On gender equity

I have always been respectful of women's ability to compete with men in non-traditional occupational roles, and I have been supportive of the aspirations of the women I know to succeed in whatever field to which they choose to apply their talents.

If I have any gender prejudices when it comes to work, it is in favour of women, particularly when it comes to young people. If I had to choose to assign a task to a young man or a young woman, all things being equal, I would choose the latter. In my experience, the young man would come back and tell me the reasons why he was unable to complete the task, whereas the young woman would tell you how she overcame various obstacles to complete it. This is a generalisation, of course, and the situation with young men changes once they reach their late twenties, whereupon they tend to step up and start shouldering responsibility, and thereafter often outperform their female peers. It also doesn't apply to physically demanding jobs, where the much greater average body strength of men invariably enables them to outperform women.

People often do not realise how great are the differences in physical strength between the sexes. Women have only about 60% of men's strength for the same body weight (e.g. see this study) and given men in Western countries also average about 15 - 20% greater bodyweight than women, the average man has nearly twice the strength of an average woman.

The differences between men and women are not just physical. Psychologists will tell you there are significant differences between men and women in the main personality traits. Men are higher on average in emotional stability, dominance, rule-consciousness and vigilance traits, whereas women are higher in sensitivity, warmth, and apprehension traits (e.g. see this study). Men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people (e.g. see this study). There is no significant difference in average intelligence between the sexes but the distribution curve for IQ is flatter for men than for women (e.g. see this study). This means there are more men than women of significantly lower intelligence and more men at the high end of the distribution.

These factors are enough to account for the marked differences in representation of men and women in different occupations. The physical differences explain why most firefighters, building labourers, dockers and forestry workers are men. It is also the main reason why throughout history men have been the soldiers, when the very survival of a society depended on its ability to field its strongest army. The psychological differences explain much of the preferences for men to take jobs that involve building things - such as engineering - and women for jobs that involve dealing with people - such as nursing and teaching. The relative flatness of men's intelligence distribution may also explain why men tend to do more manual labour jobs and why there are more men in fields requiring very high IQ such as theoretical mathematics.

So does this mean we should just accept the differences in representation of men and women in different occupations? Well, perhaps we should reverse the question and ask why is the difference in representation a problem? And what is the solution anyway? Do policies that are designed to ensure more equal representation of the sexes in traditionally unequal occupations work? It turns out the answer to the last question is no. In what has been dubbed the 'gender equality paradox', the most egalitarian countries often have some of the worst representation of women in non-traditional fields such as STEM, and compare poorly to less egalitarian countries such as Islamic nations.

In New Zealand, the government has just announced that the public service has two and a half years to "end pay discrimination against women'. The Minister of Women's Affairs, Julie-Anne Genter suggested the key to this was "making flexi working hours the norm", which suggests she understands that the problem isn't discrimination at all but rather the fact that women work different (i.e. less) working hours than men. This is the reality - men earn more because they work more hours and longer continuous service than women. And the main reason for that is that women take time off to have children. In fact, young, single women already out-earn men in most Western countries (see articles here, here and here).

What so-called pay equity advocates actually want is for women to be paid more than men for the same work, because that is the only way women are going to earn the same as men for working less hours or less continuous service. They expect female workers to be paid, say, 20% more per hour than the men doing the same jobs alongside them. Do they really think men are going to stand for that?

I'll leave you with a video on history according to sociology professors, which is sort of relevant to this post.

Another Good Man Falls to the Feminazis

So, another good man has fallen to the Feminazis. Kevin Roberts, the chairman of advertising company Saatchi and Saatchi, has been forced to resign for the terrible sin of saying that gender diversity was not a problem in his company (which, incidentally, has a 50/50 gender split) and that not all creative types, men or women, aspire to be chief executives. For these supposedly horrible, discriminatory views, he has been hounded out of his job.

This incident parallels that of scientist Sir Tim Hunt, who committed the equally terrible crime of telling a conference audience in Korea that he had a problem with women in the laboratory because he tended to fall in love with them and vice versa. The fact that Sir Tim in fact met his own wife in the laboratory, where they fell in love with each other, is all the proof that anyone would need that it was a personal joke that he was sharing with the audience, not a commentary on women scientists in general. Unfortunately none of this mattered to the Feminazis and Hunt's spineless employers who destroyed his career while he was on a flight back to the United Kingdom.

The obsession with achieving complete gender equality in the workplace is unfair to both women and men. The reports of large gaps between what men and women earn are very misleading, as this report by Pew Research states. The reality is that women on average are paid less than men for some quite legitimate reasons - they may work less hours than men, take more holidays, take significant breaks from their careers to have children, and aspire less to the most senior (and most stressful) jobs in an organisation. In other words, many women (and men) make lifestyle choices that compromise their earning ability.

The issue is illustrated well in grand slam tennis competitions, which now have equal prize money for men and women. But is that really fair? Men play for the best of five sets in grand slams whereas women play for best of three sets. This actually means that on average men are on the court for twice as long as women during a tournament. Men's games also get more spectators and television viewing audiences, and therefore earn more revenue for the tournament, so in relation to hours played and tournament revenue earned, the men are actually paid much less than the women.

I am a father of daughters and I want to see them get the best opportunities in life, but I think knee-capping men, and pushing women into roles they may not aspire to, is not the way to achieve that. As someone who has worked in senior management for a large multi-national company, I know that such roles are not for everyone. There are many capable women at the top levels of private and public sector organisations, but that does not mean that every female candidate is as capable to fill every role as every male candidate. Individuals should be promoted on their merits, not according to some ill-conceived quota that does not take into account the multitude of personal factors that determine each candidates suitability for the role.