Limits to Matriarchy

Women are making gains in science, engineering, and virtually every area of higher education and the professions.

So what we are talking about, in all likelihood, is an America where women are better educated than men and where education matters more than ever. Put those facts together, and you get some implications worth pondering....Look for that gap to widen. A generation from now, the female lawyer with her male assistant will be the cliché. Look for women to outnumber men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that the professions feed.

Women's superior education will increase their earning power relative to men's, and on average they will be marrying down, educationally speaking....Many tradition-minded cultures in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia already regard the Western economic and social model as emasculating. Radical Islam, in particular, abhors feminism. As the United States and Europe continue to feminize, will the anti-modern backlash, already deeply problematic in the Muslim world, intensify? As sex roles and expectations diverge, might hostility and misunderstanding mount between the West and the rest?

Women will...lead. Think about this: Not only do girls study harder and get better grades than boys; high school girls now take more math and science than do high school boys. If there is a "weaker sex," it isn't female. Reason

In a high technology society--dependent upon cutting edge scientific discovery and technological invention and innovation--females who wish to achieve the very highest levels in certain fields are at a distinct disadvantage. Not because of sexism, not because of marriage and child-rearing. Because of the female brain.

Female babies react more to facial expressions, males to moving objects. By adolescence these behaviors have morphed into girls' interest in social relationships, and boys' interest in machines and devices. Obviously, such divergence of interests influences career choices. Girls lean more toward fields like psychology, while similarly talented men incline toward engineering or physical science. A study6 by Lubinski and Benbow followed the careers of mathematically precocious youth from age 13 to 23. All were in the top 1% of mathematical ability. At age 23 less than 1% of the girls were pursuing doctorates in mathematics, engineering, or physical science, while almost 8% of the boys were. Equal aptitude not withstanding, girls pursued doctorates in biology at more than twice the rate of boys, and in the humanities at almost three times the rate of boys. For all these reasons, we should regard 29% as an upper bound to the percentage of women in the technological work force. La Griffe du Lion

IQ tests are specifically designed to achieve male-female equivalence in overall IQ scores. The sex differences are largely in specific areas of problem solving.

On average, men perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that require the subject to imagine rotating an object or manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is, in guiding or intercepting projectiles.

Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of words and on tests that challenge the person to find words that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly identifying matching items and performing certain precision manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a board. Kimura SciAm

The IQ curves above illustrate an even more important phenomenon--men are overrepresented at the extreme right extreme of the curve. Above 130, the ratio of males to females is 2:1. Male superiority increases as you move farther along the tail to the right. At the highest levels of math intelligence, the male advantage is 10:1 over females. That is why to this point, no women have won the prestigious Fields Medal in mathematics.

The talent required to do mathematics at the level of a Fields Medalist is extraordinary. The pool of competitors spans the adult population of the world not yet turned 40 on January 1 of the year Medals are awarded -- approximately 2 billion. (Again, the precise number is not important.) On average, there are three Fields winners per award year, so that the ratio of competitors to slots, N /NS is approximately 7 x 108. From this we estimate the minimum mathematical ability of Fields Medalists to be an incredible 5.8 SD greater than the male population mean. Approximately 1.3 percent of the Medalists will be women. Since the prize is conferred quadrennially, we expect a female Fields Medalist to emerge approximately once every 103 years, that is, every 4/[3(0.013)] years. None has yet surfaced.

La Griffe


We have reached the place where women can impregnate other women, without the use of male sperm. Theoretically, a society of women, without men, is possible. Certainly women can perform in virtually any profession or occupation. But without men--without the male brain and brawn--could a female society compete against outside societies of males and females?

Male superiority at top levels of math-intensive fields of science, engineering, computer science, and other fields important to a competitive high tech society, suggests that although women are soon to out-graduate men by 3:2 in higher education, within small but important enclaves--at elite levels--men will continue to dominate. The discoveries, inventions, and innovations that a society without males would have to forego, would hamper their competition against outside societies.

Even in areas of near-equivalent intelligence and ability, the males' greater aggressiveness from higher testosterone levels, can lead him to persist longer and against higher odds. Male competitive drive can often be the deciding factor in a contest against other males, or against females.

Even in the age of robotic weaponry and long range energy weapons, a society needs large strong men to defend it against the outsider males who would like to kill all its men and possess all its women. A society made up of only women, would lack that aggression, competitiveness--that killer instinct--that more gender-balanced societies possess.

Males are being systematically disadvantaged in North American education from the earliest age. Males learn differently than females, but a female-dominated educational system is unable and unwilling to accomodate the males' different needs. Christina Hoff Sommers made that point in War Against Boys, but her message fell on the deaf ears of an increasingly feminist establishment that lacks even basic sympathies for the males in decline.

This is an ongoing saga, which is apt to grow a bit intense. Stay tuned.