{"id":29,"date":"2007-08-21T07:23:25","date_gmt":"2007-08-21T12:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/2007\/08\/21\/culture-selection-and-gender-differences"},"modified":"2007-08-23T08:02:29","modified_gmt":"2007-08-23T13:02:29","slug":"culture-selection-and-gender-differences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/2007\/08\/21\/culture-selection-and-gender-differences\/","title":{"rendered":"Culture, Selection, and Gender Differences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Roy Baumeister&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.psy.fsu.edu\/~baumeistertice\/goodaboutmen.htm\" title=\"Is there anything good about men?\">talk<\/a> at the American Psychological Association&#8217;s annual meeting provocatively argues the following.  Historically, cultures that have matched men&#8217;s higher variance in reproductive outcomes with higher-variance occupations for men have been more likely to succeed.<\/p>\n<p>The article is loosely argued, poorly referenced,&#8230; and probably, in its central claims, with more than a grain of truth.    It certainly has no shortage of interesting fact and anecdote.  Three observations:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Heterogeneity among men and among women may be at least as large as the differences between the genders.  To the extent that&#8217;s true, it remains a puzzle why cultures would have so sharply delineated gender roles.<\/li>\n<li>One clear implication of Baumeister&#8217;s theory is that strong cultural advocacy of lifelong monogamy&#8211; which promotes gender equality in reproductive outcomes&#8211; ought to be paired with cultural advocacy of occupational equality.<\/li>\n<li>Things have changed.   In the last century or so, particularly in the West, women have had historic achievements in every sphere.   Baumeister doesn&#8217;t attempt to explain why.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Roy Baumeister&#8217;s talk at the American Psychological Association&#8217;s annual meeting provocatively argues the following. Historically, cultures that have matched men&#8217;s higher variance in reproductive outcomes with higher-variance occupations for men have been more likely to succeed. The article is loosely argued, poorly referenced,&#8230; and probably, in its central claims, with more than a grain of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":283,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[415,291],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}