Is the punditocracy too white and male?

I think this is an interesting article, but could i suggest another way of looking at the issue. Instead of seeing it as a binary choice between Affirmative Action and an unrepresentative media, we could attempt to address the issue from the bottom up. E.g. Setting up a writing class in a predominantly African American area. We can acknowledge there is a problem but also say that affirmitave action is the wrong way to do so.

A british paper had a series of very interesting articles about the blogosphere, they did some experiments writing articles under both male and female handles and posting comments under different genders. They found that the female handles were more likely to suffer abuse and "flaming" than the male ones. Blogging in my experience is quite a macho and agressive atmosphere, so while there is little overt discrimination there is a very male atmosphere that can dissuade women from taking part.

Hmf. I see my comment has been held for approval. Possibly because it contained a link--though the link was to Right Wing News. Surely not a banned website here! Or perhaps because it contained examples of the kinds of comments women who blog routinely receive--duly edited, of course, for the sake of crunchycon decorum. I await developments.

Hmf. I see my comment has been held for approval. Possibly because it contained a link--though the link was to Right Wing News. Surely not a banned website here! Or perhaps because it contained examples of the kinds of comments women who blog routinely receive--duly edited, of course, for the sake of crunchycon decorum. I await developments.

I don't know why it was held. Nobody's doing this on purpose. I have comments I make -- and not only comments with links -- held every week or two. It's the software. Let me go free it.

I've been in discussions with others about this topic. I posted under a female psuedonym for a day, and I didn't notice a difference. My present epononym doesn't suggest a gender, but 90% of the folks assume correctly that I'm male. One of my co-bloggers who is male is assumed by 90% of folks to be female. My female co-bloggers tend to believe that their opinions are disregarded and disrespected because they are female.

I think there have to be some tendencies among males and females generally. I suppose it is like a 'gaydar': it may not always be perfectly accurate, but it has some predictive qualities. FWIW, it seems women lawyers survive blogging better in the male-dominated areas of blogging over women in other professions.

I often rejected essays and analyses that I thought were superior, solely because they were written by white males (amazing how many of these were Jews, but they don't count as minorities in the diversity calculus). It was frustrating to me, because I didn't believe in this kind of discrimination as a matter of principle, but the newspaper industry makes diversity a priority.

Slightly off topic, but in the legal profession I've had similar experiences that have hardened my contempt for the Diversity scam. Here's one from about 10 years ago:

Working at a large firm, I volunteered to conduct about 15 on-campus interviews at a prestigious law school, from which 5 or 6 interviewees would be invited to visit the firm for second (and final) interviews.

Knowing full well that career advancement often depends on playing the Diversity politics right, I recommended for second interviews half a dozen "Diverse" applicants -- 5 women, 4 Asians/South Asians, 1 black woman (several of them, of course, "two-fers"). No white males. Had I based my decision on grades, the finalists would have been 5 white males and 1 South Asian female. But that would have been a huge No-No at The Firm.

Keep in mind that the pool of 15 interviewees had already been sifted through the Diversity Machine twice - first through the law school's admissions process, and then again by the law school in assigning interview spots (this particular school didn't allow the firms to select the students they wished to interview, although that would also have resulted in a Diversity sift).

And with all that, it still wasn't possible to find a minimally qualified black male candidate or any Latino (male or female).

I was praised by the HR director for the wonderfully Diverse talent pool I'd "discovered" -- although she decided not to invite back the one (Asian) male in the group and instead pulled in a black woman with poor grades.

I'm not proud of participating in this farce, and in fact washed my hands of the hiring process entirely after that experience. What's particularly galling is that this scenario is the norm. And when you fast forward just a few years you find that many of the Diverse candidates leave the intense environments of their large firms. Invariably, this results in handwringing about how the firm is failing to "mentor" them. The hard reality is, they weren't remotely qualified for the job to begin with.

