Are women better leaders than men?

A Response to Dean Withers

Jubilee specializes in videos where a single political ideologue faces a panel of 20 people from the opposing camp. The latest video included Dean Withers being challenged by 20 obnoxious MAGA women. Much like the video with Dave Rubin and Mehdi Hassan being challenged by so called “far-right”, the video was complete optics Holocaust for the right, ironically proving the Dean Wither’s negative premise which is that women suck at politics.

Now, I’m not going to be reviewing the video, the damage it caused is immense and frankly there is nothing important these women have uttered which would warrant a proper deconstruction. The only argument they’ve proven is that we need less women in politics.

Unlike the MAGA women in the video, who came across as confused and unprepared, Dean Withers predictably came out on top. Millions of people watched him, and many were convinced. That’s exactly why he’s worth responding to.

I’m not going to pick apart every point he made, though he got quite a few things factually wrong. Instead, I want to focus on the early portion of the video in which he proclaimed that “men are not better at leading than women”. The reason I want to respond to this in specific is because he dishonestly brought up numerous lines of evidence in support of the unstated (and his actual) claim which is that women are better at leading than men.

In other words, he was defending the thesis that there is a natural equality between the sexes when it comes to leadership skills, but all of his “evidence” pointed out to women actually being better at leading than men.

In the class of logic, if I were to defend a thesis that a population A is equal in a specific trait to population B I would proceed to prove that:

1. The performance of population A is identical to the performance of population B on that particular trait under examination.

OR

2. Show that A outperforms B in some measurable contexts while B outperforms A in other measurable contexts which leads to the conclusion that two populations are comparatively similar.

Because (1) is virtually impossible to prove usually feminists dishonestly cherry-picking their way to defend the (2) second proposition but because Dean Withers is a modern Woke feminist he decided to jump to the (3) third proposition instead! What is the third proposition?

3. Show exclusively that B outperforms A across every metric examined, while presenting zero evidence of A outperforming B in any context and then declare that A and B are equal while subconsciously everyone would conclude that B is superior.

This is the standard tactic of left-wing racial identity politics in which the left explicitly proclaims it believes in equality but implicitly makes the argument for White inferiority and the superiority of non-Whites through media, culture and legislation.

If reality is that Black and Brown men commit a disproportionate amount of rapes and violent crime, the left blames it on White men instead while explicitly stating that there are no group differences in crime.

But regardless of Dean’s dishonesty, the arguments themselves still deserve examination. Because if women genuinely are superior leaders, then an honest truth-seeker has an obligation to report that, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes him. I do not get to dismiss evidence simply because I dislike where it points. That would make me no different from the left-wing ideologues like Dean Withers.

One of the central claims by Dean Withers is that men are more emotional than women because they are violent aka responsible for 93% of all the murders.

First of all, violence is just one aspect of emotion, while men are indeed disproportionately likely to be violent offenders, men are also more likely to support punishing violent offenders with death penalty.

And since violence is an emotion, so is neuroticism, shame, fear and disgust. I explicitly did not mention empathy because it makes women feel good about themselves, but the reality is that neuroticism, shame, fear and other emotions in which women are higher than men are bad emotions and while a minority of men do commit violent crime or abuse their family members, a majority of women experience these negative emotions that are not predisposing them to leadership roles.

Of course, none of the women on the show have brought that up which is not surprising considering that women’s general knowledge and political knowledge in particular is catastrophically low!

Also just a question… Would you let a person lead you if they don’t know what the hell they’re supposed to lead you in? I certainly wouldn’t.

Anyways, if you are curious if men are comparatively emotional than women are no. Women are far-more emotional across the board, because they experience greater emotional intensity, including anger.

[Percentages of men and women who show target emotional facial behaviours (top), mean levels of change from baseline in self-reports of emotion for men and women (middle), and mean levels of change from baseline in skin conductance for men and women (bottom). AN 0/Anger, DI 0/ Disgust, SA 0/Sadness, HA 0/Happiness, PR 0/Pride, and LO 0/Love. ND 0/Non-Duchenne or smiles. *p B/.05.]

Most crucially, is that all of these emotions constantly interplay with each other and make women less resilient to stressful conditions which is what matters for leadership skills, your ability to overcome stress.

Anyways, in the alternative universe of Dean Withers, he goes on to spew more nonsense as if it is already proven beyond shadow of a doubt that men are more emotional than women because they are more violent than women.

His explanation for the essentialist female superiority at controlling their emotions better than men (I kid you not), is because they can give childbirth. Funny enough, he even managed to get fact-checked by Jubilee!

Then Dean Withers also claimed that men’s natural overrepresentation in leadership positions like CEOs are because of societal pressures and not because of innate biological ability. He cited the fact that despite there being much fewer female surgeons, patients undergoing a surgery by a female had lower risks of complications.

I immediately decided to fact-check the claim using a large US study conducted on the topic, and yes, females surgeons were treated patients better by a few percentage points. However the male-female difference in neuroticism is much larger! And most importantly, how the hell are we supposed to reconcile women being slightly better than men at surgeries to women leading men across the board and especially among CEOs?

One may as well interpret this finding as saying that because women display greater empathy than men they are more careful during surgery, but consequently the same would not have been true in jobs requiring strong resistance to disgust or jobs in which fear or shame plays a factor.

If I were Dean Withers and I wanted to make an argument as to why females are better than males at leadership, I would go and explore which qualities make a good leader and then I would prove that since these qualities are more present in women than in men, women are naturally better at leading than men are.

Obviously we know that since men are better than women in virtually all of the qualities which amount to good leadership skills, mean dominate among CEOs, startups and other social positions requiring leadership skills and so it would be impossible for Dean Withers to make this argument so he went with the weird projection that male suck at leadership because of their emotions.

Also, taking strategic risks is essential for effective leadership, and risk-taking is associated with both impulsivity and higher intelligence. Women are less prone to risk-taking, and traits typically coded as negative such as impulsivity and novelty-seeking may actually work in men’s favor, while traits coded as positive such as high agreeableness may work against women who seek leadership roles.

Emotional control is obviously important for leadership roles, but emotions are just one aspect of a good leader. Unfortunately the MAGA women could not have properly constructed an argument as to (1) why men are better leaders than women (2) why they should lead more than women. That requires a proper examination of the Biorealist sciences like evolutionary psychology and understanding of the patriarchal nature of our mammalian species, the recognition that we behave a certain way because we were programmed to behave a certain way by our genetics.

Also, it is better to imagine leadership qualities as existing on a spectrum. Some women are better at leading than most men, in-fact I’m certain that the top 1% female leaders is naturally better than the bottom 97% of men at leading, but at the same time, the median percentile of men is certainly better at leading than at least 85% of women. Moreover there are contexts in which women may be better at leading than men. But politics is definitely not an example of this, and we need to limit voting power to those who have demonstrated sufficient political knowledge.

I wish society had broadened the score distributions to things other than intelligence. Much of these debates should not be about averages, but the distribution itself. So the question is never “can women lead?”. The question is: across the full distribution, do men and women perform equally, or does one sex have a higher mean and/or lower variance in leadership-relevant traits?