Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
~Timothy Leary
Many feminists and progressives argue that the West is plagued by pervasive misogyny. In fact, this claim is made with such frequency, and is so rarely challenged, that it has become part of the Left’s catechism of victimhood, repeated by rote without a second thought. The only real question is how powerful and pernicious the misogyny is. Real-world data, however, suggest a different narrative, complicated by the fact that men have worse outcomes in many domains. For example, they are much more likely to be incarcerated, to be shot by the police, to be a victim of violent crime, to be homeless, to commit suicide, and to die on the job or in combat than women. Furthermore, they have a shorter life expectancy and are less likely to be college educated than women. Although these (and similar) data can be reconciled with the pervasive misogyny theory, they should at least give pause to the open-minded. The best data from contemporary social science tell a rather different story and suggest that the very persistence of the pervasive misogyny narrative is itself a manifestation of the opposite: society is largely biased in favor of women.
The world, of course, is a messy place and disparities between men and women may have many causes. This is why carefully controlled social science is useful for examining the extent, direction, and nature of sex-related biases. Although the details can get complicated, the basic idea behind most bias studies is pretty straightforward. Researchers present participants with identical information that has some bearing on the abilities of males or females while manipulating which sex the information is about. For example, they might ask two groups of people to evaluate identical essays, telling one group that it was written by a man and the other group that it was written by a woman. If participants who believed the essay was written by a man evaluated it as more compelling, more intelligent, more insightful, and so on than participants who believed it was written by a woman, psychologists would consider that a bias in favor of men. Similarly, if one asked two groups of people to evaluate identical scientific studies that discovered that either men or women performed better on a measure of leadership, and participants who read that men outperformed women regarded the study as higher quality than participants who read that women outperformed men, psychologists would consider this a male-favoring bias (everyday people consider such patterns to be biases as well).
Contrary to expectations from the pervasive misogyny theory, across a variety of topics, samples, and research teams, recent findings in psychology suggest that such biases often favor women. For example, a paper just published in the British Journal of Psychology led by Steve Stewart-Williams found that people respond to research on sex differences in ways that favor females. In two studies, participants were asked to read a popular science article that was experimentally manipulated to suggest that either men or women have a more desirable quality (for example, men/women are better at drawing or men/women lie less often). Participants evaluated the female-favoring research more favorably than the male-favoring research. Specifically, participants found the female-favoring research more important, more plausible, and more well-conducted and found the male-favoring research more offensive, more harmful, more upsetting, and more inherently sexist. This pro-female bias was observed among both male and female participants, and in study two, the researchers replicated the results in a south-east Asian sample.
In some of our own work, we found a similar pattern for the socially desired trait of intelligence. In two studies, participants read about a (fictitious) scientific study that identified a gene associated with higher intelligence that purported to explain why either (1) men score higher on intelligence tests than women, (2) women score higher on intelligence tests than men, or (3) men and women score roughly equally on intelligence tests. Participants evaluated the scientific study to be similarly credible when it drew the conclusion that men and women score equally on intelligence tests and when women were said to score higher than men, but participants found the study less credible when it suggested that men score higher on intelligence tests than women.
In a related study, participants read about a college entrance exam that is remarkably accurate at predicting academic performance in college. They were told that either men tend to outperform women or that women tend to outperform men on the exam. Participants endorsed use of the exam more when women were said to outperform men than when men were said to outperform women. These findings suggest that people more readily accept the notion that women could be smarter than men than vice versa.
Scholars observed a similar pattern among psychology academics. In 2017, the social scientists William von Hippel and David Buss emailed a survey to a sample of psychologists, asking their beliefs about a variety of evolutionary claims and findings. These psychologists were more likely to endorse a female-favoring sex difference than a male-favoring one. Specifically, they were more likely to accept that women could have evolved to be more verbally talented than men than that men could have evolved to be more mathematically talented than women. Although these sex differences are not perfectly symmetrical (one regards verbal ability and the other mathematical ability), there is little reason to believe that an evolutionary explanation for one sex difference is more plausible than the other. Like non-academics, scientists themselves may have preferences for pro-female information over pro-male information.
