Vertical ambition: I don't get it

So a guy from Saatchi* wrote that women lacked "vertical ambition" and then was sacked after a fiery storm of comment. And... I find this strange.

Let me give you an analogy. Suppose, hypothetically, I were to claim that, in my society, women spend more time and effort on their appearance than men. (I haven't even checked if this is true. I am – hypothetically – just trusting my gut.)

What might cause this difference? Is it human nature? Are women born with an innate love of finery and display? Well, someone might claim that, but it hardly seems necessary. Men seem to care about women's appearance a lot. So, if women care about finding romantic partners, they may experience strong social pressure to look good. I don't say it is fair. I just say it would explain why women might spend time on their appearance. The other part of the explanation would be that men experience less such pressure, maybe because women care about men's appearance less.

Back to ambition. For the next bit I must reveal that during my life, I have been single, gone on dates, and frequented dating websites. Shame!

My strong impression is that in the choice of romantic partners, women care a lot about men's careers. I would say that this is not confined to any one section of the population. It is true among materialists who love yachts and expensive cars. But it is also true, in a less blatant and earnings-focused way, among Guardian readers, and those who like long walks with dogs. So, at least, it seems to me. I would even go further and say that, if I had no job or a minimum wage job, I would have very great difficulty finding a romantic partner; I would basically be, in the eyes of the opposite sex, nothing and noone.

If this is true, or if men think it is true, and if they also care about finding romantic partners, it seems that men have much stronger incentives to be rich, successful and powerful than women. In other words, "vertical ambition". Again, another part of the explanation has to be that men care less about women's careers and success. That is also my impression, gleaned from e.g. the high number of females, on dating websites, whose day job is, say, "food blogger".

Material aspirations of American college students, Crippins et al (1991).
This was all the data I could find in a hurry. Make of it what you will.

So I am not sure why the Saatchi dude got pilloried for this. To get to men having more ambition, you don't need a story about male brains or genes or mammoth hunting in the Pleistocene. You just need people caring about the opinions of the opposite sex, and responding in the obvious way.

An alternative story is that men and women have exactly the same levels of ambition, but that women are constantly being stymied by the all-male hiring committee: "oh, we don't want a woman in the firm – let's have more guys!" Personally I have never observed this, or anything like it, and it seems almost the reverse of what actually happens, but I admit I live in the virtuous and PC world of academia.

Here, then, is my beef. I don't hate feminism or want to join the manosphere or think that sexism doesn't exist or whatever, but I have a beef and here it is.

On the one hand, I have a society that tells me: you'd better get to the top; you'd better be successful; or you're fucked. So I work hard. And then I get successful, or more successful than I was, or at least, mediocre. And then I and other guys are told: ah, you benefited from sexism!

I don't know, this just seems like bullshit.


* Advertising agency founded by Charles Saatchi, the famous art collector and wife-beater.

Linkage, collected

Anxiety and depression are symptoms, not diseases.

So, I needed an example of problematic libertarian paternalism for my lecture. Is this an example of "reframing choice"?

Writing about Tibet and being censored in China:

"Some content ignores the great accomplishments that several decades of reform and opening up have had in Tibet, and instead overly indulges in the nostalgia for an imagined old Tibet; the content shows faulty values and departs from correct political principles, failing to assume the societal responsibility that a contemporary author has and also the political responsibility in constructing an advanced culture."
Because I refused to admit these “mistakes”, one year after the book had been published and banned, I was fired, my apartment was confiscated, my insurance was cancelled, and I wasn’t allowed to apply for a passport to go abroad; from this moment I started the difficult career as an independent writer.

Post about our research on The World Weekly

I wrote a little more about our research on The World Weekly. Well, not specifically our research but the more general point that geneticists are getting better at predicting outcomes, and what this means for inequality.

Paper out

Our paper on genetic assortative mating in the UK is out in Intelligence . Here's the abstract:

We examined whether assortative mating for educational attainment (“like marries like”) can be detected in the genomes of ~1600 UK spouse pairs of European descent. Assortative mating on heritable traits like educational attainment increases the genetic variance and heritability of the trait in the population, which may increase social inequalities. We test for genetic assortative mating in the UK on educational attainment, a phenotype that is indicative of socio-economic status and has shown substantial levels of assortative mating. We use genome-wide allelic effect sizes from a large genome-wide association study on educational attainment (N ~ 300 k) to create polygenic scores that are predictive of educational attainment in our independent sample (r = 0.23, p b 2 × 10−16). The polygenic scores significantly predict partners' educational outcome (r = 0.14, p = 4 × 10−8 and r = 0.19, p = 2 × 10−14, for prediction from males to females and vice versa, respectively), and are themselves significantly correlated between spouses (r = 0.11, p = 7 × 10− 6). Our findings provide molecular genetic evidence for genetic assortative mating on education in the UK.

So, why's this interesting? Here's a brief summary of the social science of individual behaviour for the past 20 years or so:

SOCIAL SCIENTIST: There are correlations between parents' and children's behaviour! This proves that upbringing and social structure matter.
GENETICISTS: Dude! It's probably just shared genes.

So, lots of things seem to be handed down from parents to children: wealth and income. Moral attitudes. Which political party you support. But then, twin studies would show that monozygotic twins (identical, all the same DNA) were much more similar than dizygotic twins (non-identical, 50% same DNA) on these outcomes. Or, adoption studies would show children resembling their birth parents, not their adoptive parents. Often, all the resemblance among family members would appear to be accounted for by genetics. Biology rules. After all, your DNA is the ultimate exogenous variable: fixed at conception, it affects you throughout life, but your life doesn't change it.

Or is it?

Take a step back: at individual level, DNA is a fixture of biology (though its effects can certainly interact with the social environment). But how you got your DNA is a function of how Mum met Dad. And that is a social, even a political variable. For an extreme example: many US states banned interracial marriage until the 60s. For a less extreme example, think of"the great sorting out" – the idea that people increasingly live alongside others who are similar to them.

This paper is a first step to thinking about how a social variable – who marries whom – affects the distribution of DNA in society. Social scientists have known for a long time that "like marries like": here we show that, as you'd expect, this means that like DNA marries like DNA, using the Polygenic Score for education that I wrote about last time. (Here's another paper on the same topic for the US.)

There's lots more to do on this topic. As my co-author Abdel Abdellaoui's PhD thesis put it:

behaviour ⇄ genetics.

A picture from our forthcoming article in Intelligence

Here is a single bar chart from our forthcoming article in the journal Intelligence. (I've edited it a bit to have nicer colours.)

The bar charts represent individuals' Polygenic Risk Score for educational attainment. That is, each individual gets a score predicting when they will finish education. Don't worry about the details of how this is done: the point is that it combines the effects of many different genes, and it is purely derived from DNA. Give me a cheek swab with your DNA, or your child's and I will calculate your score. Bars 1 to 5 represent the bottom 20% of our sample on this score, then the next 20% and so on up to the top 20% on the right. The bar colours show the proportion of each group that went to university, got A levels (i.e. the age 18 exam in the UK), got GCSEs (the age 16 exam) or left without any qualifications.

This isn't actually what our article is about – our article is on assortative mating between spouses on this score.

The picture just shows that as of 2016, you can predict someone's education fairly well from their DNA. For example, only 1 in 5 of the bottom 20% group go to university, while about half of the top 20% do so.

It used to be that, while genes could significantly predict social outcomes, the amount of variation they actually explained was very small – it was statistically significant but substantively irrelevant. As you can see, that is not really true any longer, and it is likely to get less true as more large-N studies produce more accurate predictions.

Question for Bremainers

It is hard to imagine that the Front National will not make political capital from last night's horrible events.

Serious, open-ended question: how do you react to the idea that the EU might end up partly run by populists and/or neo-fascists? 

I Was Right

Just by the way, I still would like a large Foresight Cookie for this post of mine in 2011: Immigration: ordure approaching fan. Thank you. 

A little light relief