It seems all Peter Lawrence has done here is stand some already shaky gender theory, purporting to show a societally oppressed female advantage, on its head. It is no more stable in that position; even if he commendably acknowledges that uneven sexual representation is genetically based.
Whatever validity there is to making selection criteria for any particular disipline kinder & gentler, it only exists in as much as it serves the discipline itself; any scientist, any professional for that matter, is honor bound to adhere to that standard and let the rest be damned. Seeking more female geneticists, for example, so that a future "Francis Crick" won't be discouraged into opting to run a nail salon or some such, is risible. Talented and smart kids tend to find their way into fields for which they are capable.
Lawrence is to be lauded for pointing out that any discrimination that exists is as likely to favor women. Is that not enough for him?
As for agression, it has its place, and is inseparable from discovery and creation after all. The world is changing rapidly enough; those who share Lawrence's concerns about representation may find that these supposedly undervalued gifts of empathy and gentleness will gain value as time goes on. Perhaps all they need is a little more patience.

I suppose I understand why we have never been blessed with Isobel Newton, Alice Einstein, Jessie Clerk Maxwell or Carla Darwin and, indeed, why John Austin's novels stank. But why no female Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mozart, Rembrandt..... And yet we can find political leaders of the calibre of Elizabeth I, Mrs T,...
Odd.

Grad students should be evaluated by stripping away the PR, and originality should count for more than sheer output. However, that would have the opposite effect of that claimed in the article -- women would stand even less of a chance, on average.

Novel ideas are often the product of a higher IQ mind, and as the variance in IQ is greater for males than females, women fight an uphill battle in the far-right tail of the originality curve. The record of the fine arts and sciences is clear. Where women shine -- literature -- there were many innovators: one of a few candidates for "Inventor of The Novel" is Murasaki Shikibu. Emily Dickinson & Virginia Woolf were also innovative, just to name a few.

But in male-advantage arenas like hard science or visual & auditory arts, there are next to zero women in the Canon, and no Newtons, da Vincis, or Mozarts. Those who made the cutoff need all the PR they can get to make them seem like Einstein or Goya. I don't even know who they'd offer as the musical analogue of Marie Curie or Georgia O'Keefe.

Sure, women on average are less confident, so some Frances Crick might not feel sure of her bright idea, or might shrink from potential public humiliation if it turned out to be a dead-end. (Sidenote: this is probably part of why Northeast Asians aren't as creative as their higher average IQ would lead you to guess.) But in sciences, the set of timid female geniuses is smaller than the set of female sub-geniuses who would be cut if it weren't for advertising & preferences. Ditto for males, too, of course. But as the record shows, once you whittle the list down to Most Original, it makes the ratio even more lop-sided.

Hello people, there was a "Frances Crick". Her name was Rosalind Franklin and she was a coworker of Watson and Crick that they shamelessly ripped off. As for why we don't have a female Isaac Newton, you could say the same about why we don't have a black one. In actual fact, (a) we do, you just never heard of them, and (b) if you get no opportunities, AND get actively discouraged out of something, then you just aren't as likely to succeed, genius or not. As for PLoS's distinctly non-refreshing discussion, am I to understand that us girl scientists will finally be accepted, if we meet female stereotypes? I look very female, and I have many female traits, but I don't think people would call me "gentle" and "reflective". Try "smart" and "intimidating". Just because I have empathy doesn't make me some braying sheep. This whole discussion and comments are ridiculous, sorry to say. I'm as female as anything and I work in a very technical field in the hard scientists, work with men, and I even use tools! Wow! Let's all get over it and accept people for being PEOPLE. That is the biggest barrier to me as a woman right now. It's OTHER people's attitudes, not my beliefs or behaviors, that are the problem. To end my rant, Lawrence Summers is full of crap. When he comes back as me in his next life, then he can open his yap about 'innate differences'. Funny, but if he had said that about black people, he's be fired by now. But it's ok to use faulty logic for women. Stop giving this idiot airspace.

