We have much to discuss…I’ve been thinking about this and several things around it. I do think women compete but based on beauty and status. Status is accrued by her own social and material capital, conferred by career, morality, friendships, and status of the mate. I also have a piece written but not fully edited about how James Damore was right that I was just thinking about publishing this coming week, and now I think the universe is telling me to. Having been in HR for a period, I can confirm that the population therein is most female and is generally the opposite of analytical. That is, dependent on people skills rather than anything that can be judged on the merits. The analytical women who end up in tech like I am now are fundamentally different from the women in communication oriented professions. At the same time, I’ve found I have an advantage as a woman in an analytical field over men because my communication skills give me an edge. But, I got here because I had a preference for exercising these skills, and while men did discourage me, they were all Indian. Women also discouraged me though, because they didn’t want me to be able to compete based on hard skills with men. The sabotaging of female coworkers is nothing short of making sure no woman rises above you, but it’s covert competition.
I don't write as much about feminism because I feel as if I'm sometimes going out on a limb, and attributing things to femininity that might be better explained by culture and technology, but I am FASCINATED by the subject of female intrasexual competition and social dynamics. Obviously I have no access to that world (and I don't really want any) but some of the tendencies seem to bleed over into interactions with men. These don't really pertain to this focus of this brief post (they're more to do with sexual competition and friendships and coalitions than employment hierarchies and bureaucracies, although the two things MUST bleed into each other to some extent) but I'm especially struck by two tendencies among women:
(1) coalition-building: constantly trying to develop alliances and backchannel communication links, and being very concerned with the reputations of yourself and others. I can honestly say I've never much cared about my reputation and I like who I like and I respect who I respect. Those are the main determinants of how I relate to people (also rank and status, of course) and they don't tend to change, but women sometimes seem more fickle. It's as if there's an ever-changing social landscape.
(2) indirectness: THIS is the one I've observed in my interactions with women. I think that many men find it confusing. It's a reluctance to be honest about your feelings, your motivations, your goals. To me it betrays a lack of trust in others, but it seems so widespread that there must be more to it. Women who turn against others rarely seem to be inclined to state that they're angry or slighted, or why. Do they realize this seems pathological and can be corrosive to social ties? Is there some deeper motive to this? Is this a strategy to accomplish something else? Why do women usually use indirect attacks against each other? Do they admit their feelings and their intentions even to themselves? They must, on some level. If I had to guess I would say this is a kind of culturally evolved strategy, wherein the open and direct and honest women were trounced by the secretive and manipulative ones in so many cases that womenkind as a species began to acquire these tendencies, at least in certain situations. Women as adults often lived in households comprised of male family members (male and female) so perhaps honesty and directness were not luxuries they were afforded.
As you can see I have many unanswered questions. I'm not asking you for answers. I'm just illustrating why I don't write about women and feminism as much. Unfortunately, it's impossible to understand the modern world without accounting for SOME feminism. I tend to think that single combat or sales contests (or, failing those, intergroup warfare) should be sufficient to solve all social conflicts but I think that approach is becoming more and more antiquated with every passing day. I would like to tell the feminists that all of their games and causes and concerns are a kind of luxury, built upon and guarded by the deaths and killing and potential deaths and killing of men, but that's not a popular message. No one cares about gossip and mean girls when true warfare begins, not even women. I think that possibility seems very distant to people in our society.
There certainly seem to be a lot of things that we're not supposed to wonder about or discuss, and a lot of basic realities we're not supposed to acknowledge. That's the hallmark of a healthy society no doubt. lol
All I can say is that you’re onto many things here. Men can’t see almost any of it. Honestly all of what you claim is so tiring. Coalition building are constant partially because we depend more on our relationships in jobs that exercise soft skills, but even in my current job I’m always coalition building to guard myself (often against women). Indirectness drives me nuts and is possibly the source of most of my conflicts.
"Why do women usually use indirect attacks against each other?"
Status games—largely motivated by evolutionary psychology (think "man vs. bear in the woods" discourse)—aren't really about assessing the intrinsic value of an argument. Instead, their goal is to create a framework that labels men as dangerous, effectively removing them from the conversation.
I had a 40 year career in Software Engineering. My entire working life was in male dominated, military oriented, hierarchical organisations.
I think that in western workplaces as they are currently structured (ie male hierarchies), when women come to occupy large parts of the hierarchy their female characteristics become liabilities.