We have also found that people have a stronger desire to censor science that disfavors women. In this study, participants were asked to read a series of passages from books and to decide whether the text should be censored (for example, whether it should be removed from the library, whether a professor should not be allowed to require it for class). One passage argued that either men or women make better leaders. The results showed that people wanted to censor the book more when it argued that men make better leaders than women than when it argued the opposite.
Ironically, these pro-female preferences may explain why mainstream narratives focus so assiduously on the possibility of anti-female biases: society cares more about the wellbeing of women than men and is thus less tolerant of disparities that disfavor them. A series of studies led by Katharina Block found that people care more about female underrepresentation in careers than male underrepresentation. In one such study, for example, participants were told that a particular career was dominated either by men or women. Participants were then asked whether policies and programs should be put in place to encourage whichever group was underrepresented to enter that career and whether efforts should be made to actively recruit the underrepresented group. Participants were more likely to support this social action when women were underrepresented than when men were.
Moreover, when the career was said to be accompanied by a high salary, people were more likely to say that prohibitive norms were blocking women from entering the male-dominated career than that prohibitive norms were blocking men from entering the female-dominated fields. So, people are more likely to believe that external barriers explain women’s underrepresentation in desirable careers than men’s underrepresentation. These findings suggest that when real world disparities exist between men and women, people are more likely to care and more likely to try to engage in corrective behavior when women are at a disadvantage.
One explanation for these pro-female biases is that humans may have evolved a general protectiveness of women. Indeed, numerous reports over the past few decades have shown that people have more sympathy for female than male suffering. For just a few examples, people are less willing to harm a female than a male, women receive more help than men, those who harm women are punished more severely than those who harm men, and women are punished less severely than men for the same crimes.
Such findings contradict the concept of “himpathy,” introduced in philosopher Kate Manne’s successful book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Anecdotes can create an illusion of excessive sympathy for men, but more systematic analyses suggest the opposite: People are vastly more sympathetic toward women. The success of Manne’s book might indeed be a manifestation of these very sympathies, because people are more alarmed and disturbed by the possibility of a bias against women than against men.
Concerns about women’s wellbeing are so strong that researchers often frame pro-female preferences and biases as harmful to women. For example, in a series of studies led by Lily Jampol, researchers asked participants to evaluate essays and give feedback to the author. Participants who then discovered the essay writer was female were more likely to adjust their performance evaluations upward than participants who were told the essay writer was male. This paper was entitled “The Dark Side of White Lies in the Workplace: Feedback to Women Is Upwardly Distorted,” highlighting the potentially harmful consequences of providing softened or distorted feedback to women.
Of course, it is possible that overly positive feedback harms women in the long-run, but it might also help them, for example, if it boosts their confidence, or if evaluators internalize the flattering feedback. Furthermore, it’s difficult to imagine that similar but opposite results would be framed as potentially deleterious to men. It seems as if research is often framed as “if biases favor men, then that’s bad for women; if biases favor women, then that’s also bad for women.” For example, the women-are-wonderful effect, which is the tendency for people to view women more favorably than men, is often regarded as a form of benevolent sexism against women. We eagerly await a paper that claims preferences for men as teachers or leaders illustrates a kind of benevolent sexism against men.
Though not exhaustive, the table below summarizes findings from numerous studies demonstrating biases and attitudes that appear to favor women.
