Transcript:
Have you ever been looking for something important, like a set of keys, searching where you’re sure you put it, but unable to find it there over and over, and then suddenly you realize it’s been there the whole time, and you’ve been looking past it in your search, because in the moment, it doesn’t look the way you were mentally picturing it?
Regular listeners of HBR Talk and long-term listeners to our group will probably be familiar with a term I started using a few years ago, the accountability gap.
To understand it, you have to know that accountability is the state of being completely responsible for your actions, decisions, and outcomes, taking ownership of your behavior, being capable of and ready to explain it, and being ready to accept the consequences – whether positive or negative.
The accountability gap is a gender disparity in societal and personal expectations of personal accountability, or in other words, the exercise of one’s own individual power in an accountable manner. This affects social attitudes toward the individual, as well as the individual’s appraisal of his own choices, and his expectations regarding his peers’ appraisal of them. It also affects perceptions of the character of one’s actions, wherever they are on the spectra between inculpable, negligent, and deliberate, and between benevolent, neutral, and malevolent.
I explained this in more depth in a video we released a while back, titled “Six important terms every MRA should be able to explain,” but to recap, throughout their lives from early childhood into their twilight years, boys and men are attributed greater personal agency, a person’s control over his own actions and his sense of connection to their consequences, than are women and girls. This includes not only the consequences to oneself, but those that might be inflicted on others, as well.
This can even extend beyond their actual control over anything, such as when underage male victims of female-perpetrated rape are still smacked by the courts with child support obligations, while the female perpetrator of child sexual assault isn’t even barred from having custody of the child conceived during that crime.
Even though her victim had no power to prevent her sexual violence, nor the power to prevent conception, he is held accountable as the father of that child by a system that automatically applies financial obligation, and even the courts will not exempt him.
Even though the perpetrator is a dangerous predator who raped a child, she is not held accountable for the heinousness of her character flaws, and her access to another child she could harm is not subject to any systemic review unless one is triggered by litigation. She is the beneficiary of a system that automatically entitles her to custody and financial assistance, and which will not exclude her unless her crime victim takes responsibility for opposing its extension of that benevolence to his rapist.
That is a hell of a gap.
I started using the term accountability gap as a mirror term for the so-called wage gap.
As most men’s issues advocates are aware, the feminist wage gap narrative is basic bullshit. Its proponents compare the average earnings of an individual in the male workforce to the average earnings of an individual in the female workforce, take the difference, then claim there is a gap of that much between the wages a men and women get paid for doing the same work, and attribute that to sexism in the workplace.
Quite a bit of research has soundly discredited that claim, based on several details which clearly demonstrated that the gap was not between workers doing the same work, and when factors that make their work not the same were controlled for or eliminated, the gap almost entirely vanished, leaving a very small difference that could be attributed to many things and wasn’t clearly attributable to sexism.
The details in question were mainly due to worker choices. Male workers’ choices have traditionally been more geared toward earning enough to support their family, while female workers’ choices have traditionally been more geared toward personal interests and work/life balance.
The wage gap myth is a way of not holding women accountable for those choices, and in defending it, feminists often have to sidestep women’s personal agency by describing life’s pressures and women’s interests as if they are insurmountable obstacles, or unstoppable forces, and women’s responses to them aren’t women’s choices, but things that just happen to women coincidentally.
I often get asked one question in particular when discussing this topic:
What is the underlying cause of the gender-based accountability gap?
I initially believed that to answer that question, I was going to have to find the point in recorded history right before the accountability gap existed, look at when it first manifested, and examine it to figure out what changed.
I went looking.
I learned what I needed to learn.
I’m not going to go into a long spiel describing the journey, because spoiler alert:
What I was looking for does not exist. There is no such point in time.
There has always been that gap.
That’s not to say that the situation is hopeless, or the accountability gap has no cause.
It hasn’t always been this bad. There have been points in history when the gap was not so dramatic. There have been points where it has been very small, but the sexes’ styles of accountability have been very different. There have even been points were women were more self-aware, understanding the gap (not by name, obviously, but understanding it nonetheless) and accommodating men’s efforts to fulfil their obligations as the more accountable sex. There has been no point in recorded history during which women’s personal accountability within human civilization has been equal and identical to that of men.
In other words, cultural changes have historically affected the size, scope, and shape of the accountability gap, but not its existence. It is a culturally influenced phenomenon, but not a culturally constructed one.
It is, at least in part, a natural phenomenon.
No matter how much I search this countertop or that end table, I am not going to find those keys, because they are right there, and I’ve been looking right past them the whole time. They’re just not the keys I was looking for.
The accountability gap is natural.
Ok.
