Female Characters

[J_S_Bach]

I posted an amusing anecdote about a variation on the resume study to a different LRR forum post that you may enjoy.

...When my wife and I were first dating she had a really interesting idea. She made up a list of jobs that stereotypically have more women than men working in them: hair salons, community service, education, hospitality, retail, etc. She then made up two identical resumes (one with her name and one with mine) and we disrupted them through three communities (Florenceville-Bristol, Hartland, and Woodstock). Of all the businesses that responded not a single one called for me, I was quite offended. I know this is only an anecdote and the treatment of women by society is far worse than how men has been treated but that does not mean that men do not need representation all people should be treated equal but they aren't.

This is something that I actually had to deal with after I finished University and I wanted to work as a music teacher. I had to prove myself worthy of deserving a job and jump through several hoops as well as gather my own students. Eventually a female coworker got fed up with the music school and had to vouch on my behalf as other, teachers didn't have to find their own students. The issue was that I was applying to be the only violin and viola teacher there and since I wasn't playing one of the boys instruments (guitar or drums) the music school didn't think that parents would want a male teacher teaching their children violin. I had to step in when another male teacher applied to be a vocal instructor.

[My pseudonym is Ix]

There is the assumption that you have to be born an athlete, that it's all in your genes... But the truth is that training and conditioning from childhood makes up almost the entire amount of difference between an professional athlete and a regular joe. And so there comes a question...

Is the tiny athletic difference between men and women innate, or is it the result of cultural norms imposing on how they are trained and conditioned?

That is a commonly cited argument amongst sporting journalists- the idea that one's ability at sport is simply down to how much training you've had and how hard you work. For a counter to that, I point to 'Luck', an excellent book written by an ex-England cricketer that focuses for large portions on how one's situation at birth affects the entirety of the rest of one's life. I won't go through its entire contents here, but suffice it to say that a sizeable portion of athletic ability is innate, not learned.

All scientific evidence I have yet seen points to women, on average, being less physically strong than men of a similar situation, with a to-be-expected large degree of overlap between the two. I will, however, be happy to be disproved.

[mariomario42]

I'm gonna address a thing or two but then I'm done with this afterwards, as this is not even remotely what this thread started as.

The problem isn't deeper than the boy's club, the boy's club is deeper, larger, and more omnipresent than you could possibly imagine, and you've been trained your entire life to be psychologically incapable of noticing it.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory because I've heard the same argument about lizardmen ruling the country.

I was honestly gonna take the time to discuss any problems I saw with your first few links, but after looking at them, they weren't topical. Race and transgender are different stories, and India is a totally different environment. My addressing of it would have derailed things further.

A lot of my points were addressed like this

Then you post a Forbes article that doesn't cite any sources, because it agrees with you.

Something I clearly said that was ignored.

I wish that specific article linked to sources, but from what I know about the author, it is in the books.

I pointed out various problems, established some basic facts, and even an opinion on the current state of sociology (probably should have said that then since it apparently wasn't clear), and it has been met with various assumptions and insulting nature.

That's all.

[UnarmedOracle]

I want to give a detailed, lucid response, but I honestly don't think it would do any good. CulturalGeekGirl and others have been doing just that for pages and have been either ignored, accused of being offensive, or had their own arguments explained back to them.

This is such a perfect model of the behaviour that feminists have described for the last century that I would be shocked if this wasn't part of some experiment.

If your argument requires that you first explain statistics to a working scientist, you should probably stop talking.

If your argument hinges on the premise that male privilege and entitlement is a conspiracy theory on a level with lizardpeople ruling the Earth, you should probably stop talking.

These are not postulates that earn a reasonable response. If you feel that you are not being taken seriously, it is because you are making unreasonable arguments. I am not posting because I want to argue with you. I am posting because it is clear that you are arguing in bad faith and should be called out for it.

[CulturalGeekGirl]

I'm gonna address a thing or two but then I'm done with this afterwards, as this is not even remotely what this thread started as.

Ah, a "get the last word in and flounce" maneuver. That's a classic. Well, now I can address these topics in order to educate people who actually want to learn. Bonus!

The problem isn't deeper than the boy's club, the boy's club is deeper, larger, and more omnipresent than you could possibly imagine, and you've been trained your entire life to be psychologically incapable of noticing it.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory because I've heard the same argument about lizardmen ruling the country.

The difference is that Stanford, MIT, Yale, and several other major universities haven't all been involved in publishing the history of lizardmen in the united states, whereas there are plentiful historical tomes about times when we thought we'd fixed sexism or racism, but it had simply become less overt.

Perhaps it was my use of the term "boys' club" instead of institutionalized sexism that was confusing. It's a casual figurative term intended to make discussion of serious issues a little more accessible - like when someone suffering from institutionalized racism talks about "the man."

