The Doing of Social Science
Or, Why Don’t More Women Care About Ant-Man’s Pym Particles?
Writing in the Washington Free Beacon, Elizabeth Harrington tells us,
The National Science Foundation is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist. The government has awarded two grants for collaborative research to professors at Yale University and New York University to study what the researchers describe as “systematic gender bias” in the online encyclopaedia. […] Noam Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times… has asserted the encyclopaedia is biased because articles about friendship bracelets are shorter than entries about baseball cards. “And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on Sex and the City includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on The Sopranos includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode,” he wrote.
Such are the ruminations of the modern intellectual.
Although not indulged with $200,000 of public money, the mighty blogger Ace does share a few unorthodox ideas. Ideas, I mean, that are unorthodox among many left-leaning academics and New York Times columnists:
The very fact that a site exists which gives an exhaustive, 4000-word-plus citations treatment of Ant-Man is going to skew male… Men (well, those of a nerdly bent) tend to be interested in trivia and obscura; women tend to not be, or at least not so much. I don’t care about Ant-Man, but for some reason I find comfort in knowing that someone out there does care about Ant-Man, and has digested Ant-Man’s fifty year history for me, should my life ever depend on knowing when Ant-Man married Janet Van Dyne… So the real [feminist] complaint boils down to this: The ten percent of a website which could reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers does in fact reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers, and yes, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine does get a more exhaustive, nerdishly-loving treatment than Sex and the City.
The federal government needs to pay people to study this and propose “solutions”? It occurs to me that we’ve spent $202,000 for a “study” which deliberately avoids a very simple explanation: Women just aren’t as interested in this type of crap as men. You don’t have to believe that to at least agree: This should have been one of the explanations scientifically studied, if we’re going to have a scientific study at all.
I’ve seen Die Hard 50 times and I would watch it right now if it were on. I will watch Die Hard only to see the Asian guy steal the candy bar. And when I click on Wikipedia, I’m expecting them to tell me if the Asian guy stealing the candy bar was in the script, or if it was improvised on the day of the shoot. And when Wikipedia doesn’t tell me this (it doesn’t, I've checked), I’m disappointed in it. Do women watch episodes of Sex and the City 50 times? No, they don’t. Maybe the “best” episodes, they’ll watch two or three times… This phenomenon is much more a male trait than a female one. So why isn’t this obvious truism even part of this “study”?
See also Heather Mac Donald on the same non-problem and the “intellectual decadence” of contemporary feminism:
The most straightforward explanation for the differing rates of participation in Wikipedia — and the one that conforms to everyday experience — is that, on average, males and females have different interests and preferred ways of spending their free time.
Heretical, I know. Unthink it immediately.
Women just aren’t as interested in this type of crap as men.
My wife and her sister would very much agree.
It’s a rare treat to find a female enthusiast with whom one can discuss, at length and in detail, the arcane trivia of Marvel’s fictional crime fighters and their fictional technology. Most of the women I know have no detectable interest in Pym Particles or the catapult Dr Pym sometimes used to propel his tiny self across town. I know, shocking. Why, it’s as if, taken statistically, women tend to have better things, or at least other things, to do with their time.
Men and women often like different things. WE MUST FIX THIS!
This may be sort-of relevant.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/30/twitter-diversity-silicon-valley-offices
Our Jess refers to ‘white brogrammers’ while complaining that Twitter isn’t diverse enough. Sample quote:
‘…white men unconsciously build products for white men – products that subtly discourage anyone else from using them.’
A strong contender for First World Problem of the day.
It’s perhaps worth noting that owners of Wisden cricketers’ almanacs, Marvel comic book collections and Star Trek technical manuals – the kinds of things that lead to vast, rather baffling pop-cultural Wikipedia entries – still tend to be male. Not always, not exclusively, but much more often than not. And the people whose livelihoods depend on selling such things to as many people as possible aren’t trying to deter female interest and female customers. Anyone with an interest is welcome, indeed encouraged, to hand over their cash.
I know of a comic book store that has a formidably knowledgeable female member of staff. She can, and will, enthuse about the absurd minutiae of obscure characters. But she’s not exactly typical, and this isn’t because women are being excluded from working in (or shopping in) comic book stores. I suspect many comic stores, if not most of them, would regard a female staff member (or another one) as an asset, partly because of their still largely male customer base.
