Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 25

"That's Roger's job," Cassie said as the other women smiled.

"Good for Hendrik," Danielle said, ignoring Cassie's remark.

"It proves he's not the misogynist everyone thinks," Joan said.

"No, he's still a misogynist," Cassie said. "Hendrik hates women."

"He doesn't, really," Danielle said.

"It's not hatred," Rosa said.

"Why don't you explain, Rosa?" Danielle invited.

"Hendrik doesn't hate women. He's scared stiff of us, though it's really emotions he fears. Any sign of neediness or affection and he starts to fidget. Any explicit show of feelings and he'll leave the room. Danielle's a manly kind of woman ..."

"I am not!"

"You are, too," Joan said. "You're always composed and in control."

"That's your definition of manliness?" Danielle protested.

"Anyway, that's why Hendrik likes Danielle so much," Rosa said, imposing herself on the wayward conversation. "As for me, I talk nothing but physics to him and he never asks me how I am, just in case I'll tell him."

"That sounds like a good policy," Joan said. "Avoids a lot of nonsense."

"Joan," Danielle said. "You never told me how you recruited Hendrik. Why did he agree to work for a woman?"

"A few things, I guess. I had a very public spat with the Board of Directors about my refusal to set up a Women's Studies department. The spineless old men were going to surrender to the women's lobby without even a fight. We're a scientific institution, I told them, and Women's Studies does not allow its theories to be tested empirically."

"To placate the feminists, however, the board decided to adopt a target for female senior staff. I rejected that, making it a resigning issue. I gave an interview to the Academia Web saying that if women wanted to work here, then they'd have to earn their places on merit, the same as men. There'd be no special favours"

"Also, I told Hendrik he could have a full say over who worked for him."

"Even though you knew his opinion of women?" Danielle said. "What about hiring on merit alone? What if he decided not to have any women staff-members at all?"

"I trusted Hendrik to do what was best for his department. It turned out well, didn't it? He recruited you, and you brought in Rosa."

"There's Cho as well, now, who's on secondment."

"There's something else I bet you don't know," Joan added to Danielle. "On the day your details appeared on the recruitment section of the Physics Web, Hendrik came to see me and asked permission to recruit you regardless of cost. He must have set up an alert for your name."

"I didn't know that," Danielle admitted. "Poor Hendrik!"

"What do you mean, 'poor Hendrik'?" Cassie asked.

"I mean he's taken pains to establish his persona as a sour old misogynist, then he recruits Rosa and me. Now he's not only enrolled Samothea and Yael, he's paid for their tuition himself; and there's no one in the galaxy more girly than Yael. He'll probably get kicked out of the patriarchy."

"Poor Hendrik indeed," Joan agreed. "You know that the publicity that you and Rosa are creating has attracted more female applicants to the Institute than ever before? Applications for the Spring intake to the astrophysics school is almost one-third girls, which is unprecedented. Poor old Hendrik will soon have to put up with the reputation of running the most female-friendly astrophysics department in the Anglosphere."

"I can't see Samothea or Yael being a burden to him, despite how girly Yael is," Cassie said.

"They won't be," Danielle agreed. "Hendrik checked that I'm happy to do his pastoral duty toward them and I told him there's no need for pastoral care at all. The women of Samothea exist in a nexus of female relationships that is the most supportive I have ever seen. Even if the girls had troubles that they couldn't fix themselves (and you know how mentally strong they are), they'd come to me only as a friend, not as a counsellor."

"I think that's true about all the women of Samothea," Rosa said.

"It is," Cassie agreed, who had been intimately involved in Annela's treatment and seen firsthand her courage and mental strength.

"I've seen the change in Kelly," Joan said. "Though she spent only six weeks on Samothea, she came back with a real spark. It's lovely to see."

3 Agreement with Eva Welwyn

Yael was late to a lesson with Danielle one day because she stopped to chat to some earnest students who were recruiting for a student political society, handing out leaflets in the corridor, protesting a great injustice.

She carried a dozen leaflets to Danielle's office, as if she had bagged them hunting.

