Paradox of Patriarchy: The More Female Equality, the More Different Men and Women Are

From The Times (London):

We all know what is meant to happen when the genders become more equal. As women smash glass ceilings and open up education, other differences should disappear too.

Without the psychological shackles of being the second sex, women are free to think and behave as they want; to become physicists or CEOs, unfettered by outdated stereotypes.

Yet, to the confusion of psychologists, we are seeing the reverse. The more gender equality in a country, the greater the difference in the way men and women think. It could be called the patriarchy paradox.

Two psychology studies support this counter-intuitive idea, but no one can properly explain it.

In a survey of about 130,000 people from 22 countries, scientists from the University of Gothenburg found that countries with more women in the workforce, parliament and education were also those in which psychological traits among men and women diverged more widely.

Note that “women in parliament” may be a poor indicator, since it often is the result of affirmative action or even explicit quotas. Education is much better, and “women in the workforce” probably is too, although in a lot of poor countries women are in the workforce because the family is dirt poor and they have to take a sweatshop job to survive.

In China, which still scores low on gender parity, the personality overlap between men and women was found to be about 84 per cent. In the Netherlands, which is among the most gender equal societies, it was 61 per cent.

Erik Mac Giolla, the study’s lead researcher, said that, if anything, the results found a bigger difference than in previous work. Personality is typically measured using the “big five” traits of openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. Women typically score higher on all of them, but there is always overlap.

“It seems that as gender equality increases, as countries become more progressive, men and women gravitate towards traditional gender norms,” Dr Mac Giolla said. “Why is this happening? I really don’t know.”

In a separate study, published online in Plos One, of countries ranked as less gender-equal by the World Economic Forum, women were more likely to choose traditionally male courses such as the sciences.

Steve Stewart-Williams, from the University of Nottingham, said that there was too much evidence of this effect to consider it a fluke. “It’s not just personality. The same counter-intuitive pattern has been found in choice of academic speciality, choice of occupation, crying frequency, depression, happiness and interest in casual sex.

“It’s definitely a challenge to one prominent stream of feminist theory, according to which almost all the differences between the sexes come from cultural training and social roles.”

Dr Stewart-Williams, author of The Ape That Understood the Universe, said an explanation could be that those living in wealthier and more genderequal societies have greater freedom to pursue their own interests and behave more individually, so magnifying natural differences.

Whatever the reason for the findings, he argued that they mean we should stop thinking of sex differences in society as being automatically a product of oppression. “These differences may be indicators of the opposite: a relatively free and fair society,” he said.

“Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes then the same. I don’t think anyone predicted that. It’s bizarre.”

No, it’s not.

It’s only bizarre to believe that men and women are identical in their innate psychological traits. That’s a rigid dogma for feminists, but utterly foreign to cognitive psychology, and indeed foreign to pretty much all of humanity through all of history.

Are They Young Earth Creationists?

Leftists sneer at conservative Christians for not believing in evolution, but can’t get their head around the notion that the evolutionary process would exploit sexual dimorphism to improve the evolutionary fitness of the species. And not merely in obvious ways like men having a greater muscle mass (the better to hunt game and fight off attackers).

There is every reason to believe that evolution would result in women being psychologically different from men — on average. For example, the lower conscientiousness and neuroticism in men may increase the evolutionary fitness of a particular tribe or clan because men have to hunt game and fight off enemies. Being neurotic and fastidious is counter-productive in those activities.

But when women are conscientiousness about sanitation in the camp or village, and a bit neurotic about possibly tainted food or dangers children face, the survival prospects of the group increase.

While contradicting feminist dogma, these findings show that equality of opportunity for women is a good thing. That is, if feminists (and the elites who pander to them) will let women be what they want to be. Which for many women — but not all — will be different from what men want to be.

Former Director of the Gender And Sexuality Resource Center Moans and Complains About Removal of Mural of Terrorist

This blog broke the story, and it went national: a mural of cop killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur in the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center at Marquette. Quickly, the mural was painted over, and the Director of the Center, Susannah Bartlow, was fired.

She has now published an article on the issue in Feminist Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, “Gendering Bodies, Institutional Hegemonies” (2015), pp. 689-697.

