Discrimination against women in the US was a serious problem for a long time and it wasted a great human resource that could have contributed in many fields. Now discrimination in favor of women is more of a problem, and it is leading to a substantial issue for young men in particular, who are grotesquely under-represented in colleges and graduate programs. We also have all sorts of myths around women’s abilities, for example, in politics and government they will supposedly be less susceptible to corruption. My cynicism about most stuff like this told me in was almost certainly untrue and a new study confirms that. Now this study only comes from one country, Brazil, which has a richer tradition of political corruption than does the US, but humans are pretty similar everywhere.
The authors found that there was no difference in corruption issues among female or male mayors. (The authors somehow failed to include transgender mayors, a serious faux paux in the woke research world.) Pretty much what I would expect, humans being humans and all of us having evolved from the same tree. I would like to see the research extended to other countries, as there is other research, which appears to me to have high levels of bias, which suggests that women are less likely to be corrupt or corruptible. That finding may be mostly an artifact of lack of incumbency, or the relative newness of women to more elected positions. Certainly if we look at the US Congress, we see multiple examples of corrupt women–Nancy Pelosi and her stock trades being exhibit A, but AOC, Ilhan Omar and others reek of misuse of their positions. (NBER Paper)
