Does ideology hinder insights on gender and labor markets? - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Does ideology hinder insights on gender and labor markets?

Charlotta Stern Department of Sociology, Stockholm University The Ratio Institute

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

Agenda

Background

I.

Political ideology of Academics I. Invitation to write about consequences of ideological homogeneity

II.

The Second Darwinian Revolution I. Gender differences in ”new” light

• III. Does ideology hinder insights on gender and labor

markets?

2018-01-10

• I. Political Ideology of US academics

• I. Political Ideology of Swe. Acad. (left wing)

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

I.

2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

• I. Politics in Psychology, ratio

2018-01-10

Ra#o of Democrat:Republicans or Liberal s:Conserva#ves 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 Year 1920 1945 1970 1995 2020

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

“I believe that university life requires that people with diverse viewpoints and perspectives encounter each other in an environment where they feel free to speak up and challenge each other. I am concerned that many academic fields and universities currently lack sufficient viewpoint diversity—particularly political

• diversity. I will support viewpoint diversity in my academic field, my university,

my department, and my classroom.”

• http://heterodoxacademy.org/

2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

• I. Jussim and Crawford (ed) 


The politics of social psychology

2018-01-10

• Does ideology hinder insights on gender and labor

markets?

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

Agenda

Background to the study

I.

Political ideology of Academics I. Invitation to write about consequences of ideological homogeneity

II.

The Second Darwinian Revolution I. Gender differences in ”new” light

• III. Does ideology hinder insights on gender and labor

markets?

2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

• II. The second Darwinian revolution

2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

• II. Evolutionary social sciences

2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

• II. New insights in the market place of ideas
• Gender differences

– Life priorities – People/Thing – Risk, competition, aggression – Variability

• Biological-difference ideas

– Sex hormones – Universal – Stable – Present in other mammals

2018-01-10

• II. My presupposition of Gender Sociology
• Sacred ideas

– Biological differences between the sexes are minor – Cultural differences are a result of social processes having little basis in biological differencees – Doing gender as societal trap

• Sacred cause to reduce

gender differences

– Biological-difference ideas are not engaged

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

• II. Small study of ”Doing gender”
• Classic article published in

Gender & Society in 1987

• 23 most highly cited articles

who cite ”Doing Gender” in 2004-2014.

– Are biological-difference ideas acknowledged, discussed, or evaluated?

2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

• II. Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate
• Book from 2002
• International best-seller
• Nominated to 2003 Aventis

Prize

• Finalist for a Pulitzer Prize
• Challenge social constructivist

notions of human beings

2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

• II. Results

2018-01-10

Bio

N N N N

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

Agenda

Background to the study

I.

Political ideology of Academics I. Invitation to write about consequences of ideological homogeneity

II.

The Second Darwinian Revolution I. Gender differences in ”new” light

• III. Does ideology hinder insights on gender and labor

markets?

2018-01-10

• III. Does ideology hinder insights on gender

and labor markets?

• Domination of ”left-feminists”

– Marxist, socialist, critical, and post-modern feminists

• Left-feminists defines an equal society as a society

characterized by small differences between men and women

• Ideological reason why social constructivist thinking is

locked-in – Gender-difference ideas threaten ”equality”

Lock-in method: ”Essentialist ideology”

• Biological-difference ideas are described as essentialist

ideology

• Essentialist Ideology

… stereotypes about natural male and female characteristics are disseminated and perpetuated through popular culture and media, through social interaction in which significant others (parents, peers teachers) …” (Charles and Grusky 2007, 333)

Gender segregation in the labor market

Argues that norms of ”self-fulfillment” and individual choice are scripted differently for women and men, resulting in gendered

• ccupational choices.

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen 2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen 2018-01-10

Biological-differences and choice?

• How to explain occupational segregation when traditional

values are eroded – Are individuals unable to discern their own preferences from ”traditional” expectations surrounding them?

• Maybe women and men have different preferences?
• Can we learn more by exploring these preferences?

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

Investigating gender differences

• Learning more will demand asking ”difficult” questions

– Investigating the underlying assumption of slim- differences

• Positions of power and the glass ceiling

– Risk taking, status seeking and competitiveness is likely to make a difference

• Productivity differences and the gender wage gap

– The above, plus women’s greater responsibility for household

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Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

Status quo

• Limits creative theorizing

– Tools to understand gender-difference are limited to stereotypes, socialization, doing-gender

• Lowers the quality of research

– Alternative explanations are not considered – Hypotheses are not tested

2018-01-10

Does ideology hinder insights on gender and labor markets?

Yes, I hypothesize that the domination of left-feminists’, sharing a sacred beliefs in equality as slim-outcome differences fosters a taboo towards exploring gender differences. Had there been other ideas on equality present (classical liberal feminist ideas), I believe we had come further in understanding both gender and labor markets.

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

Agenda

Background to the study

I.

Political ideology of Academics I. Invitation to write about consequences of ideological homogeneity

II.

The Second Darwinian Revolution I. Gender differences in ”new” light

• III. Does ideology hinder insights on gender and labor

markets?

2018-01-10

Moving forward. . .

• It is time to work out improved attitudes about gender,

attitudes that accept that differences between the genders may continue to exist even in settings where individuals are freer to express themselves and lead their own lives.

