"We Just Can't Help It"

[rowyn]

Sexist pseudoscientific crap.

This just pisses me off. Biology is not destiny. Whatever problems you have or create are not an inevitable product of your gender that you “just can’t help”. Fine, I can believe that there are certain traits which are more common to one gender than another in my society. Making that leap to “and they always have been and always will be” is utter nonsense. What my cultures is training people to do today is different from what was inculcated two hundred years ago and different from what cultures on the other side of the world are doing, and I find it very difficult to believe that your little list of anecdotes and small studies generalize to the global population from now to infinity.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except that I get so tired of the little gender-based insults and excuses. What exactly is this accomplishing, anyway? -.-

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Comments

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Link seems to be hosed.

-TG

[rowyn]

Oh yeah, Outlook's not-smart-enough-to-know-they're-not-wanted-smartquotes. x.x Fixed now, thanks for letting me know. :)

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I can't believe you typed all that out on a phone. O_O

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Rowyn writes whole novels on a phone. Good ones, too.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

pssst! wrong login, bard! ;) ;) :P

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to identify tendencies and come up with a narrative for how they might have once been an evolutionary advantage for one group or another. There might even be some value in using that sort of data to tailor offerings that will tend to appeal more to them...

Applying stereotypes to individuals rarely makes sense though.

[jurann.livejournal.com]

They are easy cop-outs. =D

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

It's all for the hits and the ad revenue, I figure. Click and read what's said under the provocative headline, multiply that umpteen times for all the people who do likewise, the advertisers pay, and they make money.

[telnar.livejournal.com]

I'll agree with your disapproval of the implicit sexism from making sex rather than the underlying cause the focus, but there's another thread here: That investing overconfidence leads to excessive trading which is A Bad Thing (TM) presented in a moralizing tone. Better analysis and writing could have treated the different results of women as a curiosity associated with a correlation between confidence and poor investment returns (since women on average show less overconfidence).

I can make up motives for the tone of the piece like believing that men will be embarrassed by this result and reduce their overconfidence, or wanting to affiliate with women as a clumsy attempt to be PC, but I have no evidence for why the writer chose this tone. It might just be a sexist belief that all correlations to sex represent immutable characteristics, but I don't think we have much evidence that the author understands or cares about the empirical question of the degree to which sex differences are genetic. The author's views might just be related to a snapshot in time without considering what the future might hold.