So much of blogging seems to be name calling and scoring points, more traditional male characteristics. I would expect the number of women involved to increase to reflect the increasing numbers of women in management in business. Perhaps we shall see super successful anonymous women bloggers as a way to avoid the threats of sexual violence they incur. I have certainly had my eyes opened by women bloggers on issues that men just wouldn't see. The blogosphere is still relatively new. It may eventually evolve into a venue where al types are welcome and can prosper. OTOH, maybe it will remain dominated by snark and gamesmanship.

Minorities are another issue. If a poor mother in North Philadelphia were to blog about issues important to her, how many blog hits would she get? If it started to get popular what are the chances it would not be overwhelmed with racial slurs from the large group out there still doing such? Blogging just does not seem to be a viable outlet for the poorest members of our society yet. The lack of education has got to hurt also. As much as it is in vogue to blast education on this blog, look at someone like Larison, whom I consider to be one of the better blog writers. The guy is studying Byzantine history. Big bucks there I bet! The point here is that he has used his education, IMO, to learn how to think. Learning how to learn and how to think are the most important things education give you. There are not as many minorities available with an education to become pundits.

Steve

Liberals are the dumbest people on the planet. Ideology makes stupidity, and liberals have no shame. This subject is like agonizing over why blacks are obviously such better athletes...why, oh why? It can't be genetics, can it? God forbid! I mean, we all know a dog team of poodles could win the Iditarod if we just fed them right and talked nice to them! I mean, they're the same species as Malamutes, right? Give. Me. A. Break.

Given recent studies showing a correlation between low IQ and adherence to fundamentalist and literalist interpretations of religious texts, does that explain the lack of orthodox believers in journalism? They are just not smart enough to get a job, on average, in pursuits that require advanced thought.

"blacks and Hispanics lack the reading and writing skills, as measured by standardized tests, to write cutting-edge blogs"

Oh, gimme a break. Any ethnic group that includes the likes of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Maya Angelou, Niki Giovanni, and how the bleep much longer do I have to go on, doesn't need the condescension of the punditariat. Yes, poor people don't usually have time to blog, or to read and write in any medium, unless they're in jail. Which may account for certain biases in the literature of non-white Americans. This is nothing new. Among the literature that has been produced behind bars is Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, and several of the letters of St. Paul, plus possible chunks of the book of Jeremiah.

"Liberals are the dumbest people on the planet. Ideology makes stupidity, and liberals have no shame."

mdavid is really an Ann Coulter pseudonym? Come on, you have shown yourself by most of your writnig to be brighter than this. Your bell curve stuff is not written in stone. Generalized IQ tests do not address the specific kinds of intelligence/abilities needed to succeed in specific endeavors. Ambition, intuition and empathy are critical factors. Clearly, the most intelligent do not always rise to the top in our society. McCain was at the bottom of his class. Bush and Kerry were C students. Same thing goes for writers. A towering intellect w/o real empathy, be it on a cultural or one to one basis, is probably doomed to failure as a writer. Maybe women writers are less willing to move, as Rod did, to advance their careers.

Steve

White people have to do something unless we put them in concentration camps. Or society can enforce a strict racial quota on every single academic, athletic, and professional field, and there will be no disparities. How that differs from the Soviet Union, I don't know, because you'll have to force people into careers.

But if the enforement only goes one way and "too many" women in nursing or "too many" blacks in the history department is not a problem, then there must be fields with "too few" women or blacks.

Why are there so few black country stars and white rap stars? Why are there no men on "The View"? Audience matters too.

This was popular a few years ago:
http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

Paste text into the genie and it will predict whether the writer is male or female.

mdavid appears to be contradicting himself. The reason few women or blacks are bloggers: they are genetically disqualified. The reason few fundamentalists go to journalism school: they are discriminated against. Ah well. I guess in his world, discrimination does exist, but is only exercised against white male Christians.

And re his comment to Erin: As with his comments on the cooking thread, I ask again, how many exceptions does it take to disprove a rule? As I recall, he assumed me to be male, too, as did a number of other commenters. Why? I hypothesize it's because I appear to be intelligent, I express myself vigorously and competently, and I don't back down. Nor do I focus on "puppies and flowers." Therefore, it would not be expected that I'm a woman. And Rob G wonders how anyone could say that the right has its own ways of disrespecting women . . . .

