Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREVIEW: "What Is the 'Patriarchy'?" with Prof. Cordelia Fine

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PREVIEW: "What Is the 'Patriarchy'?" with Prof. Cordelia Fine · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Can I hear men's welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas?
• 0:06
  Here's a dangerous question for you.
• 0:08
  If you're a female, is the reason why you didn't want to be a truck driver?
• 0:14
  Because you are female?
• 0:17
  And if you're a male, is the reason why you don't want to be a kindergarten teacher?
• 0:21
  Because you're a male.
• 0:23
  Demails and females differ in biological ways, in deeper ways than culture, in the things
• 0:29
  that they're interested in.
• 0:31
  This has become a somewhat fashionable idea.
• 0:34
  It explains certain strands of the new media ecosystem from Jordan Peterson to potentially
• 0:40
  even Andrew Tate, but certainly to the manosphere of the Joe Rogan's of the world.
• 0:45
  And it's a questionable intuition, like where the biology and the culture meet in an
• 0:51
  explanation of why the gender roles are split the way they are between housework and looking
• 0:56
  after babies and being CEOs and being abalone fishermen.
• 1:01
  I wanted to talk to somebody who actually spends her life studying the science of this
• 1:06
  stuff, the biological differences, what we understand about our intuitions, about workplace
• 1:10
  inequalities, and whether or not there is such a thing as the patriarchy that is still
• 1:15
  assisting in organising our social structures and our workplace arrangements and our households
• 1:22
  in a way that is deleterious to women's interests.
• 1:25
  Professor Cordelia Fein certainly thinks so, so she and I have a really constructive chat
• 1:30
  about exactly that.
• 1:31
  She's one of the most notable Australian academics in this field, well I say Australian, she was
• 1:36
  raised in Edinburgh and born in Canada, but we'll have a we'll have a we like doing that.
• 1:42
  She studied psychology at Oxford University.
• 1:44
  She got her masters in philosophy from Cambridge University.
• 1:48
  You might have heard of them Oxford and Cambridge.
• 1:50
  She got a PhD in psychology from University College London, never heard of that dump.
• 1:55
  And she has fascinating ideas about whether or not differences in men's and women's jobs
• 2:00
  and housework and play and childcare and incarceration levels and opportunities are caused
• 2:07
  by intrinsic genetic differences or social constructs and whether or not in the long run
• 2:12
  that question even matters.
• 2:15
  She was recently named a living legend of research by the Australian newspaper, she is the
• 2:20
  author of Testosterone Rex, Delusions of Gender and her latest book is Patriarchy Inc.
• 2:26
  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do this debate about biology and culture and sexism and
• 2:31
  masculinity and transgenderism and the patriarchy with the one the only Professor Cordelia Fein.
• 2:38
  Even while we've got the sort of the Elon Musk and the Donald Trumps, we also have what
• 2:47
  seems to be a concerted effort to try and open up masculinity to more traditionally feminine
• 2:57
  roles.
• 2:58
  There's pushes to increase parental leave, for example, opportunity leave specifically.
• 3:05
  Some men are asking for more flexible work, they want to be more involved in their children's
• 3:09
  lives.
• 3:10
  The survey data are saying that they want to, they would rather, if they could, even if
• 3:16
  it meant they were earning less money, they would actually rather be able to spend more
• 3:20
  time with their family.
• 3:23
  Then there's this sort of small group of people who are small but growing and not to be ignored
• 3:30
  saying, you know, if you take care of children or at home, that you're less of a man.
• 3:34
  So we have these sort of, maybe it's, we have very contradictory concepts of masculinity
• 3:41
  taking place at the moment, we've got the, you know, the effects of the feminist movement
• 3:47
  that have brought women very much into the public sphere to a degree that is unprecedented
• 3:54
  since the Industrial Revolution.
• 3:57
  We've got this sort of fairly fledgling movement to bring men back home, you know, they were,
• 4:02
  they were pushed out during industrialization, now they're kind of, some of them at least
• 4:06
  are knocking on the door and women are embracing that.
• 4:09
  And I guess we're having to reestablish gender roles in some, in some ways, you know,
• 4:14
  who's, who does what, who's responsibility is what has to be.
• 4:18
  And that's, that's always, that's always uncomfortable.
• 4:21
  Is that desire that push, the former push that you articulated for men to have things
• 4:26
  like paternity leave and, you know, paid, paid paternity leave, do more stuff at the home?
• 4:30
  Is that a net positive for women?
• 4:32
  I, I think so.
• 4:34
  I mean, this is something that feminists have been thinking about for decades.
• 4:41
  They were, you know, gender roles have been crumbling for quite a long time.
• 4:45
  The traditional heterosexual households never was perfect for all, all households, of
• 4:51
  course, and it's become less and less of the norm.
• 4:55
  And if you think about, you know, the societies that were in, most of the, most of the goods
• 5:01
  that we get in terms of income, wealth, status, the opportunity to engage in, you know,
• 5:06
  meaningful social contributions, a lot of the goods of society do come from participation
• 5:12
  in the paid, in the paid market and the labor market.
• 5:17
  At the same time, that, of course, that work of raising the next generation and caring
• 5:21
  for people, that's an essential part of the economy too.
• 5:24
  But so long as that work, that really essential work in our current political economy is sort
• 5:30
  of mostly delegated to one sex rather than the other, it's really hard to see how you
• 5:36
  can get genuine equality.
• 5:38
  So to the extent that you have men doing more of that unpaid work, kind of, you know,
• 5:47
  just mixing things up a bit more, breaking down that old separation between the breadwinner
• 5:51
  and the homemaker, a lot of feminists have argued, look, we've done the sums.
• 5:55
  We've calculated that actually this is the only way that we can get to something that we
• 6:00
  can call gender equality.
• 6:02
  If we're all working 60 hour weeks in this precarious economy, you know, that's not going
• 6:07
  to work for obvious reasons.
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  If we just delegate it to mostly to women, they're going to be economically marginalized,
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  socially marginalized, politically marginalized, let's try and create an economy and work
• 6:20
  places where we recognize that people don't have, you know, your workers don't have a wife
• 6:26
  at home taking care of things and build that into our policies, into our norms, into the
• 6:32
  very way that we do work.
• 6:34
  And I think that has been happening, but, you know, it's a really slow process, obviously.
• 6:39
  Let me just interrogate a few of the things that you've articulated there, the first notable
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  one being that the homemaker is the person who is socially and politically marginalized,
• 6:49
  not just economically marginalized, right?
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  Let's grant that they're economically marginalized in Sephara's, the traditional deal was you only
• 6:58
  get compensated in Sephara's, you don't have to work, right?
• 7:00
  You don't get additional compensation on top of the fact that you get fed and housed
• 7:04
  and we split our income, but you don't have to work outside of the home.
• 7:11
  I've found, and I have a slightly unusual situation in that we're both males in my relationship,
• 7:16
  but I've found that most of, that after the first few years of having babies, once the
• 7:25
  kids started going to preschool and school, the vast bulk of our social and creative
• 7:33
  fulfillment has come from extra curricula, from non-work related sides of things.
• 7:39
  And if I had to choose which is the more emotionally flourishing and satisfying and fulfilling
• 7:48
  part of my life, it would probably be having beers and fish and chips at the bowling club
• 7:55
  on Friday afternoon with my kids, friends, parents, rather than hunkering away, trying to figure
• 8:02
  out how to make a podcast profitable. What's the resort to that?
• 8:08
  Yeah, so no disagreement from here. I mean, this is not at all, I think feminist are sometimes
• 8:15
  seen as denigrating that work of caring for family and that's not the case at all.
• 8:22
  That work that we do caring for our children, caring for our family, that is some of the
• 8:31
  most meaningful, one doesn't even want to call it work in a sense, obviously, that one
• 8:36
  that you can do, a lot of people do find a lot of joy and meaning and reward in that.
• 8:41
  But the casting of it as work is part of the critique against feminism, isn't it?
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  The sense that it somehow degrades the position to be like, well, it needs financial
• 8:53
  compensation because I guess there seems to be an implicit assumption that there's no reason
• 8:58
  why anyone in their right minds would ever raise a child or be part of a community,
• 9:02
  were they not paid by the government or somehow paid financially to do so?
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  Maybe there's a strand of feminist thought that thinks that it's just a kind of form of work
• 9:19
  like any other, but I think the point is rather that particularly once you have societies like
• 9:27
  our own, where you have high divorce rates, you have a fairly low fertility and you have
• 9:34
  long lives, when you have one group of people who are kind of, because they have devoted so much
• 9:44
  of their time and energy to that side of things that they're kind of now have limited options
• 9:51
  in the other side of things, that's going to put them in a difficult position.
• 9:56
  And when I say that there being kind of socially marginalized, I don't mean that they're doing
• 10:00
  something that is pointless or worthless. I mean, always the message of feminism has been that
• 10:05
  it's sort of taken, it's just sort of taken for granted, so we pay lip service to it being
• 10:09
  important, but that's sort of not necessarily reflected in other ways.
• 10:13
  Right, every politician gets up on the stump speech and says the hardest job in the world is
• 10:17
  being a mom and they get the applause and then they do nothing to make it easier.
• 10:22
  Yeah, but people still have to live. We have single mothers who are suffering very
• 10:30
  high rates of poverty and that's their children too. So even though they're doing this incredibly
• 10:35
  important job, they're not necessarily getting as much support for it as they should. But if you
• 10:40
  think about, yes, there are important things that one can do in the community, in terms of school
• 10:46
  or other kinds of church or whatever it might be, but a lot of what happens in society is
• 10:54
  happening at work, it's happening in workplaces, it's where the products are being created,
• 10:58
  it's where the services are being created. And when you have, you know, majority men or
• 11:05
  any particular group that it might be in leadership, that's what I mean by being socially marginalised,
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  you've got a lot of decisions, a lot of important decisions being made, resources being allocated,
• 11:16
  innovations happening, and if it's one group of people are not really
• 11:21
  particularly participating in that, that's the form of social marginalisation.
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  Also, the other aspect of it is that in our societies, it does tend to be through our work that we
• 11:31
  get, we get our status. So to the extent that we still have men who are dominating in positions
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  of authority and particularly in these industries like tech or finance that have become the most
• 11:45
  you know, the most powerful industries. That's, you know, that's where we get our status,
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  status from, and it's kind of maintaining the position of women as, as lower status,
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  lower status than men. So hopefully like that. Yes. And so if you were going, if you were trying
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  to transition from a world in which women were essentially forcibly excluded from the workforce
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  to one in which they had parity, not necessarily, you don't condone a 50-50 gender split in every
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  single, you know, you don't want women to be 50 percent of the offshore oil rig workforce
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  if they don't want to be, right? But, but, correct me if I'm wrong there, is that right?
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  I don't want to force people, I don't want to force people into jobs.
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  Like, there's going to be a natural division, right? So, yeah, so the ability to fulfil one's
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  aspirations presumably has to be the goal rather than the achievement of perfect parity in every
• 12:43
  profession. Then, is that, yeah, jump in? Oh, okay. Well, I suppose I would say that,
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  so I think this comes to a really important point because we have had this shift, right? So,
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  we had, we had the last century where it was taken for granted that certain kinds of jobs were
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  for men and certain kinds of jobs were for women. We then had the second wave feminist movement
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  that, you know, created sex discrimination laws and equal opportunity acts and so on. And it's
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  easy to forget how recent that is. I mean, I think in Australia, the Federal Sex Discrimination
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  Act was only passed in 1984 or something like that. So, you know, it's fairly, it's fairly recent.
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  And we've done, we've focused a lot on, you know, the various forms of discrimination in the workplace.
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  And I think, you know, a lot of people will say, yeah, look, we should definitely, you know,
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  if people, if women are being discriminated against and male-dominated organisations, we should,
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  you know, definitely get rid of that. But, you know, we've done a lot of work. We made a lot of
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  progress in that respect. And it's true, we really have, like, particularly in some areas, maybe less,
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  less so on others. But at a certain point, we have to explain these disparities to a
• 14:01
  significant degree in terms of the preferences, the assay is a bit of the aspirations that people have.
