empowerment, equality and truth

Several excellent recent studies show that, paradoxically, as a society becomes more egalitarian, the gender gap in occupational choice becomes wider, not narrower. A case in point: A study published last month in Psychological Science, by the psychologists David Geary and Gijsbert Stoet, looked at the academic performance of nearly half a million adolescents from 67 countries. What they found was that the more gender equal a country was, as determined by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, the fewer women ultimately took up STEM paths in college. Countries with the most robust legal and cultural protections for gender equality - along with the strongest social safety nets - such as Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and Finland, have the fewest female STEM graduates, weighing in at about 20 percent of the total (the U.S. has 24 percent). In contrast, countries with almost no protections, with few guarantees for women and where life satisfaction is low - such as Algeria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Albania - had by far the highest representation of women in STEM, approaching the researchers’ estimates of 41 percent, based on how well girls do in math and science in high school, without considering their other skills. Another study showing this paradoxical effect, from 2008, was led by David Schmitt. He and his colleagues found that gender differences in personality are way larger in cultures that offer more egalitarian gender roles and opportunities. This is not what one would predict if men’s and women’s preferences were exclusively constrained by cultural forces.

Brian Gallagher - Why Women Choose Differently At Work

Power exposes your true character. It releases inhibitions and sets your inner self free. If you’re a jerk when you gain power, you’ll become more of one. If you’re a mensch, you’ll get nicer.

Matthew Hutson - Why Power Brings Out Your True Self

Empowerment does not lead to equality. On the contrary, the freedom it unleashes removes all (population-level and individual-level) artificial constraints and surfaces the true inequalities of nature. Populations break out of unnatural distributions and individuals break free of societal expectations.

PS: For more on the true inequalities of nature read myth of equality and ethics as linearization.