| Various findings demonstrating biases, attitudes, and treatments that favor women over men | |
| Finding | Citation |
| People prefer to spare the lives of females over the lives of males | Awad, Bonnefon, Shariff, & Rahwan, 2019 |
| People support more social action to correct female underrepresentation in careers than male underrepresentation | Block, Croft, De Souza, & Schmader, 2019 |
| Both male and female faculty preferred hiring a female over a male applicant for tenure-track assistant professorships in STEM | Ceci & Williams, 2015 |
| Offenders who victimize females receive longer sentences than those who victimize males; males who victimize females receive the longest sentences | Curry, Lee, & Rodriguez, 2004 |
| Police respond more negatively toward hypothetical male rape victims than hypothetical female rape victims | Davies, Smith, & Rogers, 2009 |
| Women receive more help than men | Eagly & Crowley, 1986 |
| Women are evaluated more favorably than men | Eagly, Mladinic, & Otto, 1991 |
| People are less willing to harm females than males | FeldmanHall, Dalgleish, Evans, Navrady, Tedeschi, & Mobbs, 2016 |
| In vehicular homicides, drivers who kill women are given longer sentences than those who kill men | Glaeser & Sacerdote, 2003 |
| People are particularly intolerant of aggression from a male and aggression directed toward a female | Harris & Knight-Bohnhoff, 1996 |
| People adjust essay performance evaluations upward when they learn the writer is female | Jampol & Zayas, 2017 |
| Women are punished less than men for the same crime | Mazzella & Feingold, 1994 |
| Controlling for numerous characteristics, men receive longer prison sentences than women | Mustard, 2001 |
| People have more empathy for female than male perpetrators and female than male victims | Osman, 2011 |
| Women are more easily seen as victims and men as perpetrators | Reynolds, Howard, Sjåstad, Zhu, Okimoto, Baumeister, Aquino, & Kim, 2020 |
| People attribute less guilt to a female-on-male sexual aggressor than a male-on-female sexual aggressor | Russel, Oswald, & Kraus, 2011 |
| People have less sympathy for male than female perpetrators and more sympathy for female than male victims | Savage, Scarduzio, Lockwood Harris, Carlyle, & Sheff, 2017 |
| Female sex offenders are given shorter sentences than male sex offenders | Shields & Cochran, 2019 |
| Women’s aggression is perceived as more acceptable than men’s aggression | Stewart-Williams, 2002 |
| People evaluate science on female-favoring sex differences more favorably than science on male-favoring sex differences | Stewart-Williams, Chang, Wong, Blackburn, & Thomas, 2020 |
| Psychologists agree more that it is possible that women evolved to be more verbally talented than men than that men evolved to be more mathematically talented than women | von Hippel & Buss, 2017 |
| People evaluate science that suggests that women score higher on IQ tests than men more favorably than science that suggests the opposite | Winegard, Clark, Hasty, & Baumeister, 2018 |
| People wish to censor a book that suggests that men evolved to be better leaders than women more than a book that suggests the opposite | Winegard, Clark, Bunnel, & Farkas, 2019 |
As noted above, an important feature of many of these studies (though not all of them) is that they are experimental—they randomly assign participants to evaluate information with some bearing on outcomes for men or women (or a man or woman). Many scholars who argue that sexism against women is still a major problem in modern Western societies point to real-world disparities between men and women (but ignore many others). For example, they point out that women are underrepresented in high-paying STEM careers and leadership positions, and full-time working women earn less than full-time working men. However, the existence of such differences tells us little about the causes of them, for just as correlation does not equal causation, so too disparity does not equal discrimination. And, in fact, the claim that women are underrepresented in STEM because qualified male job candidates are preferred over equally qualified female job candidates no longer seems plausible. Experimental work suggests that faculty in STEM fields have demonstrated a preference for female applicants over equally qualified male applicants. Other explanations, such as differences in personality and vocational interests therefore appear much more promising.
This does not mean, of course, that there are no biases against women. For a long time, women in the West were treated as property and were considered emotional, irrational, and incapable of contributing significantly to higher culture. It is not unimaginable that some of these prejudices still persist and shape society. For just one example, there seems to be a sort of genius bias against women, such that people more readily associate men with extremely high levels of intelligence than women. And although there is reason to believe that men might be more highly represented at the highest (and lowest) ends of intelligence, this stereotype could explain part of the underrepresentation of women at the highest ends of achievement. However, overall, the results presented here make the claim that the West is pervaded by misogyny difficult to maintain.
The mainstream view is that we live in a sexist patriarchy that is persistently unfair toward women and privileges men in nearly all ways. And any claims to the contrary are treated as the protestations of benighted conservatives or other masculinist cranks. A Google Scholar search for misogyny yielded 114,000 results, whereas a search for misandry yielded only 2,340. We suspect this difference in interest in misogyny over misandry reflects not the relative prevalence of each type of prejudice, but rather greater concern for the wellbeing of women than men. All of the arguments, anecdotes, and data forwarded to support the narrative that we live in an implacably misogynistic society, in fact, may be evidence of precisely the opposite.
