Post by Lorpius Prime on Aug 7, 2006 1:50:04 GMT -5
La différence
How women won the sex war
Aug 3rd 2006
From The Economist print edition
Larry Summers may well have been right, but men are done for anyway
ONE of last year's better entertainments was the Larry Summers show. The row over whether Mr Summers, the then president of Harvard University, was right or wrong to say that natural ability may be one of the reasons why there are fewer female than male maths professors at Harvard brought pleasure to politically correct and incorrect alike. It confirmed the prejudices of both about each other, and led to the downfall of a man beloved by neither.
Mr Summers may have been right. In most intellectual areas, such as vocabulary and verbal reasoning, the differences between men and women are statistically insignificant. But the long tail of mathematical genius does tend to be male, along with higher rates of idiocy and masturbation. While women show less mathematical brilliance than men, their scores are better in some verbal skills (see article).
These differences may or may not be innate, but the argument anyway misses the point. The interesting question is not whether men are more likely to be weirdly good at maths than women are, but whether the things that men are good at are more or less useful than the things that women are good at. And the answer, in the rich world at least, is no.
Technology and globalisation are undermining the usefulness of male skills. Take map-reading. The female tendency to call for five right turns while holding the map upside down, playing “I spy” with the children and remarking on interesting features of the local half-timbering has been attested to over many decades by impartial scientists as well as by irritated husbands. But once satellite navigation rendered the ability to tell the cartographic difference between a car park and a lake redundant, that aspect of male superiority disappeared out of the window, along with the crucial pages of the road atlas that the toddler removed while practising his superior hand-eye co-ordination skills.
Men, studies show, are exceedingly good at rotating three-dimensional shapes in their head. Perhaps women once stared open-mouthed in wonder as their mates juggled pyramids of imaginary polyhedra. Such tricks are also quite handy for engineers who specialise in building large bits of machinery, digging tunnels or slinging bridges across rivers. But, now that the rich world has about as many tunnels and bridges as it needs, and the large bits of machinery which aren't made by computers and robots are made by the Chinese, their usefulness is limited.
Modern professional life is dominated by management, which these days sets high store by emotional intelligence, empathy and communication. Wise chaps seeking professional advancement should therefore spend their free time with groups of women, boning up on how to undermine somebody's confidence while pretending to boost it, and how to turn an entire lunch table against an absent colleague without saying a mean word. Such skills are likely to have a greater influence on their lifetime earnings than the ability to spin an icosahedron. It's a girlie man's world, as Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't say.
How women won the sex war
Aug 3rd 2006
From The Economist print edition
Larry Summers may well have been right, but men are done for anyway
ONE of last year's better entertainments was the Larry Summers show. The row over whether Mr Summers, the then president of Harvard University, was right or wrong to say that natural ability may be one of the reasons why there are fewer female than male maths professors at Harvard brought pleasure to politically correct and incorrect alike. It confirmed the prejudices of both about each other, and led to the downfall of a man beloved by neither.
Mr Summers may have been right. In most intellectual areas, such as vocabulary and verbal reasoning, the differences between men and women are statistically insignificant. But the long tail of mathematical genius does tend to be male, along with higher rates of idiocy and masturbation. While women show less mathematical brilliance than men, their scores are better in some verbal skills (see article).
These differences may or may not be innate, but the argument anyway misses the point. The interesting question is not whether men are more likely to be weirdly good at maths than women are, but whether the things that men are good at are more or less useful than the things that women are good at. And the answer, in the rich world at least, is no.
Technology and globalisation are undermining the usefulness of male skills. Take map-reading. The female tendency to call for five right turns while holding the map upside down, playing “I spy” with the children and remarking on interesting features of the local half-timbering has been attested to over many decades by impartial scientists as well as by irritated husbands. But once satellite navigation rendered the ability to tell the cartographic difference between a car park and a lake redundant, that aspect of male superiority disappeared out of the window, along with the crucial pages of the road atlas that the toddler removed while practising his superior hand-eye co-ordination skills.
Men, studies show, are exceedingly good at rotating three-dimensional shapes in their head. Perhaps women once stared open-mouthed in wonder as their mates juggled pyramids of imaginary polyhedra. Such tricks are also quite handy for engineers who specialise in building large bits of machinery, digging tunnels or slinging bridges across rivers. But, now that the rich world has about as many tunnels and bridges as it needs, and the large bits of machinery which aren't made by computers and robots are made by the Chinese, their usefulness is limited.
Modern professional life is dominated by management, which these days sets high store by emotional intelligence, empathy and communication. Wise chaps seeking professional advancement should therefore spend their free time with groups of women, boning up on how to undermine somebody's confidence while pretending to boost it, and how to turn an entire lunch table against an absent colleague without saying a mean word. Such skills are likely to have a greater influence on their lifetime earnings than the ability to spin an icosahedron. It's a girlie man's world, as Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't say.
www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SNVNRRSpost