To end my rant, Lawrence Summers is full of crap.

Any data to support that?.

Didnt we discuss this before? Women tend to spend time on child bearing and rearing.
Until you men take the job, I mean ALL of you take the job, women wont have enough time to think and hang out in the lab, when her screaming 8-year-old wont take a bath.
Now enough of this shit. :)

People also forget the role of economic comparative advantage. Even if men and women were identical in performance, so long as women had even slight differences in prefernce for things such as child rearing (assume a mere 1%) or having a family, economic specialization could lead to hugely differing percentages of men and women in different jobs.

Under certain assumptions, the most trivial differences could even lead to perfect segregation without discrimination. A forteriori, this holds if the male-female differences are larger.

All women don't have babies. So the women who don't have babies couldn't be scientists? Nonsense. Men have been "helping with the housework" for a generation now and it hasn't made a bit of difference to the emergence of female genius. Maybe genius is a predominantly male trait. Maybe it requires aggressiveness and innovative thinking. And maybe obscenity isn't a substitute for rational thinking.

It's really funny that you are using "Frances Crick" as a hypothetical nemesis of the male scientist, when, as referenced above, there really was Rosalind Franklin.
Getting away from the scientists for a moment, and observing the arts...
there is a phenomenon called "Branwellism", which ascribes female genius to the nearest male that might be possibly involved, and ladies of achievement, beware. By and large though, Victorian dear readers of either sex had no problem at all acknowledging the gifts of certain female authors, or of reading their works.
Not all great works are to everyone's taste. Critics of literature have been known to say Hemingway, etc., are "overrated" and others underrated. Just because I can't stand a certain author, doesn't mean he or she is not "Great." There are reasons why a reputation lasts centuries, but not always a good reason why others don't.
As for Shakespeare (or whoever the hell wrote his stuff-- my English lit nephew thinks it was a Mr. Devere), there hasn't been another male Shakespeare either. His type of genius was peculiar to a certain time and place.
No one would have suspected in the 16th century, that there would ever be ANY female achievement of the type and quantity that have appeared in recent generations. And gentlemen, if you don't know who these ladies may be, perhaps those nasty feminists have a wee point, though I don't foresee to many gals knocking themselves out over algorithms.
In the 19th centruy, two female artists, Berthe Morisot, impressionist, and Camille Claudel, sculptress, plied their arts to the admiration and endorsement of the great male geniuses of day, such as Rodin and Renoir. Interestingly, it was the lesser artists, the Salieris, and certain critics, who were most likely to disparage and to forget them when they were dead or in mental institutions (Claudel's fate.)
One artist said of Claudel, that the loneliness and grueling conditions under which a sculpter had to live at the time, were a sanity-threatening test for anybody, much less a woman. Well, I don't know that there aren't a lot of women who thrive under grueling conditions, but the beautiful Camille destroyed many of her own works, and spent her last 40 years in a mental hospital.
But nobody sculpted hands like Camille. It was rumored that she did some of Rodin's.

I look very female, and I have many female traits, but I don't think people would call me "gentle" and "reflective". Try "smart" and "intimidating".

On a very personal note - if I hate something more than intimidating male colleagues, it's intimidating female colleagues.

"All women don't have babies."

How many are we talking about? 1 in 1000?

How many child rearing dads are there? 1 in a 100000?

Hmmm, almost all of the intemperate rants posted here include statements like: But [I know (of) X] who is female and is a genius/scientist/what-have-you.

Given that we are talking about averages and distributions, no one is saying that there will be no female genius/scientists/what-have-you.

Just as it is impossible to say that there will be no tall women. However, it is very unlikely (baring GE or the administration of growth hormones) that the tallest woman will be taller that every male.

It is also unlikely that the most empathic male is unlikely to be more empathic that all females, and the most systematizing female is unlikely to be more systematizing than all males.