Cory Clark is a social scientist. You can follow her on Twitter @ImHardcory.
Bo Winegard is an independent scholar. You can follow him on Twitter @EPoe187.
Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash.
data forwarded to support the narrative that we live in an implacably misogynistic society, in fact, may be evidence of precisely the opposite
Indeed, the evidence has been mounting for some time now. A good summary of this research—thank you. I’ve been aware for years that it is past time for society to take its thumb off the scale—“the patriarchy”, “implacable misogyny”—its a false narrative.
This falls right in line with the myth of diversity, the myth of the glass ceiling, the myth of systemic racism and pretty much every other fictional issue that’s being peddled nowadays.
Could people stop saying misogyny when they mean sexism?
Vastly? And since this is due to women and men freely making different life choices in general (at least in western cultures), what do you propose we do about that?
Source? Do all women have the same concerns and perspectives, and are these separate from the concerns and perspectives of all men?
Yes, definitely for one’s own perspective as an individual. I would not claim to understand the perspective of anyone else simply because I am of the same sex, however. And there are many more important factors than sex in determining one’s perspective in life.
I think men pretty much understand how childbirth works and all. They also know how pain feels, so they can probably imagine the basic scenario. I’m not sure how not having given birth personally would alter any legislative decisions made by men, though.
Right, not all women have the same experiences and perspectives, and the same is true for men. I’m sure fathers tend to know a lot more about the experiences of childbirth and child-rearing than childless women do.
Spoken like someone lacking in both experience and perspective. If we “understood our own experiences” well enough, we wouldn’t need psychology, or (for that matter) literature. I suppose this is a foreign concept to solipsists who only see their own perspective, and that as if through a glass darkly.
Correlation is not causation. Surely you know this?
Consider this exchange between Jordan B Peterson and Barry Weiss at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2018:
JP: Let me lay out one of the personality differences between men and women, because it’s worth understanding. You might say, “well, there can’t be personality differences between men and women, because that’s anti-feminist.” It’s like, “no, it’s not. We might have to actually understand that there are differences between men and women, so that we can let men and women make the choices they’re going to make without subjecting them to undo manipulations.” One of the reliable differences between men and women cross culturally is that men are more aggressive than women. Now, what’s the evidence for that? Here’s one piece of evidence: there are 10 times as many men in prison. What’s that, a sociocultural construct? No, it’s not a sociocultural construct. OK, here’s another piece of data: women try to commit suicide more than men, by a lot, and that’s because women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men are, and there’s a reasons for that, and that’s cross culturally true, as well. They’re more likely to try to commit suicide, but men are way more likely to actually commit suicide. Why? Because they’re more aggressive, so they use lethal means.
OK, so now the question is, “how much more aggressive than women?” The answer is, “not very much.” So the claim that men and women are more the same than different is actually true, but this is where you have to know something about statistics to actually understand the way the world works instead of just applying your a priori ideological presupposition to things that are too complex to fit in that rubric. So, if you drew two people out a crowd, one man and one woman, and you had to lay a bet on who was more aggressive, and you bet on the woman, you’d win 40 per cent of the time. OK, so that’s quite a lot. It’s not 50 per cent of the time, which would be no difference whatsoever, but it’s quite a lot. So there are lots of women who are more aggressive than lots of men. So the curves overlap a lot: there’s way more similarity than difference, and this is along the dimension where there’s the most difference, by the way. But here’s the problem: you can take small differences at the average of a distribution; the distributions move off to the side; and then, all the action’s at the tail.
So here’s the situation. You don’t care about how aggressive the average person is. It’s not that relevant. What you care about is, “who is the most aggressive person out of 100?” You take 100 people, and you take the most aggressive person, because that’s the person you better watch out for. What’s the gender? Men, because if you go three standard deviations out from the mean on two curves that overlap but are slightly disjointed, then you derive an overwhelming preponderance of the overrepresented group. That’s why men are about 10 times more likely to be in prison. It has nothing to do with socialization. And then there are other differences, too.
