[Redcarmoose]

 
 
Series 2 Male Members
Series 3 Female Members
Series 1 New Female Members In 2014

 
 
First Head-Fi Meet and Awards Dinner March 10th, 1962
 

 

[Nusho]

   
Nusho,
Gender differences exist not only in Audio, but most fields in technology. Some say its evolution, men have always been better at making and using tools. Others say its because women haven't been involved in these fields traditionally, they don't see the appeal of entering them now.
 
I for one would say that men are generally more drawn towards taking things apart, seeing how they work, and tinkering with them. Hence most musicians have been men, and most scientists and engineers have been men as well.
 
In addition, the emotional rigidness in men gives them the ability to turn any activity/hobby into a profession (meaning, facing the emotional stress of running a business etc). You'll find a lot of women are good at the same things, but not all of them turn their interests into a profession.
 
Do women have the same physical ability? Yes. But having a physical ability doesn't mean you're drawn to the same activities as the rest, because professions need both physical  and mental abilities.
 
Most of us are capable of running, but not everyone likes to run, and even among those who do like to run, not everyone can run a marathon (its more of a mental game).

Very true. I was not suggesting that gender differences would only exist in audio -- but merely promoting audio as an example of this difference. But I think what you said is very true that men have a certain emotional rigidness intrinsic to their gender -- certainly a thought I have not contemplated before.
Thanks for the reply btw, it was an interesting read
Nusho

 

[Nusho]

I still think you are selectively choosing the evidence to fit your theory. Turn this around... Do men see better than women? There are certainly also far more males in video & photography forums than females. Why don't the same conditions apply?

This whole thread sounds like one of the logical fallacies, but I don't know enough about rhetoric to name the fallacy. I'm just having trouble getting from A->B->C. It seems like what I'm reading is: A) Women don't seem to care as much about audio as men. 2) Men needed to have good hearing to survive the prehistoric environment. 3) The modern male therefore cares more about audio than the modern female because his prehistoric role conditioned him to get more enjoyment from aural excellence.

I just don't see it...

Yea I guess it does sound a little fantastic when you just sum it up in a few sentences .
But it was an interesting theory nonetheless, but probably not very logical; there are probably other reasons for why the makeup of this forum is largely male, and they probably have nothing to do with genetics. I doubt human hearing would've genetically changed, even across genders, to the point where one would achieve aural stimulation at a much higher level than the other -- and to have that change across all human societies seems preposterous. It could've been a trait to the homo sapiens over other humanoid species, but gender differences, the more im thinking about it, sounds less and less probable.
Thanks

 

[mutabor]

   
But it was an interesting theory nonetheless, but probably not very logical; there are probably other reasons for why the makeup of this forum is largely male, and they probably have nothing to do with genetics. I doubt human hearing would've genetically changed, even across genders, to the point where one would achieve aural stimulation at a much higher level than the other -- and to have that change across all human societies seems preposterous. It could've been a trait to the homo sapiens over other humanoid species, but gender differences, the more im thinking about it, sounds less and less probable.
 

 
Your mistake is that you consider hearing in separation from other senses and from brain activity. We don't just hear sounds - we decode them and make analysis of them and we also decode sounds in relation to other data. We and animals can hear the same sounds but we make different judgements about these sounds according to our brain development. So engagement into music or visual art etc. reflects not hearing ability per se but rather brain ability to make use or interpret sound/visual data which is perceived.
 
Men and women don't perceive the world in the same manner. There is a late fashionable trend when they make us believe that differences between genders have more to do with social development rather than biological. Like women were socially oppressed and hence they couldn't perform to their best. It's only partially true. In fact it is biological differences which determine social roles and not otherwise.

 

[proton007]

Men and women don't perceive the world in the same manner. There is a late fashionable trend when they make us believe that differences between genders have more to do with social development rather than biological. Like women were socially oppressed and hence they couldn't perform to their best. It's only partially true. In fact it is biological differences which determine social roles and not otherwise.

True.
Biological differences gave rise to sociological behaviors, because thats how they developed in order.
Given the social change in the past 40 years or so I'd say if there was any truth to the social oppression argument we would see a 50:50 ratio in most professions.

 

[Nusho]

   
Your mistake is that you consider hearing in separation from other senses and from brain activity. We don't just hear sounds - we decode them and make analysis of them and we also decode sounds in relation to other data. We and animals can hear the same sounds but we make different judgements about these sounds according to our brain development. So engagement into music or visual art etc. reflects not hearing ability per se but rather brain ability to make use or interpret sound/visual data which is perceived.
 
Men and women don't perceive the world in the same manner. There is a late fashionable trend when they make us believe that differences between genders have more to do with social development rather than biological. Like women were socially oppressed and hence they couldn't perform to their best. It's only partially true. In fact it is biological differences which determine social roles and not otherwise.

Do you know where I can learn more about how men and women perceive the world differently?
Sorry I must be sounding very corny in this thread, but my knowledge about this subject is quite limited, yet yours seems to be very profound (when placed next to mine, I am not going to go around saying absolutes that I have no surety of proving).
In any case, thanks for all the responses, I think this thread was somewhat of an eye opener
Nusho

 

[billybob_jcv]

Do you guys all come from cultures where women are still treated much differently in the workplace than men, or where there are still significant differences between male careers and female careers? Some of what I've read in this thread simply doesn't match the world in which I live. I see no such differences between the genders that would lead anyone to believe a male would make a better anything than a female - other than a task requiring simple body mass or strength. We had uncounted generations of the majority of females NOT having careers outside the home. Of course that led to a majority of men occupying the business roles - it couldn't have been any other way. Yet, look at the changes that have occurred in only the last 50 years. In that time, women (at least in the USA) can be found in ALL career roles - and it's not as if there was a long ramp-up period to allow women to acquire traits that were traditionally found only in men. On the contrary, the only thing that women needed in order to successfully fill Engineering, Science, Management and all other Business roles was education and opportunity. I simply don't see any genetic or biological difference between men and women in the ability to perform a specific job that is outside the normal distribution curve found in any significantly large population of only men or only women.

 

[Claritas]

You must have noticed that Head-Fi is almost exclusively male. No one is unwelcome here, so there must be other sensible reasons for that. Hence the topic.

 

[proton007]

Do you guys all come from cultures where women are still treated much differently in the workplace than men, or where there are still significant differences between male careers and female careers? Some of what I've read in this thread simply doesn't match the world in which I live. I see no such differences between the genders that would lead anyone to believe a male would make a better anything than a female - other than a task requiring simple body mass or strength. We had uncounted generations of the majority of females NOT having careers outside the home. Of course that led to a majority of men occupying the business roles - it couldn't have been any other way. Yet, look at the changes that have occurred in only the last 50 years. In that time, women (at least in the USA) can be found in ALL career roles - and it's not as if there was a long ramp-up period to allow women to acquire traits that were traditionally found only in men. On the contrary, the only thing that women needed in order to successfully fill Engineering, Science, Management and all other Business roles was education and opportunity. I simply don't see any genetic or biological difference between men and women in the ability to perform a specific job that is outside the normal distribution curve found in any significantly large population of only men or only women.

 
No one is doubting the ability of men or women, atleast physically. Emotionally I still have my doubts. As I said, having the ability to do something, and wanting to do it are two different things.
 
These are America's 10 deadliest jobs (according to Forbes):
1. Logging workers
2. Fishers and related fishing workers
3. Aircraft pilot and flight engineers
4. Roofers
5. Structural iron and steel workers
6. Refuse and recyclable material collectors
7. Electrical power-line installers and repairers
8. Drivers/sales workers and truck drivers
9. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers
10. Construction laborers
 
Are women able to do all these? Most certainly yes. Today more than any other day in history, with all the technology available to them. Do they want to do them? Nope. No one wants to do them. Then why are most of the employees in these jobs men?
 
Its very good to see everyone has a choice to choose their profession. But let them make the choice. Whatever gender distribution comes out of this choice is then the norm, assuming that a 50:50 distribution is the 'ideal' is absurd.
 
PS: As a side note, my own experiences tell me there are a lot of women in STEM fields nowadays who use the 'discrimination' card to get their way. Always looking for sympathy and help from coworkers to hide their own laziness / lack of interest. Competency be damned. I have seen genuinely capable women, and women who were given the position just to say that it 'empowers women'.
 
My own theory is that millions of years of evolution has turned females into survivalists. In a weaker position they play the victim. In a stronger position they don't hold back in cutting off and destroying their competition.

 

[mutabor]

   
No one is doubting the ability of men or women, atleast physically. Emotionally I still have my doubts. As I said, having the ability to do something, and wanting to do it are two different things.
 
These are America's 10 deadliest jobs (according to Forbes):
1. Logging workers
2. Fishers and related fishing workers
3. Aircraft pilot and flight engineers
4. Roofers
5. Structural iron and steel workers
6. Refuse and recyclable material collectors
7. Electrical power-line installers and repairers
8. Drivers/sales workers and truck drivers
9. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers
10. Construction laborers
 
Are women able to do all these? Most certainly yes. Today more than any other day in history, with all the technology available to them. Do they want to do them? Nope. No one wants to do them. Then why are most of the employees in these jobs men?

 
Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher:
 

You need only look at the way in which she is formed, to see that woman is not meant to undergo great labor, whether of the mind or of the body. She pays the debt of life not by what she does, but by what she suffers; by the pains of child-bearing and care for the child, and by submission to her husband, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion. The keenest sorrows and joys are not for her, nor is she called upon to display a great deal of strength. The current of her life should be more gentle, peaceful and trivial than man's, without being essentially happier or unhappier. 

 
Quote:

  My own theory is that millions of years of evolution has turned females into survivalists. In a weaker position they play the victim. In a stronger position they don't hold back in cutting off and destroying their competition.

 
Arthur Schopenhauer:
 

 Hence, it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice. This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position which Nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex. They are dependent, not upon strength, but upon craft; and hence their instinctive capacity for cunning, and their ineradicable tendency to say what is not true. For as lions are provided with claws and teeth, and elephants and boars with tusks, bulls with horns, and cuttle fish with its clouds of inky fluid, so Nature has equipped woman, for her defence and protection, with the arts of dissimulation; and all the power which Nature has conferred upon man in the shape of physical strength and reason, has been bestowed upon women in this form. Hence, dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever. It is as natural for them to make use of it on every occasion as it is for those animals to employ their means of defence when they are attacked; they have a feeling that in doing so they are only within their rights. Therefore a woman who is perfectly truthful and not given to dissimulation is perhaps an impossibility, and for this very reason they are so quick at seeing through dissimulation in others that it is not a wise thing to attempt it with them. But this fundamental defect which I have stated, with all that it entails, gives rise to falsity, faithlessness, treachery, ingratitude, and so on. Perjury in a court of justice is more often committed by women than by men. It may, indeed, be generally questioned whether women ought to be sworn in at all. From time to time one finds repeated cases everywhere of ladies, who want for nothing, taking things from shop-counters when no one is looking, and making off with them.

 

[Claritas]

I read Schopenhauer's essays when I was twenty. I remember (quoting from distant memory so forgive me), "A man attains his full mental capacity scarcely before his twenty-eighth year, and a woman when she turns sixteen but she doesn't develop thereafter." That's all I remember. I don't give much thought to the part about women. My immediate reaction to his comment about men not really growing up till their late twenties was, "Yeah, right." It reminded me of the times when I was told as a child to respect someone because of his age or that I'd understand when I'm older. But it turned out that Schopenhauer was right about men. Starting from round my twenty-seventh birthday, my capacity to understand the world changed qualitatively in ways I had never anticipated. Recently, I told this story to a young colleague who has sound fundamentals. I said to him, "You're going to wake up one day and think 'I get it.'" And he felt pretty good about that.

