Why do girls do better in school?

[SwordoftheVistula]

From another thread which now appears to be closed:


"Any college teacher (at least in the social sciences and life sciences) who has ever paid attention to their own stats know that women do better than men in college classes.
There are all kinds of post hoc explanations given for this like "Girls get better grades because professors are men, nod nod wink wink" and so on. What a load of crap. Women are smarter than men on average, among the smartest people there is no emperical evidence that women are underrepresented, and among the dumbest people in the world .... well, those are mostly guys.
The reasons are obvious and straight forward. The hormones that give some men an evolutionary advantage over some other men also make you stoopid. Any questions? Ask a girl, she'll explain it to you.
And now, finally (or shall I say, "once again") there's proof:

The actual scientific studies which have been done show men to be smarter, with an IQ of about 5 points higher:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1274952/Men-ARE-brainy-women-says-scientist-Professor-Richard-Lynn.html

at the near-genius level (an IQ of 145), brilliant men outnumber brilliant women by 8 to one. That's statistics, not sexism.

The undeniable, easily measurable fact remains that, by the time both sexes reach 21, men, on average, score five IQ points higher than women.


So why the differential? I think it is a combination of:

Explosion in size of humanities & similar degrees (non math/science).

Lower-to-middle class men don't go to college as much, since they tend toward jobs in construction, truck driving, and military which do not need any education. Lower-to-middle class women in tend towards jobs such as secretary, clerical, teaching, etc usually need at least an associate's degree from a community college.

Continued resistance to standardized testing, and instead reliance on grades in K-12 (which are subjective and vary widely) as well as bullshit essays and such.

In the K-12 environment, I'd say in addition to more emphasis on humanities type subjects, there is the focus on conformity and following rules, which tends towards girls instead of boys. Also, the grades can often be subjective, and teachers' opinions of girls are usually higher due to nicer personalities and less likelihood to create classroom disruptions.

[Hellenic-Saxon]

I think it has a lot to do with the media promoting men to be bad and that it's cool to be bad, while with women, they are taught that if they don't get an education, they might wind up as a "just a house wife", and being a house wife nowadays if frowned upon even though it's the job that nature intended for women.

[Curtis24]

Its just more important to them, it seems.

Also, as for college, I believe that women have higher verbal intelligence. Which allows them to outperform men in liberal arts.

[SwordoftheVistula]

I think it has a lot to do with the media promoting men to be bad and that it's cool to be bad, while with women, they are taught that if they don't get an education, they might wind up as a "just a house wife", and being a house wife nowadays if frowned upon even though it's the job that nature intended for women.

At least in the US, education is very heavily promoted to men as well, the mantra is that 'education is necessary', and all jobs not needing college such as truck driving and construction are portrayed as paying at or around minimum wage (which is not actually true) and 'only for losers'. Even in households headed by baby boomer men employed in these jobs, these men hold a perception left over from their youth that college education=upper middle class lifestyle, and encourage their children to 'go to college' in order to 'have a better life than I did'.

Media promotion of the 'bad boy image' as 'cool' may have some effect on the underclass which already was resigned to no expectation of financial success in life, leading them to drop out of school or commit crimes in their youth, but I doubt these people would excell even if they stayed in school and tried to go to college.

[Bridie]

Any college teacher (at least in the social sciences and life sciences) who has ever paid attention to their own stats know that women do better than men in college classes.
Generally speaking, girls tend to do better in primary and high school also. I think the main factor is that higher levels of oestrogen are conducive to passivity (lower physical energy levels allowing girls/women to sit and concentrate for longer periods of time) whereas higher testosterone levels are conducive to physical activity (making boys/men more restless and unable to sit and concentrate for extended periods). Of course, men have a tendancy to be able to concentrate for extended periods also, but in active situations, not so much passive ones. Modern education systems are therefore more tailored to suit female learning styles and neglect to cater to male learning styles.



Women are smarter than men on averageIt is not a matter of men or women being smarter, but one of men and women having their own, very different strengths. Men tend to being more capable with subjects involving more abstract concepts (maths, physics) and women tend to be more capable with language and subjects involving analysis of interpersonal/social relationships (so subjects like literature and sociology). Overwhelmingly, men are dominant in professions such as engineering (among other occupations requiring a high level of understanding of mathematical concepts) while women are best represented in "caring" professions which require high levels of empathy and interpersonal communication.



The reasons are obvious and straight forward. The hormones that give some men an evolutionary advantage over some other men also make you stoopid.Ridiculous statement. Not even worth commenting on.


I don't think men and women can really be compared with each other, as is so often done these days since subjects like "gender studies" became popular after the "sexual revolution" of the 60's. It's like comparing apples and oranges. We're too different.

[Debaser11]

Uh, because our education system is a wet joke of feminist sentimental nonsense, for the most part.

Fifty/sixty years ago, women were not doing better in school. But then, we actually had an education system that valued turning out knowledgable people over conditioning people to be unthinking, Marxist simpletons.

[Breedingvariety]

- Women have better memory to memorize without thinking;
- Women have more patience with nonsense;
- Women are more submissive to accept what they are taught;
- Women have better emotional and social intelligence to better grasp what lecturer wants for good grades and share good grades achieving tactics among friends;
- Women are more concerned about good grades and not the matter of studied subject, more so than men.

[Boudica]

Hey! That was my quote.. But just so you know I was only using it as amo because I was arguing with gayfist. Gayfist (geistfaust) was trying to say women are stupid, and should beat them if they are out of line. I think that both sexes, (although very different) have the potential to be equally intelligent.

[Aelred]

Because the presence of beautiful women lowers our IQ temporarily. And they're distracting. Men perform differently in an all male environment (which is why they've fought hard to destroy those traditional institutions.)

[Bridie]

Hey! That was my quote.. But just so you know I was only using it as amo because I was arguing with gayfist. Gayfist (geistfaust) was trying to say women are stupid, and should beat them if they are out of line. I think that both sexes, (although very different) have the potential to be equally intelligent.Sorry, Boadicea. If I had realised it was a quote from a member here I'd have realised the comments probably weren't 100% serious but rather meant to be 'tongue in cheek'. :)



Because the presence of beautiful women lowers our IQ temporarily. And they're distracting. Men perform differently in an all male environment (which is why they've fought hard to destroy those traditional institutions.) It doesn't help that from high school upward, girls/women these days tend to present themselves (dress, hair, make-up) in such a sexually provocative manner. For many women, sexuality = power, and they will use it to get whatever they want, whether it simply be attention or to get an advantage over their peers (both male and female).

