What would you think if a leading scientist asserted:
“I think it may have to do with my personal slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people..People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The scientist variable just has this – it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”
Given that engineering, and the physical sciences have traditionally been male-dominated, if you were a woman doing her best to reverse this problem, comments such as this would be the last thing you'd want to hear.
The quote is from a scientist, but I have altered one word. It's from Sam Harris, who actually said:
“I think it may have to do with my personal slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people..People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this – it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”
Harris may not be a leading scientist, but he enjoys no little prestige as an unofficial leader of movement atheism, and together with the late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, have alienated a considerable number of atheist women. As feminist writer Amanda Marcotte notes:
Also, the reason a lot of women hated Hitchens is Hitchens thought we were inferior by dint of biology. I find that offensive whether you say it gently or say it acerbically. It’s the content, not the tone.
This, I must point out, is not a tu quoque rebuttal of atheism - any attempt to justify sexist behaviour by appeal to religion deserves to be condemned, and any criticism of atheism should not be predicated on the moral failing of its unofficial leaders. However, it should serve as a sober reminder that simply ceasing to believe in deities does not automatically turn you into a better class of person. Sometimes, all it does is create a sexist who also happens not to believe in God. Marcotte put it well in her conclusion to a recent Salon article on atheism and sexism:
If atheists believed in the afterlife, they would have to assume that Simone de Beauvoir and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are looking down upon us in horror, wondering how the good name of atheism has been so poisoned by rampant sexism. But since they are no longer around to judge us, it’s up to living atheists to strive to be more than a bunch of people who simply don’t believe in God, but stand up to irrationality in all its forms, including sexism.
I remain pessimistic about their chances of solving this problem.
