The Gender Scandal: More equality of opportunity leads to more sex differences in employment and income. By Jordan Peterson.
In Stockholm, I concentrated more on what has come to be known as the “gender paradox.” Here is the paradox in a nutshell: as societies become more gender-equal in their social and political policies, men and women become more different in certain aspects, rather than more similar. …
Women have entered the workforce en masse, and are participating at levels approaching or exceeding equality in many of the domains that were male majority prior to the 1960s. But… we seem to have reached the point of diminishing, or even reversing returns. …
Men and women are more similar than they are different. This is true, cross-culturally. …
However, the differences that do exist are large enough so that they play an important role in determining or at least affecting important life outcomes, such as occupational choice. Here’s a paper, for example, … showing that at least some of the much-vaunted gender gap in pay, which is caused by many factors, can be attributed to male/female personality differences and not to simple discrimination.
The largest sex differences:
Men are less agreeable (more competitive, harsher, tough-minded, skeptical, unsympathetic, critically-minded, independent, stubborn). This is in keeping with their proclivity, also documented cross-culturally, to manifest higher rates of violence and antisocial or criminal behavior, such that incarceration rates for men vs women approximate 15:1.
Women are higher in negative emotion, or neuroticism. They experience more anxiety, emotional pain, frustration, grief, self-conscious doubt and disappointment (something in keeping with their proclivity to experience depression at twice the rate of men). These differences appear to emerge at puberty. Perhaps it’s a consequence of women’s smaller size, and the danger that poses in conflict. Perhaps it’s a consequence of their sexual vulnerability. Perhaps (and this is the explanation I favor) it’s because women have always taken primary care of infants, who are exceptionally vulnerable, and must therefore suffer from hyper-vigilance to threat. …
Men are comparatively more interested in things and women in people. This is the largest psychological difference between men and women yet identified. ..
It’s very important to remember that many choices are made at the extreme, and not the average. It’s not the average more aggressive/less agreeable male that’s in prison. In fact, if you draw a random man and a random woman from the population, and you bet that the woman is more aggressive/less agreeable, you’d be correct about 40% of the time. But if you walked into a roomful of people everyone of whom had been selected to be the most aggressive person out of a 100 almost every one of them would be male. …
More egalitarian countries have more equality of opportunity and thus more sex differences in employment:
The more egalitarian and wealthier the country, the larger the differences between men and women in temperament and in interest. And the relationship is not small. …
Given that differences in temperament and interest help determine occupational choice, and that difference in occupational choice drives variability in such things as income, it follows that political doctrines that promote equality of opportunity also drive inequality of outcome. …
This is … a fatal problem, for a particular political view. The facts can be denied, but only at the cost of throwing out social science in its entirety … and a good bit of biology as well. …
There are two reasons for the differences between men and women: biology and culture. If you minimize the cultural differences (as you do with egalitarian social policies) then you allow the biological differences to manifest themselves fully. …
Woke ideology is false:
The doctrine, ever more radically and loudly insisted upon by the politically correct, that sex differences are only socially constructed is wrong. Get it? Wrong. …
One of Sweden’s leading female politicians objected on primetime TV that her daughter could be raised to be anything she wants to be. But facts is facts, I’m afraid, and no amount of neo-Marxist leftist postmodern suggestion that social science is a patriarchal construction is going to make the ugly truth disappear:
Men and women are similar. But they are importantly different. The differences matter, particularly at the extremes, particularly with regard to occupational choice and its concomitants. There are going to be more male criminals, and more male engineers, and more females with diagnoses of depression and anxiety, and more female nurses. And there are going to be differences in economic outcome associated with this variance.
Game over, utopians.
Appalling sexist pig