[Daos]

I don't know about elsewhere, but my colleagues get better grades than me because they memorise everything (and judging by the way we are tested, that's just what the professors expect), rather than trying to understand it, and they don't shy away from cheating... But I know who is the smartest in the group because, whenever they don't understand something, they come to me for answers, despite me having average grades.;)

Also, I have no motivation to get bigger grades. I really don't see why I should tire my brain with things I don't like, nor care, for some worthless scribblings on a piece of paper.:shrug: It is in college that I have learned how apathy feels.

[SaxonCeorl]

This is a good thing; more selection for the smart guys in higher education :thumb001:

[Óttar]

If I knew I could get laid and get companionship whenever I wanted I'd get ace grades too. I will concur with Aelred though in that if I wasn't a distracted horndog at all times, I would've graduated magna cum laude.

It pisses me off that all-male universities don't even exist anymore. :(

[antonio]

I sometimes have found women clever than me. What I have not found yet is one performing better with equal or less application (rather scarce). To be fair, no man neither.:D

[Aces High]

Where i work and in all the related fields,all the top management and head honchos are males.100%

So where did the women go wrong...?

[Albion]

Because boys develop latter and for longer, girls get the head start when they're in school.

[Bridie]

Where i work and in all the related fields,all the top management and head honchos are males.100%

So where did the women go wrong...?
Men and women tend to have different interests, motivations and ambitions.

[Crossbow]

The female qualities are highlighted these days, education is transformed into something in which these qualities can develop without disturbances so that they can play a leading role in society. Masculine behaviour (more aggressive and competitive) is condemned, and boys are being marginalized and where possible feminized. They should be comprehensive and have empathy and EQ, and be subordinate to women. The majority of teachers (at least here) is female, so on top of all this, boys lack a male role model, serving as an example, and a person to identify with.

[Rosenrot]

Unfortunaley, it's not my case... I repeat 3 years and study on 10 diferent schools. I was very good student on History, Geography, on writing things... But in Math, Physical, everything with numbers... I was just not able to learn. To be honest I did not even try! I thought it was so boring that my hand started rowse a pencil to draw, and I hung up the world... Or pick up a book to read. But my teachers and my parents, basically knew that I was not completly lost, and I would find a career in arts.

[antonio]

The female qualities are highlighted these days, education is transformed into something in which these qualities can develop without disturbances so that they can play a leading role in society. Masculine behaviour (more aggressive and competitive) is condemned, and boys are being marginalized and where possible feminized. They should be comprehensive and have empathy and EQ, and be subordinate to women. The majority of teachers (at least here) is female, so on top of all this, boys lack a male role model, serving as an example, and a person to identify with.

Indeed feminization of teaching is a fact that quota policies on Feminazi states like Spain seem not care much about it. Even if it's a fact that many girls want to be teachers as so little boys want it, on the areas of female underepresentation there're absurd and unfair quotas to fight it. The point is not to be on these fronts, although, just a decade ago or by last Socialist government experience, how to know in advance that Spanish new socialism were nothing more than a bunch of radicals? :coffee:

[Rygg]

I just finished high school at the highest level (that's vwo for all you dutch out there) and i will be heading to university soon-ish. From what i can tell so far, girls/women tend to do better grade wise, but are not more intelligent. Alot (and i mean a LOT, more then half atleast) of the girls tended to be the types that would just cram everything into their head and get very high marks. Most guys tended to grasp the subject instead of cramming, resulting in lower marks but better knowledge of what was actually happening.

While it's nice to have high grades, it will not help you anything in the long run if you do not actually grasp the ideas and methods. I think this is where a lot of girls tend to fail, they try to compensate for their lower IQ by cramming everything into their heads, which might show up as a positive thing in studies but will not help them later on in life.

[silver_surfer]

I just finished high school at the highest level (that's vwo for all you dutch out there) and i will be heading to university soon-ish. From what i can tell so far, girls/women tend to do better grade wise, but are not more intelligent. Alot (and i mean a LOT, more then half atleast) of the girls tended to be the types that would just cram everything into their head and get very high marks. Most guys tended to grasp the subject instead of cramming, resulting in lower marks but better knowledge of what was actually happening.

While it's nice to have high grades, it will not help you anything in the long run if you do not actually grasp the ideas and methods. I think this is where a lot of girls tend to fail, they try to compensate for their lower IQ by cramming everything into their heads, which might show up as a positive thing in studies but will not help them later on in life.



100% agree with you. Girls in my university on average scores better grades than boys but when it comes to aptitude test they score mediocre marks compare to boys.

[Damião de Góis]

They mature earlier.

[RandoBloom]

They mature earlier.

Nope. It is the curiculum. Prior to the last curiculum which apeals to female way of learning and inhibits male learning female students did worse than males.
So answer is feminism

[KirillMazur]

Sexual desire wakes up later than in guys, often when some men are already at the finish line to impotence (30+).
A 14-23 guy rarely thinks about anything other than sex while studying, so men only begin to gain real knowledge usually after the libido weakened in their third decade of life.
Our ancestors knew something by introducing separate education for boys and girls in schools (cancelled here at about ~1955).

[JamesBond007]

Modern education has its roots in Hegelian Prussianism (Prussia Germany). Germans being collectivist and lemon-like created a system that churned out people that all thought alike about the important issues of the day. In, otherwords, it created sheeple and women are more sheeple like than men. Education past the three Rs : reading, writing and arithmetic is about indoctrination. Once you have the three Rs under your belt you can teach yourself anything (especially if your IQ is above 125) via the library and the internet or ebooks and an ereader or whatnot. Colleges do not teach you how to think critically but rather hand down facts as if they where handed down by God not be question : if you think that is education then you are a moron.

You also don't need a college degree to make a lot of money -- you can start your own business or teach yourself computer programming (many computer progammers are self-taught) etc.....

[NSXD60]

Because girls like order when engaged in a task, disorder being selfish and needlessly disruptive wasting valuable time endangering and delaying everyone's goal of achieving self-sustainment.

[JamesBond007]

Girls are more attentive and less likely to behave poorly. I always was bad at writing but finally, I improved my skills. My best friend told me that reading samples (you can find a lot of good ones here https://www.topessaywriting.org/samples/addiction) help a lot. I made reading and writing my daily exercise and it worked out.

I type one-handed from a smartphone so I do not care about proper 'writing' here because it would be a major PITA.

[JamesBond007]

Because girls like order when engaged in a task, disorder being selfish and needlessly disruptive wasting valuable time endangering and delaying everyone's goal of achieving self-sustainment.

Girls get worthless degrees. I think the one female who won the Fields medal might be more political than anything else. In any case one woman has won the Fields medal since 1938, I think. She is no Terence Tao.

