Category: misogyny and gender discrimination

Iranian women: 1970 vs. 2020

March 2, 2026 • 9:30 am

I put something like this up years ago, but it’s a good way to see, with just a few clicks, what happened to Iran after the “Revolution”. Let’s taken women’s dress, a touchstone of misogyny and theocratic oppression.  Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it was a pretty free country in that respect, and everyone could dress how they wanted.

To see that, do a Google Image search for “Iranian women, 1970”. I’ve done it for you: click here.  And this is the first images you see (click photo to enlarge):

And the “after” page. Click “Iranian women, 2000” (again, just go here).  This is 21 years after the “Revolution.”  You’ll see this.

I didn’t manipulate the search in any way save put in what’s above, and I’ve used the first four rows of photos for both.

I don’t think I need to comment on the change, which speaks volumes about the oppression of women in that country.  Oh, and why the cry for change is “Women, Life, Freedom.”

Kathleen Stock on female genital mutilation, cultural relativism, and a recent (odious) paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics

December 20, 2025 • 11:00 am

Over at UnHerd, philosopher Kathleen Stock, formerly of the University of Sussex, critiques a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics that I discussed recently, a paper you can read by clicking below. (You may remember that Stock, an OBE, was forced to resign from Sussex after she was demonized for her views on gender identity. These involved claims that there are but two biological sexes, and her cancellation was largely the result of a campaign by students.)

As I said in my earlier post, this paper seems to whitewash female genital mutilation (FGM), and does so in several ways. The authors think that the term “mutilation” is pejorative, and is more accurate and less inflammatory than saying “female genital modification”, which covers a variety of methods of FGM, some much more dangerous than others, as well as cosmetic genital surgery on biological women or surgery on trans-identifying males to give them a simulacrum of female genitalia. (There is also circumcision, which some lump in with the more dire forms of FGM.)

The Ahmadu et al. paper also notes that anti-FGM campaigns in Africa, where the mutilation is practiced most often, have their own harms. As Stock comments in the article below,

And so our co-authors — the majority of whom work in Europe, Australasia, and North America — tell us that anti-FGM initiatives in Africa cause material harms. Supposedly, they siphon off money and attention that could be better spent in other health campaigns, and they undermine trust in doctors.
They also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

And if you don’t believe Stock, here’s a small part of the section of the Ahmadu et al. paper trying to push the word “trauma” out of descriptionos of FGM:

Most affected women themselves rarely use the word ‘trauma’ to describe their experiences of the practices. If they describe the experiences in negative terms, they may use words such as ‘difficult’ or ‘painful’, but some of them may simultaneously describe the experience as celebratory, empowering, important and significant. This may even accompany experiences of pain, but this pain, when made sense of in its cultural context, does not equate to trauma.

Researchers and clinicians often use the mostly biomedically based DSM-5 (the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) to assess trauma, with a focus on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While narratives of women who have experienced a cultural or religious-based procedure may contain descriptions of symptoms that fall into the PTSD nosological category (such as ‘unwanted upsetting memories’, ‘negative affect’, ‘nightmares’ or heightened sensations, vigilance or sleep disturbance), the cross-cultural validity of PTSD as a construct and its use in migrant populations has been widely contested, because it applies Western cultural understandings to people who do not necessarily equate the experience of pain as directly causing trauma.

That is first-class progressive whitewashing! As Stock describes :

[Anti-FGM campaigns] also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

Finally, Ahmadu et al. note that anti-FGM campaigns, and the term “mutilation”, have led to unfair stigmatization of some groups in the West that practiced FGM in their ancestral countries (and still practice it in the West, though to a much lesser extent). You could argue, for example, that it leads to bigotry in the West against those of Somalian ancestry, as FGM is rather common there. And I agree that it’s unfair to stigmatize an entire group because some of them practice FGM. Only the perpetrators should be punished and the promoters rebuked. But the practice should be loudly decried, and aimed at communities who employ it.

In her article, Stock rebukes the article as a prime example of “cultural relativism,” the view that while people within a given culture can judge some acts more moral than others, considering different cultures one cannot judge some as having behaviors more moral than do others.  One might, if one were stupid, criticize this as forms of ethical appropriation. So, say the relativists, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge those in Somalia who practice infibulation of young women.

