Objectification and Branding of Women in the Guitar World

[narad]

Anyway, what is "dangerous" about looking at the data from aptitude and personality tests, looking at the demographics for a particular career and saying "gee that makes sense," or, "gee, that seems counter-intuitive?"

First, I would say it’s dangerous to assign women a broad range of categories they are deemed to be better at, when our understanding of who’s better at what (across all sorts of criteria) are pretty bad and constantly being revised.

Second, a divide that cuts the entire population approximately in half is a very coarse category to be making any sweepnig generalizations over. It’s important to include metastatistics in this. Let’s say women are better than men at nursing, because we have determined that, inline with all our cultural stereotypes, they are more nuturing. They are 3% more nurturing. But let’s say, on the same test, the standard deviation among men participants was 10 pts by this same nuturing aptitude scale.

Then nothing you’ve said is wrong, we look at an industry dominated by women, and conclude that it’s probably because they are genetically predisposed to it — they are on average better at it. Yet, by the numbers, we’ve probably read it entirely incorrectly, and if aptitude correlated well to occupation, you’d have expected a much less skewed gender divide in nursing (the actual divide as mention earlier was something like 20% male IIRC).

Things like that.

But I'm really not going to even begin to touch trying to decide what non-physical occupations men/women are better/less suited to, as I think the science behind it is quite poor.

 

[bostjan]

First, I would say it’s dangerous to assign women a broad range of categories they are deemed to be better at, when our understanding of who’s better at what (across all sorts of criteria) are pretty bad and constantly being revised.

Second, a divide that cuts the entire population approximately in half is a very coarse category to be making any sweepnig generalizations over. It’s important to include metastatistics in this. Let’s say women are better than men at nursing, because we have determined that, inline with all our cultural stereotypes, they are more nuturing. They are 3% more nurturing. But let’s say, on the same test, the standard deviation among men participants was 10 pts by this same nuturing aptitude scale.

Then nothing you’ve said is wrong, we look at an industry dominated by women, and conclude that it’s probably because they are genetically predisposed to it — they are on average better at it. Yet, by the numbers, we’ve probably read it entirely incorrectly, and if aptitude correlated well to occupation, you’d have expected a much less skewed gender divide in nursing (the actual divide as mention earlier was something like 20% male IIRC).

Things like that.

But I'm really not going to even begin to touch trying to decide what non-physical occupations men/women are better/less suited to, as I think the science behind it is quite poor.

Well, I'm fine with simply disagreeing.

But if aptitude tests and actual career demographics match even with a small margin of agreement due to a wide standard deviation, I still think the science is good enough to say that there's no need for alarm, and if it's contrary to that it deserves a closer look.

It's not like there is a shortage of sociological studies that support my broad idea that women are at least just as good as men at politics, on average, yet there is a discrepancy in the career demographics, so...

Anyway, have we hit the quota for thread derailment yet?

 

[narad]

Well, I'm fine with simply disagreeing.

Given this is all a bit of a tangent, let's end it there then

Man, all my emails today have also required very careful language and I am shot.