Then there are these problems :

The seven mellenium problems are the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, the Hodge Conjecture, the Navier-Stokes Equations, P versus NP, the Poincaré Conjecture, the Riemann Hypothesis, and the Yang-Mills Theory. In 2003, the Poincaré Conjecture was proven by Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman.

August 2006, Perelman was offered the Fields Medal[1] for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow", but he declined the award, stating: "I'm not interested in money or fame; I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo."[2] On 22 December 2006, the scientific journal Science recognized Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture as the scientific "Breakthrough of the Year", the first such recognition in the area of mathematics.[3]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman

[calxpal]

I think girls specifically do better in Elementary-High School for a few reasons:

They are expected to mature early and conform more

The vast majority of Elementary-High School teachers are female

Education often discourages masculine traits

Girls seem to value grades more

I've found that girls are more likely to be told that if they don't do well in school and head to College/University then they won't have a future

Girls are a bit more submissive on average

Ofc people are welcome to disagree but these are just my thoughts.

[JamesBond007]

From another thread which now appears to be closed:



The actual scientific studies which have been done show men to be smarter, with an IQ of about 5 points higher:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1274952/Men-ARE-brainy-women-says-scientist-Professor-Richard-Lynn.html

at the near-genius level (an IQ of 145), brilliant men outnumber brilliant women by 8 to one. That's statistics, not sexism.

The undeniable, easily measurable fact remains that, by the time both sexes reach 21, men, on average, score five IQ points higher than women.


So why the differential? I think it is a combination of:

Explosion in size of humanities & similar degrees (non math/science).

Lower-to-middle class men don't go to college as much, since they tend toward jobs in construction, truck driving, and military which do not need any education. Lower-to-middle class women in tend towards jobs such as secretary, clerical, teaching, etc usually need at least an associate's degree from a community college.

Continued resistance to standardized testing, and instead reliance on grades in K-12 (which are subjective and vary widely) as well as bullshit essays and such.

In the K-12 environment, I'd say in addition to more emphasis on humanities type subjects, there is the focus on conformity and following rules, which tends towards girls instead of boys. Also, the grades can often be subjective, and teachers' opinions of girls are usually higher due to nicer personalities and less likelihood to create classroom disruptions.

While the world celebrates that there are now more women in college than men, nobody has bothered to ask whether it's for something sensible like Accounting or a colossal waste of time like the Liberal Arts. And when you consider whether the degrees women are getting are worthwhile or merely an excuse to attend a very expensive 4 year party, unfortunately 80.5% of the time it's an excuse to party.

Also, Millennials have destroyed colleges, universities, and higher education, not only inflating the market with unnecessary tuition dollars for worthless degrees, but making the college environment toxic with safe-spaces, anti-free speech codes, false rape allegations, and a War-of-the-Sexes that made the 1960’s America and Soviet Union look downright chummy.



What sort of things are women interested in compared to men? Maybe we should ask Mel Gibson. A more scientific way is to study this is to study something called vocational interests. Really, this just means what kind of job functions people like to do. Back in the early years of psychology when it was focused on solving practical problems rather than pushing left-wing policy, researchers were very interested in vocational guidance. So, how do you take a bunch of young people and provide them with reasonable career advice for further schooling, education? Well, naturally, you try to figure out how smart they are and what kind of jobs they like doing. Since intelligence tests had solved the first question well, the second question was to be solved by tests that measure vocational interests. The study of these have unfortunately fallen a lot of out fashion, but they are occasionally brought to the limelight. Recall that a few years ago, Google engineer James Damore pointed out that the science was saying something quite different than the management of Google was claiming it was saying. He wrote up a summary of this science: Google's Ideological Echo Chamber. The outcome was that, he didn't change management's views on the matter, but as a consolation prize he got fired. One of the key lines of argument by Damore was:


[Woman have more] Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

○ These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

He cited a 2010 review by Richard Lippa (also featured in Hjernevask):

Lippa, R. A. (2010). Gender differences in personality and interests: When, where, and why?. Social and personality psychology compass, 4(11), 1098-1110.


How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta-analyses and three cross-cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender-inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.


The highlighted part is the one about vocational interests. Lippa describes it this way:

The dominant taxonomy in vocational interest research is Holland’s (1992), which proposes six main types of interests and vocations: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional (see Figure 1 for a graphic depiction and description of each type). The six RIASEC domains define individual difference dimensions as well as interest types.


https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F a7c70179-62df-4fcc-a918-ae7edcf55bfa_750x479.webp

Factor analytic and multidimensional scaling studies suggest that two ‘super-factors’ underlie individual differences in interests (Lippa, 1998; Prediger, 1982): (i) the people–things dimension that taps the degree to which individuals are interested in people-oriented activities and occupations versus thing-oriented activities and occupations, and (ii) the ideas–data dimension data taps the degree to which individuals are interested in activities and occupations that require creative thought and intelligence versus activities and occupations that entail more routine tasks that are less cognitively demanding. Overwhelming evidence shows that men and women differ substantially on the people–things dimension of interests but little on the ideas–data dimension (more on this later).

It may still be a little too abstract, so I suggest simply taking an online version of the RIASEC scale. This isn't the best version because the questions are quite outdated, but you get the idea (https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RIASEC/(https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RIASEC/):


Test InstructionsThe test consists of 48 tasks that you will have to rate by how much you would enjoy performing each on a scale of (1) dislike (2) slightly dislike (3) neither like not dislike (4) slightly enjoy (5) enjoy. The test will take most five to ten minutes to complete.


First three questions:

1.) Write books or plays

2.) Help people with family-related problems

3.) Do research on plants or animals

My results:


https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F a4dbd98f-86ce-45f2-a5d7-faae521efa18_826x806.png

Unsurprising for a scientist, I score high on the Investigative interest.

Alright, so if we gave a large number of men and women, or boys and girls, these kind of vocational interest questions, they would probably show some differences in very unsurprising ways. Yes, that's what Lippa is summarizing. The most recent meta-analysis of sex differences in this high-level people vs. things is:

Su, R., Rounds, J., & Armstrong, P. I. (2009). Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests. Psychological bulletin, 135(6), 859


The magnitude and variability of sex differences in vocational interests were examined in the present meta-analysis for Holland's (1959, 1997) categories (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional), Prediger's (1982) Things-People and Data-Ideas dimensions, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) interest areas. Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. Average effect sizes varied across interest inventories, ranging from 0.08 to 0.79. The quality of interest inventories, based on professional reputation, was not differentially related to the magnitude of sex differences. Moderators of the effect sizes included interest inventory item development strategy, scoring method, theoretical framework, and sample variables of age and cohort. Application of some item development strategies can substantially reduce sex differences. The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.