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  And, you know, of course, I agree, like I'm not saying that we should be out of the keynote saying,
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  sorry, you've got to be a physicist. You can be a nurse. Sorry, it's different numbers. Okay, I'm not
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  well, nurses and physicists would be okay. It's where you get to the male-over representation of
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  garbage men and soldiers and minors that I wouldn't want to be sent down there if I was a
• 14:31
  woman for a man, but carry on. Well, yeah. Well, look, I mean, I have to say, there are,
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  there are some, some kind of blue collar occupations where women did actually, there are kind of
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  dirty, dangerous jobs and women were trying to join us because they were paying reasonably well,
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  or better than the options available to them. And there was a lot of, you know, discrimination
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  and harassment against women who wanted to join those, join those jobs. What sort of things?
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  So, that would be kind of blue collar, the heavy industries and things and things like that.
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  Yeah. Didn't that change during the during wartime when all of a sudden women had to work in factories
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  in the 40s because there were no young men to man factories? Yeah, so, but I'm actually talking about
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  the, yeah, I talk about this 19, I think it was like the 1980s that there were these big sex
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  discrimination cases in places in the US. Yeah. But I think we, one thing that we have to look at
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  is also thinking about the fact that there are, there are preferences and our aspirations
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  don't come to us fully, fully formed. So, that's one of the things that I want to talk about,
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  that I talk about in the book, that we can, we can focus a lot on the, you know, the interactions
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  that we have in organizations and there's a lot of attention on that. For example,
• 15:51
  making sure that we try and eliminate sexual harassment or on conscious bias or gender biases
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  or all these kinds of things. But we also have these, we also have these preferences. So,
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  people are, people are quite right. So, people are making choices about what kind of occupations
• 16:05
  they want to pursue, what kind of trade-offs they want to make. And we don't want to kind of
• 16:11
  overrides people's preferences. But, you know, there's a, there's a, a philosopher called David
• 16:18
  Benatar has a really nice way of putting it. He, he wrote a quite a controversial book called
• 16:22
  the, the second sexism, which was actually about discrimination against men. And he was discussing
• 16:27
  affirmative action and he sort of generally against it for kind of various interesting reasons.
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  But he has a really nice way of putting it. He says that it's hard to know what to do when you have
• 16:39
  these preferences that people, that people hold. So, they make choices and they identify with
• 16:46
  these choices. They're not, you know, they're not feeling coerced in any kind of way. You know,
• 16:50
  when I look at my university and I work in an arts faculty, you know, nobody's sort of telling
• 16:57
  their kids, you have to, you know, these young women because it is female dominated. Like, you
• 17:01
  have to do an arts degree that sometimes you hear about parents saying, please do commerce. But,
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  you know, so people are being, it's very insulting. So people aren't being forced, you know,
• 17:11
  in our societies into these, into these roles, but they can still be these background influences
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  in the preferences that people form. So, you know, we're, we're always developing our sense of
• 17:23
  self and part of that self is our sense of ourselves as a boy or a girl or a man or a woman.
• 17:29
  And we know how, you know, these, these identities of course, there's lots of room for
• 17:35
  individuality, but these identities are layered with culturally shared meanings. We can't just
• 17:41
  make up for ourselves what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. We know how
• 17:46
  variable these, these understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman or a father or
• 17:52
  a mother are, you know, they're changing across time and we, you know, we talked about masculinity
• 17:57
  as changing and they're these sort of competing ideas of what it means to be a man at play.
