Gender equality, what do you think?

General Discussion
22

Actually, we do agree. Because I study human beings I am probably dealing more with the greys between the two, of which there is vastly more than either end. I was only writing about the outputs of scientific method not what really goes on in the world. Too much is seen as 'laboratory' and far too little as in control of its own existence or destiny. That, although I use them for specific purposes, is why sociological theory and philosophy generally have nothing to do with real lives and can almost never deal with individuals, especially those who deviate from the norm those theories describe.

One problems is that opinion and belief are sometimes almost indivisible. Thus one has set in stone believers who will always say 'My opinion is...' instead of 'My immovable belief is...'. Those are the people who make change slow, sometimes impossible, and refute all compromise. For them there is only black or white. Science is, for them, neither here nor there. Therefore to objectify a woman by her gender and not her qualities is easy because belief means they do not need think out of their box.

23

But that is a black v white argument. Is there no in-between? The belief that much science has a good foundation but also that the individual experience must not be excluded.

I would actually disagree with you to a certain extent in that most people will refer to science to support individual belief to the exclusion of individual experience. Some people only ignore science when it suits them but for the most part they will refer to it as giving their personal experience validity.

As an example: modern medicine only really came into existence less than 100 years ago - yet our confidence in it is, for the most part, resolute. Prior to that observational medicine was the norm (to the exclusion of surgery). When laboratory science developed it literally started to exclude observational medicine. Science had the answers - people didn't. Why not a mixture of the two?

So, no matter whether we are researching gender behaviour or economics or a cure for the common cold, we should be looking for measurable criteria in addition to experiental - but science can't cope with that, because it undermines (I'm not sure if that's the right word) what science is.

Therefore we are just left with either science or opinion.

Heaven only knows how we got to this point from the original posting...but then again, we are dealing with people.

24

But of course. Plus, yes peer reviewing is so often wrong that there must be doubts about how reliable it, the 'told you so' factor is not always especially useful. That is why I use the placing a bet on a horse view. The same, back to the point of this thread, can be said for the so-called gender divide. One lot points out all the differences between men and women and the other lot does the same pointing out the points of exact comparison. Both use 'evidence' to make their point. However, using examples is the only way we can do that and since we must assume these are based on what has happened, none of them can be disproved. So we will have the two contending sides for perhaps forever. Even if someone comes up with a definitive and finalising evidence, there will be others still setting out to disprove the finality of the conclusions drawn who will eventually find weaknesses and open it up again. Then it will have to be pursued again and almost inevitably the same will happen again. Thus most people choose not to be scientific but accept what they know and go no further. Are they wrong? Yes, often, but for them as individuals belief is often stronger than evidence. Thus blue is black and red is green, convince them otherwise.

25

The problem is, Brian, that when certain science produces a 'result' then it is deemed, at the time, to be 'the answer.' We are dealing with people, yet again. That answer, although it is incorrect, may go on being believed for many years until further developments take place - yet meanwhile the general public (and many scientists) believe that science has found the answer. So they go on believing that 'other' scientific answers are correct. Hence you end up with ill-founded confidence in many, many situations and situations which are presumed predictable.

So, if economists say X is probably going to happen - people will believe it, including many economists. We learn to believe we have more predictive powers than we actually have. So is science given more status than is due to it? Is the emphasis on peer review causing more problems than resolving simply because by its very nature it excludes other input?

26

Always Karen. That is the beauty of all science. At present take the discourse between physicists who are either devout Christians/Jews/Moslems who believe in a creation theory but say that the biblical version is a metaphor based on the simplicity of earlier understanding against the straight up atheists who say that our world and all on it is simply the outcome of chance. Both sides only have the same set of evidences on which to base their empirical findings yet manage to extrapolate entirely opposing conclusions from them.

Science, all of science, is a big bag of speculation with no certainties in it. That is what makes it exciting and yet whilst we celebrate its successes there are many more failures or inconclusive findings that Ldopa exemplifies. It also explains why millions need to be spent to get a space vehicle on to a passing asteroid to try to see if there is any evidence for where life came from or how it began, yet because that landed in the wrong place is no longer headline worthy because it already leans more in the direction of failure than success. Like Ldopa, in time it will be rationalised away as an experiment and past findings used to begin new research to find the answers not found thus far. Yet success or failure cannot be predicted, although they are a calculable risk, since predicted failure would mean no support for the research. In that sense, putting a fiver on a horse in the 2.30 at Catterick is as scientific since even then one can still put another fiver on the same horse somewhere else a couple of weeks later and continue to do so until it wins, if ever.

27

Economics as a science can only provide us with the basic principles - elasticity of demand for example, after that it cannot be scientific because it can't take into account all the unknowns. For example all the selling on of credit that went on in the last 10 years or so. Science in a lab suffers from the same delusion - it's like you mention Brian, it is based on empirical or measurable data - nice, but only if the original data is correct.

I think science has painted itself into a corner particularly with the focus related to 'scrutiny'. What has happened is that a research team bases its theories (to prove or disprove) on previous research and they will reference that research (research which at the time was subject to scrutiny) but that research team will have done the same - rinse and repeat. What you end up with is research being produced now which is formulated on findings back from the 1940s or even earlier. At the time, of course, the results of such research were deemed to be correct based on current knowledge - yet time may well have proven those conclusions to be incorrect - but no one takes this into account in the current day.

