Gender imbalance in American atheism, as discussed by two foreigners

I went to brunch at Hickory Street Bar and Grille with friends from the Atheist Community of Austin and Center for Inquiry last Sunday. One of my table neighbors was from Sweden. He pointed out the glaring gender imbalance in the room. Out of 25 people at brunch, only 3 were women. He asked me if I had thoughts why there are so few women at atheist events in the U.S. In Sweden, he said, the balance was much closer to 50%/50%.

In my opinion -- and this is really just my personal opinion, for which I know I'm going to catch flak -- it has to do with the tone of discourse at atheist meetings. Freethought communities tend to attract people with radical socio-economic views, that are also quite loud about expressing those views. It takes only a few of such personalities to set a confrontational, even combative tone for the discussion. When a meeting turns into one-upmanship between a handful of individuals, most women (though not necessarily men) are put off.

The Swedish guy evidently didn't expect this answer. In his opinion, the reason women are underrepresented in freethought groups in the US is because of "family cult", which demands perfectionism from American mothers. He wonders that maybe most women don't find atheism compatible with the standard of a selfless, devoted mother. In Sweden, he said, the concept of a family is more loose and flexible; Sweden is far less obsessed with the idea of nuclear family. He even went so far as to say -- but maybe I just didn't hear him right across the noisy table -- that Swedish language does not have a word for family, or that it has a different, looser shade of meaning than the English word. An absence of such a word would seem mighty strange to me, so I'll assume, for now, that I misunderstood. I'll have to ask my friend who lives in Sweden, to what extent this is true.

Thus the Swedish guy thought gender imbalance in the US freethought groups merely reflects gender imbalance in the population of nonbelievers. I, however, doubt it. I think there are many more nonbelieving women than come to meetings. My case in point is the Ethical Society. They don't self-identify as atheist, though most of their members probably are. I didn't meet anyone in it who believed in gods. But they built their society not around nonbelief, but around finding a moral way of living based on secular principles. And guess what -- at least two thirds of the society (at least here in Austin) are women. Their discussions revolve not around atheism, but around topics of ethical living, learning, and meaning of life in general. The tone is very different -- cooperative, non-combative, with the whole group making sure all individuals are being heard. It makes a huge difference, though these two groups come from very similar premises.

"Infinity does not exist in our dimension"

A bunch of the ACA'ers went on a pub crawl last Friday. The crawl started out at Dog & Duck pub, the home of the ACA'ers happy hours; then we went on to 6th street. On the way there we were approached by folks who were handing out fake million dollar bills. It was some kind of Christian evangelist thing. Along the edge of a "bill" in small print there were questions such as "will you go to heaven"? Since most of us wore "Godless pub crawl: pubs, not popes" T-shirts made for this occasion, we must have been a tempting target for evangelists, and there seem to be quite a few of them hunting for souls to save in the nightlife district on a Friday night.

On the way to 6th street, the next destination in the pub crawl, some people felt they had to pose in front of a church. For irony's sake. Left to right: Justin, Matt and John.

Not surprisingly, two of them got into an argument with Matt, the then-president of the ACA. One of those guys told Matt he would prove there is a God in 30 seconds flat. Needless to say, their argument lasted a lot longer, and most of the ACA'ers got bored and wandered off to our next stop, the Darwin pub (no connection to Charles Darwin that I could tell!) It became tedious quickly, but not before I had a chance to hear this gem of an argument. The evangelist attempted to argue from the "first cause", to which Matt replied: if everything must have a cause, then who created God? The evangelist guy said, God doesn't have to have a cause or creator, he always existed. Matt said something along the lines of, you can't simply dismiss a question of whether God has a cause; just like it is meaningful to ask that question about anything else, it is also meaningful to ask it about God; you can't just arbitrarily declare that God has no cause. Matt tried to explain it by analogy: no matter how big a number you can think of, you can also imagine an even greater number, and so on all the way to infinity. The evangelist guy somehow felt existence of infinities threatened his beliefs. He said, no, I don't have to (imagine an even bigger number). I can stop any time. Infinity does not exist in our dimension, he added.

That last remark floored me. I blame science fiction. Seriously. I blame popular sci-fi shows and movies for putting terms like "infinity" and "dimension" into the vocabulary of people who cannot grasp these very simple and intuitive mathematical concepts. But that doesn't stop them from using them in a debate!

After the Darwin pub all the ACA'ers went on to their next stop, but I decided to save my liver and go home.

LoneStaRG 9

On Labor Day weekend, envious of all those cool people who were either at the WorldCon or at the Burning Man, I had to console myself by going to LoneStaRG, a Mensa regional gathering. I spent half a day there (out of 4 possible total). That was about the right amount of time. There were very few costumes at this year's LoneStaRG, and overall it just wasn't as lively as last year. But our air conditioning at home had gone out that weekend, and LoneStaRG seemed as good a place as any to go to recover from the heat.

When Mensans get together, their collective IQ sometimes takes a hit

I overheard a few funny stories at the LoneStaRG. Somebody said he received an offer for a credit card, co-branded by Mensa, with an 24.99% APR. "Whoever Mensa sold members' addresses to, clearly didn't have a good idea who they were dealing with", said the "lucky" recipient of the offer. Because you know, Mensans are way too ridiculously smart to fall for something like that.

Or are they? I got contradictory impressions of the people at the gathering. Many of them are individually as smart as advertised, and quirky enough to make you scratch your head (in a good way). But... when they get together, it sometimes looks like their collective IQ takes a hit.

You get discussions where 30 people sit around and re-hash the obvious. For example, they may devote 15 minutes to stating and re-stating the idea that symbols in general, and brands specifically, serve as shortcuts for people to make decisions about the world. A symbol stands for something; hence, seeing a symbol, a person makes a rapid decision without having to analyze the phenomenon. So what else is new? Everyone is in violent agreement, and no one offers a different perspective. I don't know about all the group discussions at LoneStaRG, but this one discussion I'