Women dominating a man's world

It's a truism that this is a man's world. But who cares? At least in many cases, the characteristics about it that make it "male" don't necessarily make it much easier for men to dominate. For example, I recently realized that women seem far more concerned about "tone" than are men. They tend to contemplate layers of meaning and intention behind a statement when there may not be any. Yet it is relatively simple for women to stop caring so much about tone. Just don't take it to heart that a tone sounds degrading, so long as it isn't actually. The mere fact that the baseline is male doesn't have to be offensive.

There are two exceptions. The first is when the male-biased baseline actually makes it easier for them to function and succeed in a culture. For example, when the baseline for effective communication is volume, the louder voices of men makes them succeed more easily in communicating. This becomes an issue of fairness when the advantage is not natural (we actually hear better when we have higher volume) but was historically established by men in dominant positions by influencing our values. For example, the (rough) tendency of American culture to value masculine strength and sports over music and art might be thought problematic for women, who cannot compete physically.

The second exception is when there is active bias against women wholesale, not about any particular quality of them. This is obviously not something women can escape easily. This is, for example, the trouble Ruth Bader Ginsburg faced in law school when her ideas would be ignored but then congratulated in the mouth of a male.

Yaron's Willy Lowman Argument

Yaron just pointed out to me a beautiful, though for many crushing, argument about the life of achievement.  I call it the Willy Lowman Argument, and the conclusion is that we should never base our entire life's fulfillment on reaching some "achievement."  For, even if we are to trace the life trajectories of all the men in history of great achievements, and discover some pattern in those trajectories, and then model our lives exactly on that pattern, the likelihood of our achieving something similarly great is very slim.  For this looks at only a biased sample of men and women: those who achieved.  The appropriate sample is those men and women who followed a similar life trajectory.  Those who actually achieved are in all likelihood a tiny minority.  This is because the outcomes of our any particular action are determined by many circumstances beyond our control: the financial market collapses, the greatest discovery of the century happens at the same time as yours and the Nobel Prize goes to it that year, the nomination for the Supreme Court doesn't come up or doesn't come up during the right presidency, etc.  Thus, we act irrationally if we hedge our life fulfillment on the achievement of a goal, because we are highly unlikely to achieve it--and all the motivation, determination, and hard work that we can muster to make it happen is drastically causally insufficient.

Of course, there is a caveat.  Many would say that the very pursuit of a goal is a fulfilling lifestyle, like Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  We are likely to at least get somewhere toward our goal: even if we do not win the Nobel Prize, we make some great discovery and are respected by our scientific colleagues, even if we are never appointed to the Supreme Court, we become a great federal district judge.  But we are still bound to end in disappointment, insofar as we fail to achieve the goal.  Perhaps we can make an argument in favor of this lifestyle nonetheless, because it is necessary for human progress for there to be individuals who are driven to attain the highest social achievements.  Yet, I wonder how many people actually need such a narrow drive, how many people who became great were driven by such a narrow goal--I suppose this is an empirical matter.

Perhaps what we can instead do to define self-fulfillment was suggested by Yaron: the pursuit of valuable activity.  If we enjoy every moment of our lives, and can find contentment in our day-to-day activities, perhaps we can n this way be fulfilled.  That does not mean stoically lowering our expectations.  And it does not mean that we do not need to have some achievements in order to find a position where we can begin to engage in meaningful activity (we do live in society, after all!). But it does mean finding meaning in the activity, without reference to any goal that is very specific or very long-term.  For me, those things include teaching, litigating, making big decisions on an everyday basis, etc.

But Yaron is right, I think, that this observation is, for many, crushing.