Setup

If I had to name one area where I think modern feminism is lacking I would say that it has almost no vision for what a just society looks like, if the sexes differ in some significant way.

Assumption 1. Lets start with the simple assumption that some innate, biological sex differences exist. Say the only differences are:

Men are physically stronger than women
All the usual anatomical differences, Genitalia, Womb, breasts
Men are more physically violent
Women are more maternal than men are paternal

The first three should be self explanatory, to expand on the last difference what I mean is that I’ll assume women enjoy caring for children (especially their own) more than men. All else being equal women will, on average, choose to spend more time with their children than men.

Now to make some more assumptions about this society. Assumption 2. I will imagine that this society starts out very patriarchal, similar to the real world at the start of the 20th century or earlier. Almost all heads of state are men, men have much more power than women, laws actively discriminate against women. Then maybe through some feminist struggle, or a general shifting of opinion patriarchy end. Women receive all the rights of men, they are allowed to vote, own property etc.

Prediction 1. Now what will happen in this world? There will be different transition dynamics for different areas of life. Some changes will happen immediately; women will use their right to vote straight away, in the first election held after the regime change approximately as many women will vote as men. Other areas naturally take longer to adapt. The fraction of female surgeons will take at least as many years as it takes to train a surgeon to equalize.

Prediction 2 A second prediction is that for a while women will focus more on working, as opposed to raising children than they will in the long run. This is individually rational for women if they enjoy non-monotony (in economic terms have a convex utility function for time spent on some activity). We can imagine a women who would like to spend 50% of hear life working and 50% raising children, if she has been forced to raise children her whole life, once these laws are abolished it shouldn’t be surprising if she spends more than 50% of her time working, for a while.

A similar phenomenon has been observed after the fall of the berlin wall. People in the GDR were able to raise children about as well as people in the west, but were unable to travel to Paris and Italy. Once the wall fell there was a substantial but short lived decline in births in the GDR, for a couple years people took holidays instead of having children.

Assumption 3. For simplicity I will assume the effect of women being more maternal is approximately uniform across industries. In this world 70% of Architects are men, as are 70% of politicians, or lawyers, taxi drivers, poets or pilots.

So for a while I’d expect women to use their newly gained freedoms and work a lot. But eventually the steady state would be reached and most jobs would be dominated by men. Now we get to the normative side, is this state of affairs adequate, is it just, efficient?

Normative questions

This depends on some crucial facts. Do men have conscious or implicit biases? Conscious bias would be if men actively legislate to help men, male filmmakers actively make films that favour men somehow. Implicit bias would be men doing this accidentally. A comity that’s 70% male might accidentally fund more drugs that treat male problems than female problems.

A world with conscious or implicit bias wouldn’t be just or efficient. Even if most women want to be home raising children, this world would need women to take up the fight and either make sure important positions are gender balanced, or make sure biases are somehow counteracted.

So we can further flesh out what happens in this imagined world. For first 30 years or so women use their newfound rights to become very politically and economically active. Half of all politicians and industry leaders are female. But eventually this subsides, too many women prefer beig at home with their children. Most areas become male dominated. Maybe 80 years after the first feminist revolution, enough people realize that many biases exist and start demanding and fighting for change. In the worst case scenario we can only overcome the biases by having women be as politically and economically active as men, lots of women have to work more that they want to, but realistically this society could create a sort of women’s council that safeguards against biases and keeps the men in check.

So we have reached our steady state world now, it’s main characteristics are:

Most jobs and positions of power are around 70% male
More women then men are at home caring for their children
There is a women’s counsel that checks if decisions are unfairly biased against women and reprimands decisionmakers if this is the case. This counsel is successful and on average institutions aren’t biased against men or women.

I would describe this society as just as well as efficient. Intuitively this seems like the sort of society feminists should strive towards in a world with sex differences.

Connection to our real world

I feel like many feminists are ideologically opposed to even considering the possibility that important sex differences might exist. I can understand why, sex differences have been used to discriminate against women in the past. But ultimately we have to come to terms with reality. If significant innate sex differences exist we should try to understand what they are and how to deal with them.