It turns out that differences in aggression and agreeableness also predict differences in interest. So it turns out that men are more interested, in average, in things than women are; and women are more interested in people, on average. That’s actually the biggest difference that’s been measured between men and women. It has nothing to do with ability. It has to do with interest. The way that manifests itself is that women are more likely to go into disciplines that are characterized by the care of others, and you can tell that by the way occupations are segregating. All you have to do is look at the data for, like, 15 minutes: women overwhelmingly dominate health care, and that’s accelerating, by the way. Men dominate engineering, let’s say. You say, “that’s sociocultural.” It’s like, “no, it’s not, and here’s the proof.” You want to test this hypothesis, right? The other thing you want to understand is that left-leaning psychologists generated this data. You think, “well, how do you know that?” That’s easy: there are no right-leaning psychologists…
BW: Except for you.
JP: Well, that’s what people say.
BW: I’m on stage with the only one!
JP: …and that’s been well documented. People have published this data despite their ideological proclivities, and despite the fact that this is not what they expected to find, or what they wanted to find. What you do, now, is you stack countries by how egalitarian their social policies are, from the least egalitarian to the most. You say, “well, the Scandinavian countries are the most egalitarian”—and, by the way, if we don’t agree on that, then there’s no sense in having this discussion at all, because we don’t agree on what “egalitarian” means. If you don’t think what the Scandinavians have done is move in the direction of egalitarianism, then I have no idea what you mean by “egalitarianism”. Now, you could say, “well, they haven’t done it perfectly.” It’s like, “yeah, yeah, it’s true, but it’s not relevant to this argument.” So what you do is you stack countries by how egalitarian their social policies are, and then you look at occupational and personality differences between men and women as a function of the country.
What you find is, as the country becomes more egalitarian, the differences between men and women increase. They don’t decrease. What that means is that the radical social constructionists are wrong. It’s not a few studies with a couple of people, done by some half-wit psychologists in some tiny universities. It’s population-level studies that have been published in major journals, that have been cited by thousands of people. It’s not pseudoscience. It’s not questioned by mainstream psychometricians and personality theorists. We figured this out back in, like, 1995. Everyone thought it was settled. So what’s the big problem? Well, who knows what the big problem is. The outcome is not exactly the same between the genders. It’s like, “who says it has to be?” And, more importantly—and this is something to ask yourself constantly—"just who the hell’s going to enforce that? And just how exactly are they going to enforce that?"
Believe me, it’s not going to be in some manner that you like, because there are differences between men and women, and, if you leave them alone, those differences manifest themselves in different occupational choices: that’s the other finding. This is a newer one: as the societies become more egalitarian, the occupational choices between men and women maximize. What that means is that fewer and fewer women go into the STEM fields. Now, no one wanted that. No one predicted it. No one was hoping for it. It actually flew in the face of, I would say, the most established psychological theories. My presupposition certainly was, 20 years ago, that what would have happened, as we made societies more egalitarian, would be that men and women would converge.
That’s not what happened. The biological differences maximized, as we eliminated the sociocultural differences. Maybe you don’t like that. That’s fine with me. I didn’t say I liked it. But whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I’m liable to accept it. I’m trying to look at the damn scientific literature, and to draw the conclusions that are necessitated by the data. And then you can say, “well, the whole thing is suspect, because it’s the construction of the patriarchal tyrants who generated the Eurocentric scientific viewpoints.” It’s like, “if you want to have that conversation, then go to an activist discipline and have it, because it’s not the sort of conversation that anyone sensible would engage in.”
In my opinion, many of the problems we face today with these positions that progressive professors push onto society is that all of the focus is on the differences (three standard deviations out) rather than focusing on the similarities between groups that builds trust and understanding. It’s good to understand the differences, but it’s equally important to put them into proper perspective so as to not allow the tail to wag the dog so to speak.
Why “white” males? Why not Black or Hispanic or Saudi Arabian males? I think your woke card is showing.