So the differences are very large on interests as measured by these scales and in very obvious ways: women don't like engineering, they like helping, health and children. Insofar as we don't think these are perfectly reliable or construct valid measures, the differences must be larger still. (I mean, I guess you could hope for measurement invariance testing showing the gaps are not real, but it's an unwise gamble.) The US bureaucracy has created a list of jobs by their RIASEC categories. This means that one can give people RIASEC tests, and then present people with a plausible set of jobs, something that Linda Gottfredson has written about for some decades. Here's the O*NET results for someone interested mainly in Social Artistic and Investigative jobs (SAI, in that order):


https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F 5e92cf5e-e09e-435e-a7bb-4154ce619b16_1207x889.png

As people also spend their own time on things they are interested in, we also find that men and women know different things. For instance, this 2001 Richard Lynn study on general knowledge shows that the sex gap varies quite a bit by topic:


https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F b2017482-855a-4ca0-9e6b-427a197a5f1f_841x866.png

Overall, men knew about 0.51 d more stuff, but the gap was only 0.08 d in art, and was -0.48 in cookery and -0.32 in medicine. Somehow there was near-neutrality in fashion knowledge, d = -0.05! The fact that knowledge differences vary by interest means that one can game a test to show larger or smaller test gaps by sampling items that measure things men or women know more. Thus, the issue of measuring overall knowledge gap becomes a thorny question of how to sample knowledge at random. Don't get too exited though, I very much doubt tinkering with the tests will change the picture much.

Finally, one might wonder if all this psychology test talk can be verified by some external approach. What if we just looked at what men and women actually talk about in private? This has been done too, with amusing results:


Tables 1 and 2 list the top 20 most female- and male-linked topics and their corresponding effect sizes (see Supplement 1 for full list of 1,281 topics and effect sizes). The most strongly female-linked topics included words describing positive emotions (e.g., “excited”, “happy”, “<3”, “love”,), social relationships (e.g., “friends”, “family”, “sister”), and intensive adverbs (e.g., “sooo”, “sooooo”, “ridiculously”). Strongly male-linked topics included words related to politics (e.g., “government”, “tax”, “political”), sports and competition (e.g., “football”, “season”, “win”, “battle”), and specific interests or activities, such as shooting guns, playing musical instruments, or playing video games. Note that topics are semantically-related clusters of words identified automatically by latent Dirichlet allocation. In Tables 1 and 2, Words are ranked in descending order of prevalence (weight) in each topic.

Male:


https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F a463b267-33e0-42a7-a3f6-c6974d527834_1572x1968.png

Female:


https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:s teep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F 8caeb1f0-1c6e-437f-8d59-b6553e521c8e_1573x1176.png

We see that the male topics include politics, war/sports/gaming/weapons/death/killing, swearing, music (especially metal/rock), work/science, metals. Women's topics are much more mundane. There's a lot of expression of emotions, especially positive. There's a lot of family talk shown by all the terms of human relationships (sister, daughter, nephew, brother, boyfriend etc.). Of interests, the main thing we see is food (cooking), and some shopping. In fact, it is surprisingly devoid of any abstract interests, I am surprised there are not more words related to clothing and child-rearing.

Overall we see that results are consistent across studies that men and women are interested in and talk about quite different things. It's amazing to live in a society that often pretends these differences are not real. But then again, when you ask people about their stereotypes about who works in which jobs, you get amazing accuracy like this:


https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:s teep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F ecd7c6ed-8c03-4210-aa90-e9b2163f671d_1243x722.png

It's not often you see a real correlation of .94 in social science, but here we are. One must wonder: how do normal people think these differences appear? Do the police show up in school and forces the girls to become nurses (10% male) and boys to become electricians (95% male)? Maybe the police tells boys to become murderers too (90% male). A similar level of accuracy can be seen for movie preferences:


https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:s teep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F bf0415cf-4345-45b4-8abc-27e547cdbf1a_1024x666.png

Surely, movie studios must know about these, yet movie studios are among the most outspoken people trying to change gender norms. As they have been trying for several decades with counter-stereotype signaling in movies, and the gendered job market remains more or less the same, clearly their efforts are not working. The question we have to ask ourselves is how long our society must be stuck in these gender delusions? I wager quite a long time to come.

[JamesBond007]

*edited out double post*

[JamesBond007]

While the world celebrates that there are now more women in college than men, nobody has bothered to ask whether it's for something sensible like Accounting or a colossal waste of time like the Liberal Arts. And when you consider whether the degrees women are getting are worthwhile or merely an excuse to attend a very expensive 4 year party, unfortunately 80.5% of the time it's an excuse to party.

Also, Millennials have destroyed colleges, universities, and higher education, not only inflating the market with unnecessary tuition dollars for worthless degrees, but making the college environment toxic with safe-spaces, anti-free speech codes, false rape allegations, and a War-of-the-Sexes that made the 1960’s America and Soviet Union look downright chummy.


What sort of things are women interested in compared to men? Maybe we should ask Mel Gibson. A more scientific way is to study this is to study something called vocational interests. Really, this just means what kind of job functions people like to do. Back in the early years of psychology when it was focused on solving practical problems rather than pushing left-wing policy, researchers were very interested in vocational guidance. So, how do you take a bunch of young people and provide them with reasonable career advice for further schooling, education? Well, naturally, you try to figure out how smart they are and what kind of jobs they like doing. Since intelligence tests had solved the first question well, the second question was to be solved by tests that measure vocational interests. The study of these have unfortunately fallen a lot of out fashion, but they are occasionally brought to the limelight. Recall that a few years ago, Google engineer James Damore pointed out that the science was saying something quite different than the management of Google was claiming it was saying. He wrote up a summary of this science: Google's Ideological Echo Chamber. The outcome was that, he didn't change management's views on the matter, but as a consolation prize he got fired. One of the key lines of argument by Damore was:

[Woman have more] Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

○ These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

...

"Persons of average IQ (between 90 and 100) are not competitive for most professional and executive-level work but are easily trained for the bulk of jobs in the American economy. By contrast, individuals in the top 5 percent of the adult population can essentially train themselves, and few occupations are beyond their reach mentally."--Linda Gottfredson


The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Coding: A Short Primer for Getting a Job in Software Development

Are you looking to change careers? Ever think of software development?

Software Developers are in high demand and can earn a high income. Believe it or not, these jobs also don’t require a college degree. Many people are able to become self-taught software engineers and developers everyday.

https://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Coding-Software-Development-ebook/dp/B088182GK6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1KFOUQHPCPEBQ&keywords=hitchhiker+guide+to+coding&qid=1668907163&sprefix=hitchiker+guide+to+coding%2Caps%2C561&sr=8-1



Tribe of Hackers: Cybersecurity Advice from the Best Hackers in the World

Looking for real-world advice from leading cybersecurity experts? You’ve found your tribe.