The mere title gives away the fact that this is going to be an example of the arcane and stilted rhetoric common among academic feminists. And indeed it is.

As the founding director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC), my job was to build an academic support office for women’s, gender, and LGBTQ+ education and empowerment. In the center’s third year, Amanda Smith (a Marquette senior) and Jeanette Martín (a community artist and program assistant at the center) envisioned, planned, and executed the Assata Shakur mural project as a way to invite greater community interest. In my role as director of the center, I supported the project, communicated it to senior leaders, and spread the word about the community-painting day in late March 2015.

So it wasn’t Bartlow’s idea. But she knew perfectly well who Shakur was, having signed a petition requesting that President Obama take Shakur off the Most Wanted Terrorists List. And she approved the project anyway.

Her claim to have “communicated it [plans for the mural] to senior leaders” is interesting, since if she informed “senior leaders” about who Shakur is, and they approved the mural, they are responsible and Bartlow was a mere sacrificial lamb.

Faced with a similar claim months ago, we wrote Bartlow, asking for details of what was communicated to higher-level officials, and she did not respond.

Defense of the Mural

Bartlow continues:

Over the six weeks it was on display at the center, the mural invited people into a quiet space off a hallway, and it had sparked discussion among staff, faculty, and students who used the space. The mural was one of very few images of a black woman anywhere on Marquette’s campus, and it contributed to a sense among many students of color that the GSRC was a space in which they were welcomed and safe and where they could be comfortable.

Yet in the distortions of white supremacy, the mural looked like a threat, rather than an intellectual and community representation central to the university itself.

So it’s “white supremacy” to object to object to a mural of a cop killer?

Did the mural “invite” people into the Center? If so, why was a mural of a cop killer particularly “inviting?” Does the clientele of the Center think killing cops is fine?

If one wants an image of a black woman, we can think of a lot of black women who have not killed any cop, and are not on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists.

As for the mural looking like a “threat,” this is what psychologists call “projection.” Politically correct feminists and other leftists are always claiming to feel “unsafe” when they face arguments and facts they find inconvenient. So they assume that other people feel “threatened” (rather than merely appalled) by an image of a black militant cop killer.

Bartlow goes on:

What happened specifically to this mural and to my job is also connected to the charged context of contemporary racialized violence. What happened to the mural is really a minor symptom of the full-on assault against poor people, people of color, queer people, and others who cannot access or play by the rules of twenty-first-century social dominance. No words fit the loss of life and the daily violations against black, brown, and poor people: in Milwaukee, where Marquette is located, more than 100 of the 105 homicides reported so far in 2015 involve black or Hispanic victims.

The chutzpah here is astounding.

Painting over a mural is part of the same phenomenon of black people getting killed?

Worse still is the assertion that 100 of the 105 homicides thus far this year had black or Hispanic victims. Is she implying that cops killed all these people? Klansmen?

No breakdown of victims by race of offender for Milwaukee is available at the moment, but national statistics pretty much tell the story. In 2012 (the last year for which tabulations are available), of 2648 blacks murdered, 2412 were murdered by other blacks. That’s 91 percent.

And the map of the locations of murders in the city of Milwaukee, published by the Journal-Sentinel, also tells the story.



It shows murders concentrated in black neighborhoods on the north side, and Hispanic neighborhoods on the near south side.

More Arcane Verbiage

Bartlow continues:

Our choice of Assata Shakur—a powerful, controversial black leader, an uncompromising woman, for better and worse—came out of a year-long process of supportive, consensus-based, power sharing between students and staff at our center. The mural was visible evidence that our feminist collaborations were working.

So she thought the process was great. But the outcome of the process was odious.

Why could not a “supportive, consensus-based, power sharing” process have produced a mural of a black woman that almost everybody on the campus could admire, and a mural that the Administration could have supported (rather than having to distance itself from). Quite simply: Bartlow and her collaborators were political extremists who didn’t particularly mind black militants killing cops.

Thus the hiring of Bartlow stands as a major fiasco. Perhaps the Administration will be more careful in the future. If so, this débâcle has served a useful purpose. But given the current administration’s habit of pandering to the activists, we have our doubts.

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