Megan McArdle engages in heresy:
What if nature, with its infinite disregard for our wishes, simply declined to deliver the raw talent for women to ever gain equal representation at the top of many fields?
I would add that men are disproportionately represented both among those with very low IQs and those with very high IQs. Women are more like at or near normal than men. Also (completely anecdotally) it seems to me that women are better at meticulous, repetitive tasks than men. Relatively few men find knitting an appealing hobby.
“[B]y nature all that is worse is also more shameful, like suffering what’s unjust, whereas by law doing it is more shameful. No, no man would put up with suffering what’s unjust; only a slave would do so, one who is better dead than alive, who when he’s treated unjustly and abused can’t protect himself or anyone else he cares about. I believe that the people who institute our laws are the weak and the many. So they institute laws and assign praise and blame with themselves and their own advantage in mind. As a way of frightening the more powerful among men, the ones who are capable of having a greater share, out of getting a greater share than they, they say that getting more than one’s share is “shameful†and “unjust,†and that doing what’s unjust is nothing but trying to get more than one’s share. I think they like getting an equal share, since they are inferior.
These are the reasons why trying to get a greater share than most is said to be unjust and shameful by law and why they call it “doing what’s unjust”. But I believe that nature itself reveals that it’s a just thing for the better man and the more capable man to have a greater share than the worse man and the less capable man. Nature shows that this is so in many places; both among the other animals and in whole cities and races of men, it shows that this is what justice has been decided to be: that the superior rule the inferior and have a greater share than they.”
Young Athenian to older Athenian.
Much too hard to separate nature from nurture here.
Steve