Corporate Executive Gender Equality

The thing about gender differences: Where there is belief, it is followed by corresponding action.

So if people believe that men generally make better corporate executives than women  ^*

, then those men will be less likely to hire a woman as a corporate executive than a man. Even if their qualifications are identical, they will assume that the man will do a better job than the woman.

Therefore, if there is a cultural perception that women are less capable than men, then there will be a bias against them that goes above and beyond whatever, if any, actual ability difference there is—because even if you have a group of people with identical ability, men will be selected over women. (See also: reasons why so much of our prison population is black.)

So even if there were an innate biological difference, there would be be an even larger representation gap because of the bias. And that should be eliminated.

The bias should be eliminated, or the gap should? I agree that the bias should be combated and eliminated if possible, but if there is an innate average difference, then eliminating the gap is a suboptimal solution.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

It seems to me there's a similar risk inherent in either having such a law or not having such a law. The risk of the first option is rejecting more qualified candidates in favor of meeting legal quotas, and the risk of the second is rejecting more qualified candidates due to biases (probably rationalized or subconscious biases, but there none the less).

I think I could live with the inherent hypocracy of a law designed to create equality encouraging unequal treatment of candidates (and yes, it does do that), but only if it managed to create a stable, lasting equality and then immediately ceased-which this law seems far too ham-fisted to be capable of (not to mention the impossibility of ending it when it's objective is complete.)

As far as what differences there are between men and women, I'd say almost all of it is social conditioning but I'm not sure how you can find objective evidence for that proposition. Maybe the fact that there are cultures where women are perceived as having the same traits as men is a start, but it's far from conclusive. It seems to be sort of an insoluble argument at this point.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

"As far as what differences there are between men and women, I'd say almost all of it is social conditioning but I'm not sure how you can find objective evidence for that proposition. Maybe the fact that there are cultures where women are perceived as having the same traits as men is a start, but it's far from conclusive." - deathjavu

What kind of societies are you referring to, and how well did they work out?

And if you attribute gender differences to social conditioning, where do you think this social conditioning came from in the first place?

^Hmm, I guess I've been forced to learn again. So there's never actually been a matriarchal society.

Huh.

Well I guess that rules out societies where women have the traditional male characteristic of leadership. I'm sure I've heard of cultures where they have traditional male characteristics like being stronger or something. I can't be bothered to look it up right now though so you're free to disbelieve me.

Personally, I choose to believe that because I'd like to believe that people are mostly free to choose who they are. The penalties inherent in not believing that and trying to enforce that belief on others (in terms of people suffering) can be seen in hundreds of books and movies and in real life as well.

Anyways, it's just as likely that my position isn't based on a rational stance but merely an attempt to rationalize something sub-conscious.

Which is half the answer to your question of where cultural perceptions (which eventually become social conditionings) come from. The other half is a gradual progression based on conclusions from a few anecdotes/events being overgeneralized, and then reinforced by those in power to maintain status quo, and finally becoming so prevalent as to be reinforced almost everywhere. Sort of like where racism comes from!

Anyways, to keep it all on topic, I'd say what it should be about is the possible negative effects of such a law vs. the possible positives, and I'd say given that the law is almost inevitably (due to the slow reaction time laws/legislation usually has) going to be implemented too late and not ended early enough, it's probably going to create more of the former than the latter.

edited 23rd Oct '10 7:51:01 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

Do you have any information that would help me or anyone else to look it up? I would be quite interested to read about that, but without more information, I'm inclined to be skeptical.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

I found something, at least.

I think it's worth noting that that was kind of hard to find, at least if for no other reason than it shouldn't have been given the amount of interest there seems to be in the field.

Also I guess I lied about not being bothered to look it up right now. But that homework will do itself, right?

edited 23rd Oct '10 8:08:19 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

"Which is half the answer to your question of where cultural perceptions (which eventually become social conditionings) come from." - deathjavu

That's not an answer at all, it's just a bunch of rambling that doesn't seem to make any sense. o.o

My point is, if you say gender differences came from gender roles, this ultimately leads to the question of where those gender roles come from. Obviously there would have to be some significant gender difference in the first place to even lead people to even support such gender roles at all. They may not be the same gender differences traditionalists pretend they are, nor may they even be the same ones modern scientists suggest; but this whole assumption that they're caused by gender roles just strikes me as willfully ignorant.

Unfortunately I find that tends to be the case when you're describing something like thought processes.

I may be too tired/lazy to prove the opposite of this, but I'm sure I can disprove this.

Where did racism come from if there isn't significant difference between the races?

There's your answer.

edited 24th Oct '10 2:31:50 AM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

The gap.

Anyway, there are few, if any, situations where focusing on the (real or perceived) innate superiorities or inferiorities of a group of people is helpful, because it can hardly result in anything except discrimination.

For that matter, focusing on the traits of a group of people at all, as opposed to the specific traits of individuals, hardly ever accomplishes anything useful.

