Study shows women discriminate against women, blame men.

[LanghamP]

I've always enjoyed reading that liberal rag called The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-queen-bee-in-the-corner-office/534213/

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, it turns out other women are the biggest obstacles to women in the workforce. To be fair, I've only had one bad experience, 19 years ago, with a single woman employee/manager but then again I'm a man.

There's good evidence, anthropologically, that women sabotaging other women has a strong evolutionary basis.

Joyce Benenson, a psychologist at Emmanuel College, in Boston, thinks women are evolutionarily predestined not to collaborate with women they are not related to. Her research suggests that women and girls are less willing than men and boys to cooperate with lower-status individuals of the same gender; more likely to dissolve same-gender friendships; and more willing to socially exclude one another. She points to a similar pattern in apes. Male chimpanzees groom one another more than females do, and frequently work together to hunt or patrol borders. Female chimps are much less likely to form coalitions, and have even been spotted forcing themselves between a female rival and her mate in the throes of copulation.

Benenson believes that women undermine one another because they have always had to compete for mates and for resources for their offspring. Helping another woman might give that woman an edge in the hot-Neanderthal dating market, or might give her children an advantage over your own, so you frostily snub her. Women “can gather around smiling and laughing, exchanging polite, intimate, and even warm conversation, while simultaneously destroying one another’s careers,” Benenson told me. “The contrast is jarring.”

The article goes into detail quite a bit but eventually suggests the solution is to make workplaces less male, that is, workplaces that have more male positions have less room for female positions, and hence that's the reason for such discriminatory behavior by women. However, I'd suggest just sending women into sensitivity training, as they are the group doing most of the discrimination.

[Mono]

The sentence "Perhaps not surprisingly, Benenson’s theory is controversial—so much so that she says she feels sidelined and “very isolated” in academia." suggests however that the jury is still out there. There are good reasons to believe that "most published research findings are false"^1, hence we should never draw strong conclusions from results of a single study (or the opinion of their authors) alone.

^1 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

[dmethvin]

I dunno. Over my career I've worked for several years in two different industries where the majority of coworkers were female. It didn't seem to me like there was any more or less drama in those offices than in the predominately male ones. Then of course, we didn't groom each other the way chimpanzees do, that might have made all the difference.

[Dingfelder]

13 hours ago, Mono said:

The sentence "Perhaps not surprisingly, Benenson’s theory is controversial—so much so that she says she feels sidelined and “very isolated” in academia." suggests however that the jury is still out there. There are good reasons to believe that "most published research findings are false"^1, hence we should never draw strong conclusions from results of a single study (or the opinion of their authors) alone.

^1 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Strongly agree..  This is true even with the "harder" forms of biological science.

In one of the Best Science and Nature Writing collections from a few year back, I spotted again an article I had read in either The Atlantic or Harpers, I think.  It was about what an extremely well-respected doctor had found by examining massive numbers of medical studies -- that the great majority of them had been set up incorrectly, administered incorrectly, contained trivial sample sizes, had unreproducible results, drew untenable conclusions, or some combination thereof.  In other words, most were junk science.  Much of our medical protocols and drug dispensations are set up on junk science.  Many of our surgical operations are justified based on junk science.  

It was absolutely chilling in its way, and this doctor was mainstream and indeed pretty much the toast of the town for bringing this out.  What has changed since then?  I hope something significant.

But it has always been extremely apparent that a lot of the more social sciences are junk.  They are often based on faulty premises or aimed toward preestablished conclusions, whether inadvertently or not.

Science is a tremendous method and the best one we have, but thank goodness that one of its most basic principles is that it is subject to change should better information come to light.  Apparently we are saddled with immense amounts of junk science, and it will be a long time before generating it loses its appeal.  It's human nature to fudge the facts, be careless, lazy, and, sometimes, deceitful.  That can make it hard for real science to come out .. especially when there is money and there are careers on the line, and so often an entry for politics to come in and confuse and corrupt everything.

 

 

 

[Dingfelder]

9 hours ago, dmethvin said:

I dunno. Over my career I've worked for several years in two different industries where the majority of coworkers were female. It didn't seem to me like there was any more or less drama in those offices than in the predominately male ones. Then of course, we didn't groom each other the way chimpanzees do, that might have made all the difference.

I've been to at least several employment agencies and workplaces where they told me that they were glad to have a guy there, because they were tired of all the drama.

In my experience, men and women can both be vicious and unfair.  Women tend to create much more drama, though.  In women-heavy workplaces, I've found the males generally just try to stay out of the way of all the ridiculous office politics and rival factions.  It can be extremely difficult too, as competing groups can want you to choose sides the moment you walk in the door for the first time, or fall hook, line, and sinker for any story you get told and immediately take up sides on that basis.  I just try to stay away from the gossip and don't care -- to the extent they let me.

And that can get you in trouble as quick as anything ..

[Mono]

6 hours ago, Dingfelder said:

It was about what an extremely well-respected doctor had found by examining massive numbers of medical studies -- that the great majority of them had been set up incorrectly, administered incorrectly, contained trivial sample sizes, had unreproducible results, drew untenable conclusions, or some combination thereof.  In other words, most were junk science.

Yes, though maybe "junk science" is a little too strong a word for most of the cases. Crucial mistakes are made, often due to ignorance (but let's be fair, it's pretty difficult to get everything right all the time), but that alone seems not enough to qualify as junk science, even if the resulting conclusions were flat wrong.

The point of the above mentioned article is in a way somewhat worse: even a well conducted study has a good change to lead to wrong conclusions without that we could point to anybody having made any mistake. And I think that this is actually true (the main reason is a number of natural biases in the system). One way to get out of this dilemma is to allow (or even demand) publishing independent replications of studies. Another is to submit study protocols to journals first, and when the protocol is accepted the result of the study will be published irrespectively of the actual (possibly boring=negative) outcome.

On the positive side, even most studies being wrong, science still progresses well. We just have to judge the meaning of each and every single study in a different way than one would expect in the first place.

Quote

Much of our medical protocols and drug dispensations are set up on junk science.  Many of our surgical operations are justified based on junk science.

It is important to realise though that many if not most people operate under these protocols because there is no better information available. That also means the protocols are not obviously wrong. When better information comes in, they change their protocol. That is to say, they do the best they can at the current point in time and nobody of us could do better, most of the time. 

[Dingfelder]

2 hours ago, Mono said:

It is important to realise though that many if not most people operate under these protocols because there is no better information available. That also means the protocols are not obviously wrong. When better information comes in, they change their protocol. That is to say, they do the best they can at the current point in time and nobody of us could do better, most of the time. 

I think that is often true, but more especially in the harder sciences.

You do have things like the sugar companies funding science saying sugar is great and tobacco companies funding science saying tobacco is non-addictive or even healthy, as they used to.  

But even more so, there are think tanks, special interest groups, and sometimes university social science departments building up industries of their own around promulgating or enforcing social ideas.  Some of these strike me as transparently agenda-driven and insupportable, and some are even promoted despite determinative contrary evidence and studies being widely and readily available.  

In short, I value that the state of scientific understanding at any given time is subject to change.  I just wish that there weren't so many things passed off as good or authentic science which are anything but.  

[lizardmech]

Shh don't be too loud or we will all end up in the goolag.