It's very easily done. And more so due to the internet.

I'll give you an example (although I could do a couple of doozies!) Back in 1969 Oliver Sacks started his work on LevaDopa with post encephalitic patients - it turned out, as anyone who has ever watched the film Awakenings will know that the patients became extremely sensitive to LevaDopa and the maintenance regimens were not titratable as was first believed. ie in each individual, unlike in the lab, X amount does not produce Y result. So, some patients could be given 5gm of Ldopa initially before they produced extreme side effects, yet after a drug holiday they could be given a much reduced dosage such as 100mg and produce the same.

So they were 'sensitive' to Ldopa.

Go anywhere on the internet and look up information on it and you will see that this has now been interpreted as the patients becoming 'resistant' to Ldopa ie no matter how much they gave them ultimately it didn't produce a change in their condition.

I was fizzing about it (because I'm a bit sad and fizz about strange things) but my head nearly blew off when I read a 'RESEARCH' paper based on the same assumption. That the patients develop a resistance to Ldopa - who the hell funded that!

But one error - one assumption - and this will spread like wildfire. Many research teams who come along in future will look at that research study and use it to underpin their own research - and on it goes.

We cannot, even in economics, assume that the research community at the time had got it right. They could only base their conclusions on what was known at the time. Even then, the simplest error can reduce formulas and principles to complete nonsense. Oh, and add on to that, the unknowns, because no one would or possibly could, have ever envisaged things like credit default swaps in the money markets and you basically end up in chaos theory land.

28

A fine comment about the wallet. Somebody once said and it was at one time much quoted, that a man is only as big as his wallet as you apply it to Bernie Ecclestone, back in the 1930s after the crash in the USA. However, bear in mind the way a money grabber will profession love, loyalty and a long and happy marriage with the divorce already in the pipeline as they walk away from the registrar or mayor. Mark Twain 'Virtue has never been as respectable as money.' But then Sophia Loren, Karen, was already as rich as Carlo Ponti, half a head smaller than her, so she was not after his wallet, he had something else and it was not the aggrandisement of her career since she more or less retired once married to him. Perhaps love?

As for love, particularly careless love in which no cost is a problem, let's take another quote, from Goethe: 'Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it and others do just the same with their time.' Which sometimes sums up the whirlwind romances into short term marriages where the richer of the two is being sued for alimony, normally the man but more recently the woman also, when the one suing is investing all of their time and money into it with the maximum of media coverage and then loses heavily out of pocket, sometimes broke, and having given so much time to the separation and divorce they have had no time to earn or generate any kind of income. being broke they sink into obscurity. They have usually been blinded by the compensatory fortune they believe they are entitled to but forget the amount of time consumed and badly wasted not achieving what often greed and avarice demand.

Love takes many forms indeed, but perhaps respect and loyalty are the virtues that make that emotion endure.

29

I'd just like to point out that I know her name is Sophia but the second I'd posted I lost my server and couldn't get back in to edit!

30

I think the wallet comment is brilliant!

Yes. If physical = instant security, then why now can't money = instant security. And if certain men deem their money to be part of who they are, then you can see why they would be peacock proud as to the women they attract.

I hope I'm not sending the 'big blokes are thick' message. I don't think Vero was either. For a start I don't think educated people are necessarily intelligent. I think they are educated. And I think intelligent people can have no education whatsoever - it's not a pre-requisite. But I do think that sometimes physically attractive people learn in a short period of time that they don't have to try as hard to be interesting. They can gain initial attention simply by standing there. However that is a broad brush-stroke statement and it probably contributes to the belief of the 'dumb blonde' and we know there have been many stunning women who are certainly not dumb.

But there are contradictions - as you say men are attracted by the physical first so women are not under pressure to be intelligent (or educated) but under pressure to be physically attractive. And, if going by the messages (relating to height) the men are giving off, they believe they have to be physically attractive too. Hmm, yet are the best (strongest) relationships built on physical attraction? Take a look at some of the women considered the world's most beautiful, Sophie Loren always springs to mind, are their husbands physically attractive?

Maybe love does exist but not in the form that we believe it is when we are younger or that we believe it should be and that is why so many people end up in relationships which get broken?

31

Mike! Scientific method describes a body of techniques for examining phenomena, gaining new knowledge or correcting and combining knowledge. That method of research is normally based on empirical or measurable data that is subject to specific principles of reasoning and is open to scrutiny by the research community within which it belongs. It is the basis of all analysis we do in the social sciences, whereby the word science is not there for nothing, and thus subject to peer review and revision. The definition you have taken from some kind of dictionary or thesaurus is contextual to natural sciences such as physics and not to the theoretical of sociology or, indeed, economics. All of the experimentation from which economics draws its empirical evidence is theoretical and not practical. In fact, in the social sciences scientific method is the basic tool from which components of various theories and practical researches are drawn together to form a hypothesis which can only be tested by what it proposes being actually carried out. Thus, what we normally see from economists is either a correlation of previous studies that provide indicators from which to extrapolate models or simply predictive theory based a what might be set of assumptions using evidence such as recent history compared with present phenomenology. In that sense, economics is as scientific as any other discipline although it cannot be compared with perhaps nuclear physics or the like.