It’s like the scene from the first Transformers film, in which the nerdish hero encounters an attractive woman who also can rebuild car engines. Boi-oing.
The entry on Sex and the City includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on The Sopranos includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode,” he wrote.
Maybe Sex and the City just isn’t very interesting compared to The Sopranos? Maybe there’s less to say about it. Just a thought.
*reports to correction booth.*
Tom Foster – They’re a problem because white men unconsciously build products for white men – products that subtly discourage anyone else from using them.
The bastards! Damn you white men and the oppressive products you invented, such as computers, phones, cars, bicycles, power stations, indoor plumbing, and pencils!
Of course, Ms Zimmerman could always not use them, but she seems not to have considered this option.
The problem is, when so many of the people who build my tech are members of the dominant culture, I don’t trust them to have my best interests at heart.
Without the technology created by white men, this woman would likely be dead in a ditch by the age of 30.
In what I’m assuming is not a stunning coincidence given her unpleasant views, the she-beast who wrote this article looks like an extra from Mad Max:
http://i.guim.co.uk/w-140/h-140/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/7/1/1404239004275/Jess-Zimmerman.jpg
INVENT SOME EYE BLEACH FOR ME, WHITE MEN!
Steve2. – that picture explains a lot.
Only the left would assume that Wikipedia is controlled by some sort of “ruler” who has some sort of “agenda” to push – presumably because they assume that’s how the whole world works.
Is it beyond them to conceive of a web site where anyone at all can write as much as they like about anything they want?
One on which, if their pet topics don’t appear, it’s just because nobody – of any gender or none – wants to write about them?
I guess it is beyond them.
Also, excellent use of boi-oing.
I see Ms Zimmerman refers to herself as a “misandrist of note,” one whose interests include “metaphors, misandry and cogent cultural analysis.”
I see Ms Zimmerman refers to herself as a “misandrist of note,”…
She seems to combine being rather dim – she gets a few basic numbers wrong in the article, surprise surprise – with unshakeable arrogance. Not a good combination.
Not a good combination.
But perfectly at home in the pages of the Guardian.
So what is the solution to this-ahem-problem? Conscript females to write for free during their own leisure time? Refuse to allow anymore “male-centric” articles until some sort of cosmic gender balance is reached?
One of the things I like to do in my spare time is sing. I’m even quite good at it, even if I say so myself. And every time I run into someone who’s involved in a choir, they beg me to join, because while recruiting altos and sopranos is easy, they just can’t find enough basses and tenors.
Choirs, which are generally voluntary organisations, are unquestionably female dominated. If we were to follow feminism’s lead, we’d have to conclude that choirs have a hostile misandrist culture that drives men away, that female singers hate and harass male singers constantly. Which is clearly not true. But feminism has an obvious bias. When considering any question, it will only accept answers that are consistent with all men being bastards.
Another of my spare-time activities, I must confess, is editing Wikipedia. Not as much as I used to, because it’s aggravatingly full of cranks and pedants. But when I discovered recently that illustrator Margery Gill didn’t have an article, I wrote one. That’s nice to be able to do. It’s also dead easy. If you’re genuinely upset that Sex and the City doesn’t have the same coverage as The Sopranos or friendship bracelets don’t have the same coverage as baseball cards, you can fix it. By design.
Unless your only interest in Wikipedia is confirmation of your prejudice that all men are bastards, of course.
Steve2, thanks for the trigger warning.
Not.
So if there isn’t enough information about the kind of things women are interested in on Wikipedia, why the f#€k don’t women write some up? Why must they sit around whining about how men aren’t doing things for them? What happened to “sistas doing things for themselves”? There’s no chromosome check on the edit button. STFU already.
*Googles ‘Pym Particles’*
Sigh. That’s boys for you. 😉
‘The entry on ‘Sex and the City’ includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on ‘The Sopranos’ includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode,” he wrote’.
I’ve noticed the following here. Noam Cohen is firstly assuming that to be interested in a show like ‘The Sopranos’ you have to be male – I wonder why he presumes that if you’re a woman you’re not going to be interested in a convoluted psychodrama involving the train-wreck that occurs when a gangster’s ‘professional’, family and personal lives collide. The assumption seems to be that women are such sensitive little flowers that violence and criminality are an automatic turn-off, as are black humour and bleak story lines.
