In my previous post I started talking about systems and how women tended to be better at being able to see the big picture; and the problem with men managing big projects is that they tend to be task-focused rather than looking at the consequences of the big picture.
This is why history focuses on specific men in history, like Churchill, generals, presidents because all those men who worked for The Man disappear into the hierarchical organization that allowed The Man to accomplish whatever task, such as running a country or winning a war... Thus The Man appears greater because he (in large part is due to his organization, attributed to his leadership) achieved something big. [In my opinion, this is why men who build businesses or corporations don't think they needed their employees, customers, government... to help them build their business - all those people he depended on for help disappear in the task of building the business]
This is primary reason we have so many problems with environmental collapse: men are focused on their quarterly reports to stockholders rather than the fuck-up their industry is causing the planet. Pollution is beyond the scope of their task, to make money; the rest is irrelevant. They only care about what involves money and what will hurt their corporation and how they will continue to make money.
My husband says that when you are (a man and) part of a hierarchy you are only looking at your boss and those below you to get the task done. This very quickly narrows your perspective. And men who get to the top of corporations likely were raised never having to tidy their bedrooms - that was either a job for their mother or the maid/nanny.
Women are generally better at being able to see the consequences of their actions because they focus on more than the immediate tasks to be accomplished; instead, they anticipate and plan for the consequences of what they do. This may be primarily due to social conditioning -- after all, men, and seemingly especially those men who are groomed for positions of privilege and leadership in our society, are often raised to believe that the rules do not apply to them ("boys will be boys!") whereas women are raised to respect the rules... and thus have to be more aware of the consequences of their actions.
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Why is the difference between how men and women think important?
Men tend to follow the leader, line up behind other men, and seldom learn to think outside the box. This is especially evident when it comes to Artificial Intelligence. The men who implement AI don't try to make it better by experimenting seriously with the algorithms. It takes women to truly experiment; we see but one example, historically, with Admiral Hopper especially. She was told not to write a compiler by her male bosses, who were quite happy with the idea of having one, perhaps two computers, per town - they weren't interested in putting computers into every home. But Hopper wrote the compiler and here we are.
The same old ugly techniques of developing AI becomes a problem when you hear about cases like Google's awful racist image-recognition misfire (which was patched, rather than carefully understood). It seems to me that for really outside the box thinking, you need women, because men do tend to (in no small part due to social conditioning) fall in line. Men can really only see one way to solve the problems with AI.
And this is important for space travel - okay wait a minute, how did we get from AI to space travel?
Well I think our civilization won't come of age until we learn to live in harmony with our environment. We might have to manage our environment but we must master ourselves to live with the confines of our environment because we depend on it. We and our technology can only function within a very narrow range of temperatures and even if we build colonies on the moon and Mars we will still be dependent upon earth for technology and our environment.
Our biggest problem is that we are all so dependent upon each other we don't see how the person who builds the circuit board in our mouse depends on, for instance, the technology of growing coffee. And the many steps in a supply chain are needed to make something as taken-for-granted as computer mice. So when we are living in our colony on the Moon we will still need the next shipment from earth for something as seemingly prosaic as a replacement mouse.
However mastering our environment -- controlling our use of it so it becomes sustainable -- will be a major milestone for our civilization. It will signal that we have come of age, that we are an adult species. We have made steps towards our civilization's adulthood before - by walking on the moon and seeing a new perspective of ourselves and the universe. We avoided a nuclear war (so far) - and the cold war ended (or so we thought) without a nuclear war.
These are milestones - but the other one will be to manage our world - by managing our environment and making sure we don't get wiped out by an asteroid. We have been lucky so far but these steps are salient in protecting the future of our species.
Because in my opinion - while space is massive - it is massive, in some sense, to protect the rest of the universe from us. And we won't be able to traverse space until women break us out of Einstein's light box - because you see that is what limits our ability to traverse space. The same thing that cripples our AI - calculus, at least as a way, or rather, THE way, of understanding everything.
In my opinion we need to realize what women bring to the table - which so far men think is pretty useless because they think they know everything - they make everything mysterious to control knowledge - and thus women and their knowledge has been marginalized.
There are vastly different ways of seeing the universe than merely using calculus (the mathematical backbone of physics).
But women's ideas have become mainstream for the benefit of men. One of the fundamental axioms of womanhood is that women form equalities. It doesn't take much to step from equalities to the notion that 'all men are created equal'.
Another is women being upset about rape has led to people being wary of their sons (as well as our daughters) being raped by older men.
Another fundamental law of the universe is that everything is recycled. Everything. Whether it is in our environment or in our universe - all will be recycled sooner or later. This isn't very interesting to men who are focused on their profit & loss statements. But it will be fundamental to off planet colonies. In my opinion until recycling underpins our technology our whole civilization will be unsustainable.
These are merely a few examples of women can bring to the table that will benefit all of us. And until we give women and their minds all the recognition they deserve then our society will not function as it will need to to survive.
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