Unlike height, we cant measure genius in one dimension. We wont know how empathic a male can be because culture forces him to be a "man". Gay men are still harassed all over the world. On what area would you measure systematizing - housework + children's ballet classes + "I believe I misread facial cues from my son's teacher" VS. alphabetic filing?
The same way, we will never know how much a female can test in a "genius" test, if culture tells her to spend more time in prepping up herself for a male's attention.
If you disagree what culture is imposing on females - just look at that "reality" show where 12 women vie for the attention of one man. Even if there are more females than men, women are prodded to compete it out.
There are two reasons why men would be a single father.
One- mother is dysfunctional. Drug addicts, romance addicts, insane, etc.
Two- mother is physically unavailable. Either dead or rearing another set of children from her second family.

Those who loves pointing out that women are dumber than men, you're disrespecting your mothers who are bright enough to choose your welfare and education than her own glory. Your Mom is intellectual enough to take pre-natal pills so you would have an IQ of 140. Maybe women should strike back. If she know her fetus is a boy, she probably could lead poison it, just to produce more dumb men, just to prove women are smarter than men. What do you think?
:)

Liv, you're kidding right? What you write reads like a verbatim parody of feminist rant.

Liv says:


Those who loves pointing out that women are dumber than men, you're disrespecting your mothers who are bright enough to choose your welfare and education than her own glory. Your Mom is intellectual enough to take pre-natal pills so you would have an IQ of 140. Maybe women should strike back. If she know her fetus is a boy, she probably could lead poison it, just to produce more dumb men, just to prove women are smarter than men. What do you think?


Actually, Liv, my mother was a semi-educated rural asthmatic who was unfortunate to be abandoned by my bio-father before I was born and who died 10 years after I was born.

However, she made sure that I had a father, at great personal cost to herself.

She was not more intelligent than I, and neither are any of her brothers or sisters, but she was my mother, and I know, given the effort she expended in keeping me alive, that she would have wanted me to reproduce, as I have done. Given the nature of my memories of my mother and the abuse she went through there is no way that I could reduce my respect for her. However, I am also a realist.

The fact is, there are differences between males and females, and there is a very real possibility that, on average, males are more intelligent than females, measured on IQ tests.

It is also possible that IQ tests measure male-oriented skills at getting one's genes into the next generation and that they don't adequately measure female-oriented skills on the same tasks.

LOL. Did you tremble with fear ;) Who's smarter now?

Why is it when men rant about how smart they are than women, its called "discussion". Point out to them that we have the power to make men dumb or smart, its called feminist rant?
Like when my Mom tells my brother again and again - "Remember that you just came out of my vagina".

Like when my Mom tells my brother again and again - "Remember that you just came out of my vagina".

You have an interesting family. And one wonders, given your syntactical issues, whether your mother didn't show you how "smart" she was through the pre-natal poisoning you suggest... :)

Liv,

Your comments, I hope, were a joke since, if a woman did consume lead to lower the IQ of a male, she would do much more damage to herself. Plus, it would not prove anything about the relative intelligence of women v men, just that lead results in congentinal abnormalities.

OTOH, if women in general did consume lead for that reason it would be strong circumstantial evidence to their lower intelligence.

I think Liv's comments are obviously using humor to make a point. I don't understand those who are offended by them.

Stripping away the ad hominem, the anecdotal, the personal, and of course the just plain bizarre, the only cogent point made by those arguing that disproportionate sexual representation in the sciences isn't the result of a significant genetic difference is made by mc here:

No one would have suspected in the 16th century, that there would ever be ANY female achievement of the type and quantity that have appeared in recent generations.

It's been a commitment to enlightenment principles that brought us to the point that young women have the freedom to pursue virtually any career they choose.
Commandeering a scientific field to serve broader goals, however well intended, betrays those principles.

Summers, by the way, merely suggested that uneven genetic distribution contributed to disproportionate representation, couching in the most delicate terms that which an unsentimental and unbiased assessment finds the most likely explanation; he was answered by female scientists who complained of nausea at the mere utterance, one saying she had to flee the room, fanning themselves like southern belles complaining of the vapors. If that is their response to the open airing of ideas, well...

