The obvious counterpoint is that this argument implicitly describes a world in which all women that would be excluded from the workplace could be replaced by men.
That isn’t necessarily true, though. Imagine that an average woman has a net negative effect and an exceptional woman has a net positive effect. Then you should hold women to higher standards without excluding them completely.
I would be royally pissed if someone attributed to me a Seductive, Whiny Essence; that would be a patently inaccurate statement to no virtuous end, and more, it would do my world harm.
They’re not attributing it to you specifically; they’re attributing it as a statistical property to a class that includes you.
Then you should hold women to higher standards without excluding them completely.
So, historically this is somewhat similar to what happened—if a woman managed to get some sort of advocate / ally, she had limited access to the scientific / mathematical world as a scientist or mathematician. (Getting access to that world by hosting a salon was the typical path women would take, but that would put them much more in a support role.) But it had clear inefficiencies—Emmy Noether was unable to get a professorship in Germany, for example, and then even in America taught at a women’s college, despite being a clearly first-rate mathematician.
One partial solution is to have some procedure by which Noether is declared an honorary man, and then gets full access. It is interesting to try to figure out how much of the distance this would cross between how things actually were and the ideal case, for varying strength of filtering. One can also imagine this smoothly progressing from a minor, reversible change to the ideal case, but because of that one can also see the slippery slope arguments that would have defeated it (since probably someone thought of this at the time).
(Whenever this subject comes up and we talk about people who managed to get around restrictions, it’s probably also important to talk about people who couldn’t get around those restrictions, not because of their ability but because of the economics or power dynamics involved. Noether had trouble getting paid for doing math, but it’s cheap to do math; Jennie Cobb could find jobs flying planes but it’s not cheap to go to space.)
That isn’t necessarily true, though. Imagine that an average woman has a net negative effect and an exceptional woman has a net positive effect. Then you should hold women to higher standards without excluding them completely.
They’re not attributing it to you specifically; they’re attributing it as a statistical property to a class that includes you.
So, historically this is somewhat similar to what happened—if a woman managed to get some sort of advocate / ally, she had limited access to the scientific / mathematical world as a scientist or mathematician. (Getting access to that world by hosting a salon was the typical path women would take, but that would put them much more in a support role.) But it had clear inefficiencies—Emmy Noether was unable to get a professorship in Germany, for example, and then even in America taught at a women’s college, despite being a clearly first-rate mathematician.
One partial solution is to have some procedure by which Noether is declared an honorary man, and then gets full access. It is interesting to try to figure out how much of the distance this would cross between how things actually were and the ideal case, for varying strength of filtering. One can also imagine this smoothly progressing from a minor, reversible change to the ideal case, but because of that one can also see the slippery slope arguments that would have defeated it (since probably someone thought of this at the time).
(Whenever this subject comes up and we talk about people who managed to get around restrictions, it’s probably also important to talk about people who couldn’t get around those restrictions, not because of their ability but because of the economics or power dynamics involved. Noether had trouble getting paid for doing math, but it’s cheap to do math; Jennie Cobb could find jobs flying planes but it’s not cheap to go to space.)