• 18:02
  So, you know, if we're, if we, if we still have a situation where, you know, the, the cultural
• 18:10
  meanings of what it means to be a man and a woman are still creating a situation in which we have,
• 18:16
  you know, men have higher status and they have more power over all, you know, various resources
• 18:21
  collectively as a group. Then we also, we can't just sort of say, okay, job's done, we have six
• 18:27
  discrimination act now. Everything's, everything's fine. What we do about that, because you say we
• 18:33
  don't want to start doing brainwashing or anything like that, what we do about it is a tricky,
• 18:37
  it's really tricky, right? And this was Benatar's point, he was saying, it just doesn't make sense
• 18:43
  to have affirmative action because in a different society with different gender influences, more
• 18:49
  women would have wanted to be mathematicians or whatever it might be, right? But we can still
• 18:54
  recognize that these influences are, are shaping who we are and the preferences that we have,
• 19:00
  even when we identify with them. Yeah, I mean, this is a perennial problem, isn't it, about not just in
• 19:05
  in terms of sex roles and gender roles, but also in economics and, I mean, Marx talked about
• 19:11
  the false consciousness of the proletariat and lots of progressives in the United States and
• 19:16
  Europe are tearing their hair out about why working class people are voting for aristocrats who
• 19:23
  are populists, you know, who say the right things about social and cultural issues, but then
• 19:28
  actually screw them on economics and it's hard to know when you can, when you think you can see
• 19:34
  someone making a fault, an incorrect choice or a choice that is influenced by a whole bunch of
• 19:40
  assumptions that they've inherited from their culture, it's difficult to know at what point to try
• 19:45
  to disabuse them of that and at what point to just say, well, if the stupid proletarian wants to
• 19:53
  vote for policy that just get him a cheaper flat screen television set, then maybe that is a
• 19:59
  desire, even if that desire is driven by a consumerist culture that in an ideal world we wouldn't
• 20:05
  live in. Yeah, I think, I think, I think I'm saying probably something slightly, slightly different
• 20:11
  than that. I mean, I think I'm not saying that people are making errors in the preferences that
• 20:15
  they have or that they're in some sense behaving irrationally. I think, you know, people are,
• 20:20
  people are developing their preferences in the world as it is, as opposed to the world as maybe
• 20:25
  some of us might wish that it were and there's nothing necessarily very, very irrational about that,
• 20:32
  so I don't, I'm not saying that people are making errors, I'm just saying that people's
• 20:37
  preferences and their sense of themselves and the experiences that they have that become part
• 20:41
  of their understanding of what they might be good at and what they might enjoy, these are all,
• 20:46
  these are all shaped times. Well, they might not, they might not be making, they might not be making
• 20:50
  an individual error, but I think you must be suggesting that they're making a collective error
• 20:54
  of some kind, otherwise it wouldn't need regressing. I've collected error. You know what I mean? Like,
• 21:00
  I'm, I'm, I'm using the analogy of the, of the working class person who votes against their
• 21:05
  interest as a way of teasing out, you know, that, that may be an example in which we ascribe
• 21:12
  greater culpability to the person for being a buffoon, but I think still implicit in your critique
• 21:17
  is the belief that there is something impure about the preferences that we claim to think are
• 21:27
  coming from a place of nowhere, that they're not coming from a place of nowhere, that we are in
• 21:30
  some cases being misled about whether or not a male is necessarily better suited to a STEM
• 21:36
  profession and a woman is necessarily better suited to nursing. Okay. Um, yeah. So I think there's,
• 21:42
  there's a few things going on from there. So first of all, I think there's a distinction between
• 21:47
  saying that there's something impure about the preferences that people have formed that, you know,
• 21:51
  I go against what I would prefer them to prefer as a, as a feminist. Um, and the idea that,
• 21:58
  the, the stories or the narrative or the explanations that we have as to why those preferences
• 22:03
  are made. So, you know, not so long ago, when scientists actually were, were, were exploring gender
• 22:10
  development, they were looking at these gender roles, you know, that the girl would grow up and be
• 22:15
  the, the haskeeper and if she had a job, it would be a little job and, you know, she would care
• 22:20
  about her appearance and she would have keeper, you know, all this old-fashioned stuff, right,
• 22:24
  opposite for, for, for boys. And they took it for granted that these were kind of just, these
• 22:29
  were social, social roles that, that children had to be socialized into. And then in the sort of,
• 22:37
  in the 70s and 80s, sort of two, two conflicting, um, uh, two sort of, um, changes were occurring
• 22:47
  in the scientific and political context. So first of all, there are more women joining,
• 22:53
  you know, sciences, biologists and psychologists and so on to the rise of women and they were
• 22:57
  a lot, some of them were feminists and they were saying, you know, what do you mean that it's
• 23:00
  the natural, you know, it's the rightful role of women to be, do this and men to do that. So,
• 23:04
  they were challenging this idea that we should be socializing people into boys and girls,
• 23:09
  into these gender roles. And then there was growing interest in the role of, um, biological
• 23:15
  influences on sex role behavior. And so on, on the other side, people saying, well, you know,
• 23:19
  it's not just about socialization, you also have to look at, um, biological influences.