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen 2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen 2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

Alternative explanations

There are alternative explanations:

• Small gender differences cannot explain large differences

in outcomes – Well, see Schelling’s tippingmodels

• Simplify to tear down patriarchal structures

– Incompatible with scientific norms

• ”Social constructivism is my perspective”

– Damages the credibility of sociology

2018-01-10

EEA – environment of evolutionary adaptation/ adaptedness

• Människan uppstod mellan 1.5 och 2.5 miljoner år sedan, runt

Pleistocen som avslutades ungefär för 12,000 år sedan

• Under eran antas att evolutionära krafter (adaptation och

selektion) kring reproduktionen formar en majoritet av de psykologiska mekanismer vi fortsatt uppbär – artens tillväxt, utveckling, partnerval, föräldraskap och sociala relationer

• Beteenden och egenskaper som är universella – evolutionärt

anpassade – Exempel är språk, kognition, sociala roller, könsroller . . .

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

• I. Political Ideology of Sw. Acad. (Right wing)

2018-01-10

Lotta Stern, Sociologiska institutionen

Gender wage gap 5% in 2007

2018-01-10

Människan

• Levde i små samhällen
• Med sammanhållna kulturer (cohesion)
• Stabila och rika kontext för identitet och mening

Missmatchning

• Rädsla för ormar och spindlar
• Fett, salt och söt mat
• Stor byst och blankt hår

• Psychologist Mark van Vugt recently argued that modern
• rganizational leadership is a mismatch.[47] His argument

is that humans are not adapted to work in large, anonymous bureaucratic structures with formal

• hierarchies. The human mind still responds to

personalized, charismatic leadership primarily in the context of informal, egalitarian settings. Hence the dissatisfaction and alienation that many employees

• experience. Salaries, bonuses and other privileges exploit

instincts for relative status, which attract particularly males to senior executive positions.[48]

Känslor och motivation

• Motivations direct and energize behavior, while emotions provide the affective component to motivation,

positive or negative.[63] In the early 1970s, Paul Ekman and colleagues began a line of research which suggests that many emotions are universal.[63] He found evidence that humans share at least five basic emotions: fear, sadness, happiness, anger, and disgust.[63] Social emotions evidently evolved to motivate social behaviors that were adaptive in the EEA.[63] For example, spite seems to work against the individual but it can establish an individual's reputation as someone to be feared.[63] Shame and pride can motivate behaviors that help one maintain one's standing in a community, and self-esteem is one's estimate of

• ne's status.[25][63] Motivation has a neurobiologial basis in the reward system of the brain. Recently, it

has been suggested that reward systems may evolve in such a way that there may be an inherent or unavoidable trade-off in the motivational system for activities of short versus long duration.[64]

Kognition

• Cognition refers to internal representations of the world and internal information processing. From an EP perspective, cognition is not "general

purpose," but uses heuristics, or strategies, that generally increase the likelihood of solving problems that the ancestors of present-day humans routinely faced. For example, present day humans are far more likely to solve logic problems that involve detecting cheating (a common problem given humans' social nature) than the same logic problem put in purely abstract terms.[65] Since the ancestors of present-day humans did not encounter truly random events, present day humans may be cognitively predisposed to incorrectly identify patterns in random sequences. "Gamblers' Fallacy" is one example of this. Gamblers may falsely believe that they have hit a "lucky streak" even when each outcome is actually random and independent of previous trials. Most people believe that if a fair coin has been flipped 9 times and Heads appears each time, that on the tenth flip, there is a greater than 50% chance of getting Tails.[63] Humans find it far easier to make diagnoses or predictions using frequency data than when the same information is presented as probabilities or percentages, presumably because the ancestors of present-day humans lived in relatively small tribes (usually with fewer than 150 people) where frequency information was more readily available.[63]

Personlighet

• Evolutionary psychology is primarily interested in finding commonalities between people, or basic human psychological nature. From an evolutionary perspective, the fact that people have fundamental differences in personality traits

initially presents something of a puzzle.[66] (Note: The field of behavioral genetics is concerned with statistically partitioning differences between people into genetic and environmental sources of variance. However, understanding the concept of heritability can be tricky—heritability refers only to the differences between people, never the degree to which the traits of an individual are due to environmental or genetic factors, since traits are always a complex interweaving of both.)

• Personality traits are conceptualized by evolutionary psychologists as due to normal variation around an optimum, due to frequency-dependent selection (behavioral polymorphisms), or as facultative adaptations. Like variability in

height, some personality traits may simply reflect inter-individual variability around a general optimum.[66] Or, personality traits may represent different genetically predisposed "behavioral morphs" – alternate behavioral strategies that depend on the frequency of competing behavioral strategies in the population. For example, if most of the population is generally trusting and gullible, the behavioral morph of being a "cheater" (or, in the extreme case, a sociopath) may be advantageous.[67] Finally, like many other psychological adaptations, personality traits may be facultative—sensitive to typical variations in the social environment, especially during early development. For example, later born children are more likely than first borns to be rebellious, less conscientious and more open to new experiences, which may be advantageous to them given their particular niche in family structure.[68] It is important to note that shared environmental influences do play a role in personality and are not always of less importance than genetic factors. However, shared environmental influences often decrease to near zero after adolescence but do not completely disappear.[69]

Videos

• Brief video clip re what EP is (from the "Evolution" PBS Series)
• TED talk by Steven Pinker about his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
• RSA talk by evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban on modularity of mind, based on his book Why

Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite

• Richard Dawkins' lecture on natural selection and evolutionary psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology-Steven Pinker & Frans de Waal Audio recording
• Stone Age Minds: A conversation with evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
• Margaret Mead and Samoa. Review of the nature versus nurture debate triggered by Mead's book

"Coming of Age in Samoa."