Liv says:


Point out to them that we have the power to make men dumb or smart, its called feminist rant?


But Liv, women don't any more than men have that power.

In some sense, males and females evolve separately, but they do impact each other. They impact each other in that males and females are continually evolving strategies to exploit behaviors or characteristics of the other sex.

However, at a more fundamental level, my genes can be used to construct both males and females so any mutations that improve reproductive success for males had better not reduce the reproductive success of any females they produce too much because the future is just too unpredictable. For any individual one of my offspring, their reproductive success might be better served by male or female offspring or both.

Well, to clarify my comments WRT liv's statements, of course a woman has the power to make her sons (or daughters) smarter or dumber by eating appropriately (with the caveat that there are genetic and other limits) or by denying them nutrition. Similarly, a man can have an effect on their offspring if they so choose.

However, the game is not really one of all women against all men, but one of my offspring against all those unrelated individuals' offspring.

It is certainly the case that a woman's reproductive success is usually better served by having sons who are smart and daughters who will have babies. The actual number of each depends on the circumstances the woman finds herself in.

Dog,

I think Liv's comments are obviously using humor to make a point. I don't understand those who are offended by them.

Actuall, Liv was using humor to be just plain silly. I confronted her on this point, and she responded with more silliness.

Fair enough.
But think about it. Girls learn how to talk at an earlier age. They learn how to tie their shoes at an earlier age than boys - BEFORE CULTURE AND EDUCATION.

"In a 1998 Department of Education study, 65 percent of boys and 78 percent of girls in kindergarten were described by teachers as usually persistent at their tasks, and 58 percent of boys and 74 percent of girls as usually attentive-a clear yet far from interplanetary gap."

The "superiority" of male intellect shows when women are busy doing something else.

I may have masked my comments by silliness, but I hope you saw the points in it.
And "hmmm" yes I have a very interesting MOM. She's a medical personnel. She raised three children while working as an OR/Emergency Nurse. If you are shocked by the word vagina, give me a break. Besides the phrase is not originally in English, it's actually less obscene than the English version. It is a joke in our culture. SO sorry if it came off as offending.
The fact that you cant take a joke just shows that you lack some skills to enjoy this world. I heard - sense of humor is a sign of intelligence, just like having good verbal and motor skills at an early age.
I am tired of this topic.

Liv says:


But think about it. Girls learn how to talk at an earlier age. They learn how to tie their shoes at an earlier age than boys - BEFORE CULTURE AND EDUCATION.


But what are we to make of this, or what would you want us to make of this?

It is certainly conceivable that males and females have different developmental trajectories.

More over, it is well known that boys are developmentally delayed compared to girls and that boys continue developing longer than girls. There are, no doubt, good reasons for both of these.

However, very little of this matters, because scientists are drawn from the extreme right-hand portion of the bell curve, and there is evidence (disputed I know) that males have a larger variance than females. If that is the case, we can never expect to see parity in the sciences ... which is something the original essay did not explore. (Ignoring other more recent evidence that suggests males might have an average of about 4.5 IQ points advantage.)

No one is suggesting that men are smarter than women. Greater male variance also means that those too mentally retarded to look after themselves are mostly male. Are we discriminating against would-be retarded females? Perhaps would-be retarded females are too busy rearing children to show evidence of retardation. Sorry that sounds harsh. I agree that parenting preferences play a role, but pushed too far, the notion is silly. Innate differences in ability are real .

Women do hold all the cards in reproduction. However, given that women have a greater genetic self-interest in bearing top-notch children of both sexes, and zero interest in female strangers w/ whom they don't cooperate, they'll choose to make their sons smarter rather than dumb them down just to stand in solidarity with their "sisters."

