Applied Epistemology

Slate has a piece that makes a whirlwind tour of studies on the possible causes of continuing female under-representation in positions of authority. To the title question, "why aren't there more female CEOs?", J.D. Nordell writes:

There are three possible answers. The first is that innate differences between the sexes mean that women either don't seek high-risk jobs or don't perform as well at them as men do; many conservatives, for example, have seized on social science studies that suggest women demonstrate an aversion to risk-taking. The second is that conscious discrimination still exists—that sexism is alive and well in the workplace. In 1998, for example, Mitsubishi paid $34 million to female workers who claimed the company had allowed employees and managers to sexually harass them at its plant in Normal, Ill. The third is that, even though formal barriers to women's workplace advancement have been dismantled, unconscious bias continues to interfere, influencing, for example, awards and honors. Recently, the transsexual neuroscientist Ben Barres, who has worked as both a woman and a man in science, noted that he is treated with more respect and interrupted less frequently now that he is a man.

It's easy to guess which option Nordell supports, since the rest of the article discusses only studies showing how pervasive and self-reinforcing unconscious bias is. (My favorite -- though I've read about it before -- is this one: remind Asian American girls before taking a math test that they are Asian, and their scores go up. Remind them that they are female, and their scores go down.) But my trivial observation would be that the three possible causes Nordell mentions above are in no way mutually exclusive.

And to boot, Nordell nowhere mentions the most obvious explanation for her title question: women are more likely than men to stop working to raise children. Leaving the workforce for several years will hamper anybody's path to the corner office. It's not a lack of ambition. It's a different ambition, which is partly biological.

The more universal question the article raises is about how ambition and achievement form a feedback loop. As with the chaos theory cliche, it would seem that a small difference in initial conditions can have lifelong ramifications. But there are just too many possible causal factors to rule out. Why have I been praised for intelligence? Because I could read at an early age. But why was I able to read at an early age? ....