I don't mean to ... suggest that you are objectively wrong (what even is objectivity am I right? I wouldn't know -- I am woefully undereducated in terms of such philosophical questions), but I would like to clarify my stance and have you all hear me out.
Feminist epistemology is characteristically subjective, so +1 to you for intuiting the concept of objectivity as void in this context. I'm actually quite sympathetic to the substantial thrust of these philosophical contributions, except their pathological insistence on gendering the different epistemic domains which makes me gag.
As for proving my argument wrong, (1) I haven't actually provided an argument in this discussion, so that's a category mistake, and (2) your response is largely targeting the legal protection of women, about which I have said absolutely nothing, but I'm happy to provide my standard pedantic commentary anyway.
This is nitpicking, but IQ is a flawed metric to begin with. It has less to do with "intelligence" (a nebulous concept as it is) and more to do with external environmental factors including race, alcohol consumption, socioeconomic status, and even tobacco consumption.
(1) I skew heavily toward the nurture side of the disjunction too, but I wasn't aware that the environmental factors are decisively settled as primary to intelligence as yet. Was taught in cognitive psych that IQ qua logical, semantic, and mnemonic function is a good indicator for professional performance, maybe that's incorrect, and it's irrelevant to the point I was making because (2) We're operating at the heuristic level here, same applies to e.g. race: while biologically complex, it's not as if anyone actually goes "hurr durr, race doesn't really exist so it can't be taken as a factor in Patriarchal Oppression™."
I've seen around the boards some of you pledging your loyalty to "intersectionality," and I honestly wonder if you even can provide a functional definition of the concept? Open call guys. Because, to me it seems just a circumspect way of constructing individuality in feminist terminology thus seizing linguistic territory. The observation that different people experience the world differently is shockingly platitudinal. I mean... duh. Again: this obsessive persistence on tieing
inherently valuable not entirely useless perspectives to identity labels.
I don't agree with many of the slippery tenets of mainstream feminism, but I do agree that they have a point when they suggest that the legal justice system (as it currently exists) does not fully protect us from gendered violence.
Cheers to the days when French was the only language I knew gendering nouns.
My point, more precisely put, is that I take issue with the assertion that women are fully protected by the legal system in its current form. This actually has been stated in prior posts!
Not mine though, even if you attribute to me some random quote.
(An aside:
a recent study actually found that women citing abuse as a reason for divorce don't actually have a significant advantage in obtaining sole custody of their children. Whether you want to dispute the veracity of their claims of domestic violence is up to you, I suppose).
If your contention is that the legal system doesn't adequately protect women, this study provides absolutely no warrant:
(1) The veracity of the IPA claims is indeed up for debate: 17% of the participants positively lied, the others span a continuum from unsubstantiated to less dubious.
(2) The mediators were not aware of the existence of abuse in all cases.
(3) "Women’s testimonies alone, for example, were not considered enough evidence for their concerns to be taken seriously. The presence of physical evidence appeared to play an important role in mothers being taken seriously...when mediators requested evidence (e.g., police reports), women were unable to provide documentation." Yes, that's a direct quote, and yes, I'm rolling my eyes. "Women whose abuse was marked by more controlling or emotional abuse than physical abuse were less likely to have evidence and, therefore, were more likely to have their allegations dismissed by the mediators." Sad, but arguably a sane practice.
(4) 69% of the women received sole custody arrangements. 21% received joint arrangements, thus "indicating that courts do not choose custody arrangements based solely on mothers’ requests and concerns." Outrageous.
(5) Among the two(!) women who did not receive custody rights, one explains that the mediator did not understand how she protected her child from the abusive father: she protected her child by leaving him alone in the house with the abusive father because the father had a gun. Yeah, I'm sorry, I also find that slightly odd, but I'm not up to snuff on systems theory. Is there a loop I don't spot here?
(6) Related to 5, of the two fathers who won custody, one actually didn't want it but was awarded custody because the mother was deemed unfit to parent the child.
Remind me again what bias is?
The sad thing is, intellectually dishonest papers like these are being perpetuated by identity politics as supportive of their case and people are buying into it, because obviously not everyone is going to have time or interest in reading through feminist soft core porn masquerading as "science."
While this lopsided distribution is not definitive proof that a court populated by male justices is inherently misogynistic,
How charitable of you....
it is safe to say that women and men are fundamentally different and that a 50/50 gender ratio would be preferable, no?
...and no, it's absolutely not. Firstly because that's a very sexist statement, and secondly because a 50/50 outcome (=equity=totalitarianism) is not indicative of "justice" at all. See
Haidt on statistics. The two claims aren't even compatible: if it is indeed true that men and women are "fundamentally different," then you should specifically expect to see their unequal representation in various professions.