"Look at this, Danielle," Yael said. "It says women are paid only 80% what men are paid. That's unfair, isn't it?"

"It would be if it were true," Danielle said.

"It's not true?"

"It's a comparison of two mean averages: the total wages earned by men divided by the number of men in work, compared to the total wages earned by women divided by the number of women in work."

"But that's not science!" Yael protested. "You can't just compare mean averages. You have to say what kind of data it is. There are different kinds of jobs, aren't there? And some people work harder than others? What about people who own their own businesses compared to their employees? They might get different rates."

"Quite so. A real scientist will drill down into the data. Shall we do that? Samothea can help. There's a lesson here on statistics for you both."

Danielle followed the link on the leaflet to the page on the Women's Web.

"It doesn't give a breakdown," Yael said, disappointed.

"No indeed. We'll have to look for the data ourselves."

Danielle found a page on the Maths Web published by a woman calling herself the Factual Feminist. She gave a breakdown.

Wildchild made a table on the projector board to present the results for sex of employee, wages, kinds of jobs and factors relating to pay. They entered data for average age of employee, marital status, years of education, on-the-job training, distance travelled for work and number of injuries and deaths in that industry. There were many other factors, but Danielle slyly kept back one statistic as a test for the girls.

"Look what happens if we compare ownership of companies," she said.

"Yael is right," Wildchild said. "People who own their own businesses generally earn more than those whom they employ; and more men than women own their own companies."

Danielle added data for unpleasant jobs, like garbage collection; jobs with unsociable hours; physically demanding and dangerous jobs, such as space-rigging; and jobs in remote locations, far from family and friends. All such jobs earned a premium and they were done predominantly by men.

Yael noticed that, for some professions, especially in science and engineering, the wage gap between the sexes went into reverse. Women engineers aged under thirty were paid more than their male counterparts with exactly the same qualifications and training.

"That's good news for you two, if you want careers in physics," Danielle said.

"But it's unfair!" Yael protested, this time on behalf of badly-treated men. "And it's the opposite of what the pamphlet said."

"True, but it doesn't last. It's a statistical effect of employers wanting to hire women when there are fewer women to hire than men. The mean average wage of women engineers is 5% more than men only until they get to age thirty. Then the advantage goes to men and women's mean-average wage drops precipitously."

"Why aged thirty?" Yael asked.

"The obvious reason," Danielle said.

"Babies?"

"Yes, by that age, many women have left work to raise children and, even if they don't, they often prefer to have a better lifestyle rather than devote themselves single-mindedly to a career."

"Do most women lack ambition?" Yael asked.

"No. Women who choose to have children have a different ambition from people who pursue money, political power or social position. But even women who do not have children will generally want a more equitable work-life balance than men. As Esther Grandley says, women are more sensible: we are usually happy with 'enough' when men often want 'more'."

With data for the number of years spent working, the wage gap skewed back toward men because more women than men had gaps in their careers and missed out on promotions. But the wage gap disappeared again for government jobs and what Danielle contemptuously called 'talking jobs'.

Yael looked at the board and said:

"There's still a fifteen point difference, Danielle. What's the data you're not showing us?"

Danielle smiled.

"It's this," she said, projecting the data for hourly wages and number of hours worked.

Wildchild immediately burst out laughing and, a second later, Yael was creased up as well. Danielle had to laugh along with the girls.

"I was outraged by that leaflet," Yael said between giggles, "because I thought it showed that women are paid less than men for doing exactly the same jobs with exactly the same skills and experience. But all the wage-gap really means is that part-time workers are paid less than full-time workers. How do feminists get away with such a shoddy argument?"

"For two reasons. Because, as my Roger says, women have been badly treated in the past, so people are sympathetic to us now. Also, because feminists have morally intimidated everyone so much that even to expose their abuse of statistics is to be condemned as a woman-hater."

"Besides," she added, to be fair, "feminists say that many of these statistics can be explained by a structural bias against women. Take the case of people who run their own businesses. More men do this, so it skews the wage graph, but feminists say it's due to social conditions that make it more difficult for women to own their own companies, rather than the personal choices of women."

