The feminization of the university
Heather Mac Donald writes about something that’s been apparent for a long time:
Mills is part of the Great Feminization of the American university, an epochal change whose consequences have yet to be recognized. Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia…
These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not…
… Females earned 58 percent of all B.A.s in the 2019–2020 academic year; if present trends continue, they will soon constitute two-thirds of all B.A.s. At least 60 percent of all master’s degrees, and 54 percent of all Ph.D.s, now go to females.
Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma.
Not all females are that way, of course. But the tendency is there. There are probably evolutionary reasons for the greater tendency on the part of females to be worried, more easily hurt, focused on relationships, and concerned with protection. When men are mostly in charge, the emphasis is different – and, although I’m a woman, it’s an emphasis I prefer. When there is an even balance, things seem to be better, as well. But put a far greater number of women in charge – in the modern age, anyway – and a tipping point is reached, and you get the sort of thing we have now in the university.
Women versus men isn’t the only parameter in this equation, of course. There are race-based victim/accusation claims, as well, that factor in heavily. And there is no question that “woke” men are voluntarily going along with the women. In fact, one puzzlement (puzzlement to me, anyway) is that if you look back at the history of the university starting in the 1960s, it was seemingly traditional white males who gave in to special interest groups in the first place (see all my posts on what happened at Cornell in 1969 – for example, this, this, this, and this).
From an essay by Thomas Sowell on the subject of what happened at Cornell back then:
In a decade noted for its student riots, this was the most violent in the nation. In an academic world noted for its weak-kneed administrators, Cornell had the quintessential appeaser and dispenser of pious rhetoric in its president, James A. Perkins. As an assistant professor of economics at Cornell at the time, my characterization of Perkins in the media was that he was “a veritable weathervane, following the shifting cross-current of campus politics.” After thirty years, there is no need to take back any of that. However, a new book published on the anniversary of that tragic academic watershed reveals in even more painful detail how this hollow man set the stage for the betrayal of the university and his own downfall…
When James Perkins became president of Cornell in 1963, it had an almost totally white faculty and student body. When I joined the faculty two years later, I did not see another black professor anywhere on this vast campus. Perkins, like other presidents of elite colleges and universities, sought to increase minority student enrollment—and to do so by admitting students who would not meet the existing academic standards at Cornell. The emphasis was on getting militant ghetto kids, some of whom turned out to be hoodlums who terrorized other black students, in addition to provoking a racial backlash among whites.
This combustible mixture led to escalating episodes of campus disruptions and violence by black militants, each episode being rewarded by the administration, while fending off faculty demands for punishment with glib pieties and evasions.
I’m a woman – as is obvious from the photo on this blog. How did that photo come to be placed here? I originally began the blog completely anonymous and photoless, but I noticed that readers kept thinking I was a man. Over and over, I was referred to as “he.” I kept correcting them, but the corrections didn’t take, and after a few months I decided a photo was necessary. Something about my writing – or my original blogname, “neo-neocon,” seemed to “read” as male. I’m not sure what it was, but I couldn’t help but notice it.
And in life, I’ve sometimes had trouble with predominantly female institutions or groups, and that predated my political change. When I say that I had trouble, I don’t mean I didn’t have female friends, or that I disliked woman. I have female friends, and I was unaware of any particular beef I had with women in general. But in female groups – and only in female groups, at least in my experience – a sort of petty “ganging up” element sometimes emerged. It took me a while to see it, and I didn’t like to admit what was happening or that it seemed more common among females in groups than males, but I couldn’t help but notice it.
I think something like that is being accentuated in the universities today, and it is part of what’s driving the “woke” phenomenon. It seems that, if there’s a critical mass of women in charge, it remains a danger. It’s not that it’s inevitable with women in groups; I’m sure a university could be run by women who wouldn’t be acting that way. Such women exist and could easily be found. But they’re not the ones being chosen for those positions.
I have noticed that the Left will only hire the Left, ( no surprise there ), so I think it will only get worse in Academe, as more and more Woke Women achieve power there.
