Who can you trust?

Regular readers will know that not so long ago I read and very much enjoyed Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which is about the influence of genes on human psychology. That isn’t my area of expertise, but he seemed to be on the level. His reasoning was mostly reasonable and his evidential claims were backed up by sources which sounded reputable enough. The first half of chapter 18 was about psychological differences between the sexes. He argued that there was strong evidence that some psychological traits are correlated with sex and some evidence that genetic differences between men and women contribute to these correlations. As I say, he seemed to be on the level and know his stuff, so I believed him.

Last week I got some conflicting signals, though. I read Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender, and I enjoyed that a lot too. Fine’s book is about the claims made about psychological differences between men and women, both by scientists and popular writers drawing on the work of scientists. I suppose if I was summarising its claims in bullet points, I’d pick these: 

• There isn’t as much evidence for psychological differences between the sexes as a lot of people make out.
• A lot of the research into this sort of thing is done very badly.
• A lot of the popular writers either misinterpret or wildly extrapolate from what evidence there is, and sometimes just make things up.
• The hypotheses getting tested tend to be based on stereotypes.
• There’s no shortage of places to look for non-genetic explanations for the differences that have been found.

Fine seemed to be on the level just as much as Pinker did, and what she said was largely pretty persuasive. Since she went into far more detail about this specific issue than Pinker did, I suppose my credences are currently balanced in her favour, and my trust in the other 20½ chapters of Pinker’s book is correspondingly undermined. Mostly though, I just don’t know what to think. Fine goes into far more detail about the methods of the research she disagrees with than those of the research she uses to support her positive claims, so I’ve no way of knowing that I won’t read another book in a few months’ time which critiques that just as severely. If she had gone into as much detail about it all it would have doubled the length of her book though, so I can kind of see why she didn’t.

I like reading non-fiction, and I particularly like reading science books pitched at about the level Pinker’s and Fine’s books are pitched at. But I sometimes wonder why I bother. I’m trying to learn but if what I end up believing depends on which persuasive-sounding books are entertainingly written and easy to get hold of, then I’m not learning at all; I’m just making myself an unwitting vehicle for the memes I happen to get infected with. That’s no good. If all I’m going to learn from reading non-fiction is that scientists disagree with each other just as much as philosophers do and nobody really knows anything about anything, then maybe I’ll just read PG Wodehouse all the time.

Are you listening, Mr Blatter?

Women’s football isn’t as popular as men’s football. This is partly because the standard isn’t as high, because it’s not as professionalized, because there’s less money in it, because it’s not as popular. There’s a vicious circle for you. I’d rather women’s football was more popular, the way women’s tennis and athletics are. Why? I suppose it’s because I like equal opportunities, football, and women. There also seems to be a lot of interest in playing football among women, and I’d like to see that encouraged. That means increasing its popularity.

One thing we could do is make female footballers wear different clothes. That’s Sepp Blatter’s idea, and he’s in charge. But I don’t think it would work as well as my idea, and I’m worried it’d alter the priorities of the game and its marketers. Blatter seems to want to increase the popularity of women’s football by making it more like other popular things women do, like waiting tables in Hooters. I’d rather make it more popular by making it more like other popular kinds of football. Men’s football, for example.

At the moment there are two sets of leagues, one for men and one for women. Clubs often have an affiliated women’s team as well as a men’s team, but their fortunes aren’t tied to one another, except in that the financial success of one might subsidise the other. Most football fans care what happens to the men’s team, and don’t care what happens to the women’s one, even if it’s from their club. This afternoon Arsenal’s men’s team blew its most recent chance of ending its six-year silverware drought, and the Arsenal faithful are not consoled that during that period their women’s team has been very successful indeed. There’s a lot that’s incomprehensible about the mind of an Arsenal fan, but this isn’t. The women’s team isn’t as good, and not just because of biology. They’re only semi-professional, and this means they don’t have the time to become as good as the men. It’s not their fault they’re worse, and it’s not the fans' fault they’re not that interested. It doesn’t make them sexist. The situation is different from that of British Tennis.

Here’s my idea. Have one set of leagues, and at the higher levels of the game a club has to turn out a female team as well as a male one. The women compete against women, and the men against men. The women’s results score league points just as the men’s do. (Maybe not quite as many while it's being phased in, but in that case a timetable for parity should be in place from the start.) As such, clubs are incentivised to put their considerable financial weight behind making their women’s teams as good as a team of women can be, on pain of relegation. The fans have to care about the women’s team because their fortunes are tied to those of the men’s team, but this is fine because the women are playing football as well as Serena Williams plays tennis. There’s nothing about the way I’m envisaging this changing football that I don’t like.

