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by dropit_sphere
4041 days ago
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A defense I'm not sure I believe, but one worth being aware of, at least: Could this simply be people exercising Bayesian reasoning? If we postulate that men come up with more out-of-band good ideas (which I don't find hard to believe, as they come up with more out-of-band everything, including bad ideas), then people's priors will change to reflect that. What I am saying is that this may in fact be rational, whatever your (or my) opinions on its rightness. |
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Men are more likely to pipe up with ideas - good or bad - because they are culturally encouraged to do so. Women are discouraged from sharing their ideas, and are frequently either ignored, or possibly even punished for it.
In addition, people tend to interpret the same behavior differently between men and women. For example, I saw a debate recently with a few men and one woman. After the debate, people (both men and women) were complaining about the woman, claiming the kept interrupting, and that she was rude, and wasn't listening.
Funny thing - she interrupted once, out of sheer desperation because her opponent wouldn't allow her to speak, was polite, and listened to everything her opponent had to say. Her opponent, on the other hand, had been praised for being more mature and rational, despite constantly interrupting, talking over the top of his opponent, and being extremely condescending.
These kinds of biases actually color our perceptions, without us realizing.
That's what's insidious about these kinds of rationalzations. They superficially seem reasonable, but they pretty much just reduce to either "men are just better than women at X", or "that's just the way things are, deal with it", and they do not hold up to scrutiny. However, they are intuitively rational-feeling enough to convince people that there's not a problem anymore. There is, but they just don't want to confront it.