Meritocracy Misogyny

namae_nanka · 2014-11-04T13:07:57+00:00

We socialize girls in ways that create this disparity. Assertiveness is not necessarily naturally gendered, at least not as it is seen now.

Kimberley Fagot conducted a study in which it was observed that teachers reinforced the tendency for girls to communicate gently and boys to communicate assertively, thus reinforcing the stereotype.

Here's another example: it has been found that in school, boys who call out in class are more likely to get the teacher's attention, whereas girls who call out are more likely to be reminded that there's a rule and they should raise their hand (Sadker, M., Sadker, D., & Stulberg, L. M. (1993). Fair and Square? Creating a nonsexist classroom).

If we change the way we treat girls versus boys, we can raise a generation of women who are just as assertive as their male counterparts.

If you want to make it as a woman in a man's world, play the game the right way.

Here's the thing, though: sometimes when you are a woman in a male dominated field, it doesn't matter what you do, you won't be allowed to go as far as your male coworkers. For instance, think about how we treat women who do not conform to the stereotype and are just as assertive as men. We call them bossy, annoying, power-mad, and bitchy. So even assertive women can't win.

ianturpiesmoustache · 2014-11-04T10:35:55+00:00

It's nothing to do with self-confidence, it's to do with the way women are treated when they try to be assertive. Women are far more likely to be given negative performance reviews, and often relating to their personality rather than their actual performance.

It's hard to "play the game the right way", as you said, when there's different rules for different players.

We_Are_Legion · 2014-11-04T10:57:13+00:00

Everyone thinks they are more competent than they really are.

But nowadays that interacts with social justice movements in an interesting way. 60-70% of all claimed discrimination based on gender happens when a person with a vagina isn't good enough and they're given a loudspeaker to bitch about it in a self-flattering way.

A decent portion of the remainder is when those hiring are sick of the majority of women and bet away from that demographic. i.e. they do not give the competent women a chance.

The remainder is blatant cases of preferring men over women.

Interestingly, we don't even hear of reverse sexism. Might have to do with the absence of movements.

[deleted] · 2014-11-04T10:23:21+00:00

Yep, welcome to SJWs. It's shit like this that gives rise to TRP in the first place. "Geek Feminism" is worse than Tumblr. It's both hilarious and makes you want to kill yourself.

homo_homini_lupus · Tue Nov 4 14:37:16 2014 UTC

To women: if you can't take the heat, get back in the kitchen

myfatbrokethewall · 2014-11-05T00:03:47+00:00

If you want to make it as a woman in a man's world, play the game the right way.

I'd think the point is that they don't want it to be a man's world.

This is from 1998, so maybe things are different now, but:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9523410

Abstract

Three experiments tested and extended recent theory regarding motivational influences on impression formation (S. T. Fiske & S. L. Neuberg, 1990; J. L. Hilton & J. M. Darley, 1991) in the context of an impression management dilemma that women face: Self-promotion may be instrumental for managing a competent impression, yet women who self-promote may suffer social reprisals for violating gender prescriptions to be modest. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of perceivers' goals on processes that inhibit stereotypical thinking, and reactions to counterstereotypical behavior. Experiments 2-3 extended these findings by including male targets. For female targets, self-promotion led to higher competence ratings but incurred social attraction and hireability costs unless perceivers were outcome-dependent males. For male targets, self-effacement decreased competence and hireability ratings, though its effects on social attraction were inconsistent.

Also, what meritocracy? What % of people even get hired/promoted based on merit, rather than based on knowing the right people?

And should the ability to self promote be included in a person's merit? Is someone who does a good job but is introverted and bad at the social game of lower merit than a person who perhaps does lower quality work but is better at socializing?

GridReXX · 2014-11-04T18:34:43+00:00

Eh. If women want to succeed in their careers they have to be assertive. If they want a surefire way not to succeed in that realm, they can be diffident.

They can tell those who don't like it to fuck off.

I'm sure she will still manage to find a SO regardless of her level of assertiveness.

babyguineapig · 2014-11-05T10:08:08+00:00

People are always promoted because of "feelings". A company is a team, and the members of that team need to be able to fit together and compliment each other's strengths and weaknesses. Specialists within their fields (niche fillers) are hired and retained according to merit; everyone else is hired and fired according to how well they play with others.

For example; you might be God's gift to accounting, but if you're rude, lousy as communicating your ideas, negative and frustrating to work with, you're services will be in less demand than a less capable account who doesn't drive his coworkers to nervous breakdowns.

Working in a male dominated field; if I'm assertive and confident, then I'm a loud mouthed, pushy sheila, but if I'm demure then I get talked over. So I put myself out there, because doing the job correctly and ensuring the safety of my workers, livestock and myself is more important than being "nice".