Isn’t it interesting that this whole nightmare was only made possible by Conservative White Males being willing to hire people who thought other than they did?
the focus on forced electives to make you take fruity subjects rather than just your actual focus is feminism
Apropos of females “ganging up,” I encountered it firsthand on my mother’s side of the family. I was an only child, and after my dad died, my mother and her older sister made my last years of high school and my college years a living hell. I won’t go into details of the abuse here; it’s enough to say that both of them are gone now, and I don’t miss either one. Thankfully their nastiness did not prevent me from developing close friendships with women in college and grad school– including three outstanding female professors. I’m glad that I learned to see women– like men– as individuals rather than as members of a category.
A big worry is the medical schools!!! Skill May be replaced by feelings!!
The evolutionary psychologists–is there really such a field as ev psych?–will tell you that when the hunting band goes out looking for a mammoth or wild aurochs, they don’t have time for a bad hair day. And evolved against it.
This is good but puts men on the back foot in facing such a situation. Their other techniques are not allowed.
… and yet, women keep whining about they’re not being enough women in STEM departments.
A long time ago, I worked on a very male dominated profession. I loved the work.
Then it got feminized. And ruined it.
A woke military unable to meet recruitment, police departments unable to meet recruitment goals, young men emasculated, rightly fearful that just an accusation is enough for conviction…
Rhetorical question; what shall the feminists do when they have eliminated all the “rough men” who stood “ready to do violence on their behalf” and all that remain are beta male pajama boys?
Obviously, reap what they so richly deserve.
I’d be interested in Neo’s take on the relationship between the feminization of academia and the transgender lobby– particularly the role of M-to-F transgenders in trying to shut down debate over the place of biological males in women’s sports and other traditionally protected spaces. It’s almost as if transwomen have become a kind of mascot for “woke” female teachers and administrators.
PA Cat:
Transgender activism leans most heavily on the postmodernist elevation of perceptions over the idea of objective truth. As such, it is allied with the left as a whole, as well as the cult of victimization, rather than specifically with feminism. In fact, it is in natural opposition to feminism and many feminists (“TERFS“) are against it and have been for a long time. The same is true of many lesbians. Activist trans women (that is, activist biological men who believe, or claim to believe, that they are women) are often seen as trying to invade women’s spaces (heretofore “safe” spaces) and to either dominate those spaces or to dominate women in sports. Many feminists and many lesbians see that as a threat. I don’t know the relative numbers, though, who feel that way.
My experiences in female vs. male-led organizations is similar to Neo’s, and so are both of my daughters’. We would all rather work for male bosses, with some exceptions.
Neo–
Thanks– I thought, too, that transgenderism would not appeal to feminists, which is why I asked you. It’ll be interesting to see how the victimization hierarchy continues to evolve.
I have a friend from the place I used to work quite a few years ago, who at the time was the manager of a small group. One day as we were talking about men and women, I commented that it seemed to me that women were a lot harder on other women, than men ever were. He gave me a very strange look. When I asked what that was about, he told me that his group consisted entirely of seven women, who were absolutely vicious to each other. It really bothered him, thinking it somehow reflected on his management style, so he was somewhat relieved to hear my comment. I have to say, since then I have seen some groups of women where this did not occur, but still others where it did. I really do not understand this dynamic, but I have seen it often enough to know that it is real.
I have had woman-led groups reporting to me, and they had very good performance and morale. I admit I may be somewhat biased in my assessment, since it was me who put these women in their management positions, but I think objective observers would agree.
May be significant, though, that these groups were mixed male-female; I’ve never had an all-female group working for me.
Neo, I find it interesting that people categorized you as “male” based on your writing when they did not know your sex. Of course, your political positions would tend to lead in that direction. But fear not! You are not alone as a male-thinking female; my lovely and very feminine wife is cut from the same cloth. She is as or more conservative than I in her political beliefs, and would likely fall into the category of “trad wife,” but she takes no guff from anyone, me included. (Although after forty-three years of marriage, we seldom find ourselves in disagreement on anything of consequence.) She does not do well in female-dominated groups; she finds them irritating in many ways, mostly because there is no clear direction, as opposed to male groups where everyone seems to sort out who’s boss pretty quickly, then gets down to business. She once tried to be a Mary Kay sales lady. After the first meeting, she returned home disgusted. She tossed a gold-painted bee on the table and said, “Can you imagine? They told us if we worked real hard, we could earn this bee–and it’s not even gold, just painted. And the rest of those women thought that was marvelous!” That was the end of that.