You can read Stock’s article by clicking below, but if you’re paywalled you can find the article archived here.

Stock is not a moral relativist, at least when it comes to genital “modification,” a term she opposes.  I’ll put up a few quotes, but you should read the whole piece, either online or in the archived version:

Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behaviour in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish.

Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.

That is: from the inside of a particular culture, certain practices count as exemplary and others as evil. Yet zoom out to an omniscient, deculturated perspective upon human behaviour generally, and there is no objective moral value — or so the story goes. All value is constructed at the local level. Worse: when you zoom back into your own homegrown ethical concerns after taking such a trip, they seem strangely hollow. Like an astronaut returning to Earth after having seen the whole of it from space, everything looks a bit parochial.

Stock lumps the authors into three groups, which she calls “the Conservatives” (no genital surgeries of any type), the “Centrists” (okay with circumcision for males but no surgery on females), and “Permissives” (people who think that “it is up to the parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm.” [that quote is from the Ahmadu et al. paper]. These conflicting views lead to the tension that Stock and others can perceive in this paper. What are the sweating authors trying to say?

Cultural relativism, while in style among progressives, is a non-starter. You can see that by simply imagining John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and ask imaginary people who have not been acculturated to look at various cultures from behind that veil and then say which culture they’d rather live in. If you are a young girl, would you rather be in Somalia or Denmark? If you’re gay, would you rather be in Iran or Israel? And so on.  Here’s Stock’s ending where she asserts that not all forms of “genital modification” should be lumped together or considered equally bad:

Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, anti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Rather than be a relativist about morality, it makes more sense to be a pluralist. There are different virtues for humans to aspire to, and they can’t be ranked. Sometimes there are clashes between them, resulting in inevitable trade-offs (honesty vs kindness; loyalty to family vs to one’s community; and so on). There are very few cost-free moral choices in this life. Equally, some virtues will vary according to cultural backdrop. The local environment may partly influence which virtues are paramount. For instance, family obedience and respect for elders will be stronger in places where close kinship ties help people to survive.

But still, there is always a limit on what behaviours might conceivably count as good; and that limit is whether they actively inhibit a person’s flourishing, in the Aristotelian sense. The most drastic and bloody forms of FGM obviously do so. They lead a little girl to feel distrust and fear of female carers; predispose her to infections and limit her sexual function for life; cause her pain, nightmares, and panicky flashbacks for decades.

With minimally invasive genital surgeries involving peripheral body parts, matters are not so clear. But whatever the case about those, you can’t just assume in advance that all genital modifications are equal, so that discriminating between them by different legal and social approaches is somehow “unfair”. If cultural relativism were really true, there would be no such thing as unfairness either. It would just be empty meaninglessness, all the way down. Academics with heroic designs on the English language should be careful not to fall into ethical abysses, even as they tell themselves the landscape around them is objectively flat.

Here Stock comes close to equating “more moral” with “creating more well being,” a position that Sam Harris takes in The Moral Landscape, and a position I’ve criticized. But here the niceties of ethics are irrelevant. There is simply no way that forcing FGM upon girls can be considered better than banning it.

Bill Maher on dads

June 23, 2025 • 9:15 am

Here’s the latest comedy/news bit from Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” this one called “New Rule: Make Dads Great Again.” It’s about the misandry shown in many t.v. shows and commercials, in which dads are depicted as bumbling, ignorant oafs while moms are the “smart ones” who keep men on the rails.

Maher recognizes that this is a correction for decades of misogny on t.v., but he suggests it’s time for the correction to end. In his view, this “cringey pandering” is both historically inaccurate (viz., many brutal women rulers) but also makes boys flock to odious “male images” like Andrew Tate, for teenage boys have only two choices of role models, “performative pussyhood or the manosphere,” alternatively “a monster or a doormat.”

At the end, Maher lists a lot of accomplishments of men (e.g., penicillin, the printing press, airplanes, the theory of evolution, etc.), which seems a little heavy-handed because women could have invented these things if they weren’t oppressed. But in the end his point is simply that “men were not completely useless.”

Bill Maher on gender apartheid

June 2, 2024 • 12:00 pm

This may not be Bill Maher’s funniest “bit” on his Real Time show, but it’s one of his best: a diatribe against the oppression of women in most majority-Islamic countries. He does get in a few humorous licks at American protesters who, he says, should be fighting Muslim gender apartheid instead of putting up tents and doing performative protests. And he’s right: half the population in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and, yes, territories like Gaza, aren’t even close to having equal opportunity. This problem is sorely neglected by most Western feminists.

Not only are women surely restive under these restrictions, which are immoral because they treat people grossly unequally, but it would be much better for these societies to tap the potential of people with two X chromosomes.  It’s impossible for me to agree that maintaining gender apartheid (usually derived from bogus religious beliefs) is socially better than giving women equal opportunities. We know this is true from how Iran and Afghanistan used to be before they became fundamentalist Islamic countries, and how they are now, with veiled and monitored women agitating against the restrictions of the regimes. Do a Google Image search for “Women, Afghanistan, 1970s” and then compare it to a search for “Women, Afghanistan, 202os“. (See this post as well.)

h/t Muffy

The reprehensible organization UN Women can’t find the ability to condemn Hamas’s gender-based violence. It tried to, but then removed its post immediately.

November 29, 2023 • 10:10 am

About a week ago I called attention to how Western feminists have largely ignored the violence inflicted on women by Hamas (rape, killing of pregnant women, parading the bodies of naked women in Gaza, etc.), and added this cartoon by Guy Morad.

In this case you can’t accuse Israel in a “both sides do it” scenario because IDF soldiers simply don’t rape Palestinian women.

One of the organizations that has resolutely ignored Hamas’s gender-based violence is, of course, affiliated with the anti-Israel United Nations: its organization UN Women, whose mission is stated below:

UN Women is the global champion for gender equality, working to develop and uphold standards and create an environment in which every woman and girl can exercise her human rights and live up to her full potential. We are trusted partners for advocates and decision-makers from all walks of life, and a leader in the effort to achieve gender equality.

UN Women regularly tweets and posts on their Twitter and Instagram pages about gender-based violence in many countries.  Here, for example, is a presentation of Palestinian female deaths in Gaza, as well as Palestinian women who have been displaced from their homes by war or have become widows.  This, of course, is the result of Israel defending itself against Hamas’s massacre of October 7, but all UN Women has to say is this:

Following the 7 October 2023 horrific attack by Hamas on Israel and the ensuing intense bombardment on Gaza by Israel, UN Women has worked to analyze the differentiated impact on women, men, boys, and girls, to ensure adequate responses to their needs.

There is nothing about Israeli women who were widowed, killed, or lost their children. There is nothing about the “bombardment” being a self-defense move by the IDF in a territory where civilians are used as human shields. In fact, UN Women has not called out the gender-based violence inflicted by Hamas on October 7, though of course it would have done so had that violence occurred in countries other than Israel.

As you can read in this Jerusalem Post report below (click to read), UN Women almost decried what Hamas did, but then, with the flimsiest of excuses, retracted its condemnation:

Get a load of these excerpts (indented):

Nearly 50 days after Hamas’ attack on Israel left 1,200 dead, and after weeks of criticism over its silence about allegations of sexual violence during the attack, the women’s rights group UN Women issued a statement condemning the terror group on Friday.

Then it deleted the post.

Here’s that first post, which is really hard to find on the internet (it’s in a tweet by news anchor Stella Escobedo). This must have been a screen capture during the brief time when UN Women had a spine:

“We condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on October 7 and continue to call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” read the initial statement, posted on UN Women’s Instagram page. It was soon replaced with a statement that dropped the condemnation of Hamas and only called for the release of the hostages.

Here’s the replacement statement, straight from the Instagram site:

 

Why did they do that?  Priorities, my dear readers:

Reached for comment, UN Women told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Instagram post had been scheduled in advance and was deleted because the message in it no longer reflected where the organization wanted to put its main focus.

“In any social media team managing multiple campaigns and during a very busy time like the one we are now with 16 Days of Activism, mistakes can occur,” a representative for UN Women said in a statement sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

In particular, said the spokeswoman, Inés Esteban González, the release of some hostages over the weekend as part of a temporary truce changed the organization’s priorities.

If you believe that, I have some land in Florida I want to sell you.  Why couldn’t they leave the first one up and then add the hostage-release one? You know why: UN Women doesn’t count Israeli women.

But there has been pushback:

Word spread quickly among Jewish women activists and Israelis, reigniting their contention that UN Women — an official arm of the United Nations focused on promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment — holds a double standard when it comes to gender-based violence against Israeli women. Some of the critics — including Sheryl Sandberg, a former top Meta executive — have lobbied openly on the topic. Many have used the hashtag “#MeToo_UNless_UR_A_Jew.”

Sheryl Sandberg’s powerful article about Hamas’s sexual violence, published on CNN, is called “Something we can all agree on“.

After an initial statement on Oct. 13 condemning the attacks on civilians in Israel, all of UN Women’s public comments about the war and its impact on women had centered only on Palestinians. Last week, Sima Bahous, the group’s executive director, called for an extension of the current temporary truce into a permanent ceasefire and for the release of all hostages.

The National Council for Jewish Women, which had previously criticized UN Women’s silence on sexual violence against Israeli women, said the group’s second statement last week was inadequate.

“The delayed issuance of a statement that fails to explicitly address the severity of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel — such as the brutal murder of over 1,200 people in Israel, torture, and rape of women, as well as the targeting of civilians and families — is equally reprehensible,” the statement said. “Immediate and unequivocal acknowledgment of these atrocities is imperative, given the blatant violation of international law.”

From another article in the Jerusalem Post, a statement from the sister of kidnapped hostage Shani Goren.  According to the latest tabulation of hostages, Goren is still held captive by Hamas.

If you want to read more about feminists’ shameful turning of their heads away from what Hamas did, read this article in Tablet (click to read for free).

A short extract:

Now, despite seeing Hamas’ rape cult, not one gender studies department has defended even one victimized woman. Feminists have long taught us to believe the accuser and not blame the victim. For years, progressives insisted, in academic papers, on T-shirts, even on coffee mugs, that when fighting oppression, “silence is consent,” or even that “silence is violence.” On Oct. 7, the violated women shouted, shrieked, cried, begged, rape after rape, cut after cut, fighting off these assaults with their voices and their bare hands as best each could. Some hostages may still be struggling. By contrast, violating every feminist principle I’ve ever read and respected, today’s feminist movement is violently, silently, consenting to this mass crime against women and against the victims from three-dozen different countries. Some even doubt the testimonials—and the staggering, bloody, heartbreaking evidence of stripped women paraded through Gaza’s streets. Robbing someone of their story is a secondary offense—but nevertheless inexcusable.

If justice is indivisible, these women deserve justice—and empathy too—whether or not you like Israel or abhor it and its policies. If rape culture is never OK, all civilized people should repudiate so many Palestinians’ and progressives’ delight in spreading these videos and cheering these crimes. In their silence, most leading feminists became complicit, aiding and abetting this mass attempt to dehumanize women just because they’re Jews—or happened to be on the Gaza border that day.

This shameful behavior by UN women, and by other feminist organizations, is an instance of what I call MacPherson’s Law, which goes something like this:

“Whenever two progressive principles clash, the one that loses is the one that involves women.”

In this case the clashing principles are that raping and killing women constitutes inexcusable gender-based violence, versus the principle that those committing gender-based violence are in fact oppressed people of color. It doesn’t matter that in this case the “oppressed people of color” were Hamas butchers. . .

Sarah Haider on World Hijab Day

February 2, 2022 • 3:19 pm

Yesterday was World Hijab Day, a day to celebrate a symbol of misogyny and oppression. In its honor(?) we have a thoughtful 15-minute video by Sarah Haider, Executive Director of the Ex-Muslims of North America, about the hijab. Needless to say, she’s almost entirely critical of reasons for wearing the headscarf.

My own view about it has been given many times (e.g., here): to see whether it’s a “choice” or a “mandate,” remove all social, religious. and political pressures to wear it, and see how many women still wear the headscarf.

That’s not an impossible experiment because it’s pretty much what Iran and Afghanistan were like in the 1970s. And most women let their hair fly free.  Sure enough, when the theocracy began in Iran in 1979, a mandatory hijab law was enacted, and women protested by the thousands. It was of no use. They were forced to wear it, and violators were beaten or even jailed for long periods.

Further, if it’s a “choice”, why would you need “morality police” in Iran and Afghanistan to beat women whose hijab doesn’t fully cover there hair? What kind of monstrous culture dictates the beating of women who, exposing a wisp of hair, are supposed to excite the libido of men?

To tell the truth, I think that women who say that their wearing the hijab is a “choice”, a sign of modesty, are largely dissimulating. Many are wearing it to make it obvious that they are in the class of the victimized, a point articulated clearly in Haider’s video by the odious Linda Sarsour, who says “Before wearing a hijab, I was just an ordinary white girl from New York City” (12:57). Now she’s a public victim as a Person of Color. Sarah doesn’t make this point, because she’s too nice to, but listen again to Sarsour.

Many have been forced to wear the veil since they were little girls, and it’s now a habit—no more of a choice than Amish wearing suspenders and black clothes. A sure sign that it’s bogus is shown by those who wear hijabs and then tons of makeup and other fancy garments. How is that supposed to be modest?

It is a sad irony that Western women, including feminists seem to valorize the hijab, for they are valorizing oppression. For that’s where the garment came from: the misogynistic idea that women must cover their hair (and bodies) to avoid exciting the uncontrollable lusts of men. Why shouldn’t the men control their own damn lusts? Again it’s an instance of MacPherson’s Law: when two “progressive” tenets collide—in this case feminism versus Muslim dictates (the culture of the Oppressed)—the women always lose.

My favorite take on the hijab comes from Alishba Zarmeen:

And now the estimable Sarah Haider, who makes a number of good points, many of them related to Zarmeen’s remark above. BTW, I just discovered that Haider has just started a Substack site, “Hold that Thought” that will be a repository of her essays and thoughts.

Scientific American (and math) go full woke

August 29, 2021 • 12:15 pm

As we all know, Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine, having hardly anything the science-hungry reader wants to see any more. I urge you to peruse its website and look for the kind of article that would have inspired me when I was younger: articles about pure science.  Now the rag is all about inequities and human diseases.

In the past couple of months, there have been some dire op-eds, and here’s another one—not as bad as some others, but (especially for a science magazine) riddled with unexamined assumptions. Click on the screenshot to read it. Apparently the “racial reckoning” that began last year has now crept into mathematics.

After reading it, I have two questions: Is mathematics structurally racist? And why has Scientific American changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology?

The article, of course, claims that mathematics is a hotbed of racism and misogyny, which explains why there are so few women and blacks in academic mathematics.

The article begins with stories of thee women mathematicians, all of whom report that they felt discriminated against or at least looked down upon. All of them have academic jobs, two as professors and one as a postdoc. I don’t doubt their stories, but what we have are three anecdotes. At face value, they show that there is some racism or sexism in academic math, but these are cherry-picked anecdotes that demonstrate little except that, like all fields, math is not entirely free of bigotry. I also procured two anecdotes with no effort. First, I asked one of my female math-y friends, Professor Anna Krylov,  a theoretical and computational quantum chemist at USC, who deals extensively with mathematicians, if that had been her experience, and she said what’s indented below. (I quote her with permission; we’ve met Anna before.)

 I was often a single women in a room — but so what? It did not turn me away from the subject I was passionate about.  I experienced some forms of discrimination throughout my career and can tell stories… But — as McWhorter often says — “there was then and there is now”! These anecdotes [from Sci. Am.] are blown out of proportion and completely misrepresent the current climate.

She also worried that these narratives, which don’t resemble her own, cultivate a victim mentality in women. (Anna is no anti-feminist, either: she helped initiate a protest against an all-male speaker agenda at a chemistry conference.)

Anna also mentioned another female math professor in the U.S. who agrees with her own experience. So we have two anecdotes on one side, and three on the other. (I have to add that, as I’ve said before, I myself felt inferior and suffered from “imposter syndrome” for several years in graduate school, constantly thinking about dropping out. But I finally realized that I could find my own niche.)

