That Glass Ceiling

Camilla Cavendish has a great piece today about the glass ceiling in the jobs market.

In my dwindling band of friends who are still combining work and motherhood, there is a common fear. It is fear of promotion. Few say it, few even acknowledge it to themselves. These women are in their thirties, educated, in good jobs. But the next move up the career ladder - or at least the conventional career ladder - seems to produce in them a secret dread.
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Why? Pinker believes that the answers are mainly biological. It is not lack of ability or opportunity that prevents so many women from reaching boardrooms and the upper echelons of science, she says, (although she does not claim that discrimination has been abolished). It is because women are wired in the womb to want different things. Baby boys are more exposed to testosterone, which drives them to be daring and aggressive. Baby girls are doused in oestrogen, which helps them to empathise. This makes women by nature resistant to investing all their energies, single-mindedly, in one thing. It makes them less extreme. Women tend to seek “inherent meaning” in their jobs, whereas men tend to seek domination.

In short, the absence of women from the top of the greasy pole is that they find better things to do with their lives. However, we need to go a little further. Pinker's book uses as a part of the argument the work of Simon Baron Cohen. Yes, he does use phrases like "female Brain" and it is to do with testosterone, but it's more subtle than men and women are different.

What he actually argues is that individuals have brain types that lie upon a spectrum, from highly systemising to more empathic. And that, as a result of the influence of fetal testosterone in the womb, men tend to be at the systemising end of the spectrum, women at the empathising. But do note the "tend", this is a matter of probabilities, not something deterministic.

So, imagine that, say, being an engineer was something that relied upon that systemising brain type, a type that men are more likely to have than women: we would expect to see more male than female engineers. This has nothing to do with any inequality, or societal factors (although it may of course, but the simple existence of a gender imbalance does not), it's simply a matter of the way that skills are handed out in the womb.

To tie that in with there being fewer women actually running things means developing the idea in one of two further ways. Firstly, that the skills required to get to the top are those of the more systemising mind, which I'm not sure is all that supportable. Or second, that the likely greater empathic mindset of women means that more of them think there is more to life than that work related struggle.

I certainly couldn't blame them for that second argument, having made the same decision myself.