• 23:24
  And the two kind of got connected in the scientific literature. So they started to look at, um,
• 23:29
  you know, investigate whether there are biological influences onto what previously have been
• 23:34
  understood as socially constructive roles. So I think what I'm saying here is there's,
• 23:39
  there's a difference between saying, look, we say that these preferences are given to us by
• 23:45
  biology. That's a sort of explanation for the preferences that we have, but they're just sort of
• 23:50
  in there, they're now being freely expressed. And that's a scientific question. And that's
• 23:55
  bit different to saying that there's something somehow wrong or impure or rational about the
• 24:00
  preferences that people have. I mean, the way that if you think about the gender system in,
• 24:07
  in many ways, it's, you know, it's set up to reward gender conformity and to punish gender
• 24:14
  non-conformity. And so people are making their decisions, you know, in that context.
• 24:21
  Yes, of course. I mean, yeah, I'm not inviting you to, you know, blame people. I think
• 24:26
  they're just to clarify. The point that I'm trying to point to is a position that would say to
• 24:34
  the extent that gender differences are biological. We are not responsible for them. And it's
• 24:40
  probably futile to fight them. And there is this kind of school of thought of evolution,
• 24:44
  in evolutionary biology, especially in the manosphere, right? This is a kind of a Jordan Peterson
• 24:50
  attitude, which says, there are fundamental differences and we fight them at our peril. And if you
• 24:54
  gave everybody the, the, you know, it wouldn't matter what society or culture you were in or what
• 25:00
  era, if you gathered a thousand males in a room and you gathered a thousand females in a room and
• 25:05
  you gave them all the option of either taking a part of machine and putting the widgets back together
• 25:09
  again or sitting around with a family that has, you know, family issues and trying to resolve
• 25:15
  those issues, you would find a greater preponderance of the widget putter together as in the male cohort
• 25:20
  and a greater preponderance of the therapists in the female cohort and that there's something
• 25:24
  biological about that to do with the female aptitude for compassion and the male aptitude for
• 25:30
  widgets or something like that, right? There would be that. Then if you come along and say,
• 25:35
  hang on, that's bullshit because there is no, there is no blank slate universe in which we
• 25:40
  can test this hypothesis on people who haven't been acculturated in a, in a sexist environment and
• 25:46
  it may be the case that boys are taught to like widgets and girls are taught to have feelings
• 25:51
  and so on. In that latter case, I think is where you start coming up against this challenge of
• 25:57
  sort of false consciousness, right? Like if it occurs to the boy that what he, that he gets happy
• 26:04
  when he gets the widget and it occurs to the girl that she gets happy when she becomes a therapist
• 26:10
  which women are massively overrepresented in, then don't we bump up against a challenge of
• 26:18
  what does it mean to say that those desires are illusory or contaminated?
• 26:24
  I think it's the, I don't think the desires are illusory or contaminated, so I don't think
• 26:31
  people are going round in a state of false consciousness about this. So is the problem,
• 26:36
  is the problem simply that it then leads to a, an economy in which one group has more power?
• 26:44
  Yeah, it's a, it's a bat.