In other words, and unsurprisingly, jamming women into male structured organisations, where the structures have arisen over centuries, doesn't work, at least a lot of the time.
Consider agreeableness. Men are much more disagreeaable than women. So when a man produces a bad idea, he'll generally be told outright by other men that it's a bad idea. In a healthy male hierarchy, bad ideas are aggressively filtered out.
Women, even if they think an idea is bad, will be more inclined to agree that it's a good idea. Those that don't agree risk running foul of the female group threats of cancellation and ostracism, and that's equivalent to death for a woman.
Taking Disney as an example, that's how you get the totally baffling destruction of vast amounts of valuable IP such as the now utterly ruined and valueless Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark franchises. That's how you get the colossal debacle that is the new Snow White movie. How did these obviously shit products make it into the public domain? Its because on multiple occasions, too many people, fearful of being rejected by the group, nodded sagely when confronted with a pile of shit, and agreed that it was a pile of gold.
It would be interesting to see what a functional and effective female oriented organisational structure would look like.
Yes, I think that's correct. Disney, games journalism, video game developments, the DNC, academia... all areas where terrible ideas are rising to the top because they're emotionally gratifying, or because criticizing them becomes unpopular.
I don’t get your interest in female oriented organizational structures because the whole point is that they are largely non functional.
You don’t have to look very far or very wide to see many examples.
You can also find structures that were previously male oriented and working fine, that became completely failures after being overrun by women (there are plenty of associations like that).
By definition structures that stand the test of time are using male behavior/values. When an organization with women leaders works it’s because they are using male behavior. But having women behave like men isn’t desirable both at the society level and mariage level.
The previous distribution of places in society wasn’t random at all, it’s just that women are too stupid to understand it and at the same time more power hungry than the vast majority of men.
I think you misunderstood me. I totally concur with your views on women in current organisations. They just don't work out, and tend to make functioning organisations dysfunctional. That has been my experience over a long career, working with a variety of organisations, both private and public.
In my last paragraph, I was simply pondering the idea that there may be some way to organise a group of women to work together in an effective manner. It's entirely hypothetical, and I'm not sure that such a thing could ever exist.
I think you're spot-on on the general premise. I think the fundamental revolution since the 60s has been a flip to a "female mode" of working and collaboration - one that prefers: 1) emotion, 2) conformity, and 3) implicit over explicit conflict.
Feminism pointed out the pain-points in the former "male modal" world; its aim was to upend the male mode, but is, in the broadest terms, uninterested in acknowledging a shift to the female mode or in critiquing it. A flaw of much of the "theory" or "studies" wings of social sciences, IMO, is that they follow Marx both in style and substance. Marx could see capitalisms flaws, but couldn't provide a solution that accorded with human nature. Generously, you could say the same about queer theory, feminism, black studies, etc.
We need a 'humanism' of the sort that seeks to balance male and female modes in society to minimize the faults and accentuate the positives of both, instead of our current trajectory, which is simply flip-flopping between who gets the "whip hand" for a century or whatever. Undoing racism by whites by allowing racism against whites, or combating male chauvinism with female chauvinism isn't progress - it's eye for an eye of an ancient and vindictive sort. We need off the treadmill entirely.
That's very interesting. Aside from the gender modalities and the organizational structures and their effects, there's an additional wrinkle: we're not allowed to notice that men and women are different, and those differences bleed over into workplace strengths and team building dynamics and psychological priorities. Just like with SO many other issues, the orthodoxy has been established (in academia) and spread through cultural institutions and we're all to pretend that the matter is settled and that any open discussion of it is a kind of moral error.
Unfortunately the orthodoxy is badly wrong. I think people are starting to wake up to that and are JUST beginning to have open discussions (even outside of Substack and the YouTube comments sections).
I think a defining aspect of our civilization over the next 10 years is going to be a slow, then a fast, collapse of the old norms and barriers and courtesies which restricted our discussions. First we must make a critical mass of people understand: the things you were taught as moral certainties aren't certain and they're not true.
