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Putting women in law and medicine is also dumb for another reason, which is that you force the most intelligent women to have a lower TFR than they otherwise might have. And you force them into a dysgenic and unhealthy motherhood environment, because stress before and during pregnancy increases the risk of all sorts of impairments in children, and a stressful occupation prevents the kind of loving mother-child bond that is essential during the first three years of life. Your milk will be filled with stress hormones, and your mood will be too stressed for your child to feel safe in the world, and your child will forever have a slightly autistic unease because they did not sustain sufficient skin contact to modulate oxytocin, like the wire monkeys. We have screwed up an entire generation of intelligent adolescents this way, though the effects are almost impossible to study (who is willing to do this to a twin?). And I think a lot of modern ills (overuse of smart phones, parasocial relationships, etc) are consequences of an impoverished bond to the mother during early life.
Also, it seems to me that women just don’t think up interesting ideas at the same rate men do. As someone who ravenuously pursues interesting ideas and thoughts (as I imagine many themotte users do as well), about 99% of interesting ideas I read are produced by men. And if you look at the places where interesting ideas proliferate without the allure of a secondary reward (social attention), it’s overwhelmingly men, like on the anonymous humanities or political board of 4chan (which like it or not has had an enormous influence on today’s online culture). And the games which focus on creative problem solving, strategy or Minecraft style games, are overwhelmingly male, whereas the cosmetic and nurturing games are overwhelmingly female. This tells us something because what people do in their leisure is what they like to do without the watchful eye of society. So, women can do systems-oriented creative problem solving, but will they if they don’t have a structure involving secondary rewards of cogent social reinforcement (degrees and peer competition), by which they can feel superior to their pretty peers? I’m going to say usually not, most just don’t do that, but that’s an issue if we want people who intrinsically love problem-solving in every kind of role like that — such people require less mentoring, less extrinsic reward infrastructure, might come up with a novel insight out of the blue, etc
Female doctors are by and large hiring nannies to give their children the stay at home mom experience, just with someone other than mom. Not daycare. These are, after all, high income women- they buy the cadillac plan for childcare, not the base model. There will functionally always be more teenagers on a gap year than there are high income mothers of young children, this equation is unlikely to change.
A much bigger and more immediate objection to the high female percentage in medicine- it isn't going to be, and probably shouldn't be, 0%, because like gynecologists- is that a limited number of doctors are produced per year and women doctors on average retire early and work fewer hours before then.
The nannies are not breastfeeding in crucial early life years, or providing the skin contact and natural maternal affection that leads to healthy offspring. And because women are averse to pairing with men below their income unless the men compensate with unusual attractiveness, they have a lower rate of marriage than they would otherwise have. And because the school years are intense, they are delaying marriage. This dysgenic effect is more serious than the economic inefficiency effect, because you can’t easily produce more high iq citizens. In a pronatal culture, high iq women have more children than average, learning the skills of husband-acquiring and homemaking at an earlier age.
Besides AWFLs being perhaps the most likely demographic to breastfeed, there's no convincing evidence for benefits of breastfeeding outside of a slight reduction in minor rashes or gastrointestinal upset in babies. Nobody has demonstrated long-run benefits for the child of any kind.
This... doesn't pass the sniff test. Formula almost certainly isn't quite as good as breastmilk and we know early childhood nutrition is very important.
It's a subject ripe for a more classic 'political correctness' to overtake it since there are mothers out there who can not breastfeed and the notion that these loving parents are depriving their children of optimal nutrition and upbringing is charged to say the least.
If you've ever been in a maternity ward it's difficult to convey how hard the staff pushes for breastfeeding. In my deep blue area mothers who just had a C section and have a baby in the NICU are constantly pressured to breastfeed (despite the pain from the surgery site while holding the baby) and pump to provide milk to the baby. All the usual progressive suspects (WHO, APA) are pro-breastfeeding. We are very much in the "breast is best" era.
And having been around a person who could not breastfeed, the only reassurance that can possibly be offered is 'it doesn't really matter' and 'babies that are breastfed also get 'gastrointestinal upset' all the time, it's not your fault'.
I don't disagree that we are in the "breast is best" era, but the subject is nevertheless ripe for political correctness to overtake it.
If political correctness were to overtake it, it would have already happened.
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