• 26:45
  Okay, so like, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, so basically where's the problem, like the question
• 26:56
  is where's the problem if you have a society in which, you know, women are doing the things that
• 27:01
  women like doing and men are doing the things that men like doing. All right, okay, good. Yeah, so,
• 27:06
  okay, so the problem is, okay, if you buy the Jordan Peterson argument and it's not just him,
• 27:13
  you know, there were, there were, you know, some mainstream evolutionary psychologists or economists
• 27:19
  who would, who would, who would put forward this point of view as well, that we have these sort
• 27:27
  of true natural preferences. And if we've, we've realized them in our modern societies,
• 27:33
  where we have maximum freedom. And if we try and change that, if those families,
• 27:39
  down feminists come in and start tinkering with it, we're either going to fail because we can't
• 27:44
  go against people just like, sorry, I just want to be a therapist, I'm not going to tinker with
• 27:48
  your widget. Or we will succeed. It sounds dirtier than we intended it to be tinkering with tinkering
• 27:55
  with people's widgets. This is a family program. All right, so that's, so that's one,
• 28:02
  another honorable profession, might we say, and the very old and venerable profession tinkering
• 28:07
  with widgets? Now I've lost my train of thought. Sorry. If you hold that scientific point of view,
• 28:15
  then yes, there isn't, there isn't a problem. If you think actually, it's not that gender has
• 28:23
  gone away since the battle days when we had women's jobs and men's jobs, it's just kind of evolved
• 28:29
  into a different form where we're still, gender is still very much part of our identities and
• 28:36
  our self-concepts. I mean, people on Kaisep and Sarah are almost obsessed with gender at the
• 28:41
  moment to become, you know, a really cool part of people's sense of self or at least in some
• 28:47
  groups. They would say, look, we have these influences and we know, we know from the fact that
• 28:54
  the differences in how many women think, feel and behave and the kinds of roles that they do
• 28:59
  are so diverse and they are so variable across time and place that we know these things,
• 29:03
  influence people's preferences. Then there's kind of a problem when those preferences are
• 29:11
  creating a society in which yes, there's one group who are, you know, in charge only all the
• 29:20
  enjoying the majority of the positions of status and authority, have more power for resources
• 29:25
  and the other group are, you know, to come back to the conversation we're having before,
• 29:29
  being economically vulnerable because they're doing the unpaid labour and, you know, not
• 29:35
  socially marginalised as well. And of course, men are also missing out. I mean, you, you know,
• 29:40
  as you rightly pointed out, there are lots of joys from that time with family and men are missing
• 29:47
  out on it. I mean, I actually had a colleague who described time at home with small children,
• 29:53
  he had a wonderful way. So it's like an opera. It's like lots of boring restitative and then the
• 29:57
  occasional Arya. So I think we can, you know, we can be a bit too, too sort of joy,
• 30:02
  misty-eyed about, you know, a lot of, you know, you know, I presume that a lot of, you know,
• 30:07
  taking care of small children, it's like, it's hard work. I hated it. I hated the first few years,
• 30:11
  was gruelling, yeah. But I love having, I'm a minor 7 now, so they're fun. Yeah, yeah,
• 30:15
  a little people now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so we can say, look, and actually this is, we can say,
• 30:22
  look, we've, we've created a situation. We have these sort of background influences that are
• 30:29
  acting on us as individuals. They're in our interactions. They're embedded in our institutions
• 30:34
  in the way that we code jobs in a sort of gendered way. That are, that are creating, that are
• 30:39
  contributing to these patterns. And we can, you know, we can set aside the question of to what extent
• 30:44
  they're biological influence, which I've spent a lot of time looking at and see skeptical of
• 30:50
  the sort of Jordan Peterson arguments. And we can think about, can we get gender equality
• 30:57
  through this, through these arrangements? And I'm thinking of gender equality in a very broad
• 31:03
  way, not just about, you know, gender pay gap and seats on boards, but in this broad sense of
• 31:08
  well-being, you know, do you have access to be able to care for your family? Are you able to
• 31:14
  engage in paid work and meaningful products? Are you able to get educators and user education
• 31:19
  in that work? Are you physically safe? Are you mentally safe? Do you get respect and so on, right?
• 31:24
  And you can, my argument is, you know, some, some ways women are doing better than men, some ways
• 31:31
  men are doing than women are overall, but part of the ways in which people are not
• 31:37
  available to access well-being, which is massively impacted by the work that we do, is because we
• 31:44
  still are kind of stuck in this sort of modified version of the breadwinner home. Make a situation,
• 31:52
  and we do have industries and occupations and leadership positions that are, that are male-dominated,
• 32:00
  and that's not, that's sort of undermining of well-being for everyone. It's not just about women,
• 32:05
  but it is a situation in which women do end up with less status, less, less power.