I’m pretty sure that there was a similar theme in the Cholmondley-Warner skit ‘Women, Know Your Limits!’, except that was supposed to be a piss-take.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w
Secondly, I’m struck by the assertion that ‘SATC’ is somehow a TV show that is somehow the genre that women automatically like. Now judging by the ratings clearly there was a demographic for watching a show about four shallow Manhattanites who lives revolved around (a) buying designer clothes, shoes and accessories and (b) being rodded by as many men as possible, but again I’d ask myself if it was – erm – perhaps somewhat sexist to suggest that women wanted to watch frothy comedies about well-paid tarts rather than challenging and at times harrowing dramas.
Thirdly, that Zimmerman is utterly howling.
So if there isn’t enough information about the kind of things women are interested in on Wikipedia, why the f#€k don’t women write some up? Why must they sit around whining about how men aren’t doing things for them? What happened to “sistas doing things for themselves”?
It’s not just Wikipedia where this applies. The answer to ‘…white men unconsciously build products for white men – products that subtly discourage anyone else from using them.’ is that there’s nothing stopping women of color from going out and filling in the gaps. Capitalist economics works to encourage people to fill unfilled niches, like products for non-white non-men, by rewarding those that fill those niches.
The reverse of this often applies. (Caution: Minnow bait) There’s nothing that says that men can’t like “Sex in the City” and women can’t like “The Sopranos”. Looking at photos from ComicCon, the fanbase, while skewing towards white men demographically, has a fair number of women and people of color. I wonder how much bias the researchers assumed when assigning TV shows to genders.
The questions that would need to be asked here:
How much does the demographic for the studied show skew one way or the other? I’d wager more women like “The Sopranos” then men like “Sex and the City”.
How much does the demographic for Wikipedia article authors skew for gender neutral articles? Perhaps more men write wiki articles in general.
Dr Cromarty – C’mon. I bet you were as stunned as I was to find out that Little Miss Radical looks like one of the witches from The Witches, just after she put on her human mask but before she could adjust the wig.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BOk1FQpC6No/UnKn3i5rQhI/AAAAAAAAD_A/vJZ_vPh3fvE/s1600/Witches.gif
Course, cynical old me wonders exactly what’s radical about believing that technology can be somehow tainted by the white maleness of the people who invented it.
Does that mean Arabic numerals are oppressey and smell of camels?
It all sounds a bit like 1930’s German National Socialist demanding everything be Judenrein.
Jeff Guinn – I’m sorry. Here’s Jess looking all sexy. Watch out, Benedict Cumberbatch!
http://m.xojane.com/author/jess
sackcloth and ashes yes, but her coming off the gold standard line was highly unconvincing. She should stick to fluffy things.
Sigh. That’s boys for you.
Pah. Here’s a lovingly detailed cutaway of Ant-Man’s helmet. Because you girls need to know these things.
I’m a chap and I had never heard of Ant-Man til today. Now I have heard of him I still don’t care two hoots. (Sorry David).
I dunno. It’s almost as if identity politics is BS, or something.
Re identity politics and inventions, the dishwasher was invented by Josephine Cochrane, a female woman. The microwave oven was invented by Percy Spencer, a male man. So is one labour-saving kitchen appliance okay and one not? Or is one just less bad than the other? Both inventors were white, after all.
‘White goods’. The horror.
So I hear Ant-Man is getting his own film.
I think that’s a sign that comic book films have jumped the shark.
This is scraping the radioactive ooze off the bottom of the barrel. Superman, Batman, the Hulk and Spiderman are global cultural icons. The Flash, Thor, Captain America, the X-Men and Iron Man are solid B-list characters.
Ant-Man has the cultural cachet of Sixpence None The Richer, powers based on Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, and the easygoing charisma of Mel Gibson after a bottle of Bushmills.
If we’re giving crap superheroes their own films now, why not Bananaman?
They spent $200k on this?
In unrelated news, the Federal Government runs a colossal budget deficit.
‘White goods’. The horror.
Snork.
I think that’s a sign that comic book films have jumped the shark.