I agree wanting to have kids plays a role. I'm foregoing grad school b/c I'd rather teach cute little kids. However, if this factor is pushed too strongly, given the fact that women are well represented in psych but not in physics, the prediction is that capable psychologists are either less interested in kids or have better tamed their maternal instincts compared to capable physicists, who are more likely to cave in. You'd have to poll undergrad majors in the respective areas, but my guess is that, on avg, the psych & bio girls are more nurturing and kid-obsessed than the mech engin girls.

And again, pushed too far, it can't account for why women have innovated lots in literature but not much in visual art and barely at all in music, despite the constant of discrimination and maternal instinct. Also, the Big Names of female scientists (like Nobel winners) numbered more during the first half of the 20th C, when women were shackled to the home as baby-producing machines. Freed from bondage, they haven't won more Nobels but fewer. My guess on that is that the pre-women's lib scientists really wanted to use their smarts as lawyers, doctors, businesswomen, etc., but settled for science since it's more objective & thus less discriminating. Sexism aside, no one would deny your math proof just b/c you were female. But to lead a corporation, you can't offer a formal proof for why your leadership is better than X's; thus, easier to irrationally keep women out.

"they haven't won more Nobels but fewer"
Undeniable, and I'm sure those who win them deserve the recognition, but after all, there are only so many to go around. Do you believe Oscar night really tells us the truly best and brightest of the film world? How often do you agree?
There are scientists and researchers (both genders) who have gone insufficiently recognized for various reasons. Case in point: we could have left fossil fuel in the dust decades ago, but that hasn't happened yet.
While Nobel winner money and status must be nice, some of the greatest inventors and researchers have never received a single trophy, and some have even had to run for their lives.

Rosalind Franklin was an excellent xray crystallographer. She was a lousy theoretician, else she would have made the discoveries, not Watson and Crick. She had all the data she needed. Watson and Crick had that "something extra" that made the connections that Franklin was unable to make.

Women have taken over psychology, obstetrics, pediatrics, publishing, much of biology, language studies, even women's studies. But no Fields medals, precious few Physics Nobels, and unless you start injecting female fetuses with testosterone in the second trimester, you won't see many more of those rare birds.

Small note about women in the arts? (And I write as someone who agrees that guys n' gals differ somewhat.) A certain amount of the feminist and po-mo critique of the "canon" is spot-on. One reason why we think easel painting is more important than, say, quilting is because guys were setting the standards. (And before you laugh about this, pause for a sec and remember that someone as burly 'n' manly as Robert Hughes now thinks that Appalachian and black folk-quilting is every bit as impressive as any other abstract art.) Many of women's creative and culture-activities either haven't been recognized as art-making (food preparation, house-decoration, clothing, storytelling), or have been looked-down-on (acting).

This isn't to say that the guys are evil. They aren't. They just like guy-things, and look for guy-things. Guys often tend to make things, and often tend to judge culture-questions according to those terms: "How impressive a made-thing is it?" Meanwhile, women often embody their ideas and feelings. They're more continuous with their work -- they make themselves up, they sing their feelings out, they act. They put themselves out there. But many guys (and guy-critics, and guy-historians) don't respect that kind of thing much. It isn't "hard" enough, or heroic enough. And guys, being guys, tend to focus on guy-creations. We see art history through their eyes. Most 19th century novels, for instance, were written by women, yet the ones we still speak of were mostly written by guys. Are we really sure that all the forgotten ones -- the ones by gals -- were stinkers? Really? I haven't read 'em, so I don't know for sure. Have you read 'em?

You ask why there haven't been female Shakespeares or Beethovens. But maybe asking questions like that is like being Henry Higgins asking "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Why not ask instead, why haven't there been male Billie Holidays, Patsy Clines, or Katharine Hepburns? And many of the great, heroic male artists have collaborated with women: What would Hitchcock have been without Grace Kelly, or Ingmar Bergman without Liv Ullman and Bibi Anderson? Many guys seem to love making and pointing cameras; many women seem to love looking beautiful, letting their feelings become visible, and being photographed. Why not say "yes" to both sides of the camera?

