You go, girl!

From Slate, on why there isn't gender parity in the upper echelons of the business world: here.

The thesis is that a miasma of unconscious bias erodes women's ambition.

Ick. Ick, ick, ick. I don't know why I've become so averse to the "unconscious bias" hypothesis, but recently nothing pleases me more than to spend an afternoon inveighing vigorously against it.

Here are my objections: "Ambition" is defined entirely too narrowly, from an evolutionary perspective. Women ARE ambitious---Hrdy is very good on this---in the sense that they are motivated to achieve particular sorts of status and acquire particular kinds of resources. But the female reproductive strategy is different from the male---all caveats about environment apply here---"ambition" is going to look very different between the sexes. Women are ambitious to achieve social status in a network that preserves social relationships---social relationships that will allocate resources to her offspring; this is the "Queen Bee" phenomenon. They will undermotivated to achieve the kind of social status that destroys or attenuates relationships with other people; conversely, men will be overmotivated in precisely this way---destroying rivals, not cultivating them---and also will be more strongly motivated to acquire material resources (or its proxies) in order to win mates.

I think this hypothesis is supported by the fact that girls' ambition changes right around puberty---when, crucially, they are STILL outperforming boys in school, so the unconscious bias hypothesis is les convincing.

I don't know what to make of the "stereotype threat" research: what is the mechanism? (And I love how the author dismisses the neurobiology in a single sentence, but devotes paragraphs to stereotype threat.) Can it really by so robust a phenomenon if it can be corrected with nothing more than anodyne happy talk? Okay then: you go, girl! Now go forth and achieve at rates precisely parous to men. That should do the trick, right?

(I was also surprised that there was no talk of the "mommy track"---this seems to me an important issue.)