I don’t think you appreciate the high drama of a hero who can be menaced by a hungry anteater.
What?
If we’re giving crap superheroes their own films now, why not Bananaman?
OTOH, Space Ghost once had is own talk show back in the 90’s. Shazam and Isis shared an hour on Saturday morning TV in the US in the 70’s. Don’t be so 21st Century-centric. You know we really need an ism for such.
In unrelated news, the Federal Government runs a colossal budget deficit.
You know, they’ve done numerous studies on why this is. Perhaps more need to be done.
Ms. Zimmerman’s article is interesting in that it shows she does not understand her own data. For example, here is her claim:
“Twitter is even whiter and maler than you imagined”
The link is to http://www.dailydot.com/business/twitter-diversity-numbers-low/
Read the link first. 70% of twitter programmers are white, vs 72% of the population. 25% of twitter programmers are Asian American, vs 5% of the population. This is what she calls “too white.”
So maybe the real problem is that there are not enough women majoring in mathematics.
‘If we’re giving crap superheroes their own films now, why not Bananaman?’
Or indeed Madame Fatal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Fatal
Madame Fatal is notable for being a male superhero who dressed up as an elderly woman and as such is the first cross-dressing hero.
See, it’s vital to know these things.
I am a woman. When I heard that Sex and the City was really about gay men, it suddenly made sense.
So I hear Ant-Man is getting his own film.
I think that’s a sign that comic book films have jumped the shark.
This is scraping the radioactive ooze off the bottom of the barrel. Superman, Batman, the Hulk and Spiderman are global cultural icons. The Flash, Thor, Captain America, the X-Men and Iron Man are solid B-list characters.
The reason here is that generally, Marvel knows how to write characters and tell stories, and their original favored medium (comics) is quickly dying. Coupled with people that have experience turning characters and stories into good movies, and you have something that actually turns a profit, such that someone is willing to put money into it, even for a C-List hero. DC has had issues turning even A-list heroes into good movies (Superman). Other studios working with Marvel properties have had issues (X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spiderman).
Make a good movie, and it sells. You can even throw in a little Political Correctness as long as it doesn’t take precedence over making a good movie; Samuel L. Jackson is an awesome Nick Fury. There’s enough money associated with a superhero blockbuster movie that the producers are going to stick to a proven formula, with all the upsides and downsides that entails. Meanwhile, Marvel’s comics division is getting laughed at for making Thor a woman, which may get platitudes from the usual suspects on the left (hey! A female character heading up an A-List comic!) but is likely to lose current fans and not attract new ones to replace it, as the people that care about the number of female main characters in comics are not likely to ever actually buy a comic.
Sorry, rant mode off. (And I’m a geek that’s never bought a DC or Marvel comic book.)
I’m finding it hard to think of an online organisation more in thrall to the “politically correct” orthodoxy than the Wikimedia Foundation. It bends over backwards to accommodate every passing political fad. If there’s a better recent illustration of the futility of appeasement, I’d like to see it.
Patrick: Excellent comment. Funny how we never see angst-ridden Guardian articles about the overwhelming female bias in choirs (and you’re absolutely right: it is). Maybe Guardianistas don’t sing.
Patrick: “If we were to follow feminism’s lead, we’d have to conclude that choirs have a hostile misandrist culture that drives men away”
Actually, if we were to follow the feminist lead, we’d have to wonder about the misandry behind the low number of male sopranos, the world’s smallest vocal category. Why so small? Shouldn’t it be 50%? After all, listen to Robert Crowe:
http://artery.wbur.org/2014/05/14/male-soprano-robert-crowe-boston
There are subtle signals and micro-aggressions that prevent men from entering this field.
Why, it’s as if, taken statistically, women tend to have better things, or at least other things, to do with their time
Feminists will switch between saying:
a) you pig, how dare you suggest that men and women have natural psychological differences. That shows your latent sexist prejudice
and
b) ooh yes women are more interested in the important, mature stuff like relationships. Girls are better than boys and their toys
…at the drop of a hat. And then back again, apparently unaware of any contradiction.
Men (well, those of a nerdly bent) tend to be interested in trivia and obscura; women tend to not be, or at least not so much.