That means that to a degree, it is in women’s nature to be less accountable than men, and to focus on different considerations when they do exercise accountability. It’s at least, to some degree, a trait of female psychology that manifests in a fixed, unlearned way regardless of cultural or other environmental changes.
In other words, it’s like an instinct. Or rather, accountability itself is the instinct, and it’s both slightly stronger and more comprehensive in men.
But how, and why? After all, personal accountability is a necessary component of success in life. Characteristics like mindfulness, diligence, and perseverance rely on it. Why would half of a species that survives mainly due to its ability to outsmart nature using those and similar characteristics be designed with weaker minds, and less ability to exercise them?
It sounds kind of unreasonable to suggest that merely by virtue of having an innie instead of an outie, women are just naturally a bit off in the head.
Sorry, ladies. Curse of the vajayjay. You get shafted in the brain department.
Sucks to be you!
Probably because that both is, and is not the case.
Remember, personal agency is a person’s control over his own actions and his sense of connection to their consequences. Personal accountability is ownership of that factor – acceptance that a person’s control over his own actions makes him responsible for them, and that sense of connection to their consequences means accepting that the consequences of your own actions are your fault, and it’s your responsibility to deal with them. If you make a decision and you take accountability for that decision, you are taking on the responsibility to follow through with it even if having to do so becomes undesirable, and you are taking a chance that if the outcome is also undesirable, you will be guilty of causing that consequence, and it will be your responsibility to mitigate it.
That guilt can be as simple as self-criticism, or it can involve others judging you, and even penalties, should your decision lead to consequences that affect another person.
That means personal accountability is a type of personal risk.
Ah-ha!
Another bit of information long discussed in the men’s rights movement is the fact, often noted in the writings of evolutionary psychology researchers, that, likely because of the biological characteristics that make human females smaller on average, less physically strong, and more vulnerable to physical threats (especially while pregnant) women are more risk-averse than men… a characteristic that is likely exacerbated by cultural norms and traditions that are more restrictive and protective toward women than toward men.
We talk about it quite a bit. I’ve even described a related phenomenon, safety net addiction among women, in which the addict is so caught up in her perceived need to avoid risk that if there is potential for a safety net she won’t even do normal things that don’t require one unless one is put into place, or she will give up protections for their civil rights and rightful freedoms in order to obtain safety nets, even if they’re not really necessary, and she may demand you do, as well.
In 1999, J. P. Byrnes and group published a meta-analysis of 150 studies in which the risk-taking tendencies of male and female participants were compared. Their report was titled Gender differences in risk taking: A meta-analysis. In it, the researchers stated their conclusion that gender differences in risk taking exist and are proven beyond the conventional cutoff for small effects, but vary according to context and age level. They noted that in one of their analyses, they showed that males took more risks even when it was clear that it was a bad idea to take a risk, while the same analysis revealed that women and girls seemed to be disinclined to take risks even in fairly innocuous situations or when it was a good idea to take a risk. They followed up by noting that this indicates that males tend to encounter negative consequences more often than they should, it also means that females tend to encounter rewards less often than they should.
I suspect we have just made note of an underlying factor in gender disparities that feminists have spent the last hundred years calling discrimination against women.
In 2023, another meta-analysis done by R. B Vela titled Gender Differences in Risk-Taking Behaviors: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) Scale, evaluated 24 studies and found that among the five distinct domains used in the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking scale used to measure willingness to take risks, men displayed higher willingness than women on 4 of the 5 domains (financial, health and safety, recreational, and ethical,) while in the domain of social risk there was mostly no significant difference, though in some individual studies women scored higher in that domain.
Meta-regression showed these patterns held regardless of publication year or average participant age.
The phenomenon is so widely accepted as fact that there are also studies on why it occurs rather than whether it occurs.
In 2006, C. R. Harris and group published Gender differences in risk assessment: Why do women take fewer risks than men? In this study, 657 participants assessed their likelihood of engaging in various risky activities relating to four different domains and reported their perceptions of probability of negative outcomes, severity of potential negative outcomes, and enjoyment expected from the risky activities. The researchers reported that men reported higher likelihood in gambling, health, and recreational domains, while women stated that they perceived higher probability and severity of negatives and lower enjoyment. In other words, women feared risk taking more, and that fear made them like it less.
Critiques of studies showing more risk willingness among men and more risk aversion among women note that while the differences can’t be ignored, they’re not dramatic.
Evidence of differences regarding specific risks backs that up. Both sexes do take risks. The gap is more of an average among a spectrum.
Gambling demonstrates this, for example. The practice attracts both sexes, and despite the fact that it involves risk of loss, it is considered a fun recreational activity among both sexes.