“A big worry is the medical schools!!! Skill May be replaced by feelings!!”
I’m not sure they are directly connected, but I have noticed the large numbers of Asian women doctors in practice now. They may know their stuff, but they tend to be very judgemental and vindicative. I’ve heard from a couple of women that if they are sent to an Asian female doctor, they’ll demand a different MD.
In one case I went with a female friend to see her primary care doc, who was refusing to refer my friend for knee replacement, saying she was too heavy and no surgeon would take the case anyway. I looked the doctor in the eye, leaned forward, and said (in what my friends say is my frightening voice), “Exactly how many years must she suffer this pain before you’re satisfied?”
Dang if she didn’t shrink back looking scared. Maybe my friends are right. I took my friend by the hand and we walked out of the room. I checked the details of her plan, and it allowed her to go to an in-network orthopaedic surgeon without referral. She did, and his first words were, “My God, how do you even walk?” 18 days later she had two new knees.
Would I have assumed Neo was male if I had read her pre-apple? Very interesting question, and I don’t know. My guess is that I wouldn’t have been sure. There are many women writers (using the term very broadly, to include, for instance, commenters on web sites) who are pretty easily identifiable as women, but I’m pretty sure Neo is not one of them. I’ve never tried to analyze what makes their femaleness apparent. Most men are similarly identifiable.
Regarding the tendency of women to criticize each other, fight among themselves, and so forth: I have certainly observed those tendencies, but they are just that: tendencies, not inevitabilities. I noticed it among feminists way back in the ’70s, when I was trying to be a good liberal and be sympathetic to the feminist movement. And I recall someone I knew at work, a woman in an all-woman office, sighing about some intra-office squabble, saying “Why do women do this to each other?” She had a pretty sharp tongue and was probably doing some of the “this” herself.
Years ago I heard or read where someone said that women wage war with words. I think that is part of it. ( As I , a male, argue a lot with libs on the Internet. )
In war, there needs to be a clear chain of command. And males have traditionally been the warriors.
What is the ratio of male to female hunters in the US? While there are female hunters, men dominant. Many women probably do not like killing. (One reason I do not hunt, but I am fine with others doing it. I have killed a number of predators that were a threat to the goats. There is a rush of anger when I am shooting- almost a ruthlessness to maneuver into range with a shotgun- but always a little sad when I see them dead. )
I also think a lot of women do not have the patience for sitting there quite in a deer stand waiting for prey. They NEED to talk.
I know correlation is not causation. However I can confirm from personal experience what happened at the college I was at. From 2000 on the faculty and administration slowly evolved to female majority, and the school degenerated from strong academic to woke social justice.
I think also female academics are self selecting to be very left and, frankly, with large chips on their shoulders. As they take over, not surprising what happens to an institution.
Gordon Scott
For some years, my father and I had the same PCP, a woman from the Indian subcontinent. She was great to both of us. Unfortunately, as she was an infectious disease specialist, I was kind of a problem. “We only see you when you’re hurt”, which is suppose is the point.
Eventually, I got the flu or something and everything was cool.
At one point, I was saying I’d let myself get out of shape. She didn’t take that for an answer and sent me for an echo. Lucky, that.
“Traditionally” warriors seems to me not the fit qualifier, Jon. Rather, how if we gave warriors “by nature” a try and see how that goes?
It is a fact that females [true chromosomal XXs] are now 53% of the US population. A majority! Because as a rule they outlive XY men. More than 50% of American births are males, but male neonatal mortality exceeds that of females, so the table is turned going out the gate, as it were.
Trouble is, women are not equal to men in so many obvious ways. But one fully employed female is not equal to one fully employed male (she does not constitute one Full Time Equivalent [FTE] for simple reasons like dysmenorrhea or pregnancy).
Yet there is this bizarre effort to push women into high positions. My medical school last year boasted in its alumni magazine that the entering class was 40% black, 60% female, so there less room for men, each of which would become ONE FTE physician.
This non-public university was also engaged in “fighting systemic racism” where none existed.
It was pretty tough to get admitted to a medical school back then, when I did get admitted. My admission was the result of an interview with the medical school’s hospital (now Medical Center and School of Medicine) director; we talked about Beethoven string quartets! And I was admitted. But no longer if sex and color are the eminent criteria, not merit.
