| > Peterson's claim that only men have high enough motivation to be successful in competitive industries. Hmm...pretty much everything you claim here is wrong. First, his is not a claim from first principles or ideology, but an observation from many years working with at least one highly competitive industry: lawyers. So independent of what you want the world to be, this is what he says he observes in reality. Second, his claim is not about "success". It is about reaching the top of whatever dominance hierarchy you find yourself in. Per definition, only very few people can be in that particular place, and his central argument is that equating these two (your personal success = reaching the top of some dominance hierarchy) is a losing proposition for almost everyone, simply because there isn't enough to go around. Third, and maybe most importantly, he says that even if you are one of the few people who have the ability/luck/desire to achieve this very dubious form of success, it is almost certainly a losing proposition because it sucks on just about every other metric of having a good life, unless you are psychologically structured in such a way that this alone will make you happy. Fourth, he notes that women are generally smart enough to figure this out. As are most men. There are a few men who don't, who will subordinate everything else in life to reaching the top of that dominance hierarchy. His claim is that most if not all of these people will not have good life. And finally, as usual, this says nothing about individuals, but only something about populations. In his case, he says that law firms are doing everything to keep their highly qualified, super smart and highly effective female lawyers, but they can't, because most of them just drop out of that race to the top. Are you claiming this is not true? |