I talked once to a guy who reads scripts for Hollywood. He said that, generally speaking, women are better fiction-writers than men. They're more free, more imaginative, and more empathetic, and they know how to bring characters to life from the inside. They also tend to drop out of the Hollywood rat-race, because the game is just too tough for them. Hey, so be it, and life is complicated.

FWIW, and for my money, the best writer of book-fiction in America today is a woman, Lee Smith.

Michael, I don't mean to blogwhore, but interestingly enough I blogged last night about who rules the fashion design world. http://akinokure.blogspot.com/20...ion-i- race.html
I wrote about the racial make-up, but to-appear parts will discuss sex and sexual orientation. I agree w/ the anti-Canon folks that these disciplines should be investigated as seriously as classical music. However, I agree w/ the pro-Canon folks that there still is such a thing as a Canon w/in the discipline studied. And in fashion design, an area you mentioned to look for female excellence, almost all the Big Names then and now belong to (mostly gay) men, no matter what look you're after (minimal, flamboyant, sex kitten, etc.).

More interestingly, most fashion students are female (80-some percent), so the elite domination of men is even more impressive. Moving above the undergrad level, the Council of Fashion Designers of America has 121 women and 156 men. At the top, their Perry Ellis Award for young talent has gone to 8 women & 29 men. I'm sure similar figures hold for percentages of interior design students vs percentages of top-level interior designers & award-winners.

This can't be due to discrimination, since throughout recent history gay men have been much more fiercely persecuted than women. Also, the handful of female Big Names come not from women's lib centers like the present-day US or Sweden but pre-'60s France (Chanel, Schiaparelli), macho Italy (Miuccia Prada), or rigidly gendered Japan (Rei Kawakubo, Hanae Mori). The one stand-out is Jil Sander who came of age in '70s West Germany.

This also can't be due to men choosing male names as the best -- it's women who run the fashion magazines that editorially select who to promote, and it's women who make the choices at the boutiques or shopping centers. Again, I don't know interior design as well as fashion, but I'd bet a similar story goes on there as well.

Sorry, I should've stated the obvious. In fashion, men excel disproportionately compared to women due to higher male avg visuospatial skills. And at the elite level of visuospatial skills, greater male variance will again play a big role in making the ratio lop-sided toward males. Apparently, in addition to talent, designers need a certain temperament & interests in order to pursue fashion, which gay men much more than straight men seem to have. Ditto for interior design -- but not for architecture. Steve pointed out that gay men are more interested in "people" careers than straight men. http://www.isteve.com/lesvsgay.htm
So gay men w/ great visuospatial skills largely go into fashion or interior design, while straight men w/ such skills largely go into the more people-free, systematizing realm of architecture.

Agnostic -- Blog-whore away! That's a good posting, thanks, and I'll link to it from my site soon. Fashion's such a fun topic to muse about ...

I was hoping to raise a somewhat larger (if vaguer) point, which is that art isn't science, let alone sports. It isn't a linear progress towards anything, for one thing. And the ranking-thing is hopelessly fuzzy -- after all, a lot depends on subjective responses, historical whim, etc. Who's important and who's not changes from year to year and era to era.

And, in any case, we may simply disagree. I spent serious time in and around the book publishing world for 15 years, for instance. And the list of "great and important books from those years" that I'd make up would overlap hardly at all with the official publishing-world consensus list. Yet, by any objective standard, I'm just as smart and tasteful as any of the official publishing people. So who's to say who's "right"?

My own take on the question is that there is no one right. There are a ton of points of view, some of which you may or may not find helpful or illuminating. And history will make up its own mind, and then probably change it. Or not.

I'm the last person to get political about any of this, btw, let alone dogmatically po-mo. I ditched lib-arts academia because I could see all the politics on the horizon. But I'm OK with many of the criticisms of the staid old thing. The staid old canon takes very little note of popular and folk arts, for instance. And, though I'm often a big high-arts fan -- I like classical music, "art history" in the most conventional sense, "literature," etc -- that has always struck me as ridiculous. The staid old thing is fine; I've got no desire to do anything but learn from it. But there's much, much else of worth to be taken note of too.