The lesson is Do not get ill! Ever.
Again, I say read Charles Murray’s 2021 book, Facing Reality, in which he shows the average American black male has an IQ one standard deviation below that of an average white American male. IQ cannot be raised by pretense or tax monies!
Reading all this… puts this into perspective (of sorts)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/20/taliban-ban-afghan-women-university-education
Never elect a woman to a position of power
@ Steve > “You are not alone as a male-thinking female”
I would view the gold bee exactly the same as your wife did.
Once I got out of college — I majored in Applied Mathematics aka computer programming & statistics (early days before IT was a thing) & continued that route for my Master’s in Government (now Political Science) — and was dealing with groups of women on a social basis, I had to deliberately “translate” most of my automatic responses into the feminine vernacular.
Should I ever write my memoirs, the title will be “Female is Not My Native Language.”
However, I have dealt with many women who are unquestioningly on the Female side of the behavioral traits distribution, and we get along fine.
I think that Leftism is the primary source of toxicity.
AesopFan, I have been reading Neo and the comments here regularly, for years. Until yesterday, I assumed you were male. (Maybe because I assume that Aesop is a male name, and that’s the part of your name that catches my eye.) Yesterday in another comment thread you said something that made me realize you’re a woman, and I was surprised.
I had an illuminating experience back when I was a baby airman on my first assignment overseas – for some reason (possibly because my boss didn’t want to waste time with a series of meetings) sent me to a committee meeting – we were to organize an all-enlisted dining in. (A kind of formal all-hands dinner.) I turned out to be the only female on the committee – all the rest male, NCOs of many, many stripes.
It absolutely blew me away, how swiftly everything was sorted. A ladies church planning committee, or my Girl Scout troop would have quibbled for hours, over everything. But the guys had everything sorted:
Invocation?
Contact the chaplain’s office, see who might be available on the date.
Menu: NCO club manager – come up with some menu selections available at a price affordable for the junior troops. Vote on it, at the followup meeting.
Arrival of Guest of Honor: Kicked around the notion of using one of the base fire trucks (for about 2 minutes) before someone suggested using the flightline “Follow Me” truck. Everyone approved – contact that office to see if the “Follow Me” truck could be made available on the date.
Decor for the tables – and this is where the church ladies and the Scouts would have quibbled for hours. I put up my hand and hesitantly suggested autumnal colors and autumn leaves for the tablecloths, napkins and vases. Committee chair to NCO club manager; got such in inventory? Manager: Affirmative. Committee chair: All in favor? Good. Next item.
I had never before seen a social event planned so effortlessly. It was eye-opening.
Related? (With some excellent comments, e.g., on Honest A. Blinken in India and Mongolia…)
“OUR STATE DEPARTMENT AT WORK”—
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/03/our-state-department-at-work.php
Opening graf:
‘Apparently our State Department must think Greta Thunberg is lonely, because here is a current international grant program our State Department has set in motion to support “girl-centered climate action”….’
Sgt. Mom.
Hilarious. But the plethora of stripes had something to do with it. Plus the male view that we don’t sweat the small stuff.
I was in a church group–only guy, five women–where we got the business done briskly but took an hour discussing how to distribute the refreshments to the congregation after service. Note. There has always been as way to distribute the cookies and coffee. But…..hard not to laugh.
It’s kind of a stereotype that a guy who fusses over a meal at a restaurant is likely gay.
Sgt. Mom,
That’s an hilarious anecdote! Thanks for sharing.
My husband taught for a long time as an adjunct, first at a business school, and later at the extension program of a state university, so had a ringside seat as changes in higher ed moved down the food chain.
At the b school, things were non-ideological until the Obama administration. Then the administration announced that its emphasis would now be on “B.I.G.” — Business in Government.
One Sunday, we were reading the NYTimes magazine — probably in the second O term, though possibly the late first — and there was an article on Harvard Business School and its recruitment of women. There were testimonials from woman on how attending Harvard helped their confidence, and (I can’t remember) either helped them lose weight or feel good about not losing weight. Husband and I guffawed, thinking surely this article is a satire, right?
