skepticlawyer

A friend of mine over here reckons that Oxford is the place where nerds go when they die. All the glorious eccentricities, social tomfoolery and obscurantist interests once repressed (or hidden) come to the fore. This is when we’re not being political junkies, finding cures for cancer or engaging in ‘other academic interests’. His comment forced me to confront something about myself that - being Australian - I’d probably be more comfortable denying. Maybe I’m a nerd, too.

Sure, I’m a reasonably sporty nerd, and that’s not traditionally part of the mix, but there’s no doubt I’m a serious jurisprudential and philosophy wonk. I get a huge kick out of ideas. I really enjoy discussing those ideas here on the Cat, too - so Dover Beach, Jason, Pommy, RL, Adrien etc - take a bow.

Publicly owning my nerdery was partly prompted through this post by Pommygranate over at the ALS. Pommy asked - pretty reasonably, I thought - why there aren’t more female libertarians, at least as regards the ALS’ and Catallaxy’s readership. This inspired some memorable snark from Ken Parish over at Club Troppo, where (among other things), he commented that:

Jason Soon suggested I was being sexist, but strangely completely omitted any reference to the gross sexism of Pommygranate’s own post that provoked my comment in the first place. In fact I simply made the perfectly reasonable assumption (in light of Pommygranate’s concession) that the intellectual attraction of libertarianism seems to be largely confined to a particular type of nerdy bloke, and that therefore women would probably only be induced to join for reasons of romance.

News for you, Ken. I’m a nerdy woman, and I didn’t join the LDP (or start engaging with libertarians) for reasons of romance (being already spoken for in that department). I joined because I agree with the ideas. Since everyone else has been engaging in anecdote and funny stories (not to mention exercises in SQL and predicate logic), I thought I’d add a few of my own. It’ll be interesting to see who listens in, too - the ‘nerdy’ libertarian blokes, or the centrists and lefties who seem far more interested in having a conversation among themselves.

First up, Pommy wasn’t being sexist when he quoted various authors who suggested that women may not be as into libertarian ideas as men for biological reasons. These authors may be wrong, but that doesn’t make the issue irrelevant. Humans tend to default to the ‘average’, and there’s no doubt that - on average - men and women tend to do things differently. Politics may well be part of the mix, and so may other things. During my involvement with Australian Skeptics, it’s been a source of persistent annoyance (and the subject of considerable debate) among members of both genders that women seem to get suckered by woo-woo more readily than men. Are women socialised to be more amenable to woo-woo? Is it biological? Or (more likely) some combination of the two? I don’t know the answer, and answering Pommy’s or the Skeptics’ question with the bog-standard ‘but you’re just sexist’ is ultimately meaningless.

While I was wandering around the interwebs thinking about this issue, two posts (from very different sides of politics) came to my attention. The first was at David Thompson’s Culture, Ideas and Comic Books, where David makes some salient points. First, he cites Christina Hoff Sommers:

Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT. ‘It is a system,’ Hopkins says, ‘where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.’ This viewpoint explains the constant emphasis, by equity activists such as [Donna] Shalala, [Debra] Rolison, and [Kathie] Olsen, on the need to transform the ‘entire culture’ of academic science and engineering…

When the women-in-sports movement was getting underway in the early 1990s, no one suggested that its success would require transforming the ‘culture of soccer’ or putting an end to the obsession with competing and winning. The notion that women’s success in science depends on changing the rules of the game seems demeaning to women - but it gives the equity movement extraordinary scope, commensurate with the extraordinary power that federal science funding would put at its disposal…

He then makes the (to me, blindingly obvious) point that:

[W]hat matters is that men and women of comparable skill and motivation compete fairly for employment. Whether or not meritocratic selection has been achieved cannot be determined by whether or not gender parity results, since we have no solid basis on which to say that gender parity should be the meritocratic outcome. On what basis could one determine that there “ought” to be a particular ratio of male and female mathematicians, engineers or oil workers? At what point and on what basis – besides political dogma - could one determine that a particular gender is sufficiently “represented” in any given vocation? Yet these are the assumptions of much of the research mentioned above, and of those who wish to “correct” who is interested in what. The belief that, magically stripped of all external influences, the male and female population should be roughly symmetrical in interests, skills and dispositions is just that – a belief; a prejudice, if you will. And not, it seems, terribly scientific.

Good scholars in hard disciplines - of either gender - tend to be nerdy, focussed and not terribly social. Good friends of mine at the Bar often make the point that barristers are often barristers because ‘they don’t play well with others’. The hivemind necessary for success at a top tier law firm isn’t for them. They’re lone wolves. I know when I chucked my job at a law firm and took off for the bar, one senior partner remarked that I may as well walk around the office with ‘future barrister’ tattooed to my forehead.

I find the link between ‘caring and sharing’ and ‘feminism’ that’s almost de rigueur around the traps to be an utter furphy. What if you’re a woman and you’re not caring and sharing? What if you don’t like kids? What if you’re a bit of a nerd? (Okay, a lot of a nerd…). It seems this kind of feminism - which I’ll call, for want of a better label, ‘victim feminism’ - isn’t about bolstering women’s rights at all, but about defining how women should behave. That’s what used to happen in the bad old days of the patriarchy, and I don’t like it one bit. Tigtog at Hoyden about Town cites this pertinent comment from a female scientist:

An individual woman ought be able to be ambitious, pushy, vain, and focused and succeed in science without her approach being considered in conflict with her gender. It isn’t. Similarly, an individual male researcher can be considerate and giving and helpful without betraying his sex. I want women to succeed in science because I don’t want anyone to be hindered in their careers by the imposition of stereotypes, and let’s not have women graduate students walk into a lab under the shadow of an expectation that they have to be the liberal nurturers of the research group, the ones who’ll be interested in art and music more than the nerdy males.

Thing is, the only politically-minded men I’ve ever met (as a group - ie, I’ve never encountered an exception to this) who don’t try to stick me into any sort of gender-based straightjacket are those nerdy libertarian fellahs. This isn’t because they’re gay, or not interested in women, or politically correct, or whatever, but because they don’t care. They’ve grasped one of libertarianism’s central tenets: individuals matter, not collectivities. Some individuals are nerdy. At the moment, more men are on average nerdy than women, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is the individual.