This is a classical response and poses an interesting hypothesis regarding the self-fulfilling prophecy of stereotypes.

There is only one big problem, lack of evidence. The "stereotype" is universal, which statistically severly stacks the odds against this hypothesis. Now, I know that you are not good at statistics (as you claimed that yourself). The odds of that "coincidence" is 1 in 2^195 (countries) -->

1 : 50000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

that the coin happens to falls on the same side in all those cases (metaphorically speaking).

Furthermore, stereotypes can be true. We are actually quite good at them.

At last, you can not claim "discrimination" as the only explanatory factor without providing evidence that all the other factors are false. That requires a lot of empirical work, and I have yet to see just one...

I thought of Ayn Rand first, and then laughed.

But seriously, I'd argue that women doing philosophy has historically been more tied with a religious affiliation, such as the many female Christian mystics in the European medieval period, of whom there was a great number. I'd also suggest that women tend more toward poetry than philosophy straight-out. This could be extended out toward literature in general, though I think this trend has diminished significantly in modern times.

What a bunch of misogynist bullshit. These so called 'well established facts' would have any bearing whatsoever if (1) women have had the educational, social and cultural oppertunities that have been offered to men, and (2) if any of the 'biological/evolutionary' nonsense was true. Check out the work of Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-Young especially - the magnificent pair Delusions of Gender and Brainstorm respectively - who consistently show that the so-called studies regarding the evolutionary-developmental differences between men and women to be mostly projections out of pre-conceived, biased readings of the evidence. What an absolute hack of a thread - unsurprising it's gone form 'there are no significant female philosophers' to 'these are the reasons why females are generally inferior humans'. Sexist filth.

Furthermore, stereotypes can be true. We are actually quite good at them. — Emptyheady

They can indeed, and that is why science confirms them. But this does not make them innate.

Your statistics would be relevant and possibly even correct if stereotypes were not communicable diseases.

Your statistics would be relevant and possibly even correct if stereotypes were not communicable diseases. — unenlightened

This is very true, but it does nothing to further the inquiry, it does not exclude the very strong evidence for non-discriminatory factors, such as genetic differences and the behavioural characteristics. The fact that all the evidence strengthen each other as soon as we accept that evolution is true, makes Murray's case quite solid at its core.

So why are women so under-represented in majors with a high average level of IQ?

What Spelke claimed here is quite common, namely that women are discouraged to enter male dominated fields.

Pinker responses concisely: "I think you could take the same phenomenon and come to the opposite conclusion! Say there were really was such a self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating dynamic: a difference originates for reasons that might be arbitrary; people perceive the difference; they perpetuate it by their expectations. Just as bad, you say, is the fact that people don't go into fields in which they don't find enough people like themselves. If so, the dynamic you would expect is that the representation of different genders or ethnic groups should migrate to the extremes. That is, there is a positive feedback loop where if you're in the minority, it will discourage people like you from entering the field, which will mean that there'll be even fewer people in the field, and so on. On either side of this threshold you should get a drift of the percentages in opposite directions.

Now, there is an alternative model. At many points in history, arbitrary barriers against the entry of genders and races and ethnic groups to various professions were removed. And as soon as the barrier was removed, far from the statistical underrepresentation perpetuating or exaggerating itself, as you predict, the floodgates open, and the formerly underrepresented people reaches some natural level. It's the Jackie Robinson effect in baseball. In the case of gender and science, remember what our datum is. It's not that women are under-represented in professions in general or in the sciences in general: in many professions women are perfectly well represented, such as being a veterinarian, in which the majority of recent graduates are women by a long shot. If you go back fifty years or a hundred years, there would have been virtually no veterinarians who were women. That underrepresentation did not perpetuate itself via the positive feedback loop that you allude to."

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What else is interesting is that the explanation regarding sexism is extremely vague, to the point of not being falsifiable in any case. It is as if those proponents put on their tin-foil hats and become the female version of Alex Jones. The Alex Jones' of academia.

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Facts =/= sexists.

There have been no great women artists too.

Neither has there ever been a great female composer

But given the above facts, this is not surprising. Composing music requires some exceptional abstract and systemic thought.

Simon Baron-cohen claimed that autism is an extreme masculine trait. There seems to be some non-random overlap between autism, masculinity and exceptional talents.

At least, your answer is quite surprising. Or is it not?

Off the top of my head:

• Simone de Beauvoir
• Lady Elisabeth of Bohemia
• Patricia Churchland
• Hannah Arendt

Probably the reasons there hasn't been as many influential female philosophers as male are:

1.) Female education has historically been limited in comparison to male education.

2.) Females have historically been subjugated by a patriarchy in which males are given the opportunity for transcendence while females are stuck in immanence, oftentimes expected to support their husbands' transcendence.

3.) Philosophy might just be something males tend to do more of, but this doesn't mean males are somehow "better" than females. If anything it might just mean that males tend to be more neurotic and isolating than females, as well as excessively proud of these character faults. It's usually hard to admit when you're not attractive/charming/popular/influential so it's not surprising that these sorts of people rescue their self-esteem by elevating themselves on a plane of existence higher than anyone else simply because they think about things that most people don't know or care about. If this superiority complex has any legitimacy, then, it applies to everyone who does not do philosophy, not just some portion of the female population.

This is very true, but it does nothing to further the inquiry, — Emptyheady

Indeed. My vain hope is to block the enquiry completely.

Pure rubbish.

I'll take your word for it.

Nice link to Linda Nochlin's canonical feminist essay on how institutional barriers and not talent - and least of all 'biology' - have made it very hard for women to make it in the art world.