"Is that true?" Yael asked.

"There are always individual cases, such as handing a family business down to a son rather than a daughter, but feminists say that the whole of society is a conspiracy to reward men and disadvantage women: a conspiracy so insidious that only feminists can see it."

"Are feminists nuts?" Yael said.

"I'm not the right person to answer that question, Yael. We need Eva here. It's not fair to attack her philosophy when she's not able to defend it. She may have a justification for the leaflet that I wouldn't think of."

Danielle called Eva Welwyn and invited her to come over.

When she arrived, Yael asked her about the pay gap between the sexes. Eva glanced at the leaflet and said: "That's propaganda."

"You can't just dismiss it, Eva," Danielle protested. "Lots of people believe this stuff. It's converted some of them to feminism. Have you ever denounced the claim in public?"

"Yes, once."

"What happened?"

"There was a lot of shouting. ... Danielle, I make a ritual case every so often for the claim to be dropped but it's too well established, so I concentrate on other things and I teach my students to drill down into the sources of every statistical claim, as you know yourself."

That was true: Eva used Danielle's famous anti-feminist rant at the Women in Science conference in her Women's Studies lectures to balance her own feminist arguments and expose her students to critical thinking about statistics.

"I understand, Eva, and I'm not blaming you personally," Danielle said. "I asked you to come here because I've just given these girls a lecture on a feminist misuse of statistics. Will you give them a pro-feminist lecture to balance, please?"

"They're your students, Danielle. I don't want to prejudice them."

"They're students of the facts, Eva, and I've never met girls so eager for knowledge as them. You won't prejudice them. Besides, don't you believe that feminism is true?"

"I certainly do. All right, I'll tell you about my most recent paper, which asks why the majority of managerial staff are men."

"There are many possible reasons: maybe men make better managers; maybe men are more ambitious than women; maybe men are more aggressive than women (in roles where aggression is a useful quality); maybe men pursue power or money more than women; maybe men can cope with stress better than women; maybe male managers benefit from having wives who unselfishly support their careers; maybe customers prefer to have male senior staff; or maybe there's an old-boys' network that secretly conspires to make sure only men get the best jobs."

"How did you eliminate all the other factors to prove that it was the evil patriarchy?" Danielle asked.

"We didn't. We eliminated them all to test the theory that it was something psychological."

"What?"

"Confidence. We followed a cohort of male and female graduates who qualified in their fields with exactly equal grades and took up jobs in five companies at the same time. The five companies have equal numbers of male and female employees and progressive attitudes toward sexual equality. Even so, they have a preponderance of male managers."

"The companies allowed us to modify their aptitude tests, so we devised questions to test the confidence of the candidates compared to their competence. Our modified aptitude tests included self-assessment questions about confidence in those fields for which we had the matching scores from the companies for skills."

"We included a long list of skills with simple tick-boxes: yes or no. We found that women generally will not apply for the job unless they can tick off almost 100% of the boxes; whereas the average for men was only 60% of the boxes ticked."

"Interesting. How many of the men with low scores actually got the jobs?"

"It depended on the kind of work. More in sales than in technical fields," Eva said. "More interesting, though, was that we were sneaky with our self-assessment forms. We invented completely fictitious skills, such as draining flux capacitors. About 30% of men gave themselves a tick for competence at that task, but none of the women did."

Danielle was amused. Eva went on:

"In our follow-up interviews we examined those who ticked the boxes for bogus skills to see if they made a mistake or were deliberately lying. Some were straight-out liars, but some assumed they can learn on the job how to drain a flux capacitor and others thought that, as managers, they could bring in experts to do the work."

"That's clever of you."

"We also took into account the fact that confidence might be exactly what the company was looking for, rather than someone who ticks all the competence boxes. This was especially the case for sales and marketing, which had the biggest disparity between competence and confidence. It was also the only case where women considered themselves competent despite ticking fewer than 100% of the boxes."