Nope. Next faculty meeting, that very article was passed around by the chair, with the announcement that this was the blueprint the school would follow — out with the old, white guys! Many of the old white guy adjunct professors got up then and there and walked out — the pay was certainly not enough to recompense them for the nonsense. My husband felt guilty that he had not had the gumption to join them. And in fact, his teaching assignments there trickled to nothing very shortly afterwards, as the OWGs were pushed aside.
At the state school, the extension program, though dumbed down, at least offered some semblance of an education, with proctored exams, papers, etc. Grades were highly inflated (somewhat due to their influence on the prof’s evaluations) and students felt that the mere completion of an assignment merited an A.
But gradually it all moved on line, and conventional texts were replaced 100% by “readings” that were all “diverse” (and according to my husband, boring and badly written). Proctored exams were eliminated.
Once a year meetings of the adjunct faculty continued for a while. But then the head of the department, who had also been faculty, was replaced by staff — naturally a woman.
They had their meeting, and she passed around the table a piece of paper and told the profs (longtime teachers with PhDs): “Now, I want you to take out your pencils and circle the answers that most apply to you.”
As in elementary school. She was treating them like seven year olds.
Faculty meetings were eliminated entirely shortly thereafter.
Although at that point, things were entirely online and the pay was minimal, demands were made that faculty complete various (unpaid) trainings in diversity, sexual harassment, etc. Once either a slip-up or a bit of mild sabotage revealed that non-compliance with these trainings was rampant. After many dire warnings, a final dire warning was issued.
At that point, my husband decided that, even though he actually enjoyed the teaching (such as it was), he could not go on.
Kamala Harris of course has the same nursery school vibe as that administrator at my husband’s university.
There was long a belief that women would rule less by conflict and more by consensus. What wasn’t considered was that the consensus could become stifling and inhibit real dissent. Was it ironic that feminism, and its visions of a more feminine, less aggressive, more consensual society took off in the 1970s when people were also criticizing “groupthink” and how it got us into the Vietnam War?
The bullying aspect may be an unpleasant result of women caring more about personalities and people. Male or mixed groups may more easily subordinate their individual egos to getting the job done, while in all female groups, a cattiness may come out.
I don’t know if that’s universal or hard-wired, but a group of women executives may develop a solidarity and a group ethos — we’ve gotten here on our own, so we stick together — that turns on people who aren’t part of the group. In other words, in order to suppress conflict and maintain unity within the group, it turns on a designated outsider. That also happens in all male groups, but it may be that men are better able to subordinate that to the task at hand when it’s important enough.
There’s a complicated chicken and egg relationship between women coming to power and society concentrating on feelings and bureaucratic paperwork rather than “real problems” and “getting things done.” Did HR departments and their values become ascendant because women took charge? Or did women rise because we are in a prosperous, peaceful society that doesn’t need to fight for survival and older male advantages don’t matter as much?
In academia, though, the problems started before women took over the top jobs. Maybe it was more a matter of nobody being in charge. American colleges often started with a religious foundation, or they might have a high civic ideal. They were often ethnically exclusive. Now that is gone, and so far as ethnic exclusivity is gone it’s certainly for the better, but universities have had a hard time since then figuring out what they are for and who is in charge. “The crisis of masculinity” was also a factor before women took the top positions and a reason for their rise in universities.
}}} But put a far greater number of women in charge – in the modern age, anyway – and a tipping point is reached, and you get the sort of thing we have now in the university
Funny how a university that has a faculty/admin that is 60% males is totally unacceptable, but 60% females is totally acceptable, huh?
“Standards for thee, but none for me.”
“But men had power for so long, so it’s only fair!”
Really? When did they stop teaching that “two wrongs don’t make a right”?
If it’s wrong to be biased towards men, it’s wrong to be biased against them.
And 60%? That’s pretty clearly the latter
Ilana & AesopFan,
Ditto Ilana. I had no idea that AesopFan was a lady. There are grammatical things like using the word spouse rather than husband, but maybe I wasn’t reading carefully enough. I always thought interesting that the commentariat here was male dominated, but apparently not as much as I assumed.
… if you look back at the history of the university starting in the 1960s, it was seemingly traditional white males who gave in to special interest groups in the first place …
Bork’s “Slouching Towards Gomorrah” chronicles much the same thing at Yale, IIRC.
