Social exclusion as a strategy

I am aware of the argument about the feminization of "X".  X might be academia, a legislature, a company, a department, etc.  The argument is that as X becomes feminized, it begins to manifest attributes of female competition strategies, female communication patterns, female social norms, etc.

While I suspect that there might be some kernel of truth in the argument, I am generally leery of it.  There are a lot of undefined predicate beliefs or contingent conditions for it to be reliably true.  It is not not dissimilar to the argument about Marxism.  Did Marx, as an economist, have some useful economic insights?  Well . . . yes.  A few.  Was his overarching argument an evil and disastrous failure?  Certainly yes.

The argument that an institution is verging into failure because it is becoming feminized feels the same to me.  There might be some nugget of truth in there but the entirety of the argument feels wrong.  

That said, this is an interesting piece from Women As Worriers Who Exclude by Robin Hanson.  

He is citing Warriors and Worriers by Joyce F. Benenson and Henry Markovitz.

This is an excellent 2014 book on how men differ from women:

In Warriors and Worriers, psychologist Joyce Benenson presents a new theory of sex differences, based on thirty years of research with young children and primates around the world. … boys and men deter their enemies, while girls and women find assistants to aid them in coping with vulnerable children and elders. … Human males form cooperative groups that compete against out-groups, while human females exclude other females in their quest to find mates, female family members to invest in their children, and keep their own hearts ticking. In the process, Benenson turns upside down the familiar wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women.

Especially interesting is her discussion of how central social exclusion is to female behavior: 

How does a woman compete while minimizing the risk of retaliation? I suggest that women use a few simple strategies. Strategy 1 is that a woman does not ever let anyone else know that she is competing with them. …  She preaches the mantra of equality for all, and sincerely believes it. …Unaware of her own competitive instincts, she tries to get as much as she can for herself, while insisting that everyone else share equally. If strategy 1 is not working out well enough, then a woman may switch to strategy 2, which requires employing social exclusion. She must ally with other females to run their target out of town. That way, they retain more resources, status, allies, babysitters, and high-quality mates for themselves. The virtue of social exclusion is that it allows overt competition but reduces the risk of retalitation because the target is outnumbered. Should strategy 2 fail, the final fallback is strategy 3, which is reserved for emergencies. It entails a direct hit on a competitor, a physical or verbal assault. If a woman must use strategy 3, she has failed. She is no longer nice; she is mean. … She will be abandoned by former allies. Not only that, but she risks retaliation from her target. …

Strategy 2 comes into play when one female stands out. She may stand out because she obviously tries to outdo everyone else. She may stand out because she is new, extremely talented, or simply has the resources or relationships that others want. She may even stand out simply because she is an easy target and has nothing going for her. She has no allies. It would cost little to be rid of her, leaving more for everyone else. In any of these circumstances, it might be worth using a more direct competitive strategy. However, any form of individual, direct competition leaves open the possibility of retaliation and potential harm. One way of minimizing this is for several girls or women to gang up on a single target. This way, there is little chance of any one of the group suffering harm. Social exclusion accomplishes just that. …

Barring imminent death of herself or her child, nothing strikes more fear into the heart of a girl or woman than the thought that she will be excluded. In one recent study, my students and I asked women and men simply to read about being socially excluded by a friend. Women’s heart rates increased much more than men’s heart rates did. In contrast, women’s and men’s heart rates increased equally when they imagined being physically assaulted by a friend. … 

Social exclusion is primarily a female strategy. … Girls practice it from early childhood. It has been used by females across diverse cultures in middle childhood and adolescence and adulthood … An experimenter brought two 6-year-olds, either girls or boys, to a room … One week later, the same two children returned to the room and …  a third child of the same sex was brought to the room after the pair had been playing for a while. … pairs of girls were more likely than pairs of boys to exclude the newcomer. … Girls took more than three times as long as boys to speak to the newcomer. … In 4 of the 15 girls’ groups, the girls never spoke a single word to the newcomer. …

[snip]

This all suggests to me that “cancel culture” can be seen as a straightforward extension of a common relatively-female strategy, upped in part by #MeToo. 

That is, many orgs are now willing to break association with anyone who enough others say they don’t like. Some sort of accusation is often required, but details or supporting concrete evidence are less often required. I guess this change is part of the overall feminization of culture, though it must also have other causes. (What?)

The above descriptions don’t give me much confidence that the excluded are typically guilty of justly-punishable offenses. Expect to see a lot more of this, unless we re-establish prior norms that discouraged it.

Hmmm.  I still am averse to the feminization argument but this gives me better reason to consider it than most of what I have seen.

One way or another, we certainly are seeing an awful lot of exercise of social exclusion as a strategy - deplatforming, cancelling, censoring . . . now much more obviously in play than in the past.