Against panic about “feminization”: how pipeline, tasks, and norms actually shift work. And for modes, not morals: human organizations need challenge, support, and triage—without the gender war frame. And context-switching is a needed skill: institutions should train to challenge to call forth extra effort without dismissal, for cooperation without saccharine evasion, and for candor without performative aggression…
The extremely sharp Chad Orzel is 100% on here:
Chad Orzel: Gender Preferences in Motivation <https://chadorzel.substack.com/p/kids-are-kids-and-gender-preferences>: ‘The other big thing making the rounds of the #discourse is this article about “feminization” from Helen Andrews. This is solidly in the deeply frustrating class of articles that have a bit of a valid point at their core, but wrap it up in enough culture-war shitposting to totally poison the topic. Megan McArdle, both in the WaPo and on the new Central Air podcast, and Matt Yglesias make a decent attempt at saying something sensible on the topic, but Andrews is so comically hyperbolic that it’s difficult to engage with…
He is right. The fight over “feminization” mistakes a design problem for a civilizational crisis. Build spaces that reward both hard challenge and collaborative care—then teach people to switch modes fast. Differences in average personality types between genders do exist; but within-gender variance swamps between. Moreover, panic doesn’t help except for those who want to be s***posters. Optimize institutions for complementary strengths, and separate content from tone to keep candor without harassment.
Chad’s selection from Megan:
Megan McArdle:
: ‘Acknowledge the reality of male-female differences and remember that those differences are manageable…. Traits are… just more or less useful depending on the degree and the context. Extreme risk aversion is a splendid quality in a bank regulator, and a crippling handicap in an entrepreneur. It’s good that employers became more attuned to the feelings of their employees…. We don’t need to protect institutional integrity from the insufficiencies of women so much as craft institutions that maximize the complementary strengths of both men and women—while also minimizing our respective weaknesses…
My selection from Matt:
Matt Yglesias: Women’s professional rise is good, actually <https://www.slowboring.com/p/womens-professional-rise-is-good>: ‘Helen Andrews is spreading panic, not telling forbidden truths…. Andrews… claims that these workplace shifts… [are] “a potential threat to civilization”… in an aggressive, almost willfully anti-persuasive tone… designed to attract… woke scolds, so that Andrews’s fellow conservatives can complain that the left is in denial about basic facts of human biology….
But this is a serious topic that deserves better than sloppy partisan demagoguery…. Andrews opens… recounting… Larry Summers’s defenestration… for speculating that gender parity in hard sciences would never be achieved due to sex differences in interests and capabilities…. Summers was treated shabbily…. However, she herself is completely blind to the implication that women have come to dominate in… fields… [that] play into… [their] strengths…. Gender gaps in specific facets of personality are not really all that large, but the gender gaps in aggregate personality are pretty big.… Like what happens with faces…. People… reliably identify male versus female… but if you zoom in on just a nose or just eyes or just a chin, it’s much harder to tell…. There’s plenty of room for overlap on individual features. But there isn’t a lot of overlap in the overall gestalt…. I personally find the rise of more agreeable office culture to be a little annoying in some respects, but I’m glad about the decline of in-office screaming.
Beyond the basic analytic unseriousness, though, Andrews’s argument lacks the courage of her convictions. She tells us that the existence of female professors, journalists, lawyers, and judges is an existential threat to civilization, then claims she has no desire to take any opportunities away from anyone—she just wants to curb the bad employment-discrimination policies…. But there’s just no reason to believe women’s prominence in these roles has anything to do with H.R. or Title VII…. The heft of Andrews’s piece comes from the prospect of widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms. And neither she nor her allies are willing to actually make the case for it, because it would be horrifying…
And Chad has his take on motivation-via-competition:
Chad Orzel: Gender Preferences in Motivation <https://chadorzel.substack.com/p/kids-are-kids-and-gender-preferences>: ‘With respect to motivation through competition… I’ll more or less stand by my summary take from [2022]:… There are some people who are powerfully motivated by… competition and striving… and others who are not. I don’t think that [those]… who speak positively of being pushed hard… are confused or deluded—I take them at their word… I’ve felt the same way at times…. And on the flip side, I find a lot of attempts to motivate people in ways that are meant to be communal and cooperative to be de-motivating… [and] check out…. So, I react negatively to the idea of de-emphasizing competition and peak performance as a goal because that… [is] saying that an entire personality type is illegitimate….
Personality types are somewhat correlated with gender… which ties into the organizational structure thing… [but] both ways of motivation are valid. We need… spaces… communal and collaborative and spaces where open and direct competition is the norm… [and] for people to self-organize into the appropriate one for them without denouncing the other as a Threat to Civilization. Unfortunately, Andrews’s piece and much of the resulting #discourse is very much Not Helping…
What do I think? I have many thoughts. Briefly, Chad is right. But, also, it is very very important—and very difficult—to teach people that they need to context-switch. And it is also very very important—and very difficult—to teach people that a challenge and a demand that they excel and go beyond their previous personal best is often intended to be helpful, and that a demand that they accommodate and validate the thoughts and feelings of others is rarely a dismissal of the value of their individual contributions.
I did figure out something back around 1990. I figured out there were three modes I could pick for how to try to engage whenever I found myself as a lead interlocutor with the presenter at an academic seminar:
