Category: sexism

Two pieces on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the new allegations against him

June 4, 2019 • 10:45 am

It is curious that the accusations of sexual misconduct committed by Martin Luther King, Jr., recently published in Standpoint by his biographer, the distinguished civil rights historian David Garrow, have largely been ignored by the mainstream press. I think it’s because the press doesn’t know how to respond to accusations of rape-enabling and abuse of women by someone as distinguished as Dr. King—someone who did more than anyone else to bring civil rights to African Americans in the last century. Given the cognitive dissonance among the Authoritarian Left when two of their values collide (another example is feminism vs. Islamic misogyny), I wondered if King would be given more of a pass than others because of his accomplishments. Although the accusations against King are still under legal seal until 2027, many have been deemed guilty by allegations as unsubstantiated as those against Dr. King.

My own take so far is to adopt a wait-and-see attitude, hoping I’m around when the evidence is unsealed, and to recognize that earlier evidence already showed King to be a serial philanderer. He was imperfect—maybe criminally so—but his legacy, his actions, and his writings still mark him as one of the most accomplished figures in American history. But so was Thomas Jefferson, who held slaves. Even now, at my alma mater The College of William and Mary, Jefferson’s statue is regularly being defaced. Lately we’ve seen the demonization of people like Dr. Seuss as well as Gandhi, whose statues have been taken down in South Africa. Somehow people haven’t yet come to terms with how we regard historical figures who have done bad things by modern lights. But clearly such judgments must balance good versus bad, recognize the complex nature of humans, and should have nothing to do with someone’s race.

The New York Times has finally come to grips with the accusations about King, but only in an op-ed by one person, Barbara Ransby. [Note added in proof: they just published another piece on King that I haven’t yet read.] Ransby is a professor of history, gender and women’s studies and African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of “Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement,” “Eslanda” and “Making All Black Lives Matter.” You can read her piece below:

The piece is not really a defense of King so much as an attack on those who accept, even tentatively, that King might have been a far worse sexual predator than we know. We can rule out many on the Right who seem to glorify in these revelations, as they really don’t like what King did. But Ransby, while properly pointing out that the evidence isn’t dispositive, attacks the FBI for its attempt to depose and terrorize King (true, but it’s still possible that the transcripts are right), and even Garrow for publishing unverified information. She gives more credibility to the testimony of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, as they were recounting their own stories rather than digging out someone else’s, as did Garrow.  And Garrow, who has impeccable credentials and no a priori animus against King, is criticized for wanting public attention,  for seeming to “want his own Me first spotlight by getting out in front of an unsubstantiated story” by telling the stories of women who can’t tell the stories themselves. That’s a bit unfair: many of the women are dead and even Garrow thinks that we need to wait before revising our judgment of King as a man (see below). Her subheading implies that Garrow is a “historical peeping Tom”.

Finally, Ransby brings in “resurgent white nationalism” to buttress King’s historical legacy, which stands untarnished to all rational people, and the racist way in which King’s “black sexuality” was described by the FBI. Probably true, but again irrelevant to the questions about his character. After all, it was King who talked about judging a man by “the content of his character.”

To be fair, Ransby does say, and I agree, that we need to wait until 2027 before we begin the painful process of evaluation:

If in 2027 when the full F.B.I. tapes are released there is credible and corroborated evidence that a sexual assault occurred and Dr. King was somehow involved, we will have to confront that relevant and reprehensible information head-on. But we are not there.

Indeed, but Ransby’s piece still looks a bit tendentious. King’s historical accomplishments are secure, though the man was imperfect and may have even been a malefactor, but neither she nor Garrow know the truth, and there’s no need to discredit Garrow and the FBI (which of course did do pretty awful things) in advance of the tapes’ release.

Politico has what I see as the most reasoned take about this whole issue, more so than Ransby’s piece (click on screenshot):

An excerpt of their piece (my emphasis):

The reports are full of erotic details and include revealing handwritten marginalia. But to the uninitiated, the written reports that Garrow cites are hard to interpret. They can’t be checked against the original surveillance tapes, which remain sealed, according to a judge’s order, until 2027. It’s hard to tell from a glance who precisely authored them, for what purpose they were drafted or what information they’re based on. It is Garrow’s decades of expertise in reviewing and analyzing FBI materials about King that gives these startling revelations their weight. Garrow has explained that while not all FBI claims are to be believed, these sorts of summaries of surveillance intercepts are unlikely to have been fabricated or manipulated.

And Garrow’s overall assessment is measured. Nowhere does he renounce the esteem for King that can be seen in his three important books on the minister’s life. Rather, he proposes that the possibility King tolerated or abetted a rape “poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible.” Garrow concludes with a call to preserve the recordings on which the FBI reports are based, so that we can learn more when they’re scheduled to be opened eight years from now.

. . .the Washington Post’s “Retropolis” blog, which declares Garrow’s article to be “irresponsible.” The thrust of the article is to insinuate that the FBI reports aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, and so Garrow shouldn’t have published them. But while the Post piece quotes some respected historians (including friends of mine) rightly noting that the FBI documents may not be entirely reliable—not least because of Hoover’s vendetta against King—it avoids the obvious, if painful, corollary that they may well be accurate to a significant degree. We should at least allow the possibility that the accusations are true.

That’s why it’s a mistake to discount Garrow’s article wholesale. Any historian who came across a new cache of documents related to a longstanding area of research would feel compelled to explore it—and, if those materials shed new light on the subject, to publish them.

. . .King’s greatness is such that he has weathered these disclosures. The rape charges are of course graver, but they don’t negate the historic achievements for which he has long been properly celebrated.

Even if the ugliest charges against King are bolstered by additional evidence, that doesn’t mean we should talk about renaming Martin Luther King Day, tearing down statues of him, or stripping him of his Nobel Prize. In recent years, we’ve had altogether too much wrecking-ball history—history that takes public or private flaws or failings as reason to cast extraordinary men and women out of our political or artistic pantheons. Historians know that even the most admirable figures from our past were flawed, mortal beings—bad parents or bad spouses, capable of violence or cruelty, beholden to sexist or racist ideas, venal or megalomaniac, dishonest or predatory. Awareness of these qualities doesn’t mean despising figures once held up as heroes. Rather, it gives us a more complete and nuanced picture of the people who shaped our world.

Garrow acted responsibly, I think. He put the tentative evidence out there, alerting historians to what he found and what needs to be examined in eight years. He is a reporter, neither an accuser nor a jury.

Until we know the real evidence, we should neither discount nor accept wholesale Garrow’s claims. And we should balance King’s private behavior against his accomplishments as a leader. But that standard should go for everyone, including Thomas Jefferson and Mahatma Gandhi.

h/t: cesar

Iranian women arrested and imprisoned for removing hijab, posting pictures of dancing

July 17, 2018 • 11:00 am

Can we hope that Iran, now in turmoil over many things, will try to stabilize itself by allowing its women simple human decency? In the last few weeks, two women have been arrested for removing their headscarves (20 years in jail!) or for posting pictures on social media of themselves dancing.  These are religious offenses, and are deemed such because they inspire the lust of men. (Women, of course bear full responsibility for whatever men do when engorged with uncontrollable lust.)

The first detainee, Shaparak Shajarizadeh (click on screenshot below) was apparently sentenced to two decades in stir for removing the hijab in protest of its compulsory wearing, and for “waving a white flag of peace in the street.” (White Wednesdays, in which women wear clothing of that color, are part of women’s protest against Iranian oppression.) Note that the story was not verified by Iranian authorities.

 

And here’s a story from the Guardian (click on screenshot, also see story in the July 9 New York Times) about a woman being arrested for posting an Instagram video (see below) of herself dancing.

This innocuous video was deemed dangerous enough to warrant the arrest of Maedeh Hojabri:

From the story about Hojabri New York Times, which described on July 9 the kind of public morality shaming that women like Hojabri are subjected to.

Like many teenage girls, Maedeh Hojabri liked to dance in her bedroom, record it and post clips to Instagram.

But Ms. Hojabri lives in Iran, where women are not allowed to dance, at least not in public. The 19-year-old was quietly arrested in May and her page was taken down, leaving her 600,000 followers wondering where she had gone.

The answer came last Tuesday on state television, when some of her fans recognized a blurred image of Ms. Hojabri on a show called “Wrong Path.”There she sobbingly admitted that dancing is a crime and that her family had been unaware she had videos of herself dancing in her bedroom to Western songs like “Bonbon,” by Era Istrefi.

Whatever the authorities’ intent, the public shaming of Ms. Hojabri and the arrest of others who have not been identified have created a backlash in a society already seething over a bad economy, corruption and a lack of personal freedoms.]

But there are signs that not just Iranian women are supporting the freedom to dress without veiling and to dance in public, but Iranians in general. As the Times notes,

Last week the judiciary warned that Instagram, which has 24 million users in Iran, might be closed because of its “unwanted content.” Ms. Hojabri, and other internet celebrities like her are called “antlers” by hard-liners for the way they stand out on Instagram.

But the public seems squarely on the side of Ms. Hojabri. “Really what is the result of broadcasting such confessions?” one Twitter user, Mohsen Bayatzanjani, wrote, using special software to gain access to Twitter, which is also banned in Iran. “What kind of audience would be satisfied? For whom would it serve as a lesson, seriously?”

Western feminists shy away from these kinds of violations, so that hijabis are often viewed as heroes though many of them are unwilling victims of Islamic morality. This represents the victory of skin pigmentation (Muslims are perceived as “oppressed brown people”, though many are lighter than I am and they’re hardly oppressed in places like Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia) over feminism. The hierarchy of oppression is clear—skin color > sex—but why Muslim women in their own countries are seen as immune to oppression, or ignored by Western feminists, defies rational analysis. You won’t find a post like this one on most of the feminist websites.

In the meantime, however, Iranian women themselves know what’s going on, and are dancing in public in support of Hojabri. I am saddened but also heartened by this video of Iranian women dancing. If you want a running account of oppression, including both men and women, just go to #Iran.

A similar sentiment from the British gay activist Peter Tatchell:

El Al CEO promises that there will be no more seating discrimination against women on the airline

June 26, 2018 • 8:30 am

Two days ago I called your attention to yet another case of Haredi (extreme Orthodox) Jewish men refusing to sit next to women on an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv. Despite El Al’s promise, in a previously settled lawsuit, that it would “never again ask a passenger to move seats based on a request that involved gender”, it did, and two women moved to accommodate the delusional Haredis. The flight was delayed by an hour and a quarter.

There was a lot of negative publicity toward the airline, and, as reader ד”ר אורי פלביץ’ noted in a comment, the Times of Israel (and now Haaretz as well) have reported more serious repercussions from a big Israeli tech company.  As the Times of Israel reports:

The head of a major Israeli tech company announced Monday that his company would be boycotting El Al after a flight from New York to Israel this week was delayed for over an hour due to the refusal by a number of ultra-Orthodox men to sit next to women.

NICE System’s CEO Barak Eilam wrote on Facebook that “at NICE we don’t do business with companies that discriminate against race, gender or religion.”

The Ra’anana-based enterprise software provider is one of Israel’s largest tech companies with annual revenue over $1 billion.

“NICE will not fly with El Al until they change their practice and actions that are discriminating [against] women,” Eilam added.

They also report this:

El Al has been known to regularly ask passengers to move seats at the request — and sometimes the demand — of ultra-Orthodox men who refuse to sit next to women.

Last year, the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court ruled that El Al cannot force women to change seats at the request of ultra-Orthodox men. The court agreed with Israel Religious Action Center, which brought the suit, in ruling the practice was illegal and discriminatory.

I suppose El Al could argue that the women weren’t forced, but asked; but given that the Haredi men were causing a disturbance (threatening to stand in the aisles if they didn’t get the right seats), and refused to even look at or talk to female flight attendants, those men should have been booted from the flight toute suite. Plus El Al promised before that it wouldn’t even ask women to change seats.

Still, according to both Haaretz and the Times, the CEO of El Al has said this won’t happen again. But instead of simply apologizing and affirming that policy, the El Al chairman waffled, weaseled and kvetched. From Haaretz (my emphasis):

Responding on Monday to the comments by Nice’s Eilam, El Al CEO Gonen Usishkin said: “The statement released by the Nice CEO was done without checking the facts [and] in a hasty manner, and I have made this clear to him in [a] conversation with him. The El Al people who dealt with the incident did so with proper sensitivity. Anyone flying the national carrier senses the values on which we have built the company. The company [observes] equality without distinction of race religion or gender.”

The El Al CEO added: “In the interest of resolving any doubt, I have today ordered a refinement of procedure on the matter and, from now on, a passenger who refuses to sit next to another passenger will be immediately removed from the flight.”

Okay, good. But given that they promised that there would be no more seat-changing, forgive me if I don’t quite believe Usishkin. El Al should also make clear, when passengers are buying tickets, that if they want to ensure that they don’t sit next to a woman, they should buy an empty seat next to theirs.

Here’s a parody ad for El Al put together by Tablet Magazine, a Jewish publication.

Israeli airports won’t tell women that they don’t have to change seats at the request of ultra-Orthodox Jews

April 7, 2018 • 1:30 pm

People might be surprised to find that, although Israel is seen as a “Jewish state,” how secular it really is. As Phil Zuckerman notes in the article I mentioned the other day:

The only nation of secular significance in the Middle East is Israel; 37 percent of Israelis are atheist or agnostic (Kedem 1995) and 75 percent of Israelis define themselves as ‘‘not religious’’ or having a ‘‘non-religious orientation.’’ (Dashefsky et al. 2003).

That’s a lot more secular than the U.S., but not a surprise to many Jews. As the old joke goes, “What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?” Answer: “A Jew.”  But Israel still caters to its Orthodox minority, even when simple decency says that it shouldn’t.

A case in point, documented by both The Guardian and Newsweek, involves a subject I’ve written about before: ultra-Orthodox (“Haredi”) Jews refusing to sit by women, and airlines trying to accommodate these religionists by moving the women. (See my posts here, here, here, here, and here.)  In the most recent case, documented in the last two links, 82 year old Renee Rabinowitz—a Holocaust survivor—sued El Al for making her move, and won a $14,000 court judgment with the help of the Israeli Religious Action Center (IRAC), the Israeli equivalent of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. That judgment also prohibited gender discrimination in seating.

But recently the IRAC wanted to put up ads at Ben Gurion airport, near Tel Aviv, letting women know that they had the legal right to keep their seats despite the complaints of bigoted religionists. (The ruling against gender discrimination in seating applies to both buses and planes, by decree of the Israeli supreme court.) Sadly, the airport refused, which is tantamount to refuse to inform women of their legal rights.  The Israeli airport authority banned the ads as being “politically divisive.”

Here’s the ad that was banned:

Well, it’s not at all politically divisive. It may be religiously divisive, but I think most of us agree that where religious dictum conflicts with civil rights, the latter must win. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. I hope the airports reconsider, as their refusal to tell women of their rights allows religious sentiments to trump civil liberties.

IRAC also had a campaign video, which I’ve embedded below. The narrator turns into Woody Allen at about 1:20:

h/t: József

Iranian woman who removed hijab sentenced to two years in jail

March 8, 2018 • 9:15 am

It’s International Woman’s Day, so here’s a report of a non-U.S. woman being the victim of draconian laws. The Foreign Desk and The Guardian both report that an unnamed Iranian woman has been sentenced to two years in prison for removing her hijab.  Hijabs, of course, have been mandatory since the theocracy began in 1979. At that time there were mass protests in the country by women opposing mandatory covering, but they didn’t work.

From the Guardian:

Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, who announced the sentence, did not give the woman’s identity but said she intended to appeal against the verdict, the judiciary’s Mizan Online news agency reported.

Dolatabadi said the unidentified woman took off her headscarf in Tehran’s Enghelab Street to “encourage corruption through the removal of the hijab in public”.

The woman will be eligible for parole after three months, but Dolatabadi criticised what he said was a “light” sentence and said he would push for the full two-year penalty.

More than 30 Iranian women have been arrested since the end of December for publically removing their veils in defiance of the law.

. . . the zeal of the country’s morality police has declined in the past two decades, and a growing number of Iranian women in Tehran and other large cities often wear loose veils that reveal their hair.

In some areas of the capital, women are regularly seen driving cars with veils draped over their shoulders.

Dolatabadi said he would no longer accept such behaviour, and had ordered the impound of vehicles driven by socially rebellious women.

The prosecutor said some “tolerance” was possible when it came to women who wear the veil loosely, “but we must act with force against people who deliberately question the rules on the Islamic veil”, according to Mizan Online.

“Socially rebellious women,” indeed! That reminds me of the “nevertheless, she persisted” criticism of Elizabeth Warren made by Mitch McConnell in the Senate when Warren criticized the appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general. But wait, there’s more! From The Foreign Desk:

Separately, a woman arrested last month after being pushed off a concrete block by Iranian police while protesting the compulsory hijab has been released on bail after posting a bond of nearly 50 million tomans, equivalent to roughly $13,000.

Maryam Shariatmadari was pushed off a concrete block causing her to sustain reported injuries. She was held in Shahr-e Rey prison and denied medical attention, according to those familiar with her case.

But if that’s not enough, there’s still more!

In December, a campaign using a hashtag “White Wednesdays” and showing a video of a woman waving a white hijab with her hair loose, resulted in the arrest and subsequent disappearance of one woman, whose fate sparked interest from media and rights groups across the world.

Vida Movahed, a 31-year-old mother of a young child, was arrested December 27 by Iranian authorities after a video of her waving a white hijab on the streets of Tehran went viral ahead of larger protests in the country in the days that followed.

After international condemnation, Movahed was released in late January.

Here’s that video (click on screenshot):

At least the Guardian reported this flagrant violation of women’s rights. As for other left-wing and feminist sites like Jezebel, Feministing, HuffPo, The New York Times, or the Washington Post—nothing. The feminist sites extol the hijab and its wearers (as “heroes”) more often than they decry it. It’s International Women’s Day, and let’s remember that the world’s most oppressed women aren’t in America, the UK, or Western Europe (unless they’re Muslims).

Saudia Arabia hosts its first women’s marathon

March 5, 2018 • 11:00 am

Gulf News reports that Saudi Arabia just hosted its first women’s marathon, presumably as part of its professed liberalization of women’s rights. It wasn’t a full marathon, but 3 km—about 1.9 miles. It did excite a lot of interest among the women, though, as 2,000 signed up within hours, and 1,500 actually ran. That was a much higher registration than organizers assumed, so they had to close off entries. This shows that women in Saudi Arabia really are interested in sports, even though they’re often not allowed to participate in that sexist country.

But look how the women were forced to run! No wonder the winning time was 15 minutes (granted, a bit better than I could do in running shorts at my age). Click the screenshot to go to the article:

Yes, they are running in burqas or abayas, though, to facilitate breathing, I suppose the organizers let them dispense with veils.

All photos: Al Marsad

Here’s a video from Al Arabiya English:

You go, girls! This is an ineffably sad spectacle.

This photo of the winners epitomizes the inequity: look at the guy wearing a tee-shirt and shorts!

Is this progress? Well, of a sort. At least they can run, but if there were no dress code, do you seriously think the women would run in robes or sacks? Gulf News tries to make the best of this:

Women have made impressive strides in recent months in Saudi Arabia as the society is undergoing intensive changes that saw them organise tournaments and attend sporting events in major stadiums.

The kingdom has in recent months eased restrictions on women, including the lifting of a driving ban — set to go into effect in June.

In September, hundreds of women were allowed to enter a sports stadium in Riyadh, used mostly for football matches, for the first time to mark Saudi Arabia’s national day.

If they really want to make progress, let them deep-six the sharia law that counts a woman’s court testimony as half of a man’s, gives her half the inheritance of her brothers, and requires her to be accompanied by a guardian (and clad in a sack) when she goes out. Compared to that, sports is a thin veneer to make the world believe the kingdom is committed to women’s equality.

My friend Orli Peter, a psychologist, had the appropriate take, which is not to laugh but to mourn:

 

Claire Lehmann and Debra Soh dismantle John Horgan’s indictment of sexism in science

January 13, 2018 • 12:30 pm

The mandatory disclaimer first: I’m not claiming that science is free of sexism. No area in which men labor is, since there are always some sexist men. I would argue, though, that we’re doing our best to free the discipline of sexism (most hiring committees, for example,  have a keen look-out for women candidates, and there are a number of initiatives, scholarships, and the like which are solely directed at women.  I’d also argue that I detect no clear institutionalized sexism in science: that is, I see no rules, guidelines, or institutionalized practices that lead to discrimination against women. But there’s always room for improvement.

But I’d rather listen to a woman than a man about these issues, since women are on the receiving end of any discrimination. Especially when the man who chooses to lecture us about our sins is writer John Horgan, a contrarian who writes a blog for Scientific American. Horgan’s recent column “Darwin was sexist, and so are many modern scientists,” sounded strange to me, for although he cited one study I knew of showing that both men and women discriminate against c.v.’s bearing women’s names, Horgan’s additional argument that science is sexist because Darwin and Galton were, and we still bear that legacy, is an argument that rang false. Virtually all men in that era were sexists judged by modern lights, and so you could indict any area of endeavor as sexist.

