As the financial elite is discovering, you can fight reality as long as you want, but it’s always going to beat down your illusions in the end:
The Journal of Applied Psychology has just published findings from a University of Florida study based on interviews with more than 12,000 men and women. Between 1979 and 2005, they were questioned regularly about how they viewed male and female roles – whether they believed a woman’s place was in the home, whether employing women led to more juvenile delinquency(!) and whether it was the woman’s job to take care of the home and family.
Sexist men, the scientists found, made an average of $8,500 (£4,600) a year more than men who viewed women as work-place equals. Meanwhile, feminists earned more than their more traditionally minded female colleagues (but not a great deal more – £800 a year, on average). And while there was only a small difference between the pay packets of “egalitarian” men and women, sexist men’s wages outstripped everyone else’s.
Surprised? Me neither. It’s one of those stories that, even without being corroborated by the figures, has the horrible ring of truth about it: we’ve all worked in an office where the sexist monster is (a) very good at his job and (b) gruesomely and guilt-inducingly attractive despite his antediluvian attitudes.
The truth is that “sexism” is merely one of the many excuses that the incompetent use to justify their failures. Nobody gets a fair shake, even those who have massive advantages usually know what it’s like to not get a chance. Does the fact that I was given an expensive education and a nice sports car by my parents mean that I don’t know what it’s like to be excluded from both sides of the mainstream media because I’m of the incorrect ideology and ethnicity? Does this mean it’s fair that most of the leading science fiction and fantasy publishers will never even look at my manuscripts while handing out three-book deals to people whose previous novels sold one-tenth as many as mine?
If you’re a loser of either sex, you complain about how everyone else is responsible for your failures, you come up with a label to justify them, and you wallow in the unfairness of it all. If you’re not, you just shrug, assess the situation, and take your best shot where you can. Life isn’t fair. There probably isn’t a single genuinely fair individual to be found anywhere in the world. So what? That’s the situation – what are you going to do about it? Change the world by force and government fiat? Yeah, that’s worked so very well so often in the past!
Since an amount of indifference to the opinions of others is extraordinarily helpful in successfully dealing with the travails of the world, it should come as no surprise that it is usually the self-centered jerks who do the best job of gritting their teeth, doing what needs to be done, and achieving their objectives. This isn’t just social science; it also has the benefit of being entirely logical. And why, one might well add, shouldn’t women be attracted to that?
Understand two things about the world you live in: 1. There is no equality. 2. Fairness is merely proper etiquette, it is not justice.