32

No offence taken either.

33

Veronique, I have enjoyed this thread, but the more it has gone along, and as I have noted elsewhere and shared, there is a decided feminist even anti-male factor at play here, which of course is fair enough.

Your stand as I understand it is predicated on the fact that there remains the infamous 'glass-ceiling' for intelligent and qualified women to get on? I find this curious and of course largely spurious as there are a great many women ' out there' who simply are not interested in 'getting on' - as I hasten to say is the case with many men as well.

I am and remain deeply suspicious of this sort of research and these types of lists, and they are simplistic in the extreme.

Men such as myself with little or no education also couldn't get past 'glass ceilings' because of our voices being "common as muck' or being 'illegitimate'. Most caved in and accepted the judgement and became what was expected, only to be condemned for ever.

For many successful men I have ever known, most were those who 'did it for themselves' and the pathways are loaded with such men - note I deliberately say 'men'. Bright women could, and some have, also done this and become successful. What glass ceiling stopped them? It didn't.

We now live in days when Jobs are no longer Careers. Jobs for life for anyone are long gone, and it is ever more incumbent in my view for men and women to look to themselves to create their lives and success, rather than whitter on about 'unfairness' and 'glass ceilings' as an employed person.

34

Toney, don't give up matey! As others are aware I am a working-class yob who left school at 15, and it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the 'intelligentia', but 'nil illegitimi carborundum'* is always my motto - and painted on the tank of my old ex-War Department Norton!

*I'm sure you either know it or worked it out - Never Let the Bastards Grind You Down!

Catherine. I am neither stating nor implying that any of the intellectuals on this site fall into the family aspects of that statement - even though I do.

35

Karen, I forgot to add in my post that men with money know they can buy 'love' or whatever substitute suits them with enough money and/or power.

36

Karen, I think that is spot-on, as it does become a quicker decision doesn't it? Instead of waiting and hoping to 'formulate' a partner into gaining financial security, get one ready-made as it were? Bernie Ecclestone anybody? - 5'2" until he stands on his wallet then he is as big as any woman could possibly ask for. Proof pôsitive?

I would agree in principle with the whole 'intellectual' and 'rationale' process being described here, but there is an underlying theme that is odd. Re-read the messages and immediately there is a thrust that says 'big blokes = thick' Reverse prejudice - I recall there are quite a lot of tall rich guys, so where are they in the equation?

I DO agree with the observation that as soon as the money runs out, so does 'love'. However I don't believe in that word as anything other than an abstraction, so I suppose by definition I can't agree? Hmm a bit surreal that?

In the interest of the thread, do men usually /often marry a woman for her money? I am sure it does happen, but feel that it is a rarity rather than the rule. Men are definitely affected by the physical first - at least as far as I am aware.

37

When I was recruited as a trainee computer programer, the male Manager said "We have quite a few female programmers, some in senior roles. Is that a problem for you?" One of the few times I was able to be completely honest in a job interview!
Interestingly, programming was one of the few intellectual tasks where you couldn't bullshit your way out of a corner. It either worked or it didn't. I met some very smart women.

38

"The scientific method distinguishes science from other forms of explanation because of its requirement of systematic experimentation." Economics fails that test, because it is impossible to exactly repeat an economic "experiment" or to know precisely what the outcome would have been if you had not taken that action.

39

Yes but I do think a lot of people want to have more fun before they go to the grave.

Don't get me wrong, I don't get it. I don't even get the beautiful young women who attach themselves to the very old rich men. I know what they do, but I don't get it.

From the old man point of view, I'm certain they must know these women are only there for the money but I don't think they care.

I'll do a quick edit here - if we go back to the survival thing and women being attracted to the man they percieved as being most able to look after them, has money taken over that role? The role of the physical, I mean.

Have men in their own minds, knowing their physical attributes aren't as relevant, exchanged the money aspect as a sign of their masculinity/superiority?

40

I have known a number of women who were filthy rich. Unfortunately I did not 'fancy' them enough to try to enrich myself and one of them was intelligent, superb personality and looks others would kill to have. No click, no thing happens. I have been in relationships, married or otherwise since I was 18 or 19, some were beautiful others not, we were together for other qualities. Marriages ended amicably and friendship remained. Money and looks are not everything. Because I have always lived a bit bread line I cannot say I have ever had anybody after me for my money. So clearly I had something else. That is the way it should be. About the person, not the things that are actually superficial. After all it is ultimately pointless because we cannot take it to the grave with us.

41

Mike, economics is very much a science but with all the contradictions of all other sciences. That is why I very much agree with what you said above because it sums up the situation that exists but those scientists waffle around and fight each other to have a different kind of being the ones who is exclusively right and offering a solution to each other's view. I love economics without being an economist, but have had to use it in my work, especially the child labour days some years back so have listened to both sides of each fence, if something can have many sides rather than just two.