Of course you give the clubs a few years’ warning so they can get their acts together, but there’s already plenty of infrastructure there, and there are already plenty of talented girls who’d like to grow up to be professional footballers if the opportunities were there. As it is, the female Maradona didn’t play football professionally at all, and the female Messi’s wasting half her time as plumber or a librarian or something. What a waste.

Czechs and balances

Suppose a country was both democratic enough to have some human rights legislation and undemocratic enough not to allow women the vote. Suppose an unelected judge ruled that the latter was in breach of women’s human rights. Then suppose the elected executive of the country said that the judge should mind his own business because he wasn’t elected. That would sound a bit rich, wouldn’t it?

One of the advantages of having elected executives accountable to an unelected judiciary is that when it comes to trampling on the interests of minorities and the disenfranchised there are lines that won’t be crossed, even if crossing them would appeal to the majority of people with votes. An example would be the death penalty. For a long time the death penalty was supported by a majority of people in my country, but by a minority of the MPs they elected. Perhaps it still is. The MPs resisted the temptation to bring it back, even though this might well have been a vote-winner. I’m glad they did, but I understand that since the Human Rights Act came in they no longer have the option, and I’m glad they don’t. A lot of what goes on here in the name of fighting Terror sails pretty close to the wind too, and it’s comforting to know that no matter how hysterical the public or how soon the election, there are some people in Strasbourg we can appeal to if things start going a bit Kafka.

I am, of course, thinking about the current debate over giving prisoners the vote. It’s been suggested that the decision shouldn’t be made by EU judges, because they’re unelected. As well as being a bit rich, I think this is exactly the sort of decision which should be made by unelected people. This isn’t because I want prisoners to have the vote, although I do. (Then again, I’d lower the voting age to thirteen if it was left up to me.) It’s because when it comes to the tyranny of the majority over the disenfranchised, elected officials can’t be trusted. Prisoners are among the most vulnerable people in society, and as such they’re exactly the kind of people human rights legislation and an independent judiciary are there to protect.

Great male hope

Today Andy Murray lost his third major tennis final. He’s the best tennis player Britain’s produced for a long time. He’s also a lot better than plenty of people who have won majors, but he seems to be a victim of the ruthless consistency of his contemporaries. The days when Gaston Gaudio or even Carlos Moya could rock up and win the French Open seem to be gone. If you’re in a major final and you’re not Federer or Nadal then the chances are your opponent is, and as a result Murray may never get a better chance of winning a major than he did against Novak Djokovic today. Seeing him blow it in such unspectacular fashion must have been disappointing for his fans, though personally I wasn’t that bothered.

What does bother me is that the media seem to think it a cause of acute shame to British tennis (whoever British tennis is) that the last British man to win a major singles final was Fred Perry in 1936. They say it all the time. They said it when Henman and Rusedski teased us in the 90s, and for all I know they used to say it about Jeremy Bates and John Lloyd. Well I think this whiffs of sexism. We’ve had six major singles champions since Perry. Courtesy of Wikipedia, they are: Dorothy Round Little, Angela Mortimer Barrett, Shirley Bloomer Brasher, Ann Haydon Jones, Virginia Wade and Sue Barker. They are, of course, all women. But so what?

As an experiment, imagine what you’d think if John Isner got to the Wimbledon final and the American media remarked ruefully that there hadn’t been a white American major singles champion since 2003. If they said it gleefully, you’d think they were making some kind of point about African-Americans being better tennis players than white Americans. But if they said it ruefully, as the British sports media do when they mention Perry, I suppose the point would be that what they want is a white champion, and the achievements of Venus and Serena Williams are either a shaming contrast or an irrelevance.

Now, when I hear people moping about Fred Perry it doesn’t sound quite the way it would in the racial case, partly because I’m used to it but partly because in tennis men and women compete separately. I’m glad they do. But it isn’t like football where the level of professionalization is very different in the men’s and women’s games, and I don’t think the achievements of female tennis players are less impressive than those of men. If Anne Keothavong starts wiping the floor with the Williamses, the Russians and Kim Clijsters then British tennis should stop moping. Maybe it would, but this means it should shut up about Fred Perry. Given the amount of money it spends, it’s embarrassing enough it hasn’t had a major champion since Virginia Wade.