Fashion's an interesting case, and you're right to call attention to the gay-male input and prominence. I might want to complicate the picture a bit, though. Those women editors play a huge role, as do the many female stylists, layout people, and makeup artists, not to mention the models, as well as the women who buy (or don't buy) the magazines and fashions. So I think it's more accurate to picture high fashion as a collaboration between gay guys and women. It's an interesting ecosystem, isn't it?

And where fashion's concerned too there's another element, which is everyday fashion: how your wife, girlfriend, mom, colleague gets herself up and puts herself together. Everyday style and fashion often has zero to do with gay men, and (in my view anyway) if/when a woman pulls herself together, she's creating her own little work of art. The hair, the jewelry, the attitude, the shoes, the occasion ... It's poetry! Gotta love 'em for going to all the trouble.

Amazing how resourceful the fashion biz and women generally are at keeping the femme thang interesting, appealing, and alluring year after year, isn't it? They're always finding some new feature to highlight, some new angle to play, some new attitude to make adorable. Can't be easy.

Anyway, it seems to me that it's a mistake to value high fashion over everyday fashion. Everyday fashion is actually much more important in many senses -- in the sense of being a much bigger business and a much more important part of our day to day lives, for instance. (What's more important: a pic in a mag, or the way your girlfriend is getting herself up today?) And it seems to me that the reason we sometimes let high fashion seem more important is that we're letting male values -- heroism, the individual creator, business success -- dictate our terms. Why should they? They're important too, and they're there to be taken note of. Yves St. Laurent really is a giant, and Armani keeps turning high quality stuff out decade after decade, and that's all very impressive. But what if we don't let heroism/business-success/etc dictate our terms? If we let go of value-ladder, then we find ourselves surrounded by millions of women creating modest-sized visual poetry on a daily basis. Impressive in its own right, as well as lovable and touching.

Who's been designing womens' clothes through history? I believe the entymology of the word wife is "one who weaves."
It should have been obvious that when mens' clothes went into mourning, circa 1800, certain among them would chaf so, in such drab rags, that something would have to be done. Men became the Names in fashion when fashion began to have Names. When it became an industry, a corporation. High fashion is for display. Have you seen that stuff? It's for crazy Vogue editors snorting coke. Who wears it before its been distilled for use by normal people? High fashion is one long, entertaining con-job, as Tom Wolfe said of abstract art.

Who arranged the matchless folds of Grecian womens' tunics, or the grace of the sari. Men? A Chinese girl's acceptance for marriage depended on her skill in exquisite embroidery. What about Indian woven blankets, or of the remarkable range of European styles through the centuries. The primacy of Paris in female fashion goes back to the middle ages, and men didn't bother their heads with womens' frippery. They were too busy thinking up their own. A turkish woman once said that the veils worn in her youth were pure coyness, a way to cleverly show off a certain feature and conceal another. Women constantly thought up new aspects to their constume in the interests of romance, seduction, practicality, etc. Men were the inspiration, not the creators.
Men are crucial to many endeavors, but women's clothing design is not one of them.
btw, I cannot find the info, but there was a highly acclaimed mens'jockey brief designed by a woman, and I don't even know her name, but suckers pay hundreds for those puzzling Jimmy Choos.

Not that it's relevant, but the etymology of "wife" is not "one who weaves" but rather "harlot," "hussy," etc.
http://dictionary.reference.com/...m/search? q=wife
Indo-European root cited in above entry:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots...oots/ IE175.html

Michael and mc both stress the importance of looking at the world of crafts rather than only design or art, and I agree that women probably outnumber men in crafts. Once one moves to design or farther up to fine arts, then men take over. This is due in part to the g-loadedness of the various disciplines, with design & fine arts requiring greater mental agility than crafts. Clothing crafts certainly demand a certain level of visuospatial skills, but fashion design does what crafts do but in addition tries to communicate a thought or feeling, or portray a persona -- much more difficult than doing so in words (our natural mode of expression), thus requiring more brainpower. This is not to slight crafts at all, just to explain why the sex ratio favors women there.