Tribe of Hackers: Cybersecurity Advice from the Best Hackers in the World is your guide to joining the ranks of hundreds of thousands of cybersecurity professionals around the world. Whether you’re just joining the industry, climbing the corporate ladder, or considering consulting, Tribe of Hackers offers the practical know-how, industry perspectives, and technical insight you need to succeed in the rapidly growing information security market. This unique guide includes inspiring interviews from 70 security experts, including Lesley Carhart, Ming Chow, Bruce Potter, Robert M. Lee, and Jayson E. Street.

Get the scoop on the biggest cybersecurity myths and misconceptions about security
Learn what qualities and credentials you need to advance in the cybersecurity field
Uncover which life hacks are worth your while
Understand how social media and the Internet of Things has changed cybersecurity
Discover what it takes to make the move from the corporate world to your own cybersecurity venture
Find your favorite hackers online and continue the conversation

Tribe of Hackers is a must-have resource for security professionals who are looking to advance their careers, gain a fresh perspective, and get serious about cybersecurity with thought-provoking insights from the world’s most noteworthy hackers and influential security specialists.

Dug Song

Dug Song is the cofounder and CEO of Duo Security, the leading provider of unified access security and multifactor authentication delivered through the cloud. Duo protects more than 12,000 customers globally, including Dresser-Rand, Etsy, Facebook, K-Swiss, Random House, Yelp, Zillow, Paramount Pictures, and more. Founded in Michigan, Duo has offices in Ann Arbor and Detroit, as well as growing hubs in Austin, Texas; San Mateo, California; and London. Prior 61 to launching Duo, Dug spent seven years as founding chief security architect at Arbor Networks, protecting 80 percent of the world’s internet service providers and helping to grow the company to $120 million+ annual revenue before its acquisition by Danaher. Dug also built the first commercial network anomaly detection system, acquired by Check Point Software Technologies.

Dug’s contributions to the security community include popular projects on open source security, distributed file systems, and operating systems, as well as co-founding the USENIX Workshop on Off ensive Technologies.

Do you need a college degree or certification to be a cybersecurity professional?

DugSong : Hell, no. For instance, at Duo, I would say only 20 percent of our people have prior experience in security, and everybody else comes from a whole bunch of different backgrounds. Even outside of our security team, we have just as large a design team, and our design team also has user research as a function. This team is led by a former journalist, who actually spends their time conducting hundreds of user interviews so we can understand our users’ experiences living with security every day. We have to solve for their needs.

David Rook is the European security lead at Riot Games. He has worked in technology for 18 years and in the information security space full-time since 2006. Before moving into the computer games industry, David held various application security roles in the financial services industry. He has presented at leading information security conferences, including DEFCON and RSA.

Do you need a college degree or certification to be a cybersecurity professional?

David Rook : My short answer to this question, as someone who didn’t go to college or university, is no; but I could be biased. The longer answer is still no, but having a bachelor’s, master’s, or even a PhD can of course be beneficial. I think if you want to land your first cybersecurity job in a large tech company like Google, then a degree is very likely a requirement.

If you don’t have the option of getting a degree or, like me, had no interest in going to college or university, you need to think about how to make yourself stand out. When I’m hiring, I don’t view standing out as proving you know X, Y, and Z, but I do want to see a demonstration of your passion for security. If you’re a developer wanting to move into application security, as an example, I’m going to look for blog posts on this topic, maybe application security–related projects in your GitHub, and potentially things like contributing to open source security tool projects. To be clear, I expect to see this kind of thing from every candidate, but I feel if you don’t have a degree, it’s vital you do this.


https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Hackers-Cybersecurity-Advice-World/dp/1119643376/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ZJJPY3B6IOOW&keywords=tribe+of+hackers&qid=1668907327&sprefix=tribe+of+hackers%2Caps%2C303&sr=8-1

[rajputprincess]

Because teacher grade men worse than women for same assignment and boys also get worse punishment for same crime in school.
Boys do better in test like sat
https://blog.prepscholar.com/what-is-the-average-sat-score

Sent from my Redmi Y3 using Tapatalk

[JamesBond007]

From another thread which now appears to be closed:



The actual scientific studies which have been done show men to be smarter, with an IQ of about 5 points higher:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1274952/Men-ARE-brainy-women-says-scientist-Professor-Richard-Lynn.html

at the near-genius level (an IQ of 145), brilliant men outnumber brilliant women by 8 to one. That's statistics, not sexism.

The undeniable, easily measurable fact remains that, by the time both sexes reach 21, men, on average, score five IQ points higher than women.


So why the differential? I think it is a combination of:

Explosion in size of humanities & similar degrees (non math/science).

Lower-to-middle class men don't go to college as much, since they tend toward jobs in construction, truck driving, and military which do not need any education. Lower-to-middle class women in tend towards jobs such as secretary, clerical, teaching, etc usually need at least an associate's degree from a community college.

Continued resistance to standardized testing, and instead reliance on grades in K-12 (which are subjective and vary widely) as well as bullshit essays and such.

In the K-12 environment, I'd say in addition to more emphasis on humanities type subjects, there is the focus on conformity and following rules, which tends towards girls instead of boys. Also, the grades can often be subjective, and teachers' opinions of girls are usually higher due to nicer personalities and less likelihood to create classroom disruptions.


https://www.heretical.com/miscella/nurse.jpg




Women are Inferior

Females are more sensitive and better at discerning taste and smell. They have greater tactile sensitivity from birth. Women are superior at child care, perceiving signals, reading emotional undercurrents and performing fine, detailed work. Here we are talking about rationality and civilisation.

1. The natural domain of the male is the thing. They can be excited and intrigued, even obsessed, about some thing. Males of certain races have evolved the ability to sublimate sexual drives into physical ones. The result is the discovery or invention of every modern amenity: electricity, computers, engines, cars, science and modern medicine, washing machines and the contraceptive pill, to name but a few. The ability of the male to process abstract concepts and objects is superior. Since the male is superior at manipulating things, the female imitates the male.

2. The natural domain of the female is relationships. Relationships are her primary sexual activity. Females are superior at understanding and manipulating them.

Women are totally sexual creatures who will go to practically any lengths to avoid physical sex.

Here the female is like an expert and naturally gifted chess player playing a beginner. The female expert makes the male beginner work, letting him win occasionally to maintain his interest, but whenever she really wants to win she does. By watching his fumbling attempts she learns his strategies even before he has learnt them himself. This female strategy of manipulating the male into doing her work is inferior.

