John Barry, a clinical psychologist and associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, has an essay in Quilette ironically titled, "How Feminism Has Constrained Our Understanding of Gender." Drawing on the work of contrarian feminist Prof. Alice Eagly and social psychologist Kurt Lewin, one-half of Barry's argument is that:
Feminist research into sex differences has typically concluded that the number of sex differences is small, and therefore unimportant, thus making the logical error that a small number of differences means those differences are inconsequential. This error is exposed if we think of the small number of genetic differences between mice and humans (five percent) compared to the similarities (95 percent). Feminist research routinely overlooks or discounts examples of cognitions and behaviours that show sex differences. The large number[?] of such differences … call into question the idea that gender differences are negligible, and suggest that such differences cannot be explained by socialisation alone.
I can't say that I'm wildly receptive to Barry's "error-exposing" statistics, which seemingly compare women to mice on the evolutionary scale and, unexplained, switch in numbered significance from "small" to "large." However confirmation bias in mainstream feminism, which reinforces the gloomily gendered, is incontrovertible. He cites the findings of Prof. Eagly, who writes that "'feminists fail to recognize the positive trends' which keeps them in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction despite major advances." Positive trends being, for example:
*in academic science, women have a better chance than men of being interviewed and receiving offers;
*experimental simulations of academic hiring in STEM found a strong favoring of women over equally qualified men;
*female business management job candidates have recently begun to enjoy a wage premium over men because of their diversity value.
I would add that student majorities in medical and law schools are now composed of women. Yesterday it was men removing the wrong organ and screwing you sideways in your divorce. Tomorrow it'll be women.
One other exception (of mine) to Barry's essay is that he uses absolutes, such as "[gender] differences cannot be explained by socialisation alone." Of course they can't. Scarcely any differences in behavior, cognition etc. can be explained by only one influence. His argument would have been much stronger had he nixed its unexceptional generalizations. (My guess is that he tossed these in only for popular consumption, which prefers to avoid the weeds.)
Barry is more balanced in writing: "It strikes me as likely that a cognitive distortion called gamma bias" — simply put, the minimization of one gender difference while magnifying another — "skews the way many people see gender issues." One could replace "gender" with "political" or "religious" and arrive agreeably at the selfsame conclusion.
In the other half of his argument, Barry notes with a certain thunderstruck awe what cultural historians discovered decades ago: that it's "becoming clear to more and more people that it is disempowering to promote the idea of gender being merely a product of the environment." (My emphasis, and there he goes again with the absolutism: gender identity as merely a product of …") It appears conservative journalists have also been behind the curve: "Traditional feminism was accused last year in the Chicago Tribune of being obsessed with a 'dreadfully tired script,' and that 'constantly telling people they are victims isn’t so empowering after all.'"
Again, feminist historians had that repetitious downer in their crosshairs years ago. One day they were noting how terribly (and truthfully) oppressed women have always been, which, as the Tribune belatedly observed, was far from "empowering"; so the next day, suddenly and with a 180° thump, women historically had been triumphant in the industrial revolution; in government (where men were dupes of women's behind-the-scenes power); and more believably, in the realms of peddling morality, emphasizing the need for religion in the home, and demanding reforms in society (e.g., temperance, abolitionism). Virtually overnight, the feminist story flipped from one of oppression to one of triumphalism.
As so many historians in other fields do, feminists first decided on a liberating thesis, and then pursued the research. Shockingly, freshly discovered research just happened to fit the new thesis.
Prof. Eagly bemoans this ideological development in the social sciences, with reference to gender studies, since, as she writes (quoted by Barry), "ideology is the most difficult of biases to erase because its advocates seldom recognize or acknowledge it." Here we return once again to cemented political ideologies, most pronounced in the extremes of left and right — which make both appear profoundly foolish, render otherwise serviceable compromise impossible, and alienate the broad swath of sane voters. (See video below.)