In defense of fashion, very little of the fashion design world churns out the overly flamboyant stuff that John Galliano does; most is very comfortable and wearable, though it's often too expensive to be worn by many. However, notice what happens when the price issue is gone, like on the makeover shows (e.g. What Not to Wear) -- the women realize that high-priced stuff in their size really is comfortable and wearable. Also, look at the popularity of the affordable collections at Target by gay white male Issac Mizrahi, or low-priced H&M's collection by Karl Lagerfeld (also gay white male).

In order to "distill" a look for "use by normal people," someone creative had to have thought up the look in the first place. More, it's just condescending to think that the unwashed masses have little appreciation for fine design, and that someone has to dumb down stunningly creative work in order for the rubes to merely "use" it. When it's within their means, they go for the Tiffany lamp or Faberge egg. Mass-produced replicas and imitations of the former show just how much "normal people" appreciate fine design, even if they like crafts too.

Agnostic -- I take many of your points. You won't catch me dissing fashion, and you won't find many bigger fans of the high arts than me. That said, I can't come up with a single reason why we should automatically value the high arts more than the other arts. And as far as importance goes, I wouldn't trust any history of 20th century art that didn't agree that two of the century's biggest art-stories were the triumph of the movies (a popular art, and a collaboration between men and women if ever there was one), and the triumph of African-derived and Afro-American-derived musics.

Michael, I didn't mean to suggest that any discipline is more important than any other, which is a normative question. Like you, I'm more a fan of design & fine arts, but I say let each choose their own favorite area to hype up. (I think the g-loadedness of a discipline makes its practitioners more impressive objectively, but not necessarily more satisfying subjectively.) I was only trying to answer the empirical question: why do males so dominate the world of visual design & fine arts?

"I think the g-loadedness of a discipline makes its practitioners more impressive objectively, but not necessarily more satisfying subjectively."

That's a great sentence!

"Not that it's relevant, but the etymology of "wife" is not "one who weaves" but rather "harlot," "hussy," etc."
Irrelevant? My dear, down through the ages, woman and her loom were mutually identified in many languages, and women were always someone's wife. To cite two icons: Penelope weaving and unraveling while awaiting Odysseus; or the Lady of Shallot, weaving before her mirror, creating the scenes unfolding beneath her bower. Women and weaving, making cloth, is an ancient connection, and when you talk of fashion, one does tend to think of the material from which it is made.
I know there is no one agreement on the origin of this and related words, Engish being a hybrid languae, and "weaver" is the one I have heard. But the etymology you've presented is tellingly unflattering. Words have meant different things at different times. Husbands/farmers were calling the ones sharing their yokes "hussies/harlots"--no more appropriate label? http://tafkac.org/language/ etymo...ymology_of.html
Why I'll have to give the feminists another hearing. Anyway...agnostic also said,
"In order to "distill" a look for "use by normal people," someone creative had to have thought up the look in the first place. More, it's just condescending to think that the unwashed masses have little appreciation for fine design, and that someone has to dumb down stunningly creative work in order for the rubes to merely "use" it."
The masses, washed and unwashed, buy what the media markets. Hidden and unhidden persuaders are everywhere. Who's talking about "dumbing down" anything? I'm was an art student (probably why I am commenting on this subject) and I fully appreciate the history of the high arts, though my tastes do incline towards the classical. The point was, that women have been thinking up styles highly interesting and imaginative throughout history. In the case of the more wealthy, it was the working women who were the "crafters." They just didn't market them.
If you believe men (actually, gay men, and that is probably the key) have a special genius for this, of all endeavors, well, who am I to disabuse you? It's just that the idea of high fashion as too "g-loaded" for women to excel, tickles me.
To paraphrase Mae West, "..brains had nothing to with it."
Well, almost nothing.