I'm leaving, I promise, since I do have to get some work done . . . but a delicious thought just occurred to me. Nobody actually knows who any of us are--only our self-representations. For all you know, I AM a man. For all we know, mdavid is an embittered black lesbian, living out his self-created Alaskan paterfamilias persona as an elaborate tease. The blogosphere (or as Mary Daly would probably call it, the blobosphere) could be just an elaborate RPG. The last line of John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar comes to mind--Shalmanezer the sentient computer, alone in his supercooled bath, chuckling, "Christ, what an imagination I've got."

Who is "Rod" Galt??

Sigaliris, your story about women bloggers receiving ugly and threatening responses is, alas, only too credible. Irshad Manji, who is a very gutsy person, puts the hate mail up on her website along with the names of the insecure idiots who send her these missives.

Regarding Rod's post, I do think affirmative action bears some of the responsiblity for the difficulty in finding diversity among the punditocracy.

I recently finished John McWhorter's book, "Losing the Race," and part of his argument against continuing affirmative action in education, especially among middle class black youth, is that it creates the sense that African-American students are "permanent cripples" who will need affirmative action forever.

And, as McWhorter points out, if people are treated like permanent cripples, they end up becoming cripples. Affirmative action was intended as a "quick and dirty" remedy for a genuine problem. As the decades have passed, it has become part of the problem, and is now a stumbling block to greater minority achievement.

The Army has taken the developmental approach to diversity for several decades. At every level, the person in charge is held responsible for seeing that minority members become qualified for promotion to the next level.

What could newspapers do to follow that model? Do they have, or could they take on, a responsibility to see that talented minority writers are taught and developed, and made available for promotion to national pundit status?

Connie, The Army has taken the developmental approach to diversity for several decades.

1) The miliary's method of dealing with diversity is to elimiates low IQ folk from their ranks, so they only get people who can be trained. The military is the IQ testing king; they thus have raised their bar so high less than half of blacks nationwide have a high enough IQ to get into the miliary (based on ASVAB/IQ correlations).

2) The military also divides people into officers (generally high-IQ) and enlisted (generally lower IQ), and orders enlisted men around and controls what they can do to a very large degree.

Point: not so sure the military methods are transferrable.

On a sidenote, punching in some random comments on this thread into the Gender Genie...

Forrest: Female
Alicia: Male
mdavid: Female (I checked two blog posts, same result)
Jullian: Male
Steve: Male
Marian: Male
Erin: Female
Daniel: Male

A coin would do as well. So...

a) Genie is some pretty lousy software
b) Bloggers are lying about their gender
c) You can't tell somebody's gender from their writing

I vote for (a). I've never really paid much attention, but everyone's posts seems pretty gender-normal to me. A few of the males I've thought might be a female, but rarely the other way around. But I wouldn't doubt that someone could fake it quite well though and fool me all day long. Never really thought about it.

mdavid- There is a baseline level of intelligence that you may need to be successful in any given profession, but raw intellect is probably not the best predicter of top level success in any field outside of Physics and Mathematics. Empathy is incredibly important in most social endeavors, including writing. Ambition is important for success. Willingness to work hard. Adaptability, creativity, ability to take criticism, tolerance for pressure are all important. The brightest person in my medical school never made it out of internship. She couldn't stand the time pressures and lack of sleep. Then there is the obvious one here, do women really want to be blogosphere pundits? Maybe a lower percentage are interested to begin with.

On the military, they do not promote people based on the highest test scores. If you meet a certain grade, you are considered qualified. They then look at all the other person's attributes. They do not worship at the altar of the standardized test.

On a final note, when was the last time you took a standardized IQ test? Did you take it seriously? Not everyone does. Not everyone is a true believer. Alternate theory for men being higher and lower on IQ tests: Men love to win. A test is just another game to win. Men try harder. More winners, except those who feel they are being forced to play a game the cannot win, those who really arent too bright to begin with. They give up sooner and go find a game they can win.