"I like this theory very much," Danielle said. "What remedies do you suggest? Not more quotas, I hope."

"No, we don't suggest quotas. The next stage of the study will be to test different remedies, such as support-groups, different kinds of training and, simply, exposing the fact to the public, which might be enough to change people's attitudes."

"We also accept the possibility that there may be no remedy at all, that there may be a male biological advantage which men subconsciously exploit and cannot be held personally responsible for. The advantage none the less exists and the inequality justifies feminists exposing it, even if nothing can be done about it politically."

Danielle smiled at Eva's attempt to be fair to men. This seemed to be a new departure for her.

"Here you are girls," she said. "The perfect counterbalance to my lesson. A case of genuine feminist science."

"What?" Eva was astonished. "You've spent years rubbishing Women's Studies as pseudo-scientific garbage and now you concede. Over this! Why?"

"Because your theory is testable. Every other feminist argument I know is untestable pseudo-science, like astrology."

"Untestable!" Eva exclaimed. "We support our theories with as much data as is available and we collect reams and reams of results."

"So do astrologers. That's the point. There's always tons of supporting evidence for any theory, however wacky, especially if you use dodgy statistics like the pay-gap, or reject some facts as misogynistic and never to be discussed, such as the way feminists usually treat the facts of biology. It's only science if you let your theory be put at risk and if you accept all the evidence, not just the evidence you like. This is the first feminist theory I know that can be refuted by the evidence. I like it very much."

"How can you test the theory?" Yael asked.

"We can send women to Samothea to develop their personalities in the absence of men. If they end up like you, Hazel and Samothea, self-motivated, adventurous, brave and resourceful, while those who stay here remain bashful and submissive, then we can say the influence of men is decisive."

"Please explain?"

"I'll give you an analogy. Some people with weak voices might have just as much to say for themselves as people with loud voices but they find themselves drowned out in public. Take the loud voices away and the quiet voices can flourish. This could be what happens on Samothea. The beauty of Eva's study is that we can test the theory. In fact, I bet she's already gathering the data she needs."

"Robyn Bradford is," Eva conceded. "You're not to tell anyone this because we don't want to influence the results, but Robyn started a study of her own. She noticed changing attitudes in herself and other members of the Women's Support Group."

"What changes?"

"Robyn says there's more 'firmness' (as she calls it) in the women; so I asked her to study it. She's analysing the psychological assessments we give the support group members before and after every rotation. Some of the questions concern morally ambiguous events, where either a man or a woman might be to blame. They range from trivial misunderstandings to sexual assaults."

"We did the assessments expecting that living in an all-female society might make the less-feminist members of the support group become more sympathetic to women. It seems to have the opposite effect. Before any of the support group went to Samothea, they generally judged the marginal cases in favour of the woman, apportioning much more blame to the man than the woman. None judged the cases to be 50:50."

"After visiting Samothea, the support group members all judge the cases closer to 50:50; and the longer a woman stays on Samothea, the nearer her judgment is to equity."

"Fascinating," Danielle said. "What's your explanation?"

"It's Robyn's study and her theory, not mine. I'd be kicked out of the sisterhood if I said I believed it."

"I hope you get kicked out," Danielle said, smiling at the first joke she had ever heard Eva make about feminism. "Then you could come here and be a real scientist."

"Anyway," Eva said, "Robyn's theory is that, having lived among such hardy survivors, the support group members take a more robust view of a woman's responsibility. The more they think of women as self-reliant, as the women of Samothea are, the less they are inclined to give a woman the benefit of the doubt over a man in a 50:50 scenario."

"I like this theory," Danielle said. "It shows how feminism pretends to empower women but really it just molly-coddles them by shifting the blame onto men."

"It does no such thing!" Eva protested, but she relented with a smile, recognising that she was being baited. "Remember Robyn's still working on her theory and gathering data, so please don't repeat what I said. She'll finish the research and write it up after we've published our joint paper on women astrophysics students."

Yael had something to add.

"It's not true that we Samotheans are all confident," she said. "I lack confidence."