Women Working for Women

What makes you a zealot?

If you believe one thing and reality says something else, you're a zealot if you think there’s something wrong with reality.

For some time now zealous academic feminists have been arguing that women possess superior managerial skills.

Apparently, women are nicer, more empathic, more people oriented. Therefore, they must be better at managing.

It is doubtful that these qualities make for great management, but don’t tell that to the academic feminist zealots.

After all, they have conducted their studies to show that the relative paucity of women managers can only be a sign of patriarchal oppression. 

You would think that the point can be tested in the marketplace. Companies compete against other companies. If one company wanted to be better managed and if it believed this theory it could simply go out and hire more women.

The marketplace may not offer a definitive answer to the question, but it will point us in the right direction. 

Of course, zealots do not believe in the marketplace. They believe in their ideas.

But, who do you trust, the feminist academic who has never managed anything or the free market?

Recently, law professor Felice Batlan surveyed 142 legal secretaries at large law firms. She asked them who they preferred to work for: male partners, female partners, male associates, or female associates.

95% of the secretaries were women. They were mostly middle aged, with considerable professional experience.

The results shocked the sensibilities of the law professor. While 47% refused to offer an opinion, 34% preferred male partners, 15% opted for male associates, 3% wanted to work for female associates, and NONE liked to work for female partners.

That’s none, zero, nada, not a one. No legal secretary preferred to work for a female partner. Only 3% preferred working for female associates.

Why is this so? The secretaries explained that they found female partners to be too emotional, too inflexible, and too condescending.

Perhaps this simply means that their attitude is incoherent. Some female managers believe that they can be better managers if they relate to their staff personally, by making an emotional connection.

Yet, this false camaraderie, or sisterhood, contradicts the significant status and stature gap between a law partner and a legal secretary.

Besides, most legal secretaries do not want to develop deep emotional connections with their bosses. They say that they prefer to work for people who give more clear directives and who keep the relationship more businesslike.

As you might imagine, feminist zealots are not taking this information lying down. They have rallied to their ideology and explained that the date can only prove that patriarchal oppression is even worse than they thought it was.

Batlan believes that women are in an impossible bind: “If they don’t behave like males, they are perceived as too emotional, and if they do act like men, they are perceived as putting on airs.”

One is tempted to reply that they might try behaving like women. Once a woman decides that she has to choose between being an ersatz male and not acting like a male, she has defined her identity as a function of maleness.

Regardless of which one she chooses, she is denying her womanhood.

What kind of woman believes that the patriarchy is so powerful that she can only define her identity as a function of maleness?

Why, a feminist, of course.

I would not want to jump to conclusions, but I would venture that most of the female partners that the legal secretaries do not want to work for are feminists.

I would venture that women would be far more happy to be working for other women if these other women were more comfortable being women, did not wear their feminism on their sleeves, and did not model their behavior on the demands of ideological correctness. 

A Confidence Game

Why do some people remain confident when reality keeps telling them they’re getting it wrong?

Are we less rational than we think? Does our rational faculty systematically fall prey to the stories we tell ourselves to order our lives?

Renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman has addressed these questions in a lifetime of research. An excerpt from his new book addressed the questions clearly. It appeared in the New York Times Magazine yesterday.

At a time when he was doing his military service in the Israeli army Kahneman and another soldier were tasked with determining which of a group of recruits would make the best officer material.

They were instructed to evaluate the recruits using a set of rules that had been established by the British military during World War II.

To test the recruits Kahneman and his colleague were instructed to set up an artificial task. They observed how each of the recruits functioned and wrote their report. They felt confident that they had identified the best future officers.

A few months later they were called in for a feedback session. They were told that they had gotten it wrong. In fact, their conclusions were so wrong that they might as well have been throwing darts at a list of names.

Having received this glimpse of reality, Kahneman and colleague were asked to evaluate another group of recruits, using the same set of rules.

Apparently, experience had taught them nothing. They made the same mistakes the second time. They were fully confident in their judgments, and again, they got it completely wrong.