The manipulative skill of females has evolved to compensate for the greater physical strength and aggression of males. The reason females abhor violence so much is because this is a battleground on which they always lose. Since the female is adept at manipulating relationships, the male can imitate the female.

Ultimately the only thing that relationships produce is babies, which already exist in abundance.

3. Females are hypocritical. Its likely origin is that females are empathic. They are sensitive to and aware of the needs of others, particularly the sexual needs of males, yet their optimal strategy relies on denying them sexual access most of the time.

Females are ambivalent, and thus neurotic. They (at least sometimes) desire sex, and it makes them feel more feminine, but their basic strategy is to raise the costs of sex and this involves avoiding physical sex, because scarcity raises its value. By signalling and other means females seek to load their neurosis onto males.

Females discourage others from pursuing policies they employ themselves (e.g. discouraging males from sexually discriminating but supporting each other). This is a form of Malign Encouragement, though its archetype is probably females encouraging competition among males while they conspire.

4. Females are selfish. The evolutionary origin is that they are thinking not only for themselves but for their child dependants (including eggs). A female may appear to be doing something with an altruistic motive but the reality, almost without exception, is that she is merely satisfying her own instincts. Males will sacrifice themselves for a greater cause, for example in war. Females are more subtle, take less risks and are less adventurous.

If a woman says something which is right, it is by accident. --PROVERB

Females enforce conformity. Females vary less than males. Exceptionally gifted individuals are almost always male.

Since females have been selecting males with female traits for generations, it is not surprising that many males now express feminine characteristics (e.g. monogamous males). Some exceptional males express female characteristics more strongly than do females themselves. This is the reason that while women are generally better at cooking, the best chefs are men.

Females have a deep desire for safety and moderation, which has its origin in her childbearing role. The practice of derogating anyone who sticks out from the crowd is known in Holland as De Wet van Jantje (Little Johnnies’ Law), in Denmark as the Jätteløven and in Sweden as the Jantelagen. If female influence is unchecked the result is a degenerating cycle of blandness, mediocrity and cultural stagnation.

"Cats, from their nocturnal rambling habits, cannot be matched, and, although so much valued by women and children, we hardly ever see a distinct breed kept up." --Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1968, p. 99

6. Females are immature. The evolutionary origin is that immature females interact more successfully with children and make better mothers. The origin of male maturity is that they compete.

8. Females are unable to separate feelings from logic. The corpus callosum, which joins the two hemispheres of the brain, is wider in women than in men. Female instincts are regarded as safer, so there has been less need for females to inhibit them. Females’ favourite occupation is sitting around, measuring, thinking and talking about their feelings. The female instinct is to be passive and to signal. Contrariwise, males must control their instinct to act or they are soon taken out of circulation, either by being killed by other members of the tribe or being imprisoned.

9. Females indulge in irrational fear. They have a thirst for accounts which reinforce that fear. Females project more than males.

The more latitude the female is allowed, the more her capricious nature will be expressed, the more she will project that nature onto the male and the more insecure of his intentions she will become.

10. Females conspire. They instinctively act together to raise the costs of sex and promote monogamy.

Many female procedures involve compound benefit, conferring benefit in multiple ways. The following scenario illustrates a subtle expression of the Conspiracy strategy.

A male makes a random, friendly comment to a female, which she interprets as an approach. Not only does her interpretation benefit her personally, by making her feel desired (enhancing her), but it also confers benefit to females generally. She is likely to have conveyed her interpretation to him in some way. Then he, learning that a pleasantry is likely to be interpreted as an approach in any case, thereafter limits his friendly comments to females he actually desires, weakening his hand. Thus Ambiguity of Intention is removed from males. Females seek to monopolize AoI.

Conspiracy is inherently inferior because competition allows the fittest to prevail.

11. Females know now no limit. They do not check their own behaviour but rely on others to do it for them. Females make unreasonable demands to test and extend their power. They do not limit the excessive behaviour of other females but will exploit whatever gains their excesses achieve (another expression of the Conspiracy strategy). The answer to the question ‘What will women do?’ is ‘Whatever they can get away with.’ Women are never satisfied.

"It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation". --Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1874, p. 858

"Amongst the half-human progenitors of man, and amongst savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of females. But mere bodily strength would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy. With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female, and the older males have to retain their females by renewed battles... To avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires the aid of higher mental faculties, namely observation, reason, invention, or imagination... Consequently... we would expect that they would tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring... Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is indeed fortunate that the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen...’

An incident... occurred in a troupe of chimpanzees observed by Jane Goodall. One day she saw a subordinate male pick up a pair of empty kerosene cans from near her camp and carry them up to the top of a hill; below a group of dominant males were eating some bananas that she had laid out as bait. The chimpanzee then proceeded to run down the hill towards the dominant males, banging the two cans together to create an awful din. Startled by the clamour, the dominant males rushed off for cover, deserting their bananas. The result of this episode was that the subordinate male not only got the bananas but was elevated to the rank of alpha-male with all its attendant sexual (and breeding) privileges. This illustrates the principle that intellectual prowess may supplant physical strength as a means to achieving dominance in the animal hierarchy, thus helping to account for the startling evolution of human brain power."

--Glenn Wilson quoting Darwin in The Great Sex Divide



Some Female Characteristics and their Evolutionary Origin

Ambivalence — Empathic/denial of males’ evident sexual needs.

Avoidance of risk — Pre-menopausal females are always gravid.

Conspiracy — Acting in unison intensifies male breeding competition and enforces monogamy.

Control of information — Manipulative: compensates for males’ greater physical strength.

Emotionality — Engenders susceptibility to manipulation.

Illogicality — Confounds males, increases the costs of sex, inspires sublimation in males.

Inability to egress — Facilitates the acquisition of the best possible mate.

Inability to sublimate — Fecundity.

Imitation — Obscures the essentially sexual nature of females; utilitarian.

Immaturity — Forging of successful relationships with children.

Imprecision — Fosters ambiguity, promotes familiarity.

Loquacity — Teaching language skills to children.

Neurosis — Females want sex/denial raises the costs of sex.

Obfuscation — Confuses males, disguises female strategies.

Opportunism — Facilitates the acquisition of the best possible mate.

Selfishness — Pre-menopausal females are always gravid.

Signalling — Passive, safe, ambiguous, manipulative; transfers neurosis onto males.

Sophistry — Manipulative: compensates for males’ greater physical strength.

Speculation — Enables sex to be foreseen well in advance without logic.

Speed of response — Compensates for males’ greater physical strength.

Tergiversation — Facilitates the acquisition of the best possible mate.

