05.20.06
That which we call a rose…
It is well-known that men outnumber women in the upper echelons of business. In spite of the efforts of women on the outside and on the ladder of what ought to be success, women are not coming close to men in upper management, and we have yet to figure out why.
Researchers Lise Vesterlund of the University of Pittsburgh and Muriel Niederle of Stanford University ran an experiment to find some reason why only 2.5% of women make it to the top.
In the first part of the experiment, men and women were asked to add up as many sets of double-digit numbers as they could within a five minute period, and were paid 50 cents for each correct answer. Next the volunteers were divided into groups of four. The same amount of money was going to be given out, but all of it would go to the person at each table who scored the most right answers.
For the final part of the experiment, the test subjects were asked to choose whether they wanted to go back to the ‘piecework’ model or continue with the ‘competitive’ model. Women overwhelmingly chose to go back to the ‘piecework’ model, even those who were best at solving answers and likely to win all the money in their group.
The researchers concluded that the factor in the difference is that men enjoy competition and women do not. I think this is a little simplistic, as “competition” is not the only thing that was being tested here, and certainly not the only character trait that would come into play.
In fact, “competitiveness” is a loaded word, with positive connotations that are valued in our culture. Is it really competitiveness when somebody without significant math skills is willing to wager that they will manage to take all? No, of course not. That is gambling, of which competitiveness is a small part. Gambling is, as we all know, a typically male behavior.
Again, look at what the women did and how we are describing them. If the women who participated (and by extension, those in society at large) are not “competitive”, then they must be “non-competitive”, surely a bad character trait.
Now look at what the males were doing as gambling. What’s the opposite of gambling that you’ll win or lose all? How about working to assure equitable distribution of earnings? Is that such a bad thing?
Principal Quattrano's Toy said,
May 21, 2006 at 11:42 am
Principal Quattrano’s Toy said…
Dear Principal,
You know what the problem with this is? Men are most likely to get their meaning in life from bullshit, braggadocio, and bullying others who they can easily remove from the competitive arena. Many women who study this to bring about a “fix” will do so in futility I truly fear. And it is because of this, dear Principal: humanity’s basic theory of the self. I see in another place, you ask me about destiny and about fate. I imagine you are getting into how we nurture our children and all of that. But the problem is more insidious than that. As I say it is tied to human meaning. And this is the outrageous thing that no one seems to believe but me. Meaning is tied in our human minds to aggression and to warfare because of a deep belief most of us have in free will. Outrageous? Crazy? More later. pqt
John said,
June 4, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Depends on what you mean by equitable. If you mean everybody get’s an equal share, then yes that is a bad thing. It’s called socialism. And whenever a society tries to be ‘equitable’ in this fashion it leads to poverty and misery.
angela said,
June 4, 2006 at 5:49 pm
A clear illustration of situational pragmatism, John. This is exactly my point, how the male thinks.
Did anybody here say “equal share”? No, but you did in your comment, and you defined “equal share” as “socialism” and defined “socialism” as “bad”. Hmm. Ask people in Sweden how miserable and impoverished they are, John. There’s a society that bald-facedly declares itself to be socialist. They like it there. In fact, in Sweden they would tell you that the attempt to decrease poverty and misery has been a success.
And you know, nowhere is there a “socialist” society where each person gets exactly the same pay regardless of whether or how much they work. So it’s all neocon mythos, John.
I think you are confounding socialism with Karl Marx’s famous quote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, which would imply that people who are able to work should work hard and earn a living wage and people who can’t work should be alloted enough money to survive. Although in theory “communism” was based on this idea, in fact no true communism was ever implemented in the world. “Communist” governments were just bureaucratic dictatorships under another name, a quasi-religious justification. No effort was ever made to end poverty and misery, as the primary intent of the government was to concentrate wealth in the hands of the well-connected.
Now we need to examine the real motivation behind your post, one which you have not examined yourself, the question of how we define “fairness”. Fairness can obviously mean different things to different people. For some people it means that those who work fulltime should get a living wage, medical care, and a modest retirement without having to continue to work until they die..That doesn’t sound to me like a society of “misery and poverty”, but again, depends on how you define “fairness”. “Fair to whom?” or “unfair to whom?” is in fact the issue we are discussing.
Since dealing with poverty and misery in the manner of socialist countries that are in existence does not lead to more poverty and misery, yet is so anathemic to you that you revile them with falsifications and delusional quasi-religious beliefs, we need to examine what these countries do that is so against your way of thinking.