Steve

Steve, the only reason anyone looks at IQ is that is correlates to results so well, time and again. It's not a matter of "believing". It's a matter of data providing accurate results.

Why it's applicable to this discussion: any time you start separating people into gender or race catagories (both biological catagories) IQ averages of those groups show large predictibility of results. Some statisical differences we see between people of different racial or sexual origins that correlate to IQ: prison rates, chess champs, doctors, businsess leaders, Nobel prize winners, people who die on the battlefield, and yes, pundit writers like Rod is talking about.

On a final note, when was the last time you took a standardized IQ test? Did you take it seriously? Not everyone does.

If it makes you feel better, I've never taken an IQ test. Why would I?

Most of the posters here don't understand statistics nor IQ, and just sound foolish. Everyone keeps pointing out this exception or that, or talking about individual people. This makes no sense. I fear for public education; my 10 year old son would laugh at all this it's so simple, and even my 8 and 6 year olds would understand the statistical logic with some explanation. This ain't rocket science. Have we really fallen this low?

Point: looking at a single person's IQ doesn't mean much except a baseline limit, because, as you point out, there are too many factors and exceptions that come into play. But when we examine large groups, all those factors average out and we get the expected results...in this example, very few minority or women pundits. So the explanation is obvious, but ideology and this strange religious belief liberals have that all racial and sexual groups are equal to each other make them so stupid and angry they deny the obvious truth by focusing on individual cases, searching desperately for execptions to the relentless statistics - hey, see that white guy on the court! See! Ha! It's eerily similar to that fundy flopping all over himself denying evolution, citing this supposed exception or that one. And just as pathetic. Please don't fall for it.

"On a sidenote, punching in some random comments on this thread into the Gender Genie...

Forrest: Female
Alicia: Male
mdavid: Female (I checked two blog posts, same result)
Jullian: Male
Steve: Male
Marian: Male
Erin: Female
Daniel: Male"

What on earth is Gender Genie? Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be doing any worse than the Spam Genie who sends me 100 posts a day based on the presumption that I am not only male, but single and Christian, with bad credit, erectile dysfunction, and a dog. Wrong on every count.

Gender Genie must mistake father's daughters for males:-)

Meh, I think Derb and Yglesias are both overrated, but that's cause I think logic and reason are the best means to truth, and a like a piece that stimulates my mind to follow a rational argument. I tend to have contempt for writers who argue on impressions and rhetoric, no matter how entertaining their writing is.

mdavid- Quick break so quick response. One, your explanations work best if intelligence is determined solely by genetics. Off the top of my head I think that only about 75% at best is considered due to genetics. Didnt they do twin studies to look at this? Two, intelligence scores change over time, sometimes too quickly to be explained by genetics. Three, you have more confidence in the tests than I do. I think we are still finding out what constitutes intelligence. Last, we started out discussing what leads to success in a given endeavor. You claim intelligence as the prime factor, if I have followed you correctly, at the extremes. This would seem to be best resolved by prospectively following a group with higher IQ test scores and proving a correlation between higher scores and success. Do such studies exist? If intelligence is the prime determinant I would expect there to be a direct correlation with highest scorers having the most success.

Steve

Things remembered from various biology classes, an indirect answer to Sig...

In many species, females are the final step in the selection process. Any male that fails to make a successful attempt to mate will not have offspring with that female.

A common mistake is to look at current selection processes as having anything to do with the current members of the species. In the Einstein example, what happened to the German Jews is not relevant; what happened to his immediate ancestors' fellows is relevant.

In species that reproduce sexually, variations within a gender are not necessarily comparable between the genders. For example, in many species the male is brilliantly marked (fur, plumage, etc.) and the female is drab (at least by comparison). Is that difference because of selection for markings in the mating process, or because drab makes it easier to hide from predators, thus making the male who mates that much a better survivor?