Further, Horgan cited Geoffrey Miller, an outlier evolutionary psychologist, as evidence for sexism for writing “Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men dominate mixed-sex committee discussions,” arguing that Miller claims these traits reflect biological differences. Well, they could reflect biological preferences (differential outcomes don’t by themselves indict sexism unless they occur in the face of equal opportunities), and anyway, one guy’s opinion is not that of the whole field, even though Horgan unfairly indicts the entire field of evolutionary psychology as “subtly denigrat[ing] females’ capacity to reason. That’s simply wrong.

Horgan further dismisses the well known pickiness of women and promiscuousness of men in choosing mates, saying that that could be societal, despite the fact that such differences are seen in virtually all animal species, including our closest relatives (the metric is “variance in reproductive success”).

Finally, Horgan cites the infamous memorandum of fired Google engineer Jame Damore, saying that the memo “cherry-picks studies that supposedly prove male intellectual superiority”.

Horgan’s piece has, however, has been dismantled by two women, Claire Lehmann (editor of Quillette) and Debra W. Soh, a writer with a Ph.D. in neuroscience from York University “with a specialization in sexology”. I’ve never seen a rebuttal to a blog post in Scientific American, but this one—”A different take on sexism in science” (subtitle “The fear that research into sex differences give fuel to those who claim that women are naturally ‘inferior’ to men is misguided”)—appears to severely damage Horgan’s assertions, or at least the data he uses to back them up.

Lehmann and Soh’s counterclaims:

1.) They agree that there is some sexism in science, but it’s much less than in service-sector and low-wage jobs, and, more important, “it is premature to claim that sexual harassment has caused the uneven gender ration in STEM. There is no clear evidence demonstrating a causal link between the two.”

2.) Horgan distorts Miller’s “evo-psych” claims, as Miller claimed that the differences cited above were probably due not to biology but to culture.

3.) Lehmann and Soh note that it’s entirely possible that the differences between men’s and women’s personalities and preferences, some of which are well documented, could explain a sex-ratio disparity at Google, and then add that, contra Horgan, Damore does not claim in his memo that men are intellectually superior to women. I read that memo a while back, but my recollection agrees with Lehmann and Soh.

4.) Horgan himself has cherry picked that single study of c.v.s showing discrimination against women, neglecting a more recent study that says this:

. . . Horgan should have mentioned the 67-page review published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2014 called “Women in Academic Science: A Changing Landscape,” by Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams. This review compiled data from several hundred analyses of women’s participation in sciences—from the life sciences such as psychology—to the more math-intensive disciplines such as engineering and physics.

They found that the biggest barrier for women in STEM jobs was not sexism but their desire to form families. Overall, Ceci and Williams found that STEM careers were characterised by “gender fairness, rather than gender bias.” And, they stated, women across the sciences were more likely to receive hiring offers than men, their grants and articles were accepted at the same rate, they were cited at the same rate, and they were tenured and promoted at the same rate.

A year later, Ceci and Williams published the results of five national hiring experiments in which they sent hypothetical female and male applicants to STEM faculty members. They found that men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males.

I haven’t read that study, but you have the link and can judge for yourself, just as you can judge the two sparring articles at hand.

Finally, Lehmann and Soh appear to indict Horgan for white-knighting, and point out, as many have before, that differences between groups, be these differences cultural or genetic, should not mandate differential group treatment or any kind of unequal moral or political treatment:

In an attempt to “protect” women in science from sexist scientists, Horgan commits the sin he accuses others of. He ignores the work of female scientists whose work has challenged popular narratives of sexism in STEM, and he avoids dealing with the female writers and commentators who have publicly supported Damore.

Support for women in science should not be dependent on politics. Stratifying this support for women in favor of those who tout politically expeditious opinions—and castigating those who do not—counters the very idea that women are individuals who have self-determination and are capable of independent thought. There is also something oddly hypocritical about a man educating women on just how oppressed they are.

And finally, we want to stress that the fear that research into sex differences gives fuel to those who claim that women are naturally “inferior” to men is misguided. Difference is not “inferior” unless one thinks that what is male-typical is preferable and what is female-typical is somehow undesirable. We do not share this fear, because we do not view masculine typical traits as the gold standard and female typical traits less than.

Since Horgan’s piece was written just a month ago, and he’s a science journalist, there’s really no excuse for him to cherry-pick literature—unless, that is, he has an agenda that he needs to buttress. Confirmation bias doesn’t look good on a science journalist.