How could their confidence, Kahneman asked, remain untouched by the verdict of reality?

In his words: “I thought that what was happening to us was remarkable. The statistical evidence of our failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of particular candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid. I was reminded of visual illusions, which remain compelling even when you know that what you see is false. I was so struck by the analogy that I coined a term for our experience: the illusion of validity.”

Kahneman concludes that he was in love with a story in which he was perfectly competent, so much so that he could not give it up even when reality was telling him that it was not true.

In other words, irrational feelings trumped rational judgment.

Let’s look more closely at why they kept getting it wrong. Kahneman explains that the test itself was flawed. A one hour test was too artificial to replicate all the factors that were involved in combat command.

He explains: “We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual’s future, which was almost everything that would actually matter. When you know as little as we did, you should not make extreme predictions like ‘He will be a star.’ The stars we saw on the obstacle field were most likely accidental flickers, in which a coincidence of random events — like who was near the wall — largely determined who became a leader. Other events — some of them also random — would determine later success in training and combat.”

They had made up a story, true enough, but I would suggest that they had to do it. They did not make up the game or the rules, thus, they had no experiential basis for judgment.

When we lack experience, we fill in the gaps with stories.

Does this all tell us that we are less rational than we think? Does it prove that our self-confidence never concords with reality?

Perhaps it does. But then again, perhaps it doesn’t.

For all I know Kahneman and his colleague based their confidence on the fact that they had successfully followed the rules. Wouldn’t your confidence get a boost if you fulfill the conditions of an assignment?

Perhaps they should have asked themselves whether the rulebook was inadequate.

If they did not ask the question, the reason may have more to do with the fact that it was above their pay grade. Who were they, two first year soldiers, to question a set of rules established by one of the world’s great military forces?

They were not, in other words, just a couple of human subjects participating in an experiment. They were a couple of soldiers whose identities were defined by their place in the military hierarchy. It was neither their place nor their role to question their assignment.

If you are a low ranking soldier, one who has no real say in policy, you are more likely to fictionalize your experience.

Kahneman is right to say that they had too little information to make an extreme prediction. But could they reject the premise of the game they were told to play?

Here, we need to make an important distinction. As Kahneman says, there is surely a difference between the puffed-up and fragile confidence of a young soldier and the true confidence of someone who has gained his in the crucible of experience.

Two or three experimental tests do not a lifetime of experience make. The less experience you have, the more you will be relying on fictions.

A wealth of experience will give you expertise. In Kahneman’s words: “True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.”

If this is true, it appears to contradict another of Kahneman’s views: “The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right.”

If a man plays baseball for years and has an excellent batting average, he has the right to feel confident in his ability to hit a baseball. If he feels confident then he wants to be at bat when the game is on the line. His confidence is not based on a story; it is based on his record.

If he has never played baseball or has a low batting average, and feels confident when he steps up to the plate, we would say that his confidence is an illusion.

If I am to decide which of two young baseball players is going to become a star, I have, if I am a scout, a basis for judgment. If I have, over the years, chosen some talented ballplayers, then I have reason for my confidence. Experience will tell me what to look for and what to look away from.

Confidence is not a constant; it fluctuates according to experience.

When you are dealing with a young person, someone who, by definition, lacks experience, confidence cannot have been formed from experience. Young people are always going to be over or under confident.

If they are, as we would like, overconfident, they will revise and build on their overconfidence through their experiences. They will therefore move from overconfidence to true confidence.

Kahneman’s observations lead to another question. Is it good or bad to feel confident in the face of adversity or in the face of evidence that seems to be telling you that your confidence is misplaced?

What is perseverance if not the ability to maintain your confidence when the evidence seems to suggest that your efforts are futile?

How often do you need to fail before you discover that your confidence is mistaken? Is it rational to give up after one try or after two tries? Is there an optimal number of times that will tell you, for example, that you need to find a better career path.

