Why aren't there more women on the board?
Talk by Steve Moxon. Leeds psychologist Dr Gijsbert Stoet finds no evidence that women under-perform through internalising false stereotypes, a recent major review reveals no sex-discrimination in academia, and ground-breaking field research shows that it is actually in favour of women in recruitment; so why is it women tend not to 'get to the top'?Recent science confirms the sexes to be not just different but dichotomous, albeit that confounds with other factors often obscures this, and on many measures there is more variation within- than between-sex. This itself is revealing in that the form of within-sex distribution is profoundly different - males are often at the extremes of variance, whereas females overwhelmingly cluster around the median. This pattern results from several key sex-dichotomies: in sociality, stress-response mechanism, and brain architecture.
Drilling down further to the deep biology, the major problem of accumulating gene replication error necessitates a coping mechanism that has to be quarantined on the male side of the lineage (to spare females additional burden on top of rearing offspring). This is why there is always more selection on males, and why male 'mate-value' is not fertility (as for females) but 'good genes'. This in turn explains why male social structure is a dominance hierarchy, which is the basis of the polarisation of male quality that is evident in male variance.
The ramifications in human psychology are profound: even a mode of reasoning to 'police' the male hierarchy so as to largely prevent males gaining access to sex. This is the basis of why we have always 'done down' the male whereas the female we tend to 'big up'.
Anti-male / pro-female prejudice is reinforced in periods of rapid social change because arrangements in place to privilege women become anachronistic yet are held on to through the very pro-female prejudice that also ensures new arrangements are quickly made. Both the tardiness and rapidity of change contribute to an 'unfalsifiable' feminist perception, which is furthermore grounded in the 'political-correctness' backlash against the mass of ordinary people by the intelligentsia to salve the 'cognitive-dissonance' of its political-Left mindset. The failure of the ethos to have any practical impact led to the blaming of 'the workers' for not 'following the script', and their replacement by those who are not stereotypically 'workers': women.
Our deeply politicised back-to-front perception that women are the subject of prejudice and disadvantage is the greatest fraud in history, but given important facts have never been effectively suppressed for very long, it should be only a question of the time-scale over which it collapses.
When?
Saturday, 21 July 2012 14:00