So even if there were a difference, the best thing to do would be to ignore it.

edited 24th Oct '10 12:32:29 AM by jewelleddragon

^
Voting rights for everyone, including 5 years olds?
No (additional) social security for the physically and mentally handicapped?
Equal things have to be treated equal, unequal things unequal is not a basic principle of law by coincidence.

Well, change sex organs directly after birth, raise the people accordingly, look if they switch to their new assigned gender without problems (there are still some things left you could criticize in this approach). So far (the sex changes were in fact made for medical reasons) such experiments support a relevant influence of biology to behaviour and associated gender role. I'd say that's also the reason why it's not that well known, it just doesn't support the notion of absolute equality.

Not necessarily true. A system without any gender rules might just be inherently unstable, so ANY development of roles is possible, and the ones we currently have would be simply a coincidence. I wouldn't agree with that, because there appear to be common traits amongst even the most seperated cultures, but that there are other explanations for existing gender roles than biological necessity.

Pour y voir clair, il suffit souvent de changer la direction de son regard www.xkcd.com/386/

There's a difference between treating large groups differently, where you can't treat them as individuals because there are far too many, and situations like hirings where those who apply should be considered on their individual merits rather than what particular categories they can be filed under.

I think I remember having a discussion about this once somewhere else on T Vtropes, but my view essentially boils down to "classifying people and giving them treatment based on categories is a necessary evil, and like all necessary evils should be done as minimally as possible"

Also, even if there are significant biological differences between the sexes (beyond the obvious ones), I'd still say a relevant consideration is what the effect of reinforcing/encouraging such a difference is. There's a potential in that reinforcement for a lot of harm to a lot of people.

edited 24th Oct '10 2:43:36 AM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

Do you suppose that without unfairly discriminatory hiring practices, women would be equally represented among construction workers to men?

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

"Where did racism come from if there isn't significant difference between the races? . . . There's your answer." - deathjavu

That's not an answer. That's just another question.

And what a ridiculous false equivalence you've set up. Race and gender are completely different things. One was driven by different branches of the human species adapting to different geographies, the other was facilitated by opposite sexes having different roles in reproduction, the driving factor in evolution. And like others have pointed out, raising people with a gender assigned after birth hasn't worked out all that well before.

edited 24th Oct '10 8:49:32 AM by neoYTPism

Doesn't matter; you hire people based on their individual merits, not based on general principles of a group of people.

I suppose the flip side is, if it's more profitable to hire based on generalizations, (ie. if the effort saved on assessing people as individuals outweighs the lost benefits of it) then it's understandable that businesspeople would tend to do so, drowning out those who focus on individual merit through a competitive edge. If true it isn't exactly the right thing to do, but it's hardly the worst thing capitalism rewards. The relevant point, though, is that IF the current discrepancy can even be partly attributed to gender differences, trying to force equality would be reverse discrimination.

edited 24th Oct '10 12:46:27 PM by neoYTPism

No, it isn't a false equivalence in this context at all. You said there couldn't be a difference in perceptions and roles if there wasn't a significant difference to begin with. And I pointed you towards racism, where there is/was a difference in perception and roles without a significant difference to start with. Racism is the perfect counter-example for your argument that perceived roles/differences must stem from actual significant differences.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

"And I pointed you towards racism, where there is/was a difference in perception and roles without a significant difference to start with." - deathjavu

Your Mileage May Vary on just how significant it is, but being from different parts of the world, with different geographies, and different climates, facilitating physical differences over the course of the component of evolution within human history, is inevitably going to be noticeable; I never said racism came out of thin air either. I recall from introductory geography that one of the rationalizations for slavery was pointing to the hot, humid climates of Africa and making Africans out to be "lazy."

Obviously, the differences were there; they just weren't the same differences the slavers made them out to be, just as I pointed out that gender differences weren't necessarily the same ones the traditionalists made it out to be. You are Completely Missing The Point if you think calling out a false equivalence equates to pretending racism came out of thin air.

It does matter if you're expecting the gap to disappear rather than just the bias.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

You know racism began with people of different nations believing one another to be inferior. You're masking today's modern racism, which has evolved to combat its criticism, with original racism in which people made ridiculous statements like "The English Race is superior to the Scottish Race". That would just be plain stupid today.

As for gender roles, there are a number of societies, but most wiped out by the Europeans by germs and guns, that considered women to be physically stronger. I'll have to fish out the anthropology textbook in which I read this if you would like specific examples but comparing western culture with western culture and then concluding that all cultures are the same is silly. Just previous to colonisation, Africa for instance, was filled with women-powered societies. Most gender roles grow out of culture rather than biological differences. What biological differences that exist are likely to be so marginal that culture would mask over it especially in the context of the current discussion. In what way does having a vagina make a person less capable of being a corporate executive? Even with respect to physical strength, just picture a society that makes women train even marginally more in physical exercise than men and watch the average strength of women simply eclipse that of men. Culture is easy to see, biological differences are not.