I agree - the 'not noticing' is an important part. That's baked into the 'theory'/'studies' approach - thou shalt criticize the old order but are to assume that what replaces it is without fault (because it was informed by 'theory'). It's a weird mindset, because it basically says that patriarchy was the male mode and overlooked the female aspect, but in the same breadth has an assumption that what's best for women is what's best for everyone. The observation that 'what is good for men is not good for everyone' is feminism at its most common sense - but cannot countenance that what is good for women is not good for everyone. That's apparently misogyny. Likewise across the other power differentials - you 'solve' white supremacy by adopting a stylized black perspective, you solve 'heteronormativity' by adopting a queer perspective, etc.
I often think about it in terms of overreach; the Left (or whatever you want to call it) once upon a time started with the premise that our society was "-ist" in many ways, which was a fair enough observation if you go back far enough, at least in the whole. However, we quickly sailed past accommodating / incorporating / considering minority perspectives to being told the minority perspective was the only valid perspective. We went from tolerance of differences to forced acceptance of uncommon perspectives. And therein lies the tension so many feel with 'wokeism' - it's not that a critical mass of people yearn to be racist, homophobic, or misogynist - it's that the critical mass does not want to forfeit their own perspective of what is 'normal' or 'moral' to a group of activists.
It's disheartening that our intellectual class cannot stomach complexity - there's either the racist (or male or hetero) view or the black (or female or queer) view - there's no give or take between the two views, no balance. You are to accept one or the other as your only choices.
I'm heterosexual. I find the thought of actual male to male sexual intercourse to be stomach churningly repugnant. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of other straight men feel the same. I think it's quite normal and OK to feel that way. It's an instinctual thing, not something I've intellectualise about.
That being said, no doubt a lot of gay men find the idea of male - female intercourse similarly repugnant. And that's entirely okay too.
I'm cimpletely accepting of gay people, and have known many throughout my life as friends and colleagues. People are people, not just mobile genitals, and I'm interested in people and don't care at all what they do with their genitals in their homes.
What I profoundly disagree with is the expectation that I should not only accept and tolerate "gayness", but that I have to enthusiastically embrace and support it and advocate for it in every way. Pride weeks at work supported by the pride action network and pride flags around town during pride month and all that other shit. And social ostracism and potential disemployment if one simply says "can we leave all that at home?".
I'd like to get back to everybody being just people, and keeping their sexuality outside the public sphere.
Good questions to ask your readers. I hope your receive thoughtful responses, including anecdotes from people's workplaces involving male and female leadership. It's hard to find good female leaders who don't require compliance, obedience, and minions to clean the mess of incompetence.
I employed a very capable female engineer who was in her late 20s. On a number of occasions she was driven to tears in the workplace, and I remonstrated severely with her male colleagues who I assumed were at fault. They protested their innocence but I didn't believe them.
Despite my best efforts, this kept on happening and I was at a loss. Why were the guys bullying her? I tried to address it with her, but she started crying and I ended the meeting. A failure of courage on my part.
Then, another female engineer took me aside and told me she'd known this person at school. She always cried under stress. It was a weapon. A crying woman in the workplace (or almost anywhere) will disarm a male colleague or supervisor 100% of the time, because tears normally reflect powerful emotion. In this person's case, the tears simply reflected a means to an end.
I met with the person again and advised her that I was directing my staff to ignore her crying. She started crying. I ignored her crying, and we had a 30 minute conversation while she blubbered. One of the most vivid and difficult memories of my entire 40 year career.
And that's how we carried on. Eventually she realised her technique didn't work any more and she stopped it.
So. One female engineer chewed up literally hundreds of hours of wasted time involving her colleagues, me, the Engineering Manager, the HR Manager, the CEO pondering the legalities etc etc.
Then there was the other female engineer who circulated a survey asking all her colleagues when (not if) they'd last been bullied in the workplace. This, in one of the fairest and most equitable and reasonable and kind workplaces anywhere in the world.
Then there's all the other stories about all the other dysfunctional and disruptive female engineers I've worked with.
I started my engineering career as a total supporter of women in the engineering workplace, and 40 years later concluded that they are mostly far more trouble than they are worth. Not all of them obviously, I've known some fantastic female engineers. But the autism (or whatever it is) that produces good male engineers (and fucking hell, they can be hard to handle too) tends to produce absolutely dysfunctional female engineers.
I know this probably sounds horrible and misogynist, but it's what I experienced as an engineer, and team leader and engineering manager many times over many decades.