Author Crowell also gives two examples of undeniable racial discrimination against black mathematicians, but those took place in the early 20th century and in the Fifties, and it’s undeniable that at that time there was academic racism. But, as Anna said, “there was then and there is now”. If we’re to accept that mathematics is now structurally racist and misogynist, with an endemic culture of bigotry that leads to inequities, we need to do better than that.

So beyond the academic data, the article adds this:

Racism, sexism and other forms of systematic oppression are not unique to mathematics, and they certainly are not new, yet many in the field still deny their existence. “One of the biggest challenges is how hard it can be to start a conversation” about the problem, Sawyer says, “because mathematicians are so convinced that math is the purest of all of the sciences.” Yet statistics on the mathematics profession are difficult to ignore. In 2019 a New York Times profile of Edray Herber Goins, a Black mathematics professor at Pomona College, reported that “fewer than 1 percent of doctorates in math are awarded to African-Americans.” A 2020 NSF survey revealed that out of a total of 2,012 doctorates awarded in mathematics and statistics in the U.S. in 2019, only 585 (29.1 percent) were awarded to women. That percentage is slightly lower than in 2010, when 29.4 percent of doctorates in those areas (467 out of 1,590) were awarded to women. (Because these numbers are grouped based on sex rather than gender, that survey did not report how many of those individuals identify as a gender other than male or female.)

This is the Kendi-an idea that inequities in achievement are prima facie evidence of bias. But if you think about it for both women and African-Americans, that need not be true. This is a true case of begging the question: assuming that there is structural racism and misogyny in math and thus the lower representation is simply its result.

The problem with this, as we’ve discussed before, is that there are reasons for these inequities beyond structural racism, so you can’t just assume its existence. (As I said, nobody with any sense would deny that there are racist or sexist mathematicians; the claim is that the field is permeated with bigotry._

Regarding women, we’ve learned that the sexes differ in interests and preferences, with men being “thing people” and women being “people people” (these are of course average differences, not diagnostic traits!). As Lee Jussim points out in a Psychology Today op-ed, on the advanced high school level, men and women do about the same in math, but women do better than men in demonstrating verbal and reading skills.  In other words, women are better than men at everything, but many choose areas that are more word-heavy than math-heavy. That itself, combined with different preferences, causes inequities. As Jussim writes,

This same issue of differing interests was approached in a different way by Wang, Eccles, and Kenny (2013). Disclosure: Eccles was my dissertation advisor and longterm collaborator; I am pretty sure she identifies as a feminist, has long been committed to combating barriers to women, and is one of the most objective, balanced social scientists I have ever had the pleasure to know.

In a national study of over 1,000 high school students, they found that:

1. 70 percent more girls than boys had strong math and verbal skills;

2. Boys were more than twice as likely as girls to have strong math skills but not strong verbal skills;

3. People (regardless of whether they were male or female) who had only strong math skills as students were more likely to be working in STEM fields at age 33 than were other students;

4. People (regardless of whether they were male or female) with strong math and verbal skills as students were less likely to be working in STEM fields at age 33 than were those with only strong math skills.

Thus inequities in academic math may be a matter of differential preferences or other factors not reflecting bigotry. And this may be one explanation for why, although Sci. Am. notes that only 29.1% of doctorates in math were awarded to women in 2019, it looks from Jussim’s bar graph that about 35% of first time graduate enrollees in math and computer science are women. That bespeaks only a slightly higher attrition rate among women than men—something that needs to be addressed. But again, the go-to answer is not automatically “misogyny.”

As for African-Americans, yes, there’s way too few doctorates awarded in mathematics. To me this does bespeak racism, but racism in the past, not necessarily now. The situation is that due to inequality of opportunity, blacks almost certainly lack easy entry now into mathematics studies. This is a narrowing of the pipeline from the outset that needs to be rectified. But again, the figures do not show that the low output at the pipeline’s terminus is due to racism.

As to what happened to Scientific American, well, it’s gone the way of all the science journals. It is doing performative wokeness.

One more item: Have a look at MathSafe, an organization hired by the American Mathematical Society to police meetings like beagles sniffing out impurities. It’s as if we are no longer adults who can police our own behavior at meetings, and need to pay others to do it for us.

h/t: Anna