Men value and understand women and their opinions just fine. Unless you think that the past 12,000 years of cooperative child rearing and human progress is a fluke…or all attributable to just men, which would be a ghastly philosophical and historical error.
There are no places in the world with nearly so little sexism against women as the places where the males are white. Barber is too deep in his partisanship to deal with even this obvious truth.
Consider the man with a high status, high effort job that pays $250,000 year. Now consider his wife, who does no work outside the home. And they have no children!
He earns all of the money that supports them both at a high standard of living? What does she contribute? Hopefully the majority of cooking and cleaning (unless she hires a service). But mostly, her days consist of spending his earnings. She enjoys them quite a bit more than he does, as he has no time for recreation Monday-through-Friday.
Who has the better of this relationship? The woman, quite obviously. She contributes far less and enjoys far more.
Millions of American households experience this dynamic. True, most don’t have quite so much money. And in some cases, children do exist, though they’re at school all day. Those situations where the women are true SAHMS - with young children to wrangle all day - do not qualify. But for the rest, quite a gender imbalance exists!
I know this dynamic well working in software. My coworkers are overwhelmingly male and all make six figures. Few wives work, even when they have no children to deal with.
What is important is not only to understand how common this dynamic is, but also how left-wing rhetoric represents it. To the Left, my original scenario of the man earning $250k/year and his wife living off of it looks like this:
Man - Earns and spends $250k/year
Woman - has nothing
Why does it look this way? Because of how the Left does “data”. They simply compile statistics on what men and women earn with no context. If women are earning nothing, then they’re poor and sympathetic, period! It is assumed that all earnings are spent entirely on the person who earned them; no one lives off of anyone else!
Thus men appear to have it far better than women.
Far more women than men do not work. Far more women than men work only part-time, more for their amusement than for the money. These women’s paltry paychecks relative to their mens’ are not evidence of their oppression. They are evidence of their privilege.
Men simply do not have the option of doing nothing and living off of their women. In the few cases where it might be allowed, it comes with great social penalty.
I think it was JP who illuminated this idea for me…women, on average, have 3 options whereas men have precisely 1.
Women as wives can:
Men can:
And I won’t even get into alimony, child support, and no-fault divorce that, to some large degree, ensures any woman can do anything she wants and walk away with 1/2 (or better) of a man’s paycheck and retirement savings (among other expenses) regardless of whether or not she ever contributed financially to the wellbeing of the family.
The article is good but under states the case. The situation is far more extreme than the article suggests in fact misogyny is extremely rare whereas gynocentrism and misandry are common.
My eyes were opened to this about ten years ago when I read an article claiming the NHS had ‘failed women’. The reason was that the most recent statistics in Britain showed that the life expectancy of men and women had gone up but the advantage women had over men had declined slightly. I posted a comment that it was very odd to claim a failure when there was an imporvement for everyone and a closing of teh gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups. The results was a barrage of posts that I was a misogynist. I was shocked and dismayed especially when the implications worked through.
A mainstream media publication was saying that a goal of public policy should be to ensure women maintained a large life expectancy advantage over men and to suggest that life expectancy equality was a desireable outcome results in abuse. In effect the publication and many of its readers were saying thatbecause I was a man they believe I should live a shorter life. Once this hit home I saw the true nature of society everywhere. Whenever there is anything that can be said to disadvantage women then immediate action is taken to change the imbalance in womens favour, whenever there is an imbalance in womens favour action is taken to further increase the imbalance.
Take education, there are countless projects to help girls to do better, but for boys who are actually doing worse, hardly any. If you look at the web site of any science or engineering professional body you will see promenantly displayed material designed to encourage and support girls but if you go to a teaching union site and search for gender you will see a series of projects to support women and girls despite the profession already being dominated by women. Violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated against men and boys but we have violence against women and girls campaigns and nothing for boys. Abuse of children is predominantly committed by women but action to prevent child abuse is focussed on preventing men from having acccess.
In every domain women are advantaged and action is being taken to increase that advantage.