We have much to discuss…I’ve been thinking about this and several things around it. I do think women compete but based on beauty and status. Status is accrued by her own social and material capital, conferred by career, morality, friendships, and status of the mate. I also have a piece written but not fully edited about how James Damore was right that I was just thinking about publishing this coming week, and now I think the universe is telling me to. Having been in HR for a period, I can confirm that the population therein is most female and is generally the opposite of analytical. That is, dependent on people skills rather than anything that can be judged on the merits. The analytical women who end up in tech like I am now are fundamentally different from the women in communication oriented professions. At the same time, I’ve found I have an advantage as a woman in an analytical field over men because my communication skills give me an edge. But, I got here because I had a preference for exercising these skills, and while men did discourage me, they were all Indian. Women also discouraged me though, because they didn’t want me to be able to compete based on hard skills with men. The sabotaging of female coworkers is nothing short of making sure no woman rises above you, but it’s covert competition.
I don't write as much about feminism because I feel as if I'm sometimes going out on a limb, and attributing things to femininity that might be better explained by culture and technology, but I am FASCINATED by the subject of female intrasexual competition and social dynamics. Obviously I have no access to that world (and I don't really want any) but some of the tendencies seem to bleed over into interactions with men. These don't really pertain to this focus of this brief post (they're more to do with sexual competition and friendships and coalitions than employment hierarchies and bureaucracies, although the two things MUST bleed into each other to some extent) but I'm especially struck by two tendencies among women:
(1) coalition-building: constantly trying to develop alliances and backchannel communication links, and being very concerned with the reputations of yourself and others. I can honestly say I've never much cared about my reputation and I like who I like and I respect who I respect. Those are the main determinants of how I relate to people (also rank and status, of course) and they don't tend to change, but women sometimes seem more fickle. It's as if there's an ever-changing social landscape.
(2) indirectness: THIS is the one I've observed in my interactions with women. I think that many men find it confusing. It's a reluctance to be honest about your feelings, your motivations, your goals. To me it betrays a lack of trust in others, but it seems so widespread that there must be more to it. Women who turn against others rarely seem to be inclined to state that they're angry or slighted, or why. Do they realize this seems pathological and can be corrosive to social ties? Is there some deeper motive to this? Is this a strategy to accomplish something else? Why do women usually use indirect attacks against each other? Do they admit their feelings and their intentions even to themselves? They must, on some level. If I had to guess I would say this is a kind of culturally evolved strategy, wherein the open and direct and honest women were trounced by the secretive and manipulative ones in so many cases that womenkind as a species began to acquire these tendencies, at least in certain situations. Women as adults often lived in households comprised of male family members (male and female) so perhaps honesty and directness were not luxuries they were afforded.
As you can see I have many unanswered questions. I'm not asking you for answers. I'm just illustrating why I don't write about women and feminism as much. Unfortunately, it's impossible to understand the modern world without accounting for SOME feminism. I tend to think that single combat or sales contests (or, failing those, intergroup warfare) should be sufficient to solve all social conflicts but I think that approach is becoming more and more antiquated with every passing day. I would like to tell the feminists that all of their games and causes and concerns are a kind of luxury, built upon and guarded by the deaths and killing and potential deaths and killing of men, but that's not a popular message. No one cares about gossip and mean girls when true warfare begins, not even women. I think that possibility seems very distant to people in our society.
There certainly seem to be a lot of things that we're not supposed to wonder about or discuss, and a lot of basic realities we're not supposed to acknowledge. That's the hallmark of a healthy society no doubt. lol
All I can say is that you’re onto many things here. Men can’t see almost any of it. Honestly all of what you claim is so tiring. Coalition building are constant partially because we depend more on our relationships in jobs that exercise soft skills, but even in my current job I’m always coalition building to guard myself (often against women). Indirectness drives me nuts and is possibly the source of most of my conflicts.
"Why do women usually use indirect attacks against each other?"
Status games—largely motivated by evolutionary psychology (think "man vs. bear in the woods" discourse)—aren't really about assessing the intrinsic value of an argument. Instead, their goal is to create a framework that labels men as dangerous, effectively removing them from the conversation.
I had a 40 year career in Software Engineering. My entire working life was in male dominated, military oriented, hierarchical organisations.
I think that in western workplaces as they are currently structured (ie male hierarchies), when women come to occupy large parts of the hierarchy their female characteristics become liabilities.
In other words, and unsurprisingly, jamming women into male structured organisations, where the structures have arisen over centuries, doesn't work, at least a lot of the time.
