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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest

I realise I'm replying quite late (got here for the Quality Contributions thread) but I don't think this is the case. There are plenty of studies that show that gendered opionions (both positive and negative) neutralise with age. Older women are treated like men. Not worse than men, the same as men.

Shakeri and North found that, in general, women were viewed more positively than men, and younger and middle-aged adults were viewed more positively than older adults. However, when looking specifically at intersections of age and gender, the results revealed a more nuanced picture. Younger and middle-aged women were both rated more favorably than their male counterparts. But when it came to older adults, perceptions of women and men were virtually identical, suggesting that gender differences in attitudes tend to level out in later life. This pattern provides empirical support for what the authors call the “gender convergence effect,” where distinctions in attitudes based on gender diminish with age.

TLDR: Women are wonderful, until they get old, at which point they lose the benefits of their femininity and get treated like men. At no point are they treated worse than men.