Women Are Better Than Men At Nearly Everything- But We Are Eliminating Them! The Absence of Women In A Man-Made World

Here is some ammunition I am not interested in having used against me (I am, after all, the sole male living in a household of four): Women are better than men at just about everything!

Dang, if that doesn’t leave me struggling for self-respect. Actually, respecting women and praising women’s achievements comes naturally to me: I come from a family with a fair share of illustrious women on both sides (one side includes the “celebrated Daly sisters”) and I have always been surrounded by wonderful women. Still, I’d like to stick up for men as being at least equal but now I’m told that they are not and there is a gentleman who has assembled a lot of data that proves it. (Also, as I will get to later, "mankind" can do some pretty stupid things.)

Data on Women Being Better

I got the male ego-deflating news about female superiority listening to a segment of the Brian Lehrer Show: Girls Rule, Boys Drool, Monday, June 13, 2011. Dan Abrams appeared to discuss his new book: Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt that Women are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers and Just About Everything Else. Mr. Abrams is a legal analyst for Good Morning America and ABC News, as well as the founder of the Abrams Media Network.



What are women better at than men? Here is a list of some of things mentioned in the segment:

• Hedge Fund Managers: Women get consistently higher returns as hedge fund managers and investors.- They are more careful and deliberative.

• Political Leaders: Legislatures that have more women are less corrupt and laws passed by female legislators are more popular and better funded. They also get more laws passed.

• Newscasters: Women newscasters are more credible when reading news copy.

• Qualified Ivy League School Applicants: Ivy league schools are having to act affirmatively to admit enough men to equal the number of qualified women applying.

• Hammering nails: Women are 10% more accurate. (Men might swing harder.)

• Enduring pain: Women complain less about pain.

Men are better at some things it is not necessarily desirable to be good at: 82% of the people struck by lightning are men. Some things are a mixed bag: Women are supposedly better drivers but men are better at parking. And how much does it matter that women wash their hands more frequently than men after going to the bathroom?

Here is something to think about that wasn’t mentioned during the discussion: It has been suggested that women are better at fitting into large organizations and working cooperatively with large teams. The heads of very large corporations may especially like women in the many support positions that exist in such organizations. (Why, we might ask, are those corporate heads so often men?) What does that entail for an American economy with an ever increasing consolidation of businesses into a smaller and smaller number of 21st-century monopolies where working for a few large corporate teams is about all there is?

One thing the segment gave credit to men for is that they are better risk takers, with the attendant characteristic that they make more mistakes and errors. That might be valuable if we still had an economy that supported a proliferation of small businesses, but . . . .

If Women Are Better Than Men Why Are We Getting Rid Of Them?

If women are really better then men that means that the world must be on the precipice of a fearful decline since more and more families around the globe are choosing to have boy babies instead of girls. The world-wide choice to have an increasing number of boy babies rather than girls is written about in another new book out by Mara Hvistendahl: Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

Ms. Hvistendahl was a guest for a segment of another WNYC radio program, Leonard Lopate’s: The Consequences of Choosing Boys Over Girls, Thursday, June 16, 2011.



The artificial selection of male babies over female seems repugnant on its own, but mention of Ms. Hvistendahl's book begs to be paired with Mr. Abram’s book, albeit that his is of a lighter tone, to conclude that the women thus being eliminated from world may actually have more to offer than the men edging them out. Mara Hvistendahl looks at other wide-ranging detrimental consequences of the unnatural sex selection.

From the Lopate show and web site:

• The port city Lianyungang has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls.

• In China the overall ratio of boy to girl babies is now 120 to 100. The natural ratio in nature is 105 boys to 100 favoring boys, it is thought, to make up that boys are more likely to die (perhaps getting hit by lightning?)

• Other countries and cultures are involved in this emerging trend, India, Azerbaijan, Armenia (in 2005 Armenia had 120 boys to every 100 girls), Georgia, Albania, South Korea and Vietnam.

• China and India together account for one third of the World’s population.

• Globally the male female ration is 107 to 100.

• United State has had a historic preference for boys and new technology in this country will allow sex selection of embryos - U.S. and western countries helped introduce sex-selection in Asia.

• Families immigrating to the U.S. continue sex selection-biased practices after arriving here.

• Middle- and upper-class families are more likely to select sex (and have more means to identify and select sex) and then the practice trickles down.

• Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. (An example is the Wild West where a strategy adopted to improve things was to ship women in.)

• By 2020 there will be 24 million “surplus males” in China.

• Surplus men can’t find partners- Men from South Korea and Taiwan are taking trips to Vietnam, another country sex-selecting against women, to find wives.

• In Asia women are being kidnapped to even out the sex ratio imbalance.

Man’s Brave New World?

The arrogance of artificial intervention to replace valuable females with less valuable men seems like science fiction. Is man actually willing to step in and change the natural order of life so drastically, like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

The arrogance made me think of how we are now dealing with the disappearance of bees around the world due to colony collapse disorder. Colony collapse disorder may be occurring because genetically modified crops are producing a new class of neonicotinoid pesticides (produced by companies like Monsanto). How are companies like Monsanto dealing with the fact that the world is dependent upon bees for fertilization of most of the world’s crops, about 40% of what we eat? Not by eliminating the genetically modified crops threatening the bees. These companies are hard at work developing almond and soy crops that won’t require fertilization by bees.

Ending with a reference to the impending elimination of bees from the natural world may seem to go rather far afield for a National Notice post that was supposed to be talking about the value of women in the world. . . Until you realize that nearly all the bees in a bee colony, the queen bee and all the worker bees, are female . . . .

. . . In a summer beehive consisting of 60,000 - 80,000 bees, perhaps only 3% (300-3000) are male drones kept around to mate with the queen. In the winter the hive is all female: The male drones are expelled in the autumn because they are of no use during the winter.

That may seem like too little respect for men . . .

But when it comes to humans, it's mankind that has too little respect for women.