_______
But in female groups – and only in female groups, at least in my experience – a sort of petty “ganging up” element sometimes emerged. It took me a while to see it, and I didn’t like to admit what was happening or that it seemed more common among females in groups than males, but I couldn’t help but notice it.
Plus, Sgt. Mom on March 7, 2023 at 9:05 am & Abraxas:
Male or mixed groups may more easily subordinate their individual egos to getting the job done, while in all female groups, a cattiness may come out.
I’ve had a few occasions where I was a member of a group of 4 to 6 men working a tough multi-faceted problem for a few hours. Everybody was smart, I was junior, and my personal thought going in was: There are people here who are smarter than you and certainly more knowledgeable than you in some areas, and everyone’s time is very valuable, so keep your mouth shut unless you feel you can add to the solution.
And the meeting progressed swimmingly, until it happened. Some guy had to assert his ego by interjecting his dumb idea into the analysis. In one instance, because I wasn’t capable of adding anything useful anyway, I was able to mentally switch gears and observe the dynamic. You could see it on some of the faces. Let him say his piece and hopefully we can move on soon. And we did.
I suspect women’s ego’s may be expressed more in terms of social connections and rankings. I have heard second hand that groups of Army or Navy officer’s wives tend to be very tough groups somewhat obsessed with rank.
Neo – fro me, the giveaway that you are a woman, was your choice of less serious topics – esp ballet and fashion. Or, really those videos where someone (and esp women) dresses (or is dressed) in an earlier era. My wife went through college on a dance scholarship, and greatly preferred ballet (older sister was into tap, younger, who also had a dance scholarship, was into jazz). A good friend still, from my college years (and the girl I was in love with then – but it was unrequited, because of the dance) got her degree in modern dance, though the routine she does now to stay fit is closer to ballet than anything. My wife loves your ballet videos, and, along with cat videos, are the only thing that she will look at online. Yes, there are male ballet aficionados, but my experience is that there are many more female ones.
And similarly, with the history of dress. My wife has some interest there, but is much more interested in the history of architecture and furniture (her third career was as an interior designer). Back to dress – I was going through my dressier wardrobe the other day, and our 21 year old grandson took an interest in the sports coats I was giving to Goodwill. They were 40 years old, but probably still wearable. I promised to give him, and his 19 year old brother one of my Navy sport coats. Both are interested. Timeless male fashion. I have 40 year old dress suits that I could still wear to court, if I weren’t retired. For most of us guys, dress is a way of showing status, and little more. It’s a uniform.
Other than those places, I probably could almost believe, by your writing, that you were a guy.
Drcool#1 on March 6, 2023 at 4:55 pm said:
A big worry is the medical schools!!! Skill May be replaced by feelings!!
I watched this over 15 years teaching clinical skills to medical students. Early on, I was often given the task of “straightening out” students who were failing or who had failed and were repeating a year (usually the first year). One of these students told me later that I was the only reason he graduated. I was sort of the crotchety old man professor. I quit just in time as the culture was changing. I did get to meet the “Diversity Dean” shortly before I left. One time, later in the period, I mentioned in a faculty meeting that the greatest educational institution in American history was the US Army Air Corps as it taught 200,000 men to fly in three years. That was not a popular sentiment in the female faculty.
I spent 50 years as a surgeon working in operating rooms. I noticed that nurses and other female techs, who predominate in operating suites, much preferred male supervisors even though they were rare. I have advised a number of men to go into nursing as they will quickly move into administration.
“And the meeting progressed swimmingly, until it happened. Some guy had to assert his ego by interjecting his dumb idea into the analysis. In one instance, because I wasn’t capable of adding anything useful anyway, I was able to mentally switch gears and observe the dynamic. You could see it on some of the faces. Let him say his piece and hopefully we can move on soon. And we did.”
“I suspect women’s ego’s may be expressed more in terms of social connections and rankings. I have heard second hand that groups of Army or Navy officer’s wives tend to be very tough groups somewhat obsessed with rank.”
