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I think the author is saying that she is smart and got her position through merit, and is willing to prove it, but she thinks most women in high positions did not. Does this make her kind of an asshole? Hell yes but she did say she's a disagreeable sort of person.
Sure, but if the argument is that "society is becoming too feminised", then it doesn't matter if she got her position on merit: she's one of the feminising forces. Her argument rests on "I'm different" which, uh, is not very convincing: the only women who should have male jobs are women who behave like men. Fine, great, but how do we get women who behave like men? Because she starts off with the difference between male qualities and female qualities, which is biological essentialism and which does boil down to "there may be some exceptions in women who behave like men, but in general don't hire women because too many women in the professions spoils the profession".
So again I have to ask: what is the correct ratio of men to women in any job, profession, or field? How many is "too many"? What is the tipping point? And the only way to be sure (maybe the tipping point comes at 51% women to 49% men, but maybe it comes at 33% women to 66% men! we don't know!) is to have no women in the profession, or at least not above a relatively low level. Lots of female secretaries, to lots of male bosses. Lots of nurses, to lots of male doctors. Lots of kindergarten teachers, to lots of male professors.
If she is the mother of sons fearful for them in a feminised world, then she has to give the example of stepping down to be replaced by a man. And if she doesn't do that, then her argument is the old problem that feminism has dealt with before: pulling the ladder up behind you. She's okay, she's One Of The Boys, she values all the male values so it's okay for her to get that senior position, but other women just aren't the right fit, not trustworthy, too... female.
I am confused whether she thinks merit is a separate quality from masculinity. E.g. could you have lots of extremely talented women who get a job on merit but then, by their fundamentally feminine traits and preferences, ruin the workplace nonetheless? Or are merit and maleness the same thing to her, in which case you could safely allow a whole bunch of very 'male'-leaning women like her into a workplace, as long as you vetted them carefully?
I think in the latter scenario she can probably unhypocritically keep her job, it's just she'll also have to adopt a notion of merit that is divorced from ability to directly perform a job function, and is instead all about degree of fit to a male workplace culture.
She does seem to be pushing for "merit = maleness", even if she puts in a few quibbles here and there. That's why I think this article is not well thought out or well presented. She may well have a better argument, and perhaps that will be in her book.
Though looking at the blurb about her book, I think a lot of the questions I have are answered by her being a Millennial. I'm (early)Gen X/(late)Boomer, depending where you start counting from, and of course our experiences as women in society/the workplace are different*. Especially if she's complaining about "them rotten Boomers what ruined our futures!" Yes, dear, weren't you the one who wanted the cut-and-thrust of competition and meritocracy? Not to have things handed to you on a plate because of the Nanny State?
Commitment from bosses? What a female-oriented view of the workplace!
*I think Helen would be highly insulted by Inspector Monkfish's view of her place, but that attitude really was around in the 70s. Of course, she wasn't even born then.
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She thinks they're highly-correlated in practice, in traditionally-male fields.
No, because part of 'merit' here is 'not acting in typically-feminine ways which ruin the workplace.'
No, not the same thing, but in that case you wouldn't actually need to vet them very carefully. It would simply become the de facto understanding that the workplaces will operate along masculine lines, as they used to when women started entering the workforce. Women would understand this and either self-select out or at least understand that they are to comply with such standards of behavior or face disciplinary action.
No. Implicit in her take is that male workplace culture is itself more meritorious and will naturally outcompete female workplace culture.
So that's her take as I understand it.
Personally I'm not convinced. I don't think it's so easy to just 'treat women like men'. We're biologically hardwired to treat women differently and it's upsetting to almost everyone when women are held to male standards.
As a business owner myself, I prefer to assign female employees to accounts that I expect will go poorly. This is because if I send a man and things go poorly we're fired. If I send a woman and things go poorly "We love her, she's great" and "She works so hard" and "Yeah she's making steady progress, we'll get you more funding." Great stuff as a business owner. You can be sure that even if the regulations were dropped I'd keep hiring women!
It does cause me to reflect upon my own hiring standards. From my perspective the only way for a business, such as the one I describe taking advantage of above, to protect itself would be to demand that I send a man instead of a woman in the first place. Admitting a woman to the position at all is implicitly admitting several potential time-bombs. Presumably this works back around to implying that the value of female labor is inherently somewhat lower even with most else being equal. Interesting.
Anyway the author makes a great moderate case and I'd be happy to see us moving toward her policy proposals.
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Madame -- I'm assuming based on what occurs to me as cattiness and barely-disguised passive-aggressive hysteria but lmk if I'm wrong -- this is a strawman.