If something doesn’t work the first time, does that necessarily mean that it will never work? Is it rational to abandon your confidence in the face of a setback? If the British Army has devised a way of doing something, and has devised it over decades and maybe centuries, is it rational or irrational to throw it out because it did not work the one time you tried it?

The Global Warming Cult

Let’s hope Michael Barone is right when he says that the global warming cult is heading toward the dustbin of history.

Let‘s hope that we will no longer have to listen to Al Gore yelping about settled science.

Throughout human history, Barone reminds us, people have fallen prey to apocalyptic cults. From the nineteenth century Millerites who sold all of their worldly possessions to prepare for the end of the world to the thirteenth century Children’s Crusade to more modern exemplars, people have found a strange solace in thinking that they know the future.

Yet, the global warming cult differs from many others in one important respect. It is designed to effect government policy. It wants to force people who don't believe in it to live under it.

Whatever the Millerites believed, they kept it largely to themselves. 

Hiding behind what they insisted was science, global warmists tricked governments into regulating the energy industry… the better to force the world to lived according to their vision. The environmentalist crowd had no interest in the effect that policies based on their visions would have on human beings. When you think that the world is coming to an end, you do not worry about a few blackouts or the loss of someone's livelihood. Only the truest of true believers would traffic in that degree of insensitivity and cruelty.

Now people are waking up. In Barone’s words: “The idea that we can be so certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves now seems increasingly absurd.

“If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.”

The extent to which the earth is warming is subject to some doubt. Even if it is, we cannot know to an absolute certainty that human beings are responsible.

Of course, global warmism allows us to feel guilty and gives us a way to do penance for our sins.

As Barone says, and as I have often pointed out, the cult of global warming is constructed in terms of sin and penance, leading to redemption.

Yet, global warmism suffers from its own sin, the sin of pride. Not just the pride of its arrogant perpetrators, but its presumption that human being have the power to change the course of nature.

As for claim that it is all settled science, it is worth repeating, because the point does not seem to have been grasped, that there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow. Not a settled scientific fact or an unsettled scientific fact.

There are no facts about tomorrow, or about next year, or about the twenty-second century.

Policies that try to change the world in the name of global warming are not based on science. They are based on prophecy.

The Origin of Our Political Incivility

From whence cometh the gross incivility of American politics? Who is at fault for the rancor and the vitriol that has made American politics into gladiatorial combat?

The mainstream media, unfair and unbalanced as always, tells us that Republicans incite violence and that Democrats, especially Barack Obama, are models for moderation.

Some liberal pundits have suggested that Obama is too sensible, too mature, and too adult to deal with the obstreperous adolescents who call themselves Republicans.

Whatever liberals lack in intelligence they make up for in gullibility.

Among New York Times columnists, Joe Nocera is hardly the most liberal. Yet, he is considered to be a liberal, because he once compared Tea Party activists to terrorists.

When called out on the slur, Nocera did something that his colleague Krugman has never done: he apologized.

In itself, this speaks well for his character. Next to Krugman Nocera looks like a moral giant.  Yes, I know: next to Krugman anyone would look like a moral giant.

Friday, Nocera wrote a column about the incivility that has infested American politics. Specifically, he addressed himself to Times-reading liberals who tend to take it as an article of dogmatic faith that Republicans are the fons et origo of all that is uncivil about American political culture.

Looking back into history, Nocera discovered that while Republicans have not exactly been models of decorum, modern political incivility was invented by liberal Democrats in 1987.

When notable moderate Lewis Powell announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, President Reagan nominated Robert Bork.

Faced with the spectre of Robert Bork, American liberals lost it. Having long suffered from conservativophobia , they went completely berserk. 

Overcome with terror, they took leave of their rational faculties and decided that the stakes were so high, and the threat so grave, that would have to do whatever was necessary to defeat Bork.

In classical ethics, good behavior involves tempering one’s emotions. There is no redeeming moral value in saying that you feel so strongly about an issue that you need not obey the rules of courtesy and civility.