Consider agreeableness. Men are much more disagreeaable than women. So when a man produces a bad idea, he'll generally be told outright by other men that it's a bad idea. In a healthy male hierarchy, bad ideas are aggressively filtered out.
Women, even if they think an idea is bad, will be more inclined to agree that it's a good idea. Those that don't agree risk running foul of the female group threats of cancellation and ostracism, and that's equivalent to death for a woman.
Taking Disney as an example, that's how you get the totally baffling destruction of vast amounts of valuable IP such as the now utterly ruined and valueless Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark franchises. That's how you get the colossal debacle that is the new Snow White movie. How did these obviously shit products make it into the public domain? Its because on multiple occasions, too many people, fearful of being rejected by the group, nodded sagely when confronted with a pile of shit, and agreed that it was a pile of gold.
It would be interesting to see what a functional and effective female oriented organisational structure would look like.
Yes, I think that's correct. Disney, games journalism, video game developments, the DNC, academia... all areas where terrible ideas are rising to the top because they're emotionally gratifying, or because criticizing them becomes unpopular.
I don’t get your interest in female oriented organizational structures because the whole point is that they are largely non functional.
You don’t have to look very far or very wide to see many examples.
You can also find structures that were previously male oriented and working fine, that became completely failures after being overrun by women (there are plenty of associations like that).
By definition structures that stand the test of time are using male behavior/values. When an organization with women leaders works it’s because they are using male behavior. But having women behave like men isn’t desirable both at the society level and mariage level.
The previous distribution of places in society wasn’t random at all, it’s just that women are too stupid to understand it and at the same time more power hungry than the vast majority of men.
I think you misunderstood me. I totally concur with your views on women in current organisations. They just don't work out, and tend to make functioning organisations dysfunctional. That has been my experience over a long career, working with a variety of organisations, both private and public.
In my last paragraph, I was simply pondering the idea that there may be some way to organise a group of women to work together in an effective manner. It's entirely hypothetical, and I'm not sure that such a thing could ever exist.
Oh yes I understand. I believe they have those sorts of organizations already, they are just for things that are inconsequential and/or frivolous.
The problem is the insistence of feminism to force women into organizations that have more important outcomes.
In a way they do work in an effective manner but only because the efficiency and outcomes are of secondary importance.
I think you're spot-on on the general premise. I think the fundamental revolution since the 60s has been a flip to a "female mode" of working and collaboration - one that prefers: 1) emotion, 2) conformity, and 3) implicit over explicit conflict.
Feminism pointed out the pain-points in the former "male modal" world; its aim was to upend the male mode, but is, in the broadest terms, uninterested in acknowledging a shift to the female mode or in critiquing it. A flaw of much of the "theory" or "studies" wings of social sciences, IMO, is that they follow Marx both in style and substance. Marx could see capitalisms flaws, but couldn't provide a solution that accorded with human nature. Generously, you could say the same about queer theory, feminism, black studies, etc.
We need a 'humanism' of the sort that seeks to balance male and female modes in society to minimize the faults and accentuate the positives of both, instead of our current trajectory, which is simply flip-flopping between who gets the "whip hand" for a century or whatever. Undoing racism by whites by allowing racism against whites, or combating male chauvinism with female chauvinism isn't progress - it's eye for an eye of an ancient and vindictive sort. We need off the treadmill entirely.
That's very interesting. Aside from the gender modalities and the organizational structures and their effects, there's an additional wrinkle: we're not allowed to notice that men and women are different, and those differences bleed over into workplace strengths and team building dynamics and psychological priorities. Just like with SO many other issues, the orthodoxy has been established (in academia) and spread through cultural institutions and we're all to pretend that the matter is settled and that any open discussion of it is a kind of moral error.
Unfortunately the orthodoxy is badly wrong. I think people are starting to wake up to that and are JUST beginning to have open discussions (even outside of Substack and the YouTube comments sections).
I think a defining aspect of our civilization over the next 10 years is going to be a slow, then a fast, collapse of the old norms and barriers and courtesies which restricted our discussions. First we must make a critical mass of people understand: the things you were taught as moral certainties aren't certain and they're not true.
