I just read two posts about sexism, which I think reinforce each other in interesting ways. First
write:What happened is just that colleges moved somewhat towards egalitarianism, and as a result women began to see them as a desperately needed tool to balance out the rest of society’s sexism.
Women are still largely excluded—often by on-the-job harassment and employer discrimination— from the careers that provide a middle-class income without a college degree. Women are 4% of firefighters, only 13% of police officers, 14% of construction workers. They are only 1.4% of plumbers and 2.3% of electricians. Women inherit only 31% of family businesses—which indicates that even women’s parents discriminate against them when it comes to employment.
There are a couple of exceptions here; flight attendants don’t necessarily require a college degree, and they are about 75% women. Women without degrees have also traditionally dominated the secretarial field—but that’s been changing. In 1990 only 9% of secretaries had college degrees; now it’s 33%.
My first reaction is, “that’s fair, but also an oversimplification. There’s a lot more going on than is reflected in that summary.”
Which brings us to the second post which talks about how Game Theory provides a useful framework for talking about bias in society. Henry Farrell on “How the Battle of the Sexes sheds light on the battle of the sexes“
What Jack [Knight] does, in the chapter that I’ve linked to, is to suggest that this simple game tells us a lot about where informal institutions come from, and how they work. There are a lot of informal institutions in human societies – informal rules that aren’t laid down by the government, but that are pretty pervasive. Think about how people queue in different countries. Think also – to make the stakes clearer – about the informal but harshly enforced expectations that Black people would make way for White people if they encountered each other on the sidewalk in the pre-Civil Rights South.
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As men and women engage in this kind of interaction, again, and again and again, they set general expectations which in turn lead to informal rules. Women figure out, as a class, that they are likely to end up worse off if they disagree with men, and men are able to make them back down. Norms emerge in a decentralized way that systematically favor the more powerful actor, and disfavor the less powerful one.
As a result, the rules that emerge from spontaneous orders are likely to reflect the power asymmetries within them. Such asymmetric rules are adhered to not because they are legitimate in any meaningful way, or necessarily deeply internalized, but because the disfavored individuals expect that they will be worse off if they don’t abide by them.
And this can be generalized. The kinds of evolutionary arguments that Hayek makes (e.g. that in a spontaneous order, rules will evolve that are to our broad advantage), and the transaction cost arguments made by institutional economists such as Williamson and North turn out to be special cases of the mixed-motivation framework. This can be seen if you look at a more generalized version of the 2×2 framework, where two players, Player 1 and Player 2 each have two strategies, X and Y.
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There’s a classic quote from G.K. Chesterton, often referred to as Chesterton's Fence
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
This is an argument about what is the proper level of abstraction from which to view a problem. Chesterton argues that you can easily get in trouble saying, “we don’t need to worry about the specifics; this can easily be handled as a case of a general principle.”
But, Farrell argues, that has it’s own limitation
In other words, power matters a whole lot. ... Spontaneous orders and decentralized bargaining are only likely to lead to attractive informal rules under highly specific circumstances. And creating those specific circumstances will likely require a lot more social engineering than Hayek would be comfortable with. ... [T]his argument (made in various forms in the late 1980s and early 1990s) speaks to a much more recent emerging literature that asks about the relationship between power and emergent informal norms. This paper [Evolutionary bargaining with intentional idiosyncratic play] by Suresh Naidu, Sung-Ha Hwang and Sam Bowles is one example. Liam Kofi Bright, Nathan Gabriel and Cailin O’Connor’s recent piece on the stability of racial capitalism is another. And one day, for that matter Cosma and I might harpoon our own Great White Whale paper and bring the proceeds into port (we do have a different piece on a very different topic coming out soon).
So I think it’s true that society is complicated; that people’s behavior reflects a mix of personal preferences, personal abilities, societal expectations, and economic calculations (and I am less convinced than Noah that the economic reasons are the predominant reason explaining the current gender ratios in college). I also think it’s true that paying too much attention to those specific explanations can easily result in missing the forest for the trees, and that there’s good reason to think that earlier power imbalances in society can echo throughout society in a multitude of ways.
Both posts are very much worth reading and, in particular, my brief description of Farrell’s post leaves out a lot — but I didn’t want to go too far in summarizing a post which is, itself, summarizing an academic literature.
One final notes; there are a variety of conservatives who enjoy pointing out that people on the left are quick to say, ‘when you see clear disparities in outcomes you should have some suspicion that the playing field is not even, regardless of whether there is any evidence of personal animosity or prejudice’ but are reluctant to apply that principle to academia. I think they have a point; I think it is highly likely that academia is structured in ways that are more amenable to certain personality types or styles of self-presentation. That isn’t necessarily a problem, there’s no reason for Academia to reflect a precise cross-section of society, but it’s also not something to ignore.
That said, I think Noah is correct to say that one needn’t spend too much time searching for structural bias when there are clear economic incentives that push towards the observed outcomes.