Liberal Americans indulged their strong feelings and let fly. They did not seem to care that someone might think that their emotional incontinence was a sign of feeble mindedness.

Their behavior set the moral tone and established a moral example.

To contrast the liberal reaction with reality, Nocera reminds us that Bork was eminently qualified for the Court. He had taught at Yale Law School, had served as solicitor general of the United States, and was a sitting federal judge.

Of course, he was a constitutional originalist, a man whose opinions were consonant with those of Antonin Scalia. As it happened, Scalia had been confirmed unanimously by the Senate in 1986.

Nocera offers a summary of Bork’s philosophy: “Moreover, Bork was a legal intellectual, a proponent of original intent and judicial restraint. The task of the judge, he once wrote, is ‘to discern how the framers’ values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply to the world we know.’ He said that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, was a ‘wholly unjustifiable judicial usurpation’ of authority that belonged to the states, that the court’s recent rulings on affirmative action were problematic and that the First Amendment didn’t apply to pornography.”

“Whatever you think of these views,” Nocera adds, “they cannot fairly be characterized as extreme.” Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg has questioned the way Roe v. Wade was decided.

Liberals are supposed to be a fount of deep thought. They pride themselves on being more rational and less emotional than the yahoos who live in flyover country.

If those had been their defining qualities, they would have relished the chance to debate the merits of the Bork nomination. They could have used the occasion to raise salient issues in judicial philosophy and constitutional law.

They concluded, however, that that they could never prevail on the merits, so they shifted gears. Believing that they had to defeat Bork, and basing their actions, Nocera explains, on the immoral principle that the end justifies the means, they decided to assassinate Bork’s character. .

Sen. Ted Kennedy led the charge. Never having demonstrated any moral character of his own, Kennedy was well qualified to demagogue the issue.

Nocera reminds us of that appalling moment: “The character assassination began the day Bork was nominated, when Ted Kennedy gave a fiery speech describing ‘Robert Bork’s America’ as a place ‘in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,’ and so on. It continued until the day the nomination was voted down; one ad, for instance, claimed, absurdly, that Bork wanted to give ‘women workers the choice between sterilization and their job’.”

The speech was as memorable as it was infamous. The morally challenged Ted Kennedy was the right hit man for the job. 

Heaven knows why people still admire Ted Kennedy. If we are serious about wanting to restore civility to our political culture, we should stop lionizing people who have no moral character.

Nocera concludes, strikingly: “The next time a liberal asks why Republicans are so intransigent, you might suggest that the answer lies in the mirror.”

Way to go, Joe. 

STEM Sells

In politics, as in personal interactions, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with expressing anger.

If your anger draws attention to an issue, it serves a purpose. If it merely draws attention to you, it hasn’t.

Angry citizens can push the nation to address the issue of income inequality. Or it can make the angry few look like they are throwing a tantrum.

If people watch your protest and think that something is wrong with the financial system, that’s one thing. If they see you camped out in squalor, chanting and beating drums, without a leader or a theme, they are going to think that you have a problem.

A fine line separates those who are making a political point from those who are throwing a tantrum because they are not getting their way.

Which of these applies to the Occupy Wall Street protests? Are the protesters drawing attention to the inequities of capitalism or are they making fools of themselves?

In this case, we can follow the media coverage.

At first, news reports did address questions about executive compensation and income inequality. Few people, left or right, would agree that profits should be privatized while losses are socialized. 

The more the young protesters complained about their student loans, the more the commentators started addressing the higher education bubble.

Many, many students exit college today with a mountain of debt and minimal marketable skills. If they cannot find a place in the capitalist world does the fault lie with the capitalist system or with the parents and teachers who made them what they are today?

Are these young people alienated and disaffected because the world is unjust? Or are they alienated and disaffected because they were not brought up to function effectively in a free market economy?

If they cannot get or hold down a job, whose fault is it really? If they cannot compete, does the fault lie in the free market or in their upbringing?

The more the protests continue, the more people are asking how these young people were brought up and what kind of education they received.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are trying to indict American capitalism and especially the banking system. The more the nation watches their antics, the more it is seeing the failure of contemporary culture.