Again the Aspie continuum raises its sexist head: males are more likely to obsess about the technical details of their favorite fictional pursuits than women — hence the tendency to pick apart Star Trek minutiae and insist on internal consistency — such as we see in the classic SNL bit wherein Shatner is asked the combination to a safe.
Female-driven fandoms are not interested in technical detail because they’re most all of them shippers — a scourge and an abomination, IMAO — who fantasize about various pairings and write slashfic to that effect.
I was in the thick of the shipper vs. theorist battles on Harry Potter for Grown Ups (HPfGU): we required that shipping posts be marked with SHIP in the header so that the rest of us could skip the horrid things, and as with the rest of the board, we required that it be canon-based: fanfic and fever dreams were not valid bases for your arguments.
Because nothing ruins a perfectly good discussion on the implications of the animagus spell than 13-yr-old girls going SQUEE! about that thing Ron said to Hermione.
::spit::
A pox upon shippers, to whose clamoring The X-Files writers acceded, thereby ruining the series in the worst way.
Caution: Minnow bait,
In the real world, minnows are bait.
So when a writer describes herself as a misandrist, are we supposed to automatically assume that her identifying herself as a person who hates men is ironic? Are we to take hatred of people due to their sex as a good thing as long as the hatred is directed at the proper, hate-worthy sex, or is this a “joke” because “misandry” is a thing that cannot exist, either because one cannot hate men enough for it to be excessive or because misandry happens so infrequently or to such a small extent as to not count?
I genuinely don’t know if she means to say that she hates men and feels justified in doing so, or if she’s “joking” because while misogyny is apparently rampant misandry does not or cannot exist.
I don’t think you appreciate the high drama of a hero who can be menaced by a hungry anteater.
Anteaters are tired of being thought benign and have begun to take over the world, one disembowelment at a time.
So when a writer describes herself as a misandrist, are we supposed to automatically assume that her identifying herself as a person who hates men is ironic?
I’m guessing that in her circles, “misandry” is not ironic at all but rather a sign of the utmost piety: men being the worst oppressors imaginable and so being against the whole lot of them shows your solidarity for the largest possible group of victims: women.
It’s also highly edgy and transgressive to come right out and identify as a “misandrist” instead of the blander “feminist”; edginess and transgressiveness also being sure signs of True Piety.
edginess and transgressiveness also being sure signs of True Piety.
And what could be edgier than feeling a need to continually announce just how edgy you are?
And then back again, apparently unaware of any contradiction.
There are no female video game protagonists, and they’re all too objectified and *gasp* attractive!
Again the Aspie continuum raises its sexist head: males are more likely to obsess about the technical details of their favorite fictional pursuits than women — hence the tendency to pick apart Star Trek minutiae and insist on internal consistency — such as we see in the classic SNL bit wherein Shatner is asked the combination to a safe.
Female-driven fandoms are not interested in technical detail because they’re most all of them shippers — a scourge and an abomination, IMAO — who fantasize about various pairings and write slashfic to that effect.
That’s one of the reasons I like anime; Japanese producers are unafraid of making a series that appeals to two completely different demographics, and the overall creativity and originality tends to be much greater than a single-market focus group tested American product.
I’m a chap and I had never heard of Ant-Man til today.
and
So I hear Ant-Man is getting his own film.
I think that’s a sign that comic book films have jumped the shark.
Oh, the first time I learned of an attempt to make an Ant-Man film was upon getting a reminder email from the Nikki Finke website and then running across a movie news update
Anteaters are tired of being thought benign and have begun to take over the world, one disembowelment at a time.
And then of course there was flypaper. That was another deadly peril.
The National Science Foundation is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist.
Words fail me.
Luckily, they came easier to this guy
It occurs to me that we’ve spent $202,000 for a “study” which deliberately avoids a very simple explanation: Women just aren’t as interested in this type of crap as men.
… and to MacDonald
The most straightforward explanation … is that, on average, males and females have different interests and preferred ways of spending their free time.
Is this all some justification for the God-awful idiocy that is the Feminist run ‘Edit-a-thons’ of Wikipedia?
As a wise man once observed, “Skirts is weird”.
I would wager that the Wikipedia articles on Stengle’s Postivstellensatz or the pinacol rearrangement were written and edited by men, too. That goes for the articles on King Valdemaar IV of Denmark and ratio decidendi as well. So what?