Jacksambuck · 2014-11-04T08:48:36+00:00

This maps to why much of these issues, debats are more pronounced in North America - this self-aggrandizing thing is seen as repulsive in Europe or even IMHO Australia.

You would think Canadians and Brits are culturally close - but I have seen how hard Brits cringe when a Canadian guy was demoing a new e-business concept - pretty much that pushy, immodest, in-your-face attitude. Later on one of the audience told me there is a term used in the UK, not sure if it is known in North America: "one-upmanship". (Check that link, that book is very RP except that it is a satire.) Yes, they hate that.

(In Continental Europe Germany is seen as a bit of an immodest country - I LOLled hard when they made a point to fly the biggest airplane of the world to the World Cup in South Africa (this is such an "American style thing", "look my penis is the biggest" lol), I was in Austria looking for a place to settle and the TV news anchor was like "our favorite modest neighbors" (bescheidene lieblingsnachbarn) :D Yet it is not as hard as in North America and it is not an issue for women at work because Germany likes objective facts more than "selling yourself")

But, to be fair, even in the most egalitarian cultures men tend to be somewhat pushier and women somewhat more modest. The way it is solved is e.g. most of Europe/UK/other places is that simply in many jobs being pushy is not an advantage. I often see this split: sales: men, marketing: women, technology and logistics: men, HR and accounting/finance: women. In technology, female engineers gravitate to testing, in my experience, and to customer support engineers (better empathy). There is no advantage of pushiness in accounting or marketing, it is more of an objective thing: the reports created in time and accurately, the advertisement to look good, tests are passed or not passed, etc. etc. and in stuff like customer support the objective is to calm irate customers, not to push something on them :)

Bakerofpie · 2014-11-04T13:17:08+00:00

My husband and I were discussing something similar over dinner last night. There was an opinion piece in the New York Times calling for a law to ban catcalling. It would make a woman eligible to sue or a man have to pay a fine for "catcalling," which is particularly concerning considering 90% of the supposed harassment I've seen has consisted of men saying "hello, beautiful" or even "good morning" from a safe distance away. Anyway, when you keep adding ideas like this and trying to move further and further away from meritocracy and introduce more and more laws and social movements to push "equality" for women, why in the everloving hell would you expect businesses to want to hire women at an equal rate to men?

If we go throw meritocracy out the window in favor of giving women an extra leg up regardless of performance, an employer has to be concerned that if one of his male employees outperforms a female employee and thus gets a larger raise that the employer will have a lawsuit on his hands. Or even if a male employee negotiates for a raise but a female employee doesn't, is their boss supposed to give the woman the same raise the man negotiated for because that's what's "fair?" Creating more and more increasingly ridiculous basically affirmative action type laws makes women less and less desirable as employees, regardless of their actual competency. That whole movement shoots itself in the foot. As my husband said, they hire a male and they've got a 0.5% chance of getting sued, hire a woman and the chance of getting used goes up to 2%, the choice is pretty clear and reasonable (note I am not claiming these as actual numbers, it's just an illustration of my point).

17b29a · 2014-11-04T15:36:43+00:00

get ready for certain companies to fail when they can't meet their bottom line because they promoted people out of "feelings."

People are already promoted out of "feelings," assertiveness and other things irrelevant to the quality of their work

Archwinger · 2014-11-04T13:39:08+00:00

This is just one more way of saying "We don't see equal outcomes for women in every area of life. Until women achieve equal or superior outcomes in every single area, the system is broken and must be changed, logic be damned."

[deleted] · 2014-11-04T16:17:54+00:00

Reality is misogynist

adrixshadow · 2014-11-04T09:11:26+00:00

Women do not want equality.

Women want communism.

FollowThisAdvice · 2014-11-04T13:43:03+00:00

Now we need to push for more equality to balance out women's lack of assertiveness

No. Its a very simple claim - It is hard to maintain a meritocracy, and often what is intended to be and is described as a meritocracy in fact heavily relies on other characteristics that may not be relevant for the candidates merit at a job.

It shouldnt be controversial AT ALL to make this claims:

"A true meritocracy assesses candidates based solely on their ability to do the job, and not on abilities which do not relate to the job. Therefore, if a job does not require self-promotion, a system in respect of that job with advances self-promoters over non-self-promoters, all else being equal, is not a true meritocracy".

Do you disagree with this assertion? The language in that website and its comments. They arent critiquing an ACTUAL meritocracy, they are critiquing a sham meritocracy pretending to be one.

Meritocracy Misogyny

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Title	Meritocracy Misogyny
Author	redpill80
Upvotes	17
Comments	109
Date	November 4, 2014 8:21 AM UTC (11 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/2l8tsm/meritocracy_misogyny/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/meritocracy-misogyny.284448 https://theredarchive.com/post/284448