What Is the Gender Gap?

As if you didn’t have enough to worry about, now you can agonize about the gender gap.

Thinking about the gender gap is somewhat muddled. This, as opposed to thinking about the thigh gap, which is not muddled.

Anyway, the impetus for pondering the gender gap derives from a simple fact, occasionally noted on this blog. I trust that everyone feels grateful to me for keeping them ahead of the curve. Or better, for minding the gap. 

However much you imagine that gender is merely a social construction, the division of the sexes is being played out in political affiliation. As I have been wont to explain, the Democratic Party is becoming the Girl Party while the Republican Party is becoming the Boy Party.

The Democratic Party is all in with empathy and compassion, with oodles of good feeling for the downtrodden victims who inhabit our urban landscapes. It cares deeply about nature and deplores any human efforts to violate the natural order in order to build factories and homes. And it certainly opposed to any violation of the pristine wilderness in order to heat said homes and factories.

The Democratic Party promises to take care of you, and if it is not taking care of you, it is feeling your pain. Thus, it attracts those who feel that they need to be taken care of. One thing is clear, it refuses to be judged by pragmatic criteria, as in, do its policies actually work?

The Republican Party, often caricatured as heartless, prefers the competitive free market and free enterprise systems. It values industry and energy, doing things, over feeling things. It values hard work over charity, though it does not, last I looked, ignore the need for some charity some of the time. 

As I have said, when the members of these parties start acting like adults we will graduate them and call them the Woman Party and the Man Party.

As though to prove my point, polls are showing that among America’s young, men are more likely to lean to the political right while women are more likely to lean to the political left. Of course, the reference is to biology, at a time when certain people are pretending that you can change your sex by changing your mind.

Thomas Edsall has the numbers, for the New York Times:

In one of the most revealing studies in recent years, a 2016 survey of 137,456 full-time, first-year students at 184 colleges and universities in the United States, the U.C.L.A. Higher Education Research Institute found “the largest-ever gender gap in terms of political leanings: 41.1 percent of women, an all-time high, identified themselves as liberal or far left, compared to 28.9 percent of men.”

Of course, we live in an age where gender fluidity and gender confusion rule the minds of America’s elite intellectuals. Many of them believe that the only real difference between the sexes involves what they call the social construction of gender.

Anything a man can do a woman can do and vice versa. Up to a point, of course, but anything really valuable that a man can do a woman can do and vice versa.

At the same time, the recent discovery of a gender gap has led to some serious consideration of the difference between the sexes. Obviously, this runs counter to most sophisticated radical thinking on the subject, but what can you do.

So, Edsall remarks that women increasingly are taking positions of political influence and power, especially in what people have taken to calling-- the decadent West. After all, we fought in Afghanistan and Iraq with a coed military, and how did that work out? Naturally, elite intellectuals believe that giving more power to more peace loving women will usher in an age of peace and harmony around the world.

In that they simply expose their mental limitations. They fail to recognize that advertising weakness invites aggression. Would Saddam Hussein have invade Kuwait in 1991 if America had not had an ambassador named April Glaspie, who was more schoolmarmy than diplomatic? Did Saddam consider the appointment of a woman as ambassador to Iraq an insult that needed to be rectified. And did he believe that such an appointment spelled civilizational weakness? 

Of course, it turned out that he was wrong, but we had to fight a war to prove the point.

The same applies to Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady had to prove her mettle after the Argentinian government attacked the Falkland Islands. Other female leaders have had to engage in wars when opposing male leaders might have provoked more reflection and less aggression.

The same applies to male leaders, especially those who are deemed to be weak. Would Hitler have been quite as aggressive and brazen if he had not believed that the nation represented by Neville Chamberlain had become decadent and weak. And did he believe that Franklin Roosevelt was too weak to counter his aggression.

And, let’s not forget, that America, as a consequence of its eight year love affair with Clintonian decadence, was rewarded by a terrorist attack on New York City and Washington. Weakness invites aggression. It just happens that women are more clearly associated with weakness, and so more likely to invite aggression. But weak and decadent men provoke a similar aggressivity.

Allow Edsall to explain the current thinking about gender difference. 

Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women. At each stage of the escalatory ladder, women prefer more peaceful options. They are less apt to approve of the use of force and the striking of hard bargains internationally, and more apt to approve of substantial concessions to preserve peace. They impose higher audience costs because they are more approving of leaders who simply remain out of conflicts, but they are also more willing to see their leaders back down than engage in wars.

The increasing incorporation of women into “political decision-making over the last century,” Barnhart and her co-authors write, raises “the question of whether these changes have had effects on the conflict behavior of nations.”

Their answer: “We find that the evidence is consistent with the view that the increasing enfranchisement of women, not merely the rise of democracy itself, is the cause of the democratic peace.”

If the past century had seen an outbreak of world peace, this would be a serious piece of thinking. Since it has not, it represents an ideologically driven piece of stupidity. The past hundred years has seen more war and more destruction than most previous historical moments.

Besides, there is more to competition than warfare. Economic competition is alive and well. The clash of civilizations is ongoing. Our adversaries and competitors in Asia clearly believe that Western democracies are weak and decadent, destined to fail. 

Edsall continues:

Put another way, “the divergent preferences of the sexes translate into a pacifying effect when women’s influence on national politics grows” and “suffrage plays a direct and important role in generating more peaceful interstate relations by altering the political calculus of democratic leaders.”

This is, dare I say, laughable. It is propaganda, and nothing but. At a time when democratic institutions are in retreat around the world, where a more authoritarian mode of governance is on the rise, the notion that relations between nations are more peaceful is absurd. As for why other nations are not adopting the Western model, they can look to America and see a pathetic imbecile like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wielding political power, and say to themselves, if this is what democracy gives America, it is time to turn away from democracy.

I will not run through the theories that suggest that women are more likely to be more cooperative. In truth, men form armies and even sports teams far more than women do. And these activities require a high level of cooperation. One does best not to confuse the issue. 

Edsall then quotes Harvard professor Steven Pinker:

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, writes in his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” that “the most fundamental empirical generalization about violence” is that

… it is mainly committed by men. From the time they are boys, males play more violently than females, fantasize more about violence, consume more violent entertainment, commit the lion’s share of violent crimes, take more delight in punishment and revenge, take more foolish risks in aggressive attacks, vote for more warlike policies and leaders, and plan and carry out almost all the wars and genocides.

Pinker continues:

Feminization need not consist of women literally wielding more power in decisions on whether to go to war. It can also consist in a society moving away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory.

We do better to differentiate, as Pinker does elsewhere, an honor culture that favors gentility from an honor culture that approves of violent retaliation for insults. The fact that the government of China feels that it has been grievously insulted by certain American politicians will cause it to retaliate, probably by economic means. At least, such is our hope. Violent retaliation is characteristic of macho cultures, which are more show than substance.

As for what an honor culture looks like, consider the television series Downton Abbey. Doing the honorable thing, a constant in the series and even in much British Victorian fiction, is quite different from feeling your pain or expressing your feelings or even venting your anger.