13. Females have no sense of humour. Women often define Our Cosy Circle (OCC) by deriding people they wish to exclude from it. They can discourage true humour because males use it to distribute information and alleviate neurosis, and it is in the female interest to maintain the male in as high a state of neurosis as possible. By disallowing humour on particular themes taboos can be instituted. Then the perception of a topic can be altered to further an agenda which would be rejected were it to be openly stated.

Dispersive Procedures serve to dissipate normal male reactions such as anger and surprise. When a female says ‘No’ to some trivial request in jest this is merely the precursor to a refusal being made in earnest.

The female will use any argument, however ridiculous, if it suits her purpose.

14. Women are unforgiving. Grievances are too useful to them as weapons to be discarded and forgotten.

15. Females always reduce everything to the personal. Further, females are superficial, because this is consistent with ambivalence.

16. Females’ strategy of creating problems and then blaming males is inferior. The most important expression of this is over-population; that is, women having babies. Human populations have increased roughly fifty-fold in just five centuries, and over-population is the ultimate cause of most modern-day problems. The female who says that she would not like a baby is a liar, because she has become extinct, just as surely as one cannot have a eunuch for a father. Men, most of the time, would simply be happy with sex.

Intelligence may be used to solve problems and create wealth or merely to divest others of wealth by clever manipulation.

https://www.heretical.com/sgs-1998/aaw.html




I shall begin this discussion of sex differences in ability and achievement in the place where the most striking and controversial gender differences are observed. Virtually all the people throughout history whose achievements are acknowledged as products of undisputed genius have one thing in common. They come from a great variety of geographical, national, social and religious backgrounds, but they are all male. Starting with names like Da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Galton, Shakespeare, Edison, Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner and Picasso, we might have to fill many pages before the first comparable woman would appear. When we consider the claims of women for inclusion in the list of outstanding accomplishments, their contributions can be seen mostly in the fields of literature (Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf), humanitarianism (Florence Nightingale, Mother Teresa) or politics (Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir), rather than science, technology music or fine art.

The supremacy of men in the field of scientific achievement can also be seen in the record of Nobel prizes awarded for physics, chemistry and medicine/physiology. Reviewing the background of the 164 recipients of these prizes between 1900 and 1950, Moulin (1955) noted that only three were women and they had all shared prizes with their husbands. The only exception was Madame Curie, who after sharing a prize with husband Pierre was later awarded another one independently. In a follow-up study by Berry (1981), the sex of the recipients was not mentioned at all. Berry describes the national origin, race, personality and social background of prize-winners, even the age at which their father died, but he does not mention whether any were female. When I contacted him for further information he explained there were so few women in his sample he didn’t think them worth mentioning. Apparently there has been no appreciable increase in the number of women receiving Nobel prizes for science in recent years.

In a recently published book on scientific genius, Simonton (1988) discusses every imaginable demographic and personality factor that might be related to scientific brilliance, including such things as age, birth order and persistence, but sex or gender do not appear in his index. Is this because the gender issue is too hot to handle, or are we supposed to assume without inquiry that genius is a purely male phenomenon? Certainly, raising this question in public today is no way to make female friends, but it is surely intellectual cowardice to side-step it in a book specifically about the topic.

Few social learning theorists or feminists, if pressed, would deny the preponderance of male genius, but would proffer an explanation in terms of the limited educational opportunities for women throughout history and general discouragement to achieve outside the realm of motherhood and the home. This explanation seems to be unsatisfactory on a number of counts.

Variations in the social position of women do not seem to be accompanied by any change in the sex ratio of geniuses. For example, despite the increased number of women in science laboratories in the last three or four decades, the outstanding discoveries are still mostly made by men.

Many male geniuses have to override considerable disadvantage in their educational or social background and considerable social or religious opposition before their contributions are recognized. Galileo, despite being old, feeble, and virtually blind, was imprisoned by the Vatican for his heretical support of the heliocentric theory. Michael Faraday was the son of an itinerant tinker, had practically no schooling and could not afford any books. Isaac Newton came from a family of small farmers, was a premature child so puny and weak that he was not expected to live and received a poor education at the local village school. Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin both came from backgrounds of working-class poverty that they capitalized upon in their art. Charles Darwin defied his religious training and risked social ostracism by advocating evolution theory. George Washington Carver emerged from a background of civil war and slavery in Missouri to become one of America’s greatest biological scientists, despite constant hunger, poverty and ill-health and having been denied education because of his colour. Social and educational advantages cannot be held accountable for the achievements of men such as these, so why should disadvantage be invoked to account for the absence of female achievement?

Social learning theory does not adequately explain why a proportion of women do occasionally achieve quite well in certain areas (e.g. literature and politics) but not in others (e.g. science and architecture). Music composition is an interesting case in point, since it is a male-dominated profession despite the fact that girls are given more than equal encouragement to learn music at school and there are many accomplished women performers. British composer Peter Maxwell Davies recalls asking to study music at high school in Manchester and was told very firmly by the headmaster, ‘This is not a girls’ school!’ For hundreds of years European ladies have been expected to sing and play an instrument such as the piano as a social grace, and yet the great composers have without exception been men.



Glenn Wilson, The Great Sex Divide, pp. 97-99. Peter Owen (London) 1989; Scott-Townsend (Washington D.C.) 1992.

https://www.heretical.com/wilson/geniuses.html




The nature of the female

One needs only to see the way she is built to realize that woman is not intended for great mental or for great physical labor. She expiates the guilt of life not through activity but through suffering, through the pains of childbirth, caring for the child and subjection to the man, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion. Great suffering, joy, exertion, is not for her: her life should flow by more quietly, trivially, gently than the man’s without being essentially happier or unhappier.

Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word big children, their whole lives long: a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the actual human being, ‘man.’ One has only to watch a girl playing with a child, dancing and singing with it the whole day, and then ask oneself what, with the best will in the world, a man could do in her place.

Natural weapons

In the girl nature has had in view what could in theatrical terms be called a stage-effect: it has provided her with superabundant beauty and charm for a few years at the expense of the whole remainder of her life, so that during these years she may so capture the imagination of a man that he is carried away into undertaking to support her honorably in some form or another for the rest of her life, a step he would seem hardly likely to take for purely rational considerations. Thus nature has equipped women, as it has all its creatures, with the tools and weapons she needs for securing her existence, and at just the time she needs them; in doing which nature has acted with its usual economy. For just as the female ant loses its wings after mating, since they are then superfluous, indeed harmful to the business of raising the family, so the woman usually loses her beauty after one or two childbeds, and probably for the same reason.

