to be done [1]. So men basically tend to have women working for them. There is evidence the difference is grounded in psychobiology [2]. This needs to be so well understood that it could be remedied, as it means that women tend to find glass ceilings in their way…
The habit of women to tend to make less waves consign them to be more easily victims of gender discrimination, as they complain less, and are less feared. And thus more easily ganged up on. In other words, the qualities of women which tend to make them better team players make them more manageable victims. This creates a paradox: the more competent the women, the more they play along, the more they work hard, thus the more they work hard for male exploiters, who advance more, and hence the more blocked and victimized they get.
The way out of this requires to understand why male characteristic behavior tends to be more domineering, and why the women tend to be more cooperative. The difference is not much… but in a sexist society, it causes feedback amplifying the existing sexism, in a vicious circle. A way out will be to compensate for a while by legally hounding down male excesses… until those can be well exposed, thus socially counteracted…
Some may ponder why we need to fight sexism. The answer, as usual, has to do with augmenting the species’ intelligence. Removing half of humanity by forcing it into menial tasks makes it more stupid than need be. As women are tighter with the youngest children than men, they tend to have more influence on mental genesis. So, if they are themselves not as smart as they could be, they will get children not as smart as they could be. Not just this, but as half of the competition is removed, especially the half they tend to be most excited about, men’s competitive instincts in intellectual matters are lowered to the basest considerations.
In these times which are most propitious, and most cataclysmic, intelligence is more needed than ever. So the problem of fighting against sexism is not just about equity, but about something even more fundamental, the justification of equity, the reason why equity is best, for the species. And the justification for equity, from the evolutionary point of view, is that it optimizes the rise of intelligence in the species.
By the way, this is also true at the level on nations. The more sexist the nation, the more stupid. As observed.
Patrice Ayme
[1] Who was the chief ranger to Yosemite National Park got a PhD in ecology for studying chimpanzees. He wrote the classic book on fatalities in Yosemite over more than 160 years and remarked: “Revealingly, every one of these fatal mistakes was made by a male–no woman in Yosemite is known to have shortcutted and paid for it with her life.”
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[2] Psychobiological differences between male and female humans are subtle. Paleoanthropology seems to reveal that women brought in more calories than men. Men do best what male lions and wolves do best: patrol the territory. It was found recently that women in some South American prehistoric society did a lot of hunting. The reason why sexual diffeomorphism between humans is small has probably to do with weaponry: a woman armed with poisoned arrows will be, on average, roughly as deadly as a man to predators. Human beings have certainly used weapons for three millions years… Coincidental with the vanishing of major sexual diffeomorphism in humans.
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Right now, it’s the wild West with sexual harassment and discrimination. A top Google executive, Rubin, was accused of it. Google organized its departure, paying him ninety (90) million dollars. As the New York Times put it in “How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’:
“What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013, according to two company executives with knowledge of the episode. Google investigated and concluded her claim was credible…Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms.
Mr. Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men…
The transgressions varied in severity. Mr. Rubin’s case stood out for how much Google paid him and its silence on the circumstances of his departure. After Mr. Rubin left, the company invested millions of dollars in his next venture.”
This all suspiciously look like gang-rape, virtual or not… Basically Google condones rape, on the face of it, and rewards rapists with 90 million dollars. Does that mean Mr. Page, one of the two main plutocrats owning think accused rapists, even if they do not get in legal trouble, should be consoled?
Civilization, hence the law, should not tolerate this sort of behavior.