However, Lucy T. Tran MSc and group screened 3692 reports, with 380 representative unique samples, in 68 countries and territories, and stated in their report titled “The prevalence of gambling and problematic gambling: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” that while nearly half of adults globally have gambled, about 46·2%, rates of gambling were higher in men, about 49·1%, than in women, about 37·4%. The lower prevalence among females than males was not just in overall gambling, but showed as a pattern, whether among adults or adolescents, and whether examining any risk gambling, or problematic gambling, but there was no area of gambling that the study found to be exclusively male. Women are more risk averse, but not so risk averse that none of them will take that risk, and many will do it for fun.
We know that personal accountability is a risk. It’s a labor risk. It’s a self-image risk. It’s a social risk. It can even be a serious economic risk, especially if one is taking accountability for one’s work/life balance, or for one’s sexual choices.
And throughout history, women’s accountability for their work, lifestyle, and sexual choices, even when it has been higher than it is now, has always been different from that of men by necessity, because women bear children, then have to be there to nurse and nurture them even when somebody has to go out and hunt the mammoth. Historically, that somebody has been the child’s father, and historically, it has been the mother’s primary job to make sure that his children are fed, protected, and cared for while he is gone, and that his home environment is a haven of comfort and security for him to return to after the hunt, regardless of whether the mammoth is an actual animal, or the paycheck a man brings home from his job.
In a discussion on X.com this week, the final key on the real keyring dropped into place. Commenter Dré Mcfleuve posted an image of a translation from the Book of Changes, or Yi Jing, an ancient Chinese text used for guidance, decision-making, and understanding the natural cycles of life. This text operates on the philosophy that the universe is constantly changing and that everything is connected.
It said,
“Six in the second place means:
Contemplation through the crack of the door.
Furthering for the perseverance of a woman.”
Through the crack of the door one has a limited outlook; one looks outward from within. Contemplation is subjectively limited. One tends to relate everything to oneself and cannot put oneself in another’s place and understand his motives. This is appropriate for a good housewife. It is not necessary for her to be conversant with the affairs of the world. But for a man who must take active part in public life, such a narrow, egotistic way of contemplating things is of course harmful.”
It struck me how this points out that one’s most effective and efficient contemplative perspective is determined in large part by one’s spectrum and scope of responsibilities. One’s ability to take risks is also determined in large part by one’s spectrum and scope of responsibilities, and of course, those factors affect one’s potential for personal accountability, and also color its presentation.
Traditionally, women’s responsibilities have had a much narrower scope than those of men, and women’s shade of personal accountability has reflected that. Women have been able to uphold cultural standards and take responsibility within that narrower scope by following the traditional cultural norms that feminists hate so much – premarital abstinence rather than sexual promiscuity, homemaking and stewardship of their household resources rather than heavy spending and building up debt, loyalty to their husband and family, diligent nurturing of their children.
Two plus two plus two… the historical gap, plus women’s aversion, plus the fact that having a narrower scope of responsibility means having a narrower scope of factors that are available to consider in order to exercise personal accountability.
It leads to one more factor. Due to the historical role women filled, and what their limited outlook presented to them for contemplation and consideration, women have been culturally programmed, perhaps evolved, over time, to be a little selfish.
Combine this with humanity’s – that is, mankind’s – history of advancements in technology, security, safety, and comfort within civilizations, and that selfishness gets more and more indulged. Hardship inspires masculine ingenuity and resourcefulness. The resulting creative advancement leads to prosperity and convenience, which ultimately breeds complacency, leading women to become increasingly solipsistic and narcissistic, and increasingly, sometimes ridiculously, dependent on men and on social safety nets to rescue them from the consequences of their choices.
That is why the gap has gotten so fat. Historically, women were sheltered in ways that made it grow, and as men have advanced civilization to remove the necessity of that shelter, the sheltering has become more prevalent and pervasive, not less.
That means, even though the accountability gap is, in part, natural and cannot ever fully be closed, there is still a significant element that is cultural and can be changed.
The expansion of the accountability gap is a result of that pattern, and that pattern can be recognized, evaluated, halted, and reversed to return societal standards to a more rational pattern.
So, this isn’t the news of doom and gloom it has sounded like for most of this explanation, but just a major wake-up call, because if we know the issues – risk aversion, solipsism and scope of contemplation, narcissism and scope of self-awareness, cultural gynocentrism and double standards – then we can fight to get it back down to a more reasonable size and protect men so that when a woman falls into it, she cannot drag one or more of them down with her. In fact, the more we understand this phenomenon, the more we may be able to keep anyone from falling in.
It’s not a white pill, but it’s not a black pill, either.
I suppose we can call this the one shade of grey pill.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-13573-004
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