Regarding which gender gets the better end of the deal, yes, that is indeed what I think about the question. I might add that even if someone took the trouble to accurately chart every harm each suffers (provided people could agree as to what counts here, which they clearly cannot) in every situations and averaged it out, you wouldn’t end up with a very useful number. What policy implications, for instance, could people draw from a hypothetical series of results where men, on the whole, tended to be less well-off than women? As far as I can see, there aren’t many, as it would again venture us into the land of oughts, which, as many people go to great lengths to point out, you can’t derive from the land of is. I would especially find it pointless because it’s not as if the genders are on separate teams, each trying to win against the other; that distinction would imply my welfare is more closely tied to strange men than it is to my mother or girlfriend, which it clearly isn’t. There are simply too many competing interests among individuals for such a gross distinction to be useful.

I’m not sure what to make of your fighting comment. I read it, but I don’t understand what point you’re trying to get across, so I’ll leave it for now.

The point of the slutwalk piece is, again, that we should not expect consistency from people about issues like whether or not it’s morally acceptable to judge someone for the way they’re dressed or whether they’re more or less promiscuous. Sure, one could posit that almost none of the women in the study were sympathetic to Slutwalk’s cause, but my intuition, for whatever it’s worth, is that women involved in the slutwalk aren’t substantially different from women not involved in it on a cognitive level. The same systems are still there, and they’re just as inconsistent as ever. Many people who seem to have stated problems with slut shaming, for instance, seem to also have no problem commenting negatively on the appearance or sexual behavior of others at other times, be those others men or women. Which arguments they tend to deploy (one should/shouldn’t be judged for the way they dress) are context specific, as we ought to expect to them to be. With regard to the professional context argument, for instance, it’s entirely unclear to me how using sex appeal to get ahead is unfair, exactly. Surely other women aren’t barred from attempting it themselves, though whether they might want to is a different story.

“The question about whether women, as a gender, are systematically disadvantaged relative to men, as a gender, is, I think, a massively underspecified one, the answer to which is unlikely to be informative or useful for any party involved.”
That is really what you think, having thought long and hard about it? To me that’s like saying that it’s impossible to say if poor people as a class are, on the balance, all things being equal, disadvantaged as compared to the middle class, who defines what an “advantage” is anyway… It literally is saying that, considering allocation of wealth and property between the sexes. Of course that can be said, people from most major religions assert it all the time, but we don’t hear anyone using that seriously as a consideration when debating economic policy; “why this lopsided focus on the disadvantages of NOT having much money?”

(And why on earth would women not be disadvantaged? The absolute most characteristic difference between men and women is that one will nine times out of ten win over the other in a fist fight. You can argue that women own less shit and decide less shit because we’re inferior to men in other ways than physical strength – though I would disagree – but if there was any way in which we were advantaged, what would the evo basis for THAT possibly be?
This isn’t about guarding entry to the vagina again is it?
Aside from men equally guarding access to the penis, we know that many – most – human societies have simply not ever acknowledged women’s right to do that, and it’s really not very hard for men anywhere to ignore.)

Your article about the SlutWalk confuses me, because the way you introduced it I thought the study would include women who either participated in or expressed that they sympathised with Slutwalks. But it’s just on young Canadian women. Is it possible that you are not aware that most young women neither participate in or particularly sympathise with Slutwalks? For roughly the reasons the study explores? That fighting “slut shaming” – primarily women slut shaming other women – is one of the most uphill battles for feminists? If so I will tell you now: most feminists are aware of intrasexual competition, aware that girls are mean, and consider it a big problem. (Tina Fey is a feminist!) SlutWalks are extremely controversial. I find their purpose both worthy and important and I could not ever bring myself to participate in one.
So I really don’t think this is a question of different contexts – AKA a double standard – it is a question of different people with consistently different priorities.

But say it is pretty much the same people. I can see a fairly morally coherent argument (even if I disagree with it) that women should be shamed for dressing slutty in professional settings (for whatever justification – they are trying to gain professional advantages through sex appeal, it’s unfair use of competition, it encourages people to focus on women’s looks at work, whatever), but that they are definitely not asking to get raped or causing someone to rape them.

“This suggest that women, regardless of whether they’re sexually promiscuous themselves, would tend to be at least somewhat put-off by other women’s sexual availability and actively work to restrict it through aggression.”
My objection to this is a typical one against much evo psych – sure, that could be, but it could just as well just be the way we are socialized for rather different reasons, and the latter rings more true to my personal experience. When I was 12-13 purported sluts pissed me off as much as the next bitch, and I chimed in with the name-calling. Then I had long discussions with friends, read some fabulously enlightening literature, and today many of my best friends are sluts.
I know that isn’t proving anything, I assume you’re not a determinist anyway, but I felt the need to put that out there.

The question about whether women, as a gender, are systematically disadvantaged relative to men, as a gender, is, I think, a massively underspecified one, the answer to which is unlikely to be informative or useful for any party involved. There are simply too many moving parts and too many subjective judgments in the equation to make it anything other than a mess. Pointing to this or that disparity only goes so far, especially when the reasons for those disparities are often poorly, if at all, understood. Accordingly, I find the conclusions that people draw from this mess – conclusions which can’t possibly be based on a full examination of the relevant issues – to be a fascinating source of data.

