Skip to main content
Post a Comment

A Response to Why Men Fail


Regarding David Brook's column Why Men Fail:

Although I have been reading these arguments for a long time, and I am not interested in questioning them, one item irked me. It is that women who leave financial firms do better than men. I have read studies of this issue, and it partially stems from the fact that women rely on external networks, while men tend to have strong internal networks.

As an aside, economic inequality has been increasing for as long as men have been becoming social/economic laggards, and like many social issues, I wonder how much is attributable to something larger than men themselves. As an example, people cite obesity causes and cures, without realizing that obesity correlates with inequality at about .7, a very large relationship. This correlation points to potential causes that are so large and beyond the control of individuals. It is possible that growing inequality more heavily impacts men, regardless of the causes attributed to individuals.

  • Does this kind of gender disenfranchisement exist in all WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) countries?
  • Is there some degree of correlation between economic inequality and male 'failure'?
  • If not economic inequality, is there some larger-than-individual social factor at play?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars I finished reading this crying. It is a work of neurobiology, social science, anthropology, and history, but ultimately it is a work of great humanity, suggesting ways that humans, our groups, our systems, and our societies can be made better. View all my reviews
Post a Comment
Read more

A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers

My responses in a NY Times comment section for the book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson : #1 - Link Although I've been a software developer for 15 years, and for longer alternating between a project manager, team lead, or analyst, mostly in finance, and now with a cancer center, I found it funny that you blame the people doing the coding for not seeing the harm it could cause. First, most scientific advancement has dark elements, and it is usually not the science but how it is used and sold by business people that is the problem. This leads to the second problem, in that it is not coding that is in itself problematic, but specifically how technology is harnessed to sell. It is normal and desirable to track users, to log actions, to collect telemetry, so as to monitor systems, respond to errors, and to develop new features, but that normal engineering practice has been used to surveil users for the purpose of selling. Blaming
Post a Comment
Read more

Don't learn to code. Learn to think.

A response to  Don't learn to code. Learn to think. : Below is is my usual response when I see an article stating that everyone should learn to code:  Rather than programming, it is more important to impart the thinking of computer science (CS) than a specific implementation. Programming can be an end point for some students, but it is likely that programming itself will be increasingly automated, so that one needs more the general concepts common in CS. Even then, programming itself is to some degree a grunt task that one progresses beyond:  The following are typical components of a CS degree: algorithms & flowcharting systems thinking logical systems and set theory object-orientation & patterns probability, statistics, mathematics All of the above can be useful in an increasingly automated and data-driven world.
1 comment
Read more