 

[eke2k6]

There aren't many female head-fi'ers because of threads like this, and the different varations of the "I hope the ol' ball and chain doesn't find out about this multi-thousand dollar purchase I just made without consulting her first" phrase. 
 
I really don't see where mutabor's reasoning comes from, other than from obviously sexist and misogynist sources. Mutabor also seems to believe that men are inherently more intelligent than women, as evidenced by the "fact" that there are so many more "great men" than there are "great" women. He repeatedly made this argument in previous threads.
 

   
In my opinion hearing and other senses are shaped by intelligence. Humans don't need to hear very distant sounds. Our hearing is adapted to speech recognition and high sensitivity to tiniest vibrations would hindrance decoding of speech patterns. 
 
So what was the question? Why there are much more male composers than female ones? 

 
 

 
Could it be that the would-be female composers were too busy caring for the children and their men? You forget that women were not even afforded the right to vote in the US until half a century ago. Women were subject to forms of social slavery, suppressing any kind of upward drive they may have had...not unlike actual racial enslavement. Mutabor's arguments are actually quite analogous to old justifications for the enslavement of "negroes" and other "less civilized races". As a matter of fact, Cocaine was made illegal in the states because it caused "crazed negro syndrome". Marijuana was criminalized as part of a plot to get the Mexicans out of the country after the Great Depression ended. Phrenology was used to show that blacks had an extra bulge in their brains that predisposed them to servitude. This is the same sort of reasoning that mutabor is using here.
 
The truth is that women are nurtured to think in certain ways, just like men are. I used to think it was comfortable to sit on the toilet to urinate until my dad slapped it out of me. I'm sure I'll do the same to my son. I'm a bit of a Don Draper myself sometimes when it comes to women, but it's often disgusting the type of things that are said around here. It's like a bar full of smelly old fat guys snickering about how they outsmarted their women.
 
Remember, this was the prevailing ideology until a few short years ago...
 

 

[Claritas]

/img/forum/go_quote.gif

There aren't many female head-fi'ers because of threads like this, and the different varations of the "I hope the ol' ball and chain doesn't find out about this multi-thousand dollar purchase I just made without consulting her first" phrase. [...]

 
It's plausible that our male membership allows for such conversations, but that's no reason to believe that the conversations caused the membership composition.

 

[Nusho]

  There aren't many female head-fi'ers because of threads like this, and the different varations of the "I hope the ol' ball and chain doesn't find out about this multi-thousand dollar purchase I just made without consulting her first" phrase. 
 
I really don't see where mutabor's reasoning comes from, other than from obviously sexist and misogynist sources. Mutabor also seems to believe that men are inherently more intelligent than women, as evidenced by the "fact" that there are so many more "great men" than there are "great" women. He repeatedly made this argument in previous threads.
 
.....
 
Remember, this was the prevailing ideology until a few short years ago...
 
 

I dont think those were Mutabors personal views. I think he was just quoting Schopenhaur and mentioning how he had similar thoughts to proton007 -- but as those quotes from Schopenhaur show, he had an especially sexist view of the world -- something which was not entirely wrong in his time (so I dont think we can blame him). 

 

[Nusho]

   
It's plausible that our male membership allows for such conversations, but that's no reason to believe that the conversations caused the membership composition.

Agreed. Threads like these ask questions -- indeed, I woudl be most interested if a woman could comment on one of these and express her thoughts. Furthermore, sure we use sexist colloqialism but its rampant in all areas of society -- honestly, we joke about it all the time. I dont see how a woman seeing a comment like that would make her bear hate towards high end audio, etc. ANd the same applies for women -- they have to face up to their husbands if they buy headphones worth thousands of dollars.