As said earlier in this thread, you hire people on individual merit. If society had overcome cultural issues, then we would not need to have a discussion on whether we want such a law. Unfortunately, society is not that mature. You make a poor argument that there HAS to be some difference for racism or other beliefs to come up but there does not. Do you somehow contend that, for instance, East Asians/Southeast Asians were incredibly idiotic 20 years ago but somehow magnified their intelligence ten fold since and now dominate the tech industry? Or perhaps the "White" group somehow decreased in intelligence and thus lost their grip on the tech industry? Those are of course not the reasons why and most of the shift in composition of the workforce is cultural and political. Plus, they hire based on individual merits, not group statistics (at least in North America). Nobody throws out a resume based on the guy's culture (of course in North America there are laws to prevent people from getting any such information unlike Europe).

Also, I am not sure if you guys were aware but laws can have a sunset clause. So if your concern is that the law "can never go away", it can. Just like the Terror Legislation in Canada, you can give any such reverse-discrimination law a sunset clause which causes it to fizzle out after say 5 years.

The difference in training would have to be a lot more than marginal in order for that to happen. Not that women aren't encouraged to remain physically small and fragile, but men do have a rather sizable natural advantage in upper body strength.

In any case, "fixing" issues caused by broad cultural prejudices by targeting something as specific as this is probably not a good idea. Even taking for granted that women can be equally competent in leadership positions, it may be that women don't want to be in those positions as much as men do - not necessarily because they're naturally less given to leadership, but because they don't face as much cultural pressure to be in positions of leadership as men do.

Being free from the expectation of being a breadwinner is in itself a privilege that is conferred to women by the same cultural bias that keep them from the top, and one which the law doesn't address.

"You're masking today's modern racism, which has evolved to combat its criticism, with original racism" - breadloaf

You really claim to know where racism started in the long history, including prehistory, of the human species?

"As for gender roles, there are a number of societies, but most wiped out by the Europeans by germs and guns, that considered women to be physically stronger." - breadloaf

Well, either those cultures were wrong or it only applied to their race, because in our part of the world males tend to be the physically stronger sex... or at least so say most scientists... or are you implying that you know better than them?

"In what way does having a vagina make a person less capable of being a corporate executive?" - breadloaf

Nice try, but having a vagina isn't the only thing separating females from males. They also tend to have different concentrations of specific hormones, which play a key role in psychology. For example, males have more testosterone, which is known to make them more aggressive. In a walk of life as vicious as business, do you really think aggressiveness would make no difference to success? And that's only an example of a possible difference. Yes, variation is among individuals above all else; but when talking about discrepancies in average, mentioning differences in averages is quite fitting.

"As said earlier in this thread, you hire people on individual merit." - breadloaf

Points about theoretical profitability of merit-shortcuts aside, how can you be so sure who is hiring based on individual merit and who isn't? In this thread, you've mistaken opinions for facts, mistaken "different skills per gender" arguments for "women are inferior" arguments, mistaken my "oh the irony" argument for accusing you of ignoring statistics, mistaken my "men and women alike decide the government" argument for denial that more M Ps are male than female, etc...

Time and time again, you've either straw-manned or misinterpreted points that I've made. What's to stop you from mistaking merit-based hiring for discrimination... or from knowingly misrepresenting it as such?

"You make a poor argument that there HAS to be some difference for racism or other beliefs to come up but there does not. Do you somehow contend that, for instance, East Asians/Southeast Asians were incredibly idiotic 20 years ago but somehow magnified their intelligence ten fold since and now dominate the tech industry?" - breadloaf

Of course not. The argument could just as easily be that there WERE differences, (in order to be noticeable enough for people to even want to discriminate) but obviously they weren't the same differences as the more fervent anti-asian racists pretended they were. Just as I said that was apparent with other forms of racism. Once again, you are Completely Missing The Point.

But like I said earlier, gender is quite a different issue from race. If you want to attribute differences to social norms, the issue inevitably arises that these social norms did have to come from somewhere in order to even separate males from females in gender roles in the first place.

That gender roles come from somewhere doesn't necessarily mean that they indicate a natural biological predisposition towards "traditional" gender roles.

They could, for example, simply have risen from the fact that women give birth, which could make patriarchy a stronger meme at a certain point of a civilization's development (the more safe and sheltered you keep your women, the less of them will die before reproducing, which keeps population growth high but also limits women's rights).

edited 26th Oct '10 10:44:53 AM by MostlyBenign

"That gender roles come from somewhere doesn't necessarily mean that they indicate a natural biological predisposition towards "traditional" gender roles."

Right. And I didn't say they did.

I claim to have an introductory knowledge of history, I suppose, as far as racism is concerned that term did not exist that long ago. It's only been around for centuries.

Why don't you spend a post explaining your viewpoint more clearly instead of just lashing out at everyone else for arguing the wrong thing. Apparently no matter what I say to you (or anybody else) I'm strawmanning something. Perhaps something was also debunked. It's very difficult to discuss anything if your only replies amount to nothing more than a big no.

edited 28th Oct '10 1:14:55 AM by breadloaf