Women's Problems

Pandora and her box.

A piece I came across recently on the Web is titled “The 150 things the world's smartest people are afraid of.” For it, they asked 151 people--not the world's smartest, so far as we can tell, but mostly prominent scientists, with an odd mix of others--what they were most afraid of.

Very early in reading the list, I notice what seems to be a fairly consistent difference in the answers between men and women. See if you feel the same. Men usually, although not always, point to some problem that sounds as though it threatens us all. The women tend to cite something that seems objectively less threatening, or less cosmic.

“That pseudoscience will gain ground.”
“The decline in science coverage in newspapers.”
“That funding for big experiments will dry up, and they won’t happen.”

Okay, these are problems for scientists and perhaps also for science. But is it a problem for all of us, or mostly for scientists?

Which makes me wonder, are women's concerns more tribal? Or more personal?

Another woman scientist, after all, simply answers “men.” Tribal and personal at once; presumably not a problem at all for half of the human race.

But it is not that women's focus is necessarly too small, at only what effects them personally. It seems just as likely to be, to my mind at least, too large. Other women scientists don't stop at worrying about problrms even for humanity as a whole, but see humanity itself as the problem. One sort seems unable to see the forest for the trees; the other cannot see the trees for the forest.

“We should be worried about the new era of Anthropocene—not only as a geological phenomenon, but also as a cultural frame.” The “anthropocene” is the period of human existence in the world. Hard to imagine what we worried about before we existed.

Another most about “Humanity’s unmitigated arrogance.”

At least two women respondents cite “stress.” In other words they are worried about worry itself, which does not seem like a way to get perspective on the issue. It is either too personal, or too cosmic.

Another's chief worry is that “we have yet to have a conversation about what seems to be a developing 'new normal' about the presence of screens in the playroom and kindergarten.” It almost sounds chosen at random.

A female political science laments “The fact that so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a very limited set of others and to define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values is deeply worrying because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enable them to deny complex and more crosscutting mutual interdependencies—local, national, and international—and to elude their own role in creating long-term threats to their own wellbeing and that of others.”

This is reasonable enough, indeed poingant, once one isolates her essential point that she is worried about tribalism. But, firstly, once you peel through the ostentatiously “scientific” jargon, one wonders: is tribalism really a growing problem in a globallizing world? And second, is sounding scientific more important to her than being scientific?

To be very clear, not all the women responding seemed to me to be out of kilter in their answers; nor do all the men seem to be more sensible. But there is a general tendency here. It seems to me to correspond to the often-observed differenve between how men and women think of spatial directions when trying to navigate. Women go by familiar landmarks; men go by absolute directions and distances. And men are able to navigate, on average, far better than women can. They have a much better sense of direction.

I suspect, in fact, that men tend to have a much better sense of direction in all ways, not just geographically. If true, this makes the traditional division of roles between men and women perfectly sensible, and our departure from it vitally dangerous.

In fac,t it might be the one thing we most need to worry about.