Her argument is that if we just took the thumb off the scale and left things to meritocracy the system would balance itself out naturally. She's not positing an optimal number of women. She's saying that the women who belong would fit in and the ones who don't would fall out as a matter of course because Men and Women Who Get Things Done wouldn't be forced to put up with them.
More to the point, she's talking about the ones who behave the way you're behaving right now.
There is no hypocrisy here, only what occurs to me as an unfortunate lack of self-awareness on your part.
Yes, and what are the qualities of "women who fit in"? What are the number of women who would remain and the number of women who would be pushed out? If I'm planning the office Christmas party, I need to know "how many are coming?" and a vague answer like "the ones who will be fun will come, the wet blankets will stay at home" is no good. She wants to revise the current world of work and indeed society as a whole.
You need a plan for that, not just "oh well the Right People will show up".
(I feel it's particularly ironic that I'm doing the male virtue thing of asking for facts, figures, and concrete plans, while you all are doing the female virtue thing of feelings, relying on coincidence, and 'it'll all work out in the end').
But "it'll work itself out" is exactly how that kind of deregulated meritocracy is meant to work, and arguably works. In that context, positing or demanding quotas, as you seem to do, is trivially absurd.
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What would your argument be for why meritocratic hiring would be likely to prevent feminisation? Is it that the high-merit candidates are low on feminine traits, regardless of their gender?
(It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects, but perhaps those women are more masculine?)
To give an example of some of the stuff @TitaniumButterfly is talking about, here's the way the tertiary entrance rank worked in Victoria (where I live) when I was in year 12 (back in the oughties!).
You do four or more subjects, and get a score of 0-50 for each. Languages other than English (LotEs) get a +5 to their score; uni-level subjects get a +5 to their score. Then you add up your top four subjects' scores, and add on 10% of your fifth- and sixth-highest scores. So far, so good.
Except that English is required to be counted as one of your best four, and LotEs can count as one of the top four (and you can do more than one, for a theoretical maximum of +16) while uni-level subjects can't (and you can only do one of them, for a theoretical maximum of +0.5).
Guess what sex does better at English and other languages (my score for English was 15 points lower than the worst of my other six subjects*). Guess what sex is more likely to be doing uni-level science in year 12 (I'd have done two - physics and maths - if I could). Girls' best subjects are prioritised over boys' when calculating the TER, which means yes, you will wind up with more girls than boys qualifying for competitive uni positions, including science courses which have nothing to do with year 12 English (i.e. writing essays about Hamlet or the linguistic differences of Aboriginal English) or LotEs. This is not meritocracy - not, at least, when talking about sex disparities.
*Actually, I'm like 70-80% sure that I failed English outright (which doesn't count as a score at all, and means you can't graduate), but my English teacher fudged the paperwork. Not that it wasn't justified after the complete trainwreck my life was at that point, but this demonstrates even further how wide the gulf was between that and my other subjects.
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My understanding is that there are two main thrusts:
Masculinity in the workplace and other similar institutions like school has been banned to a great degree. This prevents men from competing on an even playing field.
Equivalent forms of femininity have not only not been banned, but are encouraged and given the legal power of law in many instances, which further tilts the field in those directions.
If we rectified the situation in either way, the argument is that the fields would sort themselves out in a fairly efficient manner.
As I said elsewhere, I find her diagnoses of the problem to be probably correct, but her overall conclusions and solutions underdeveloped.
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Generally yes if we consider part of 'merit' to be 'psychological compatibility with a competitive work environment.' I.e. able to participate in direct debate rather than shy away and seek consensus.
University is a bad joke at this point and partly for this reason. The rough IQ required to 'graduate university' now is lower than the rough IQ required to graduate high school a few decades ago; in that sense, at least, a university degree means less than a high school diploma did fairly recently.
Absurd feminized departments abound. I've seen published 'mathematics' papers that were substantially just the author talking about their feelings re: how hard they perceive being female (or black, etc.) in Math. History, psychology, genetics, pretty much anything outside of hard science has become infantilized, feminized, sanitized of female-triggering content. Why would men want to go into that? Why would we expect to do well in it? How could we respect ourselves while playing along?
I had no end of fighting with my professors over their ridiculous feminized/marxist positions when I was in college, and that was decades ago. At this point it's a massive humiliation ritual for men and especially white men. It's a tremendously-hostile environment and while some men are willing to put up with it a lot of others are not. Personally I dropped out and started a business after the sheer wall of feminine condescension became more than I cared to submit myself to.
For straight while males, starting our own companies is one of the last best ways to live a life mostly-free of feminized nonsense. Until they start to get too successful, at which point the (wo)Man steps in and tells us the party's over and it's time to make everything a dysfunctional daycare again.
Really would have preferred not to be a serial entrepreneur but here we are.
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