Racism and sexism are similar, and they stack... African-american women are more economically disenfranchised than pretty much any other group. It's popular today among some demographics to claim that racism is over, and others tend to claim that sexism is over, but the same techniques are employed to demonstrate the continued existence of both.

I was honestly gonna take the time to discuss any problems I saw with your first few links, but after looking at them, they weren't topical. Race and transgender are different stories, and India is a totally different environment. My addressing of it would have derailed things further.

The idea of "intersectionality," or the fact that racism and sexism are similar forces that can be studied and addressed using similar techniques, is the reason I posted the study about survey name and race. I've commonly used both studies together, in order to address the concerns of people who may believe that sexism is a factor but not racism, or vice versa. The point was to show that this study design is widely used, and the techniques used to control for noise are well-established and consistent across studies.

The story about the transgender scientist wasn't about prejudice against transgender people, it was an attempt to describe and explore a particular case relevant to the subject. As several people have said, it's impossible to create two really identical people, one male and one female, and then have them report their experiences - but this was exactly that: a person whose qualifications and expertise did not change, only their gender changed.

The "case study" is a technique that biology and psychology share - it's how you study Lou Gehrig's disease when the only person who has it is Lou Gehrig. It's not intended to prove anything, it's intended to describe and explore a unique situation where direct experimentation is difficult. Detailed personal accounts of several kinds can be used in this way.

Think of it as the psychological version of a prototype. When all you have is a prototype, you aren't trying to "prove" how future production models will all fare, instead you're trying to document how the particular ideas you have function in this particular case. A single person's written account isn't intended as proof of a widespread phenomenon, but it also shouldn't be dismissed as irrelevant. A prototype doesn't prove that a production model would actually be viable, but it does provide evidence that the concept may have some validity and be worthy of further exploration.

It's like hypothesizing that dinosaurs moved in herds and then pointing out a specific set of dinosaur tracks as an example of why you think this, especially if the rest of your evidence is more arcane and harder for people outside the field of archaeology to understand.

I pointed out various problems, established some basic facts, and even an opinion on the current state of sociology (probably should have said that then since it apparently wasn't clear), and it has been met with various assumptions and insulting nature.

Just in case you weren't serious when you said you were leaving, wanted to clarify this. You posted some concerns (I found it a bit difficult to understand your specific qualms, but it seemed like you were concerned about the fact that the professors surveyed were from different demographics and disciplines. Let me know if this is inaccurate), and I pointed out how the study used specific techniques to minimize and analyze the influence of those factors. Then, instead of stating why you thought those techniques were ineffective, you made a statement that strongly implied you would not accept that any form of sociological analysis was valid science. I'm not the only one who interpreted your statement in that way.

If you do come back and you want to be a little more specific about your concerns and why you think the methods described to mitigate them are not sufficient, then I'd be happy to try to help explain them.

[JayBlanc]

I think it's probably time to draw a line under this thread's discussion of feminism, and redirect that to the other thread that was opened specifically for that. And keep this thread solely for commenting on the original video?

[Graham]

I think it's probably time to draw a line under this thread's discussion of feminism, and redirect that to the other thread that was opened specifically for that. And keep this thread solely for commenting on the original video?

Probably ideal.

Here's the new thread: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22742

[AdmiralMemo]

Scientific fact: Women are, on average, physically weaker in upper-body strength than men.

Issues to consider:
There is significant overlap between the two, and the averages aren't that much different.
Being physically weaker is not some sort of "handicap" especially considering that women, on average, have other strengths over men, such as pain tolerance and dexterity.
And the most important one... Every individual is different.

Were I to bet you $5 that you couldn't find a "completely average" person, I believe I would win that bet, because I don't believe they exist. Everyone has abnormalities of some kind.

Now, statistically, the recorded difference between Men and Women in strength, is insignificant. I mean that in the way that the medians of the distributions will be so close that environmental noise will blur them together.

And even when you look at the far outliers of professional athletes, the differences are tiny. Small enough to matter in professional athletics, but an entirely academic matter of seconds and 3% differences.

There's one kind of significant problem here... Physical ability is not entirely innate.

There is the assumption that you have to be born an athlete, that it's all in your genes... But the truth is that training and conditioning from childhood makes up almost the entire amount of difference between an professional athlete and a regular joe. And so there comes a question...

Is the tiny athletic difference between men and women innate, or is it the result of cultural norms imposing on how they are trained and conditioned?

Not going to continue with any discussion in this thread, but I still wanted to thank JayBlanc for articulating my point better than I could. Using a mean instead of a median seriously messes up the true interpretation of what the data conveys.

[Deedles]

The video is awesome. Just wanted to say that. It was hilarious, and despite some people's reactions I think it gets the point across very well.