When it comes to the abortion debate, for instance, many people are under the impression that the abortion issue doesn’t affect men because men don’t get pregnant, overlooking the fact that men can be legally forced into paying roughly 20 years of support for a child they did not consent to have, which, when one does the math, I’m told, can work out to about a solid year of wages (i.e. if one was working 24/7 without sleeping). Or, to flip the issue, if the woman decides she does not want the child but the father does, the father has no say in the decision either, legally, anyway. Now neither of those is an argument that men ought to have one choice or another, but they rather just point out that there are often-unappreciated facets to abortion issues. A woman being forced to carry a man’s baby is generally viewed as morally abhorrent by many, but those same people often see little problem with a man having no say in the matter when it comes to supporting the child. My body, my choice; your wallet and time, also my choice. My intuition is that, keeping the size of those relative harms constant, if the genders were flipped we would end up with a debate that looks much different than it currently does. I think the sentencing data backs me up on that.

Now, as for the above comment, no; I’m not saying that an intuition needs to be logically coherent for it to be considered not post-hoc. What I’m saying is more along the following lines: pretty much all the reasons behind arguments or intuitions that people – you or I – express are post-hoc. The part of the brain doing the talking doesn’t necessarily know why the part of the brain that reached some inference did so, and the extent to which the talking part gets things right is more a function of chance (i.e. the extent to which the plausible or given explanations match reality). This is because the part of the brain that is talking does not have the function of being accurate; it (likely) has the function of persuasion, and accuracy is only useful insomuch as it aids the persuasion.

The interesting part to me, then, is what that talking part tries to persuade other people about. Precisely what the talking part tries to persuade others of ought to vary by context, as you pointed out. When there’s a context like this one, where it seems that women might be disadvantaged relative to men, the persuasion goal will be far different than a context where that’s intrasexual competition. My post about the slutwalk talked about as much.

We should, of course, not expect these judgments to be consistent, as consistency isn’t always useful across situations. For instance, if I was outraged about my partner having sex with another person, I could conversely be not at all bothered by other people showing a sexual interest in me. Depending on which situation I found myself in, the talking part of my brain might find arguments for justifying or opposing infidelity, as the relative costs and benefits shift dramatically. In a similar vein, I don’t think many people consistently find sexism to be a bad thing, or even consistently recognize sexism as sexism (just as they don’t consistently recognize harm as harm). Why would they? If one can benefit sexism by fighting it vocally at some times and also benefit by not fighting it vocally at others, well, that’s what we ought to expect people to do. The research question then becomes who might benefit in what contexts and for what reasons.

About point 2, I think the fact that you are doing that research tells me I’m right But to not be too flippant – it may well be an understudied area. In this instance, my thinking is that the less impressed you are by someone who seems to be trying hard and who wants your esteem, the more likely you are to say they seem like a great person and all. So it’s hard for me to take the professors’ appreciation of Jennifer’s personality seriously enough to consider if it’s a problem. But sure, it could possibly reflect something more genuine and then, in a very different context, it could be what I would consider “a problem” – true.

As for the second point, you might feel confident about the notion that research will be dedicated towards alleviating people’s problems equally, irrespective of gender, but I have my reservations. My reservations are largely based on the idea that things like “problems” and “harm” are abstract concepts, and what counts as one of these things will hardly be consistent between the genders (or across actor position, as some recent data I collected is showing nicely). As I said previously, this already seems to be reflected in the sentencing data from the courts. I’m going to begin data collection on precisely this issue in the coming month, once I make it through the tedium of designing the physical version of my experiment, so stay tuned for the results.

That said, I was in no way suggesting that the trade off here between competence and likability was a consolation, but rather that there’s more to the story than “people view women a certain, negative way because of their gender”. As some of my more recent posts have dealt with, were I ever sentenced to do jail time, I’m likely to get far more time for the same crime, relative to a woman who’s very similar to me, and I would hardly count that as “compensation” for my being viewed as generally more competent (in some regards, at least; I doubt that competence bias extends across all domains. For instance, go and see how commonly the point is made that I, as a man, ought not to have a say in any debates on abortion because I can’t get pregnant or don’t have a vagina).

There are really two issues here: the first is that the findings of the initial paper might just be a statistical fluke – these things do happen, and, if some people are to be believed, they happen in psychological research so often as to be the norm (due to various researcher degrees of freedom, publication bias, etc). Working under the assumption that there are real effects, however, the second point is that there were two effects found, but people only seemed to have considered one of them to be a problem. Coyne, for instance, found it surprising that women were just as discriminatory as the men, and didn’t seem at all concerned that men weren’t liked as much as women. If his interest was in fighting or removing sexism more generally, it seems he ought not have made that first assumption about men being the discriminators (a rather sexist assumption, I’d think) and have been just as interested in closing the likability gap as he was the competence gap. I think that says something very interesting about human psychology.

Also… The day that many men are actually bothered – find that they are structural oppressed, in fact – because people don’t immediately finding them quite as likable (if incompetent) as they find comparable women, plenty of research will be dedicated to that problem. I feel confident of this. Until then it is just not as interesting a question as the one about equal pay and severe female underrepresentation in leading positions in any field. Until then it actually seems to me like you are making false equivalences, in order to insinuate that women are really being favored. Or treated with some sort of undue chivalry even by psychological researchers. Or that all research these days is under pressure from some feminist agenda.
Whatever the idea is there, that’s just, you know, your hypothesis, man.

(Believe it or not, Jesse, if the trade off is that they do think I seem like a rather nice girl, that is really no consolation whatsoever. I actually don’t know too many people of either gender who would choose to pay $4000 a year for that. But the potential lost opportunities are what disturb me.)

The findings do not at first glance seem contradictory at all to me, by the way. Brilliant overambitious women do fine. But people are a lot more interested in the “potential” of moderately intelligent and accomplished guys than girls. Since that is where the vast majority of us humans per definition actually fall that’s really quite a problem. But of course it doesn’t describe most women who have chosen to pursue academic careers in male dominated fields like math or physics. That is why they are male dominated.

That, anyway, is what this research seems to me to suggest.