Gender Is Big

Consider the possibility of discrimination against the left-handed. Such discrimination might make efficiency sense in contexts where expensive-to-change complementary equipment is designed for the right-handed. Such as pilots. In other contexts, one might justify mild discrimination based on weak correlations, such as between handedness and intelligence, gender, and health. But these other factors tend to be directly observable, and correlations are weak. So stronger correlations of handedness with success, especially where not explained by these other correlations, are suspicious.

What do we suspect? One possibility is political equilibria wherein an established group of insiders arbitrarily favor people like them against outsiders. We might especially suspect this if we saw people rewarding others for discriminating against the left-handed, as something like this would need to be part of an insiders-favoring political equilibria. It is plausible, though not obvious, that disrupting such an insider-favoring equilibria is good for the world. So we might consider prohibiting or at least hindering discrimination against left-handers. (One might also just think we are in a bad choice out of multiple equilibria, and not blame insiders so much.)

This all makes sense as a way to think about discrimination for what are arguably relatively minor, or small, features such as height or hair-length. But now consider gender. It seems to me that the above framework is far less useful for gender, as gender is not remotely a small feature.

For most people, their main long-term spouse is the most important relationship in their life. And most care greatly about the gender of that spouse. It isn’t just ordinary “straight cis” people who think this way. Gay/lesbians also mostly agree that the genders differ greatly in important features, and they have a strong preference for one end of the gender spectrum. In part because others care about gender, most people also care greatly about how others see their own gender. Most transgender people also care a lot (almost by definition) about how others see their gender; they just make unusual choices about that. So most everyone agrees that most everyone cares a lot about the genders of their associates, and the genders that others assign to them.

Some may postulate gender as an innate atomic feature of the universe of human concerns, so that when we desire that an associate have a certain gender that has nothing to do with their many other associated features. But that seems crazy to me. Much more plausibly, what we like about a gender is strongly tied to the set of associated features that tend to go along with that gender. That is, we like the package of features that “are” a gender. In this case, the fact that we strongly care about genders suggests that different genders differ greatly in many features that are important to us. These features probably include habits, attitudes, preferences, and abilities. Gender is big, and it matters a lot.

Because gender is big, we expect it to correlate substantially with many features that we care about when assigning people to roles. But this means that even strong correlations of gender with success in particular roles is at best only a weak cause for suspicion about insider-favoring or other bad equilibria. There are just too many other good reasons to expect to see large gender-role correlations.

Now you might argue that today’s large correlations between gender and important features are largely a legacy resulting from a bad past. And change takes time. So creating pressures for low gender-role correlations today will push us to move faster toward a better future, even if that costs us today in terms of matching people to roles well.

However, the prospects for a world anytime soon where different genders correlate little with other important features seems to me quite low. (As low as the chance that communist governments would rapidly “whither away” to produce “true” communism.) Yes, gender correlations have changed across societies and across time, but almost always there have been strong correlations between gender and important things. The fact that societies with weaker gender roles have more strongly gendered personalities also (weakly) suggests to me that we fundamentally want genders to differ, even if we aren’t that stuck on most particular differences. We want gender to be big; we want to love and be loved by people that differ from us in big known ways.

Thus I don’t see gender-success correlations as by themselves offering much of a justification for anti-discrimination efforts today to suppress such correlations. At least they don’t in terms of disrupting insider-favoring or other bad equilibria, or in terms of promoting a low-gender-differences future. But I do see some other justifications, which I may write about in future posts.

It seems to me that our public discussion about gender has for a while been somewhat in denial about the likely long continuation of strong gender correlations with important features. If the genders continue to act differently on average, then observers will naturally form gendered expectations based on such behavior. That is, there will be gender roles. We can and should talk about what we want those gender roles to be, but we can’t do that until we admit that such roles will exist.