Heather Mac Donald: I have spent the last year or so observing the photos of the AI entrepreneur tech startup people.
There is no barrier to females. In fact, females, as far as getting venture capital, they are welcomed with open arms. We saw this with the fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, who came up with a phony medical device that was going to cure a liver or kidney disease. People were throwing millions, if not billions of dollars at her because they were so happy to finally have a female tech entrepreneur that they could back. George Shultz was backing her. It was just unbelievable She had the honor roll of the VCs in Silicon Valley and the political elite. There are no barriers to females.
You look at the newspaper, it's all male. It's all male. It's incredible. The people that are starting these tech companies now, it's not a legacy company. They are males because they have–– it's the same drive that led Vasco de Gama to try and figure out how to navigate around the Atlantic Ocean that led to the exploration, the circumnavigation of the globe.
Winston Marshall: You're saying it's different in tech than it is in AI?
Mac Donald: No, it's the same. Females are just not pushing themselves into that world. There are no barriers. There are no gatekeepers.
Marshall: Oh, right, I see what you're saying.
Mac Donald: There's no gatekeepers. The argument is always there's gatekeepers that are discriminating against females.
Marshall: Yes, there's a glass ceiling.
Mac Donald: I collect natural experiments of gatekeeper-less environments, environments without a gatekeeper, so you can't blame the gatekeeper. I've invoked this before. The perfect example of this is Wikipedia, the online crowdsourced encyclopedia, which is anonymous, crowdsourced–
Marshall: Hard-left crowdsourced.
Right. Well, that's a different story, but let's just look at the gender issue. Nobody prevents anybody from editing a Wikipedia entry. It's blind; there's no barriers. And to Wikipedia Foundation's utter dismay and horror, about 90% of the editors are male. Nobody's keeping out the females. They just don't have that same drive for facts, for documentation. Even the putatively female entries on Manolo Blahnik's stiletto heels, they're very short, they're very thin compared to an obscure battle in the Civil War.
Woman's development, even if it were not guided by biological elements that tend toward creating and sustaining life itself, is more "healthy" in that there is less aggression to be turned inward. Thus female biology does not clash with familial and societal environmental realities to as nearly as great an extent as does aggressive male biology, and so there is less frustrated aggression to be channeled into creative energy. I think that this would help to explain why even in literature, the creative area where the possible sex differences in the raw cognitive abilities would seem to be least relevant, we find, as Elizabeth Hardwick has pointed out, that even the undeniably great women writers have lacked the obsessive dedication to their work and the inexorable energies, the lifelong burst of speed, that enabled a Balzac to write at the limits of his abilities for sixteen hours a day all his life. It is perhaps crazy to write for sixteen hours a day, but it is a craziness that seems to possess men more often than women. No doubt there are psychological preconditions for this, but it seems likely that there are biological preconditions also.