What they do is they provide much less of an income gap than our country does. People who work for a living earn a living. People who cannot work receive a sufficient stipend to survive. People who reach retirement age are able to retire. And to do this, the upper income levels are much closer than the lowest levels, plus, the rich pay more taxes than we do.
This is evil, is it not? Because by your definition, the wealthy deserve more, and they deserve it so much that it is a moral imperative to remove wealth from the poor to provide it to them.
In other words, it sounds like “fairness” to you is the concentration of wealth in the hands of the well-connected – “rich white guys”. If it concentrates wealth in the hands of the well-connected, it is a good thing, regardless of whether it increases poverty and misery in this country, as you have already defined that as something that is only a problem in socialist countries. In fact, since any increase in poverty and misery in this country will result in transfer of wealth to the rich, then that is a good thing, right?
From the Office of the Principal » Female superiority and…bullshit said,
June 4, 2006 at 6:45 pm
[...] No. If your opinion is not supported by the facts as they exist, you are only deluding yourself by manufacturing factoids to support some proposition that you don’t even understand. That which we call a rose [...]
John said,
June 5, 2006 at 5:54 pm
Lol! I do seem to have hit a sore spot, haven’t I? I’m not going to waste my time attempting to deal with all of the falsities in your comment, since I don’t believe anyone who thinks that a particular group is superior to another based upon an accident of birth is really open to rational debate, but I did want to mention one thing. Its funny that you pick Sweden as your example of successful socialism, since it is not in ‘fact’ socialist.
Sweden is a mixed system of high-tech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits. Privately owned firms account for approximately 90% of industrial output. Privately owned means capitalism, not socialism.
No doubt posting this was a waste of time, but it was a slow night anyway. And at least I had a good laugh reading some of the truly ridiculous inferences you made about me. Of course it’s my own fault, if I’d read your blog a little more carefully I wouldn’t of posted anything in the first place. Trying to discuss something rationally with you, would be like trying to have a reasoned debate with a member of the kkk, a waste of time. You both only see things through the twisted prism of your own ideology.
Though I have to admit people who hold the kind sick views that you do , hold a certain fasination for me. I mean, how do you come to the idea that some arbitrary grouping of people is better than another? Whether this grouping is based on race, nationality, or gender; this seems patently ridiculous to me. How can you judge someone just on the way they’re born? Whether it’s the color of thier skin, or thier ethnicity, or thier genitalia as seems important to you , it’s no way to judge a person. It’s the individual and what they do that matters, not the group they’re a part of.
Tom Rylie said,
September 15, 2006 at 12:21 am
>>A more correct statement would be, “Women have been making educational progress, and the men have fallen behind women in educating themselves and the job market.”
angela said,
September 15, 2006 at 9:43 am
Tom, it sounds like you are saying that men are falling behind women nowadays merely by failing to make progress. Would that they were merely not keeping up! Observe in any high school study hall and you will see the majority of girls working on assignments or studying, while the majority of boys sit with headphones on, staring blankly into space, unable and unwilling to read anything for a required 5 minutes a day.
Tom Rylie said,
September 15, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Sorry, Angela, the message somehow got cut off. So, when trying to fix that problem, I then posted my reply in the wrong place (could I have illustrated your point any better?)
Anyway, here’s the whole reply. I was quoting the article “Female superiority and . . . bullshit.” The Principal wrote as follows:
“A more correct statement would be, “Women have been making educational progress, and the men have fallen behind women in educating themselves and the job market.”:
In support of that point of view, I added [the part that got truncated] that my daughter is in college and wrote a research paper on women and men in the 21st century. After amassing pages of evidence, she gleefully concluded her article with these two paragraphs, which struck me close to home for its accuracy in every detail:
“In sum, men as a group are, in fact, in denial about the emerging power of women and are not thinking collectively enough to be aware of what is happening. Women have not merely caught up with men, they have already surpassed men in important fields like law, education, and business. This is not merely a pendulum swinging, this is a resolute and intentional move by women to put themselves in their rightful positions of leadership and control.
“Research supports that, in a century-long head-to-head competition, the women have proven to be more than adequate to the roles of leadership and control, moving men more and more to powerless roles of obsolescence. This move is not as obvious at the beginning of the 21st century as it will be in a generation or two, but the balance of power has clearly shifted. This has been such a resounding conquest (similar in nature to many other conquests in history in which one people overran another), that there is little, if anything, men can actually do at this point to stop women. In fact, the words of Camile Paglia, though graphic, seem appropriate: “The stronger women get, the more men masturbate. What else can they do?”
Tom
(proud of my very smart daughter, but not telling her how accurate she is on every detail)
libera said,
March 16, 2007 at 4:51 pm
i’am really impressed!!