• 32:11
  I want to come back to the home and the gender roles in the home, because that interests me,
• 32:16
  but just because you just mentioned, the, the, the, the, the, earth of women in leadership positions,
• 32:21
  I just want to address that. So if you were going to transition from a world in which women
• 32:28
  were disempowered to one in which they had equal opportunities, there would be a period during which
• 32:35
  the old judges and CEOs and world leaders would still be male. So it, it does strike a lot of
• 32:43
  people as disingenuous. I think a lot of guys as disingenuous when they hear statistics about how
• 32:50
  few Supreme Court justices and like senior senators and greatest people in professions which
• 32:59
  took 40 years for them to get there, a male. When you look at the fact that the majority of
• 33:05
  college graduates are female and girls are doing so much better at school and boys drop out of
• 33:10
  high school at 40% higher rates than females do and females dominate in a number of very
• 33:16
  lucrative professions of the future in terms of their graduation rates. And so in, in terms of
• 33:21
  if you look at veterinarians or pharmacists or, you know, public relations people, there are
• 33:27
  kinds of industries which are massively female dominated. When I was at the ABC, my senior producer was
• 33:33
  a woman, my junior producer was a woman, my boss was a woman, her boss was a man, but his boss
• 33:38
  was a woman, the chairman of the company was a woman. You would expect there to be a period of
• 33:43
  transition time. So it can sound a bit, when we talk about like the lack of women in sea suites,
• 33:47
  it can sound a little bit like, you know, if, if Mormons had always been banned from, I don't know,
• 33:53
  playing pickleball and all of a sudden you let them into play pickleball, you would expect
• 33:57
  there to be a period of time when the greats, the best pickleball players of all time and like
• 34:03
  the Hall of Famers still lacked Mormons. But if you tried to make the Hall of Famers equal,
• 34:10
  then that would mean basically no one who wasn't a Mormon would ever get anything for the duration
• 34:15
  of the transition period. Does that make sense? You're saying we just have to be patient and
• 34:22
  well, yeah, well, yeah, being patient sounds a little bit glib looking at the input to the
• 34:28
  pipeline. And if that's, if that is egalitarian, then the rest will absolutely sort itself out.
• 34:35
  Otherwise, you would just have to never promote a male in any, and this is happening. I mean,
• 34:39
  I have male friends who are in middle to senior management who because of the,
• 34:45
  the, you know, equity and inclusion and diversity policies of their big multinational
• 34:50
  corporations have absolutely no prospect of promotion because there's no way that they can
• 34:55
  get to the 30% female senior management that they've put as a target by 2030 if any male at all gets
• 35:02
  promoted. Yeah. So, I mean, I think, I think targets and quizzes are a difficult philosophical
• 35:11
  position, you know, I feel, I have become sort of increasingly ambivalent about those things.
• 35:22
  I think there, there's a lot of thought that needs to go into whether you engage in those really
• 35:31
  strong forms of affirmative action. I mean, just to clarify, I wouldn't say that then this is the
• 35:38
  where necessarily talking about the same thing. So a target or a quota, I think could be totally
• 35:43
  justified if you're talking about an input phase of an industry, like you might, I think it's a
• 35:48
  separate, I think there might be two questions, right? One might be would it be legitimate to
• 35:52
  require a company to have a 30% at your minimum 30 or 40 or 50% female intake into its internship
• 36:01
  into its junior internship program? That might be a question about diversity and quotas.
• 36:06
  And you might have one answer about that, but you might have a different answer about whether or not
• 36:10
  senior management or the justices on a court, you know, or CEOs or prime ministers or senators
• 36:21
  should be equal, because it takes 30 years to get enough, you know, to get the qualifications to
• 36:28
  do those positions. So I think the quota question is distinct from whether or not we regard it as
• 36:35
  being a burning issue of gender justice that women are underrepresented as judges.
• 36:45
  Yeah, look, like as long as women are overrepresented as lawyers, they're going to end up being
• 36:49
  overrepresented as judges. Well, I'm not 100% sure that that's true. I mean, what you what you
• 36:56
  tend to see is that even in, even in sort of industries where it's female dominated at the entry
• 37:05
  level, you still see this tapering, tapering off as you, as you get to the top. How do you think that
• 37:11
  happens? What, what's our explanation for that? If that were going to continue.
• 37:18
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• 37:23
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