Some of this is biological. Men naturally wish to protect and support women. However the false idea that women are heavily disadantaged, that men as a group are abusive and that action needs to be taken to advantage women has taken the natural tendancy and pushed it to a damaging extreme. Society needs self confident, well educated men just as much as it needs self confident, well educated women.
Last year I coined a term to cover precisely this phenomenon: “Mythogyny”
Across the media, across message boards and throughout academia, the idea that we live in a “male-dominated” society is accepted without question. UK Feminist activists regularly take to the streets or the airwaves to challenge this ‘male dominance’.
I always pose the following question: “Is THIS the male dominated society you wish to overthrow?” …
Our Head of State is a woman - Queen Elizabeth II
The Prime Minister – until recently was a woman - Theresa May
First Minister & Head of the Scottish National Party - Nicola Sturgeon
Head of the Democratic Unionist Party - Arlene Foster
Head of Sinn Féin - Mary Lou McDonald
Head of Plaid Cymru - Leanne Wood
Head of the Green Party – Sian Berry with Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett before her
Head of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland - Naomi Long. With Geraldine Mulveena its President
President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom – Until very recently Baroness Hale of Richmond
Director General of the Confederation of British Industry - Carolyn Fairbairn
General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress - Frances O’Grady
Chief Medical Advisor to the UK government – until recently Professor Dame Sally Davies – She now sits as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge
Chief Executive Officer of the Charity Commission for England and Wales- Paula Sussex – with Helen Stephenson before her.
Chief Inspector of Schools - Amanda Spielman
As for teaching the next generation (in this male-dominated society) … well, the Teaching profession is almost entirely female driven, 80% of teachers are women
The gender gap among students IN FAVOUR OF WOMEN is the highest ever: Over the last few years on average approx. 100,000 more women apply for University places than men.
So, maybe women have it tougher through their lives…
Life expectancy for women - 82.9 years
Life expectancy for men - 79.2 years
The gender pay gap has been roundly and soundly debunked many times over, yet politicians and the media cite it regularly as though it were an accurate and meaningful stat.
Okay, but what about Covid? … Nope. Corona-virus appears to be considerably more lethal to men than women.
If feminist writers chose to highlight the cause across the globe then I could understand it a bit better. There are undoubtedly male dominated societies around the world, where women are treated as 2nd class citizens, but the UK in 2020 isn’t Saudi Arabia.
Yet every day, particularly on BBC Radio’s “Women’s Hour”, they manage to dig up another cast of unreconstructed feminist activists who keep banging the drum and railing against injustices that mostly haven’t existed in this country for 30 years or more.
Continuing the discussion from The Myth of Pervasive Misogyny:
Thoughtful article and discussion. My professional and personal observations support the notion that misogyny or anti-female sexism is just not a thing in the English-speaking West. Besides, as noted previously, misogyny is a misused and abused term and doesn’t mean what many users think.
My wife is an elementary school teacher and observes that education is structured to favor girls in everything from the choice of books and stories in language arts to the de-emphasis of physical activity. I believe this is a major factor in the incredible imbalance between men and women earning university degrees. Does anyone think for a second we wouldn’t be decrying a national sexist crisis if 60% of bachelor’s degrees were being earned by men?
The primary education system is hugely biased against boys. Jordan Peterson makes this point frequently.
In socializing boys in school, the natural male “animal spirits” is completely suppressed. Sitting for long periods of time quietly is not what boys do. They need to run and whack each other. Fighting is a natural thing, at least wrestling is.
My son and daughter were twins. Both did well in school. In middle school, both were in the honor school club for high-achievers. You stayed in the club if you kept up your grades and didn’t get into trouble. When my son was in 8th grade, they changed the system. “Trouble” used to be defined as “fighting, hitting, skipping school” - basically felony-level activities. It was changed to include multiple misdemeanors. Low-level actions were now considered enough. Jumping in the halls, whistling, being late - all were considered a misdemeanor. You needed 3 and you were out. I was outraged and had a meeting with the FEMALE principal. She defended this change, for some dumb reason.
Sure enough, by the end of the year, all the boys had been booted from the honor club.