Bite-sized Philosophy
1 HN recommender · recommended in 6 months, 2017–2022
11:38 · 1.9M views · Apr 6, 2017
A clip of psychologist Jordan Peterson discussing why few women reach high-paying, high-pressure jobs. He talks about the tension between a demanding career and having a family.
HN cites it in threads on gender gaps in tech and law, though some commenters point to a longer Peterson video for the full argument.
7 comments from Hacker News
I think Jordan Peterson had one of the best takes on why successful women struggle to make both a family and a career happen and why so many screech their careers to a halt when they hit 30: this video
I found this longer video of his on the same subject to be better at explaining the nuances of his viewpoint: this video
Certainly much better than a lot of the outrage that's been going on. A couple of nits: > I know most of Google’s work is people-centric. Hmmm...is that really so? Last I checked a lot of Google's code output and value-generation is backend-y, with very little interaction with humans. Google is also notoriously bad-mediocre at UX, though this has improved lately. > Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from > differences among demographic groups. Hmm...he didn't do this, and in fact explicitly states that doing so is not correct. > Damore naturally assumes the differences between > typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled. I also didn't see that in the memo. At all. First, what he talks about is mostly preferences , not skills . Second, there is the whole "you can't draw conclusions about individuals from slight variations in populations"-thing. So you can't turn "women have slightly stronger preferences, statistically, for these things" into "men are more skilled". Third, and maybe least intuitively, this is almost entirely about the people who don't (yet) work at Google. Finally, she brings up Northern Europe. I can relate, because I am also from Germany, and yes, the country finds, for example, having a female Chancellor simply not remarkable . So when people vote for or against her, it is largely (can't speak for everyone) because of what they think about her, her party and their policies (or in her specific case, lack thereof g ),
I was curious to see if he'd actually said that or if you were misrepresenting a more reasonable claim. I'm not familiar with Jordan Peterson but managed to find this video: this video ... in which he says that high-powered careers are very unpleasant due to hyper-competition among people who are exceptionally willing to tilt their work-life balance way toward work, and that most (but not all) of such people are men. Which doesn't sound like that unusual a claim, really: it's a fairly mainstream belief that women average more family-focused than men, and you only need a small difference in means between populations to get a big difference in representation at the far tails of a trait's probability distribution. (I would have preferred that he make the point with less bluster and more graphs, but that's just a matter of taste.) Is that what you were alluding to, or does he somewhere else contradict this to make the crazy and very different claim that "only men have high enough motivation to be successful in competitive industries"?
"...Two retired women partners at the firm have joined her lawsuit, but a larger number of current women partners have actually condemned it." So it's not "law firms vs. women", more women actually support the law firm in this case. Of course that's not proof of anything, but it does suggest it could simply be a normal case of people disagreeing about compensation. In these sorts of cases, you tend to go for any "weapon" you can, and "discrimination" is a pretty powerful one, even if there's nothing to it. Of course the stats don't look good, but we all should know that correlation ≠ causation. Jordan Peterson, who apparently works with law firms, gives a very different reason: this video TL;DW: Law firms try their darnedest to keep women, but most women just aren't as mono-maniacal as the few men who make it to the very top.