Today’s young people were brought up to be creative free spirits, well-rounded, full of self-esteem, happy and healthy, but not so wholesome.

They were not brought up to work hard and to excel. They were not taught to fit in and to affirm traditional American values. They were not taught the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin or James Madison. They were not taught to emulate George Washington or Alexander Hamilton. They were brought up to fulfill a therapeutic ideal.

Instead of teaching them math and science, their teachers, with the collusion of their parents and the culture at large, taught them to be mentally healthy.

Rigorous academic work was replaced by the dogmas of political correctness. Non-judgmental teachers refused to say that one student was better or smarter or harder working than another. Many teachers did not even accept that there were right and wrong answers.

Humanities courses rejected the wisdom of the ages and the achievements of a great nation and civilization. They became indoctrination mills dedicated to undermining American and Western values.

To a large extent they have succeeded. Having broken the system, and many students with it, it’s time for them to own it. Better that than sending their students out on a futile crusade against free enterprise. 

The products of this educational malpractice are now living over their parents’ garages. Unless they are camped out in squalor in lower Manhattan.

Sad to say, many of them are unemployed and unemployable.

It’s one thing to say that students contracted far too much debt. It’s more important to remark that the skills and knowledge they purchased for that debt will not help them to pay it off. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were defrauded.

A few days ago three Cornell University English professors convened a meeting to encourage students to major in English. Link here.

They acknowledged that a degree in English has no real value in the job market today. In the past it paved the way to an academic career, but sadly that is no longer possible.

Universities are overstaffed. Tenured faculty members prefer to stay around forever. And universities are so stuffed full of useless administrators that there is no money left to hire new faculty.

Of course, students and their parents have finally caught on. The population of students teaching Humanities course is shrinking. 

The Cornell professors recognized the realities of the situation. They recommended that students do a dual major, half in English and half in a useful subject.

Of course, this only works if English departments are still in the business of teaching English. As a former academic, I have no sympathy for Humanities departments who took it upon themselves to indoctrinate students in countercultural values, the better to undermine Western intellectual hegemony.

If the world is figuring out that the products of these departments mills do not even know how to write coherent reports, then the problem lies with the literature departments.

If the marketplace has come to understand that the products of these institutions have been disabused of the traits that constitute good character, then current students do well to take courses in other departments.

The tragedy of the higher education bubble is not just the trillion dollars in debt that has been accumulated. Given what college has done to their minds and their character, far too many young people today can aspire to nothing more than to be permanent wards of the state.

By now the Occupiers have drawn so much attention to themselves that they have piqued the interest of Gail Collins.

Hardly a right winger, Collins uses her New York Times op-ed this morning to reflect on American education.

Reporting on a study by one Richard Arun, Collins observes the sad fact that American college students lead the world in lethargy and sloth.

Only Slovakian students work less.

Of course, the study also shows that students who work the least tend to have the least promising employment prospects.

Between the educational system and therapeutically-approved child-rearing techniques, America has driven a stake through the heart of the Protestant work ethic. Her children are now paying the price.

Colleges teach students how to be creative and how to have fun. Yet, these do not enhance anyone's job prospects. They do not shine on a resume.

In truth, there are a few privileged sanctuaries where schoolchildren are forced to work very, very hard. Yet, their parents have difficulty accepting that their darlings have hour after hour of homework. Now, the counterculture propaganda machine has mounted an assault on an educational system that assigns too much homework. 

In the person of a movie called Race to Nowhere, American parents are still being told that it’s more important to be well-rounded and to learn to enjoy life than to work hard and excel.

By now college students and their parents have started to see the light. They have been migrating out of Humanities majors and into the STEM fields.

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. A recent New York Times article reports that those majors are the ticket to career advancement and bright jobs prospects. Link here.

Unfortunately, these disciplines require hard work. They have right and wrong answers. They have no place for bloated self-esteem.