I agree - the 'not noticing' is an important part. That's baked into the 'theory'/'studies' approach - thou shalt criticize the old order but are to assume that what replaces it is without fault (because it was informed by 'theory'). It's a weird mindset, because it basically says that patriarchy was the male mode and overlooked the female aspect, but in the same breadth has an assumption that what's best for women is what's best for everyone. The observation that 'what is good for men is not good for everyone' is feminism at its most common sense - but cannot countenance that what is good for women is not good for everyone. That's apparently misogyny. Likewise across the other power differentials - you 'solve' white supremacy by adopting a stylized black perspective, you solve 'heteronormativity' by adopting a queer perspective, etc.
I often think about it in terms of overreach; the Left (or whatever you want to call it) once upon a time started with the premise that our society was "-ist" in many ways, which was a fair enough observation if you go back far enough, at least in the whole. However, we quickly sailed past accommodating / incorporating / considering minority perspectives to being told the minority perspective was the only valid perspective. We went from tolerance of differences to forced acceptance of uncommon perspectives. And therein lies the tension so many feel with 'wokeism' - it's not that a critical mass of people yearn to be racist, homophobic, or misogynist - it's that the critical mass does not want to forfeit their own perspective of what is 'normal' or 'moral' to a group of activists.
It's disheartening that our intellectual class cannot stomach complexity - there's either the racist (or male or hetero) view or the black (or female or queer) view - there's no give or take between the two views, no balance. You are to accept one or the other as your only choices.
Interesting thoughts.
I'm heterosexual. I find the thought of actual male to male sexual intercourse to be stomach churningly repugnant. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of other straight men feel the same. I think it's quite normal and OK to feel that way. It's an instinctual thing, not something I've intellectualise about.
That being said, no doubt a lot of gay men find the idea of male - female intercourse similarly repugnant. And that's entirely okay too.
I'm cimpletely accepting of gay people, and have known many throughout my life as friends and colleagues. People are people, not just mobile genitals, and I'm interested in people and don't care at all what they do with their genitals in their homes.
What I profoundly disagree with is the expectation that I should not only accept and tolerate "gayness", but that I have to enthusiastically embrace and support it and advocate for it in every way. Pride weeks at work supported by the pride action network and pride flags around town during pride month and all that other shit. And social ostracism and potential disemployment if one simply says "can we leave all that at home?".
I'd like to get back to everybody being just people, and keeping their sexuality outside the public sphere.
Good questions to ask your readers. I hope your receive thoughtful responses, including anecdotes from people's workplaces involving male and female leadership. It's hard to find good female leaders who don't require compliance, obedience, and minions to clean the mess of incompetence.
I employed a very capable female engineer who was in her late 20s. On a number of occasions she was driven to tears in the workplace, and I remonstrated severely with her male colleagues who I assumed were at fault. They protested their innocence but I didn't believe them.
Despite my best efforts, this kept on happening and I was at a loss. Why were the guys bullying her? I tried to address it with her, but she started crying and I ended the meeting. A failure of courage on my part.
Then, another female engineer took me aside and told me she'd known this person at school. She always cried under stress. It was a weapon. A crying woman in the workplace (or almost anywhere) will disarm a male colleague or supervisor 100% of the time, because tears normally reflect powerful emotion. In this person's case, the tears simply reflected a means to an end.
I met with the person again and advised her that I was directing my staff to ignore her crying. She started crying. I ignored her crying, and we had a 30 minute conversation while she blubbered. One of the most vivid and difficult memories of my entire 40 year career.
And that's how we carried on. Eventually she realised her technique didn't work any more and she stopped it.
So. One female engineer chewed up literally hundreds of hours of wasted time involving her colleagues, me, the Engineering Manager, the HR Manager, the CEO pondering the legalities etc etc.
Then there was the other female engineer who circulated a survey asking all her colleagues when (not if) they'd last been bullied in the workplace. This, in one of the fairest and most equitable and reasonable and kind workplaces anywhere in the world.
Then there's all the other stories about all the other dysfunctional and disruptive female engineers I've worked with.
I started my engineering career as a total supporter of women in the engineering workplace, and 40 years later concluded that they are mostly far more trouble than they are worth. Not all of them obviously, I've known some fantastic female engineers. But the autism (or whatever it is) that produces good male engineers (and fucking hell, they can be hard to handle too) tends to produce absolutely dysfunctional female engineers.
I know this probably sounds horrible and misogynist, but it's what I experienced as an engineer, and team leader and engineering manager many times over many decades.
It makes me terribly sad thinking about it.
"Am I crazy."
No. No you are not, James.