Transcript
Chris Williamson (0:00)
Did you read this New Statesman article?
Tanya (0:02)
I did.
Chris Williamson (0:03)
Okay, what did you think of that?
Tanya (0:04)
I thought it was fascinating, I thought it was concerning, but also a little bit predictable that women are. Well, there was a lot in there. There was. You know, women are, have a bleak outlook on life and that they are also spending a lot of time online, which is making everything worse. And that they dislike men so strongly more than men dislike women. I think that this is to be predicted by an evolutionary framework. Throughout human history, women were very vulnerable because they are targets of sexual abuse, because they're reproductively valuable, they're smaller on average, and they needed assistance getting the calories for themselves and for their children. And the data suggest women's foraging isn't enough to sustain any, even themselves. So women who signaled their vulnerability through looking kind of pitiable would have been favored. But also any display beyond that, so communicating sadness, communicating need would have been favored. So I think this kind of tendency towards a bleak outlook on life makes sense. And in fact, women perceive themselves around the globe to be less happy, less healthy than men, both men, mentally and physically. And so this is a common pattern. And there also seems to be like a social contagion effect to it. So if you look at women's interactions, when they are sad, their partners, whoever they're interacting with, becomes more sad. Their depression spreads through networks in a way that men's doesn't. So there's also like a social contagion effect. So I think a lot of this makes sense. And then if you look at like the men hating, it also makes sense that if women needed to signal their loyalty to one another, so if they were often in these patrilocal environments where they weren't around their family or kin, then one way to communicate to other women, you can trust me, is by being loyal, a really good friend, but also probably being a girl's girl. And one way to signal you're a girl's girl is by hating men. Hannah Bradshaw has some cool research showing that women, our guys, girls tend to be not trusted by other women. So if you have more guy friends, they don't trust you, they think you're more provocative. And so I think some of this is also related to that. I think there's a lot going on.
Chris Williamson (2:42)
Is that in group loyalty thing around the guys girl stuff?
Tanya (2:46)
I think so. So she didn't test it in that framework. She tested it as like just what do you think of a girl who only has guy friends or a girl who has girls friends and women like the girl with girlfriends more and trust her more. But in some of our data, where we looked at kind of this asymmetry and concern for men versus women, women showed the bias to a stronger degree than men did. So I think if you put those two together, I think women might be like advocating for women to signal to one another, I'm on your team.
