Monday 2 February 2015

The worrying feminization of psychology

I have been reading a social psychology textbook recently and, when I last opened Goodreads, this is what greeted me:


Weird, right? OK, so maybe their algorithm is not very smart, but it most probably is not lying either: the data must be strongly pointing to a hefty correlation between reading psychology and, er, knitting. And, sure, as women nowadays routinely outnumber men 3 to 1 among psychology graduates (click to enlarge),



in fact this should not even be considered as surprising.

Now, I am a strong believer in diversity. On financial markets, for instance, I have seen culturally homogeneous banks run into trouble like clockwork. The dangers caused by groupthink should never be underestimated - and especially so in a soft science like psychology, where well-established, sobering facts are not that numerous and where quite a few of the results taught in undergraduate textbooks remain controversial.

So I do find this slightly worrying.


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