This has been a bad summer for the whiz-bang TED set. First Jonah Lehrer falls, then Fareed Zakaria, and now sociologist Philip N. Cohen takes Hanna Rosin to task for her wildly misleading TED talk. Basically, it seems that Rosin cobbled together a bunch of bogus or exaggerated statistics to come up with what Cohen calls “the myth of looming female dominance”:
There is a TED talk featuring Hanna Rosin from the end of 2010, and I finally got around to watching it. Without doing a formal calculation, I would say that “most” of the statistics she uses in this talk are either wrong or misinterpreted to exaggerate the looming approach of female dominance. For example, she says that the majority of “managers” are now women, but the image on the slide which flashes by briefly refers to “managers and professionals.” Professionals includes nurses and elementary school teachers. Among managers themselves, women do represent a growing share (although not a majority, and the growth has slowed considerably), but they remain heavily segregated as I have shown here.
Rosin further reports that “young women” are earning more than “young men.” This statistic, which has been going around for a few years now, in fact refers to single, child-free women under age 30 and living in metropolitan areas. That is an interesting statistic, but used in this way is simply a distortion. (See this post for a more thorough discussion, with links.)
Rosin also claims that “70% of fertility clinic patients” prefer to have a female birth. In her own article in the Atlantic, Rosin reports a similar number for one (expensive, rare) method of sex selection only (with no source offered) — but of course the vast majority of fertility clinic patients are not using sex selection techniques. In fact, in her own article she writes, “Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls.”
Finally, I don’t think I need to offer statistics to address such claims as women are “taking control of everything”and “starting to dominate” among “doctors, lawyers, bankers, accountants.” These are just made up. Congress is 17% female.
This is what is happening to public debate: Religious and moral considerations are disparaged in favor of the finding of science, which, far from telling us what to do, is twisted in order to tell us whatever its interpreters were hoping to hear. Rosin and those like her ought to be loudly, publicly shamed for their abuse of science and of their undeserved cultural authority.
August 14th, 2012 | 2:50 pm
Religious and moral considerations are disparaged in favor of the finding of science, which, far from telling us what to do, is twisted in order to tell us whatever its interpreters were hoping to hear.
Either science needs to evolve or we do.
Right now, science is on its way to becoming meaningless, because fact is being freely confused with opinion, values, beliefs, and desires.
Hardly anyone realizes that studies are invariably “conditional” – that is, they give us information, but that information is only meaningful if it is understood within a strict context. Too many people don’t know how to defend themselves against people who, out of ignorance or malice, reduce scientifically gathered observations into unsupported partisan assertions – either X is clearly, obviously, self-evidently true (don’t read the fine print), or the study that gives us X is clearly, obviously, self-evidently crooked (because if you read the fine print you find that there are caveats and limitations – therefore, we are told, the whole study should be disqualified, because otherwise people might take it as representing “truth”).
August 14th, 2012 | 6:16 pm
The average citizen only knows enough science to know that they should trust the “experts.” Thus, if you can define who the experts are (which is basically what TED does), then you can define the “facts.”
August 14th, 2012 | 6:36 pm
This is fun stuff. Women dominate everything. Resistance is futile.
Next up on TED: Babies most powerful people in the world. They bend all to their wills. Resistance? Futile.
August 15th, 2012 | 9:51 am
Blake –
I’d say “we” need to get a better handle on ‘degrees of confidence’. Some things are well-established, some things are probable, some are tentative. Accurately distinguishing between those is the trick.
August 16th, 2012 | 4:19 am
I don’t know about all the statistics, but the cultural ascendance of women isn’t something imagined. The best seller lists have been dominated by books targeted to women over the past few years, more women do attend college and church, and women in general seem to be handling the knowledge economy slightly better than men at equivalent levels.
She may have had bad or incomplete social science, but I think she’s on to something that pointing out flaws in this specific methodology can’t erase.
August 17th, 2012 | 12:16 pm
I’d say “we” need to get a better handle on ‘degrees of confidence’. Some things are well-established, some things are probable, some are tentative. Accurately distinguishing between those is the trick.
Yes, and that is exactly why science needs to evolve.
Right now, it uses the same language to describe things in all these categories – thus the minute a group of scientists come to a consensus on something, it is just as “well-established” as something that has been proven through hundreds of years of practical application – but just because the scientific community uses language that suggests a thing is proven beyond dispute doesn’t mean it is, and it doesn’t mean they’ll accept responsibility when their “proven beyond dispute” factoid turns out to be responsible for lots of bad things happening.
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