Gender Equality of Outcome Goes Against the Nature of Women
Pushing for a society that creates equality of outcome will never happen but even if it does, it comes at the cost of destroying women’s happiness.
A society with equal rights and opportunities are favorable in almost all instances. However, what about equality of outcome for both gender? Is it favorable to move towards this kind of society? The answer is no, and, unfortunately, we are moving towards this direction.
What does equality of outcome mean? Equality of outcome, in the context of gender, means to have males and females share an equal part in society. Those that advocate for equality of outcome, ideally, would like the occupational break up for those in STEM fields to be 50/50 or to have those in the Fortune 500 to be 50/50.
But to not cherry-pick, it also means to have the prison population to be 50/50 or to equalize the number of men and women working as bricklayers.
How is it that males and females don’t have equal outcomes?
The simple answer… is because they are intrinsically different in their personalities.
It’s true that studies show that they are more similar than different, but when the extremes are accounted for (such as prison population), the difference becomes more pronounced.
Because of their inherently different personalities, their interests will also differ leading to different choices. According to the meta-analysis by the American Psychological Association in 2009, the female-male ratio for physical sciences is 2/5, 1/4 for computer sciences, and 1/5 for engineering.
It is also true that men are more interested in working with things, while women are more interested in working with people.
This explains why, 99.19% of all technicians are male, while 97.72% of all nurses are female.
Women score higher than men on all five trait factors (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness). In which, neuroticism and agreeableness have effects on the income difference.
From the chart on the left, women tend to be more agreeable than men. The difference doesn’t seem to be significant though.
However, if you zoom in on the extremes (so, look at where the x-axis is at 4–5), you’ll find that there’s a larger population of women that is more agreeable than men. And this dataset changes everything.
Because those that are agreeable are more likely to get a job, per se, we’ll only isolate that specific population (x-axis: 4–5). Thus, we’ll find that women in the workforce are generally more agreeable than men.
Those that are more agreeable are less likely to fight for higher wages or are more likely to submit to a low paying job. Effectively, this explains some of the disparities in income.
Looking at the prison population in the United States, 93.2% of prisoners are male. Before unpacking the chart on the left, it’s important to note that the most aggressive individuals usually are incarcerated. Because of this fact, we need to look at the outliers of the data.
From the chart, there’s a bigger population of men being aggressive; thus, their chances of being incarcerated is higher.
So, the prison system and corporations aren’t necessarily sexist, but rather individual personality differences lead to different outcomes.
What will happen if we become more egalitarian and push for gender equality?
Surprisingly to many statisticians, psychologists, and psychiatrists, it’s found that as society becomes more egalitarian, the gender difference exaggerates.
A cross-culture study of 76 countries found that “greater availability of and gender-equal access to material and social resources favor the manifestation of gender-differentiated preferences across countries.”
Another study of 22 countries suggests that as gender equality increases, men and women will both gravitate towards their “traditional gender roles.”
However, gender differences were larger, rather than smaller, in industrialized countries where more progressive socioculture gender role norms would presumably lead to smaller differences. (UR)
Scandinavia, arguable one of the most egalitarian regions along with Finland and Iceland, have seen their gender differences grow as it becomes more egalitarian. Their social policies have become more equal, they’ve eliminated many social barriers, but they continue to see the gender differences diverge, rather than it converging.
The more a government works to manifest an equal society, it actually backfires and makes it more unequal.
What explains this gender difference phenomenon?
“Biological and sociocultural explanations have been offered to explain these findings,” according to professors from the department of psychiatry at the University of Rochester.
Firstly, since the beginning of time, women have usually been the caretaker for the family. Their simple ability to reproduce, perhaps evokes an emotional attachment to their children. This biological component leads to traits that are more profound in women. And as time passes, these trait becomes embedded within their DNA.
“First, the traits on which men or women differ are consistent across cultures; second, gender differences in these traits are of the same general magnitude.”
If the traits are consistent across cultures, and the difference is of the same magnitude, then it can only mean one thing: It was genetics and biological factors that led to these differences.
However, sociocultural factors may also have a role in the difference.
For example, the traditional role found in the first male-female relation has been passed down through thousands of generations. For example, if a woman in the first generation of humans were caretakers, and every generation that followed until modern-day were also caretakers, then, this traditional role would have been ingrained in their culture.
How does it destroy women’s happiness or go against the nature of women?
It’s simple. It’s because we are forcing occupations and roles on women that they don’t enjoy.
In order to fully have a society with an equal outcome for both genders, the government must artificially do so. As their personality difference is so significant in the extremes, they’ll never go into occupations that they don’t enjoy. Thus, the government would need to forcefully fill the vacancy.
Not only is this going against their right, but it’s also harming the efficiency of society.
Let’s look at Company A and Company B as examples. Company A functions in a government-forced equal outcome society, while Company B functions in a free society without these limits.
Both companies need 100 engineers. However, Company A needs to split the job opening evenly to have 50 females and 50 males. Since the pool of female engineers is extremely low compared to male engineers, the company will be forced to pick female engineers that are incompetent or subpar compared to their male counterparts.
Meanwhile, Company B doesn’t have these restrictions set on them. Thus, they picked 90 male engineers and 10 female engineers, all of which were extremely competent individuals.
Comparatively, the company without these legislations were able to perform better because they had more proficient employees.
Stop dreaming of a perfect utopian society. Not only is it never going to happen, but statistics have shown that as we move towards this direction, it actually becomes more unequal.
This paper is written and submitted anonymously.