Female truth

The fundamental defect of the female character is a lack of a sense of justice. This originates first and foremost in their want of rationality and capacity for reflexion but it is strengthened by the fact that, as the weaker sex, they are driven to rely not on force but on cunning: hence their instinctive subtlety and their ineradicable tendency to tell lies: for, as nature has equipped the lion with claws and teeth, the elephant with tusks, the wild boar with fangs, the bull with horns and the cuttlefish with ink, so it has equipped woman with the power of dissimulation as her means of attack and defence, and has transformed into this gift all the strength it has bestowed on man in the form of physical strength and the power of reasoning. Dissimulation is thus inborn in her and consequently to be found in the stupid woman almost as often as in the clever one. To make use of it at every opportunity is as natural to her as it is for an animal to employ its means of defence whenever it is attacked, and when she does so she feels that to some extent she is only exercising her rights. A completely truthful woman who does not practice dissimulation is perhaps an impossibility, which is why women see through the dissimulation of others so easily it is inadvisable to attempt it with them. – But this fundamental defect which I have said they possess, together with all that is associated with it, gives rise to falsity, unfaithfulness, treachery, ingratitude, etc. Women are guilty of perjury far more often than men. It is questionable whether they ought to be allowed to take an oath at all.

Feminine charms

Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex: for it is with this drive that all its beauty is bound up. More fittingly than the fair sex, women could be called the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor poetry, nor the plastic arts do they possess any real feeling or receptivity: if they affect to do so, it is merely mimicry in service of their effort to please. This comes from the fact that they are incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything whatever, and the reason for this is, I think, as follows. Man strives in everything for a direct domination over things, either by comprehending or by subduing them. But woman is everywhere and always relegated to a merely indirect domination, which is achieved by means of man, who is consequently the only thing she has to dominate directly. Thus it lies in the nature of women to regard everything simply as a means of capturing a man, and their interest in anything else is only simulated, is no more than a detour, i.e. amounts to coquetry and mimicry.

Absence of genius

Nor can one expect anything else from women if one considers that the most eminent heads of the entire sex have proved incapable of a single truly great, genuine and original achievement in art, or indeed of creating anything at all of lasting value: this strikes one most forcibly in regard to painting, since they are just as capable of mastering its technique as we are, and indeed paint very busily, yet cannot point to a single great painting; the reason being precisely that they lack all objectivity of mind, which is what painting demands above all else. Isolated and partial exceptions do not alter the case: women, taken as a whole, are and remain thorough and incurable philistines: so that, with the extremely absurd arrangement by which they share the rank and title of their husband, they are a continual spur to his ignoble ambitions. They are sexus sequior, the inferior second sex in every respect: one should be indulgent toward their weaknesses, but to pay them honour is ridiculous beyond measure and demeans us even in their eyes.

Insipid women-veneration

This is how the peoples of antiquity and of the Orient have regarded women; they have recognized what is the proper position for women far better than we have, we with our Old French gallantry and insipid women-veneration, that highest flower of Christian-Germanic stupidity which has served only to make women so rude and arrogant that one is sometimes reminded of the sacred apes of Benares which, conscious of their own sanctity and inviolability, thought themselves at liberty to do whatever they pleased.
Monogamy and ‘filles de joie’

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties. But when the law conceded women equal rights with men it should at the same time have endowed them with masculine reasoning powers. What is actually the case is that the more those rights and privileges the law accords to women exceed those which are natural to them, the more it reduces the number of women who actually participate in these benefits; and then the remainder are deprived of their natural rights by just the amount these few receive in excess of theirs: for, because of the unnaturally privileged position enjoyed by women as a consequence of monogamy and the marriage laws accompanying it, which regard women as entirely equal to men (which they are in no respect), prudent and cautious men very often hesitate before making so great a sacrifice as is involved in entering into so inequitable a contract; so that while among polygamous peoples every woman gets taken care of, among the monogamous the number of married women is limited and there remains over a quantity of unsupported women who, in the upper classes, vegetate on as useless old maids, and in the lower are obligated to undertake laborious work they are constitutionally unfitted for or become filles de joie, whose lives are as devoid of joie as they are of honour but who, given the prevailing circumstances, are necessary for the gratification of the male sex and therefore come to constitute a recognized class, with the specific task of preserving the virtue of those women more favoured by fate who have found a man to support them or may reasonably hope to find one. There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone: and what are they if not sacrifices on the altar of monogamy? These poor women are the inevitable counterpart and natural complement to the European lady, with all her arrogance and pretension. For the female sex viewed as a whole polygamy is therefore a real benefit; on the other hand there appears no rational ground why a man whose wife suffers from a chronic illness, or has remained unfruitful, or has gradually grown too old for him, should not take a second.

No argument about polygamy

There can be no argument about polygamy: it is a fact to be met with everywhere and the only question is how to regulate it. For who is really a monogamist? We all live in polygamy, at least for a time and usually for good. Since every man needs many women, there could be nothing more just than that he should be free, indeed obliged, to support many women. This would also mean the restoration of woman to her rightful and natural position, the subordinate one, and the abolition from the world of the lady, with her ridiculous claims to respect and veneration; there would then be only women, and no longer unhappy women, of which Europe is at present full.

Property and inheritance

In India, no woman is ever independent, but in accordance with the law of Manu, she stands under the control of her father, her husband, her brother or her son. It is, to be sure, a revolting thing that a widow should immolate herself upon her husband’s funeral pyre; but it is also revolting that she should spend her husband’s money with her paramours – the money for which he toiled his whole life long, in the consoling belief that he was providing for his children. Happy are those who have kept the middle course – medium tenuere beati.

In almost all nations, whether of the ancient or the modern world, even amongst the Hottentots, property is inherited by the male descendants alone; it is only in Europe that a departure has taken place; but not amongst the nobility, however.

That the property which has cost men long years of toil and effort, and been won with so much difficulty, should afterwards come into the hands of women, who then, in their lack of reason, squander it in a short time, or otherwise fool it away, is a grievance and a wrong as serious as it is common, which should be prevented by limiting the right of women to inherit. In my opinion, the best arrangement would be that by which women, whether widows or daughters, should never receive anything beyond the interest for life on property secured by mortgage, and in no case the property itself, or the capital, except when there cease to be male descendants. The people who make money are men, not women; and it follows from this that women are neither justified in having unconditional possession of it, nor fit persons to be entrusted with its administration. When wealth, in any true sense of the word, that is to say, funds, houses or land, is to go to them as an inheritance they should never be allowed the free disposition of it. In their case a guardian should always be appointed; and hence they should never be given the free control of their own children, wherever it can be avoided.



Up to ‘Property and inheritance’ the translation is by R. J. Hollingdale, from Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms (Penguin 1970), then by T. Bailey Saunders.

https://www.heretical.com/miscella/onwomen.html