An exercise in feminist sociology

[redbird]

Someone yesterday quoted, in a comment thread elsewhere on LJ, a study
that they claimed showed that day-old human girls pay more attention to
faces, and day-old human boys pay more attention to mobiles.

I haven't checked to see whether there is such a study, much less looked
at the methodology or the robustness of the results. For the purposes of
this exercise, it doesn't matter.

The exercise is to think about how such a study would be interpreted in
a culture that was, and long had been, female-dominant, in which the
long-standing default assumption was female superiority. A culture in
which many moderns believed the sexes were equal, but old habits had
women in charge of most things and the not-so-occasional reactionary
defending that imbalance as the natural order of things.

My immediate thought is that, in such a society, the conservatives would
be saying "Well, of course. We know that women hold most political power
because they pay more attention to other people and what they want,
which makes them better at negotiating and persuasion. It's not
discrimination keeping men out of top management, it's that they're so
easily distracted."