It is generally the case that bien-pensant women (and not just the women!) in advanced Western societies are eager to crush all vestiges of “gender” differences. They imagine a world in which half of all soldiers, network admins, metallurgists, auto mechanics, and oil-rig workers are female, and half of all librarians, nurses, pre-school teachers, cosmetologists, stay-at-home parents (and, presumably, gender-studies professors) are male.
The assumption behind this is that the sifting of men and women into their “traditional” roles is due entirely to habitual, and purely cultural, patterns of oppression, and due not at all to any innate differences between the sexes. (Such differences are properly understood to be statistical, rather than absolute, a distinction which appears to escape some of the smaller minds, and shriller voices, that enter into policy debates relating to this issue.)
It will come as no surprise to any of the HBD/neoreaction community that a new study has found that affluent societies, which offer a good deal more latitude in career choices and social roles, exhibit more sex-related differences in those choices and roles, and in personality traits, than less prosperous and well-educated ones. The idea is that prosperity, cultural permissiveness, and better education leave people freer to choose what they would like to be and do, and so give natural differences a better chance to be expressed in life choices.
Christina Hoff Sommers comments on all of this in a piece at the Atlantic. Read it here.
As Philip K. Dick said: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”