Kant liked to deflect away from himself and personal questions, and only ever gave vague, dismissive comments about his personal life. He definitely was ashamed of something. Like the least was wrong with him from what I could tell. Why so obsessed with being good? Why books over people? — Wosret

Kant was quite possibly a virgin all his life, with little to no interest in sex for the sake of pleasure.

Camille Puglia discussed why there are very few great women painters. She observed that this is the case despite women having plenty of access to artist-training--several hundred thousand women taking drawing and painting classes (over the previous 2 centuries). She attributes the dominance of male painters of great stature to "the male gaze" -- the priority of looking. Visuality is more important to men than to women. Could be.

If you take the population as a whole over the last 2 or 3 thousand years (what... 10 billion people?) very very few people did exceedingly well at anything in the areas of 'cultural production'.

Performing far above the plane of the average, truly excelling in cultural production, is limited to a small number of people. The barrier to high-level performance isn't in the stars, isn't solely in oppressive systems of discrimination, it's in us. The "package" -- genius, high levels of creativity, unusually profound insight, high ambition, aggressive competitiveness, is rare. 99.99% of us are not going to be notable at anything.

Take any field -- mathematics to shoeing horses -- people will perform somewhere on the normal distribution, from really very good to just very bad.

One would suppose that women and men are as evenly represented in the thin, extreme ends of the distribution as they are in the fat middle. It seems like the conditions of success at the high extreme end are such that only those with social support (family connections, wealth, social status, etc.), high levels of competitive drive--aka aggressiveness, or the ability and willingness to survive as loners, are going to make it.

What it takes to succeed at the high extreme end just might not be all that attractive to women.

And maybe, a lot of what academically oriented men do just isn't that interesting to women either.

:-} Great. Now even studying the existence of obvious differences between men and women is sexist, because... you're not assuming they are equal in all respects. Great inquiry blocking logic! >:O

studying the existence of obvious differences ... — Agustino

... is a bit of a waste of time, like studying the existence of obvious differences between chalk and cheese. One might wonder at cheesemongers bigging up the statistics on how much calcium there is in cheese.

... is a bit of a waste of time, like studying the existence of obvious differences between chalk and cheese. One might wonder at cheesemongers bigging up the statistics on how much calcium there is in cheese. — unenlightened

Yes but it's still another area of study that should be approached normally, instead of with fear. Why should we mind being different? It's only if you presuppose that men are superior, that women being different becomes insulting. And indeed it's only if one presupposes that men are superior, that training women to behave like men becomes reasonable...

Yes but it's still another area of study that should be approached normally, — Agustino

It's the norms of study that I have a beef with, along with the norms of training that come from them. The fact is we do mind being different, and we mind others being different even more. That is why we want to measure and classify each other all the time.

It's the norms of study that I have a beef with, along with the norms of training that come from them. The fact is we do mind being different, and we mind others being different even more. That is why we want to measure and classify each other all the time. — unenlightened

But surely that's also part of understanding each other - understanding how it is we're different.

20% of all Nobel prizes are won by Jews, while only 0.2% of the world population are Jewish. Should we put on our tin-foil hats and speculate about the Jewish end-game? Are Jews oppressing the rest of us? Was Adolf onto something?

Sexist filth. bah...

Well it is a fact that Jewish people have done very well in terms of science historically. Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Sigmund Freud, Jonas Salk, Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynmann, von Neumann, Steven Weinberg, maybe even Isaac Newton actually but the latter isn't certain.

But this doesn't mean they're oppressing the rest of us. It means that they're very well-organised, they work well together, they are very interested in science and learning from a young age. We should actually follow their example and make ourselves better!

Was Adolf onto something? — Emptyheady

No. Adolf Hitler was a progressive, and just like other progressives, he had ideas which were obviously crazy. Only that the progressives never realise their ideas are crazy, until it's too late. Just like today. God bless us that we got rid of Obama and Crooked Hillary >:O Those lunatics would have destroyed America!

I am actually baffled by your insightful post. I often don't read them.

Anyway, regarding your comment, there is extremely strong inverse-correlation between the level of income/education and fertility rate, which is exemplified with women due to pregnancies.

I read somewhere that the most dominant factor for this phenomenon is the idea of opportunity cost. Women often complain that they are getting "punished" for having to choose between a stable family or a successful career. What you stated is echoed by Murray's essay.

One obvious policy is to compensate those career women through government handouts. This is highly controversial, since this will be a de facto wealth distribution from the poor to the rich, heavily increasing inequality.

Opportunity cost is a fundamental economic principle, an objective fact of life, not the fault of any institution. Many women can't fathom that, which is a shame but not a surprise. Only one woman got a Nobel prize in economics so far, compared to 73 men.

As a famous economist once said: 'there are no solutions, only trade-offs'.

lies! This is simply homophobic!

Men should be less ambitious and successful, so that we can become more equal.

Men should be less ambitious and successful, so that we can become more equal. — Emptyheady

What's the point of being equal? How boring that would be...

Opportunity cost is a fundamental economic principle, an objective fact of life, not the fault of any institution. Many women can't fathom that, which is a shame but not a surprise. Only one woman got a Nobel prize in economics so far, compared to 73 men. — Emptyheady

It's THE fundamental economic - or better said business - principle. Every choice is a negation.

Sexist filth. — StreetlightX

Filthy...but genuinely arousing.

I'm not a huge fan of Murray as he puts too much stock into intelligence tests, but his point is well taken and correct.