Your teacher is not going to excuse your mistake on your engineering assignment on the grounds that you were expressing your creativity.

If an engineer designs a motor that does not run or a roof that leaks, no one is think that he was being creative.

In STEM courses, your professor will not excuse your errors by saying that incoherent sentences and mindless drivel show untapped poetic potential. 

Unfortunately, there is no job market for unappreciated poets. Jobs in high tech are going begging, to the point where employers have to recruit abroad or to move their operations offshore.

This should surprise no one. If you have sat through a college level course in multivariable calculus or advanced engineering latterly you will have noticed that a large proportion of the students majoring in these fields are Asian.

How did this happen? I suspect that they were shielded from the American counterculture by their Tiger Moms.

  

Madoff in Prison

There's nothing like a riff by Bess Levin to liven up a dreary Friday afternoon.

Today Levin, the editor of Dealbreaker, sinks her incisors into Bernard Madoff, in particular, into his experience of prison life. It surely a meaty topic.

In Levin’s words: “Maybe, you thought, Bernie Madoff wouldn’t like prison. Maybe, you thought, after a life of luxury, living in an 8X10 would cramp his style. Maybe, you thought, that he’d have trouble earning between 14 cents an hour sweeping the floors, after spending several decades ‘earning’ millions making fake trades. Maybe, you thought, he wouldn’t take to an environment wherein taking your pants off means open season on your ass, after coming from a work environment where nobody blinked an eye when he regularly ‘dropped his trou in the office to ensure that the line of his shirt buttons was precisely vertical,’ without the slightest threat of attack. Maybe, you thought, he’d be home sick. Maybe, you thought, he wouldn’t make any friends. Maybe, you thought, he wouldn’t get picked by any fraternities during rush. Well, you couldn’t be any more wrong. Not only is Berns quickly adjusting and joining all sorts of groups, but he’s having the time of his life.”

Levin goes on to quote the relevant documentary evidence:  “’They call me either Uncle Bernie or Mr. Madoff,’ Bernie wrote his daughter-in-law — who had written him, expecting to hear about his suffering. Instead, Madoff told her: ‘I can’t walk anywhere without someone shouting their greetings and encouragement, to keep my spirit up. It’s really quite sweet, how concerned everyone is about my well-being, including the staff…Madoff told her he was ‘pumping iron, and had plenty of recreational classes to choose from.’ He compared prison to a college campus, with 'lovely lawns and trees' and said other inmates treat him with respect and admiration.”

For the record, the daughter-in-law in question was married to Madoff’s son, Mark. You remember, Mark Madoff. Overwhelmed by the horror of what his father had done, he hung himself from the rafters of his Soho loft.

Steve Jobs Didn't Have to Die

Steve Jobs didn’t have to die.

Among the more shocking revelations in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the great tech entrepreneur is this one: when doctors first discovered Jobs’ pancreatic cancer, they could have removed the relatively small and contained tumor surgically. Link here.

The world’s greatest high tech entrepreneur refused to take their advice. He decided to go low tech. After all, he lived in that New Age paradise called California.

Steve Jobs refused surgery. He told Isaacson that he didn’t want his body to be “violated.”

Did Steve Jobs equate surgery with rape?  

So he tried to arrest the growth of the tumor with experimental diets, macrobiotics, meditation, and spiritual healing.

After nine months of New Age nostrums, Jobs allowed the operation. It was too late; the tumor had spread.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against brown rice or meditation or yoga. Each and all of them have a place in life.

Steve Jobs did not die for alternative medicine. He died for a reactionary mindset that has convinced those who are sufficiently gullible that we are being sickened by modern industrial civilization.

He died for an environmentally friendly religion that wants us all to go back to the good old pre-industrial days, when men lived in harmony with nature. Then, the human body could marshal its natural resources and heal itself.

True believers in this nonsense never seem to recall that back in those good old days the average lifespan was something like 40.

Steve Jobs didn’t have to die. He died for a stupid idea, one that has infected the minds of the smart set on the West Coast.