Male decision making tends to be relatively top down, and the more formal the male hierarchy, the more that is. I suspect that Sgt Mom’s experience would have been different if it had been a group of officers, instead of noncoms. I ran into that one time, when we were developing a new method to write patents. Our VP laid out his thoughts, then played devil’s advocate with the refinements. I did the same, but got written up in my performance review for not being a team player. He could criticize, but I couldn’t. Yet, I was the one, out of almost 20 of us, who actually adopted the new methodology, and ended up as one of the top producers in the company, with over 100 patent attorneys. Didn’t matter – he was the VP, and I effectively criticized him.
It’s probably getting better with more sex role reversal in the military, but my grandmother had the time of her life during WW II. Her husband was an Army Col, CO of the camp he was building. When he finished, he turned it over to a General to run, and went and built another. In any case, she loved being the most important wife there. She controlled the social life among the officer’s wives. She was automatically invited to any social function among them, put on by the wife of a Major or above. Plus, she had the big house with help.
Finally, my theory (which wasn’t original to me) is that women are not as hierarchical as men, and their decision making reflects that. With men, if you are low ranked in the group, often no one really wants to hear your suggestions. The top of the group will make obvious when low ranking suggestions are welcomed, and when they aren’t, so sometimes there is a free for all brain storming, but when it comes time to make decisions, you should recognize that and shut up. Meanwhile, women are often much more Democratic, at least superficially. Everyone there needs to have their thoughts heard, and feelings respected. Which comes across to men as dithering. It isn’t decision making, as we understand it, but a therapy session.
I have to wonder if strong tendency to consensus based group dynamics of women will stagnate science? It isn’t science until it is settled, and once settled cannot be re-evaluated.
There have been relatively few iconoclast women scientist and engineers (there have been some, but not as many as men, regardless of cutlture (western, islamic, hindu, chinese). I don’t think is a simple ‘patriarchy!’
If this trend continues, maybe we really will be able to shut the patent office down.
“Did HR departments and their values become ascendant because women took charge? Or did women rise because we are in a prosperous, peaceful society that doesn’t need to fight for survival . . . .” [Abraxis @ 10:53 am]
IMO your two observations can be co-dependent: Strong men create good times->Good times create weak men->Weak men create bad times->bad times create strong men-> . . . . Pick wherever you believe us to be in that cycle. It also speaks to Gloria Steinem’s ludicrous dictum that “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” It reveals her ignorance and myopia because to the extent that her simile can be called valid, its validity is only possible “. . . in a prosperous, peaceful society that doesn’t need to fight for survival . . .” and which, ironically, has been built predominantly by men.
But IMO there is also another principle at work, i.e., the difference between theory and practice. It is especially because of this distinction that academicians should be feared in positions of power and influence; the efficient exercise of power requires some knowledge of the effects of a given action, but too many people today are willing to pass laws, edicts, and (oftentimes contradictory) regulations just assuming it will all work out for the better.
Used to be a tradition in the Army, at planning session, the junior guys spoke first. That way, a possible good idea wasn’t stifled by reluctance to seem to disagree with higher.
I haven’t noticed women are particularly hard on each other in work situations or family situations.
What I’ve noticed at work in feminized offices is that there is a tendency to sort tasks for political reasons rather than seeking functional efficiency (process process), a tendency to insist on formal meetings with minutes which are 45 minutes long rather than an informal chat that’s 15 minutes long and can accomplish as much (process process), a tendency for the convenience of employees to be favored over service delivery, learned helplessness in supervising staff, and socializing on company time.
As for domestic life…
I think people mistake Neo for a man because she makes bullet pointed arguments, rather then the observational on-the-one-hand-on-the-other interventions that women seem to favor in discussions like this. Also, the blog is devoted to public affairs. Girlblogging tends to be devoted to mundane life, hobbies, or matters of particular interest to the blogger given her occupation.
TommyJay:
I’ve noticed that, in general, commenters in the political blogosphere are more likely to be male.
Mike K
Such as Ted Williams, who became a pilot- and by most measures an outstanding one- without any college. Those tests picked out his talent. Ted may have been a stubborn so-and-so, but he wasn’t stupid, and those tests detected that. I can think of other examples of the armed forces tests picking out talent among my relatives that would have otherwise not been noticed.
Here’s some info as to how the Air Corps training program worked:
https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196138/aaf-training-during-wwii/
Note that the primary training was done by contracted civilian flight instructors. A little surprising that there were enough of them.
Also during WWII, there was a program called ‘Training Within Industry’ to help people learn to work effectively in a variety of manufacturing jobs:
https://www.lean.org/lexicon-terms/training-within-industry-twi/
… the greatest educational institution in American history was the US Army Air Corps as it taught 200,000 men to fly in three years.
If I understand the reference correctly, there were also a large group of women in the US and UK who flew the fighters and bombers from the point of manufacture to remote hubs or distribution points. In the US, some of those hubs were places where extensive retrofitting was done either for the Pacific theater or the European theater. According to a documentary I saw, while it wasn’t combat, it wasn’t a trivial job either.
Bruce Hayden & Richard Aubrey,
Interesting points. I hadn’t heard of Richard’s point.
Bruce’s points are a slightly different tangent to mine. I think women’s groups can be more cliquish than men’s. Things like a husband’s military rank is just one of many things that can factor into being included or excluded in a clique. I get Bruce’s point about male hierarchy. Perhaps because my environment was an academic one, I didn’t see that much.
To overgeneralize my earlier point, both men and women can lose control of their egos, and it tends to manifest differently. Cliquish behavior is a particularly unhelpful(?) manifestation.
On yet another tangent, I really like the pro’s vs. con’s style of analysis even though it is supposed to be poor editorial or op-ed practice. In a group problem solving environment, I’m not sure. I can see the advantages, but also that it could diffuse the focus and slow the process.
About 30 years ago, I got interested in the various methods of determining and analyzing personality types, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory and its variants, and other systems.
https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/
I don’t buy into the underlying Jungian jargon, but I do think he and his successors sorted out the major personality preferences accurately enough to be useful. It’s used a lot in career counseling; not as a hard-and-fast rule in the sense that “Type X could never be happy in Job Y” but helping to identify where you might actually be more comfortable working.
https://careerassessmentsite.com/myers-briggs-test/mbti-personality-types/careers/istj/
We and all the boys “typed” ourselves, and it helped in defusing conflicts for them to remember “oh yeah, he’s the Extrovert” or having the Thinking types (a majority of our crew) consciously adjusting to work with the Feeling brother (and vice versa) — instead of just believing something was wrong with them (or the other guys).
What was most helpful to me was learning that all personality traits (and their 4-part types) are exhibited by both men and women, but their distributions for the sexes (there are only two) are not the same.
https://www.slayerment.com/mbti-gender
I am an ISTJ, which is much more prevalent among men, but not unknown among women.
FWIW, I would much rather work with Sgt Mom’s NCOs than the officers’ wives’ club, but over the years I have learned how to do both, mostly by treating groups that function differently than I would as a field exercise in anthropological observation.
My children believe I should have been either a drill sergeant or the Mother Superior of a medieval abbey.
AesopFan…years ago, I was at a company management training program where we had several interesting outside speakers, one of whom was a psych progessor of the Jungian persuasion. He talked about personality types, and how natural it feels to hire people who are like you..and: You must resist this tendency, or you will all have the same blind spots and will happily all walk off the cliff together.
This is a kind of ‘diversity’ that is pretty much totally ignored in today’s Diversity discussions.
…except that walking “off the cliff together” seems to be the goal.
BTW, I very much like the concept of “progressor”.
(You may have—if inadvertently—coined an ingenious job title! And college major!!)
…One perfectly suited for today’s “woke-work/study/living/coercing” environment (and also perfect for walking off cliffs…but not before causing as much damage as possible….).
25+ years ago a fellow Marine retired and completed his PhD in management, his dissertation topic compared leadership styles of women and men executives.
He was encouraged to publish his thesis, his response: “are you crazy, if I did I would never get a job in academia.”
His data showed female executives tended more political, vicious and likely to undermine co-workers, as they worked towards promotion. Perhaps necessary up to that time (1990s), but not constructive traits.
He did go on to work at UVa, in the administration, not as a prof.
Steve Malunn…”He was encouraged to publish his thesis, his response: “are you crazy, if I did I would never get a job in academia.”
A few years ago, it was revealed that the senior PR executive at Boeing had…more than 2 decades earlier, when he was a Navy pilot…published a paper arguing against the use of women as combat pilots.
He was forced out of his job.