Published in 1869 Female submissionEconomist and political philosopher John Stuart Mill Mill wrote, “Though I denied the notion of its existence, I certainly knew that there were some natural differences in the average strength and direction of the mental faculties of the sexes, much less what these differences might be.” Whatever the differences, the political implications would be as Mill had thought them.
Article economist Perhaps this suggests that women are better doctors than men. The paper cites recent medical studies concluding that female doctors have better medical outcomes in terms of patient survival and readmission rates (“Do women make better doctors than men? Study suggestsThe data consisted of hundreds of thousands of medical records from Canada and the United States. economist They point out that these are retrospective studies and therefore less reliable than controlled randomized studies: For example, the female doctors in the study may have, for some reason, been responsible for the mildest cases, which would have been the control in a study that randomly assigned doctors to patients.
But why is it important to know whether women or men are better doctors? This question seems odd, but perhaps it is of interest to hospitals, clinics, and medical groups. discrimination If it were legal, we would have an interest in hiring the most competent doctors and in paying female doctors more than less competent male doctors. Since sex discrimination in hiring is illegal (today we would say “gender discrimination,” which has the advantage of avoiding a culturally frowned-upon three-letter word, but we’ll stick with Mill’s terminology here), there must be another reason why this issue is on the research agenda.
In a free society, whether men or women are better physicians, regardless of genetic or social factors, has no philosophical or political implications. Productivity (Even if it were built into pay, there would be little business benefit, since prices provide enough information.) The question would be as immaterial as whether left-handed or right-handed doctors are better.
Now, it seems pretty obvious that women are genetically predisposed to be more empathetic and compassionate than men, right? economist I suggest that information about the relative abilities of men and women as physicians would help male doctors to change their errant ways. But similar studies of other social groups, say, white and black doctors, or left-handed and right-handed doctors, would be equally useful. Why not? Surely such studies would further strengthen the cage of group identity, but this should be no objection to our group-loving intellectual class, except for the fact that some groups are more beloved than others.
Of course, it is up to each individual to decide what research topic they want to study, but the question remains as to whether researchers should be forced to fund their own research. I have discussed this issue in a number of previous posts on EconLog. For example: Fake academic journals Helped by government funding of higher education, freedom of research is the only way to ensure that important issues are not ignored.
Given the current zeitgeist, one might wonder whether studies on the relative efficiency of male and female doctors that had found male doctors to be superior would have been published. Or would such studies have been buried in professional and academic journals? Imagine what would happen if a newspaper headline read, “Government-funded study claims male doctors are better than female doctors.” Mrs. Grundy (Opinions change with the times.) She would roll in her grave. In this field, as in others, a free market of ideas is essential to the search for truth.
Let us go back to John Stuart Mill and see how he justified it. formal The freedom of women to compete with men in any profession Compulsory It’s something I’m used to now. Female submission, As I wrote in this blog beforeMill argues that women’s emancipation benefits everyone in society (or General rules that are useful to everyoneMill thought that discrimination against women was either harmful or unnecessary. It is harmful if it prevents women from competing and proving themselves superior or equal to men. It is unnecessary if women are unable or unwilling to compete at a particular job or task, such as garbage collectors. Mill saw no reason to prevent women from competing in any field of activity by particularly discriminatory laws, but he also saw no reason for the government to help women. What mattered was the formal freedom to compete for those who proved they could successfully meet the personal preferences expressed in the marketplace, whatever the consequences.
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If you’ve ever struggled with DALL-E, you’ll understand my frustration. The image was supposed to have a male and female doctor on either side of the wall. But the robot just didn’t get it. For example, I spent over an hour trying to replace the woman standing on the male side with a male doctor, or at least replace the female’s head with a male’s. I tried to teach the robot the secrets of life and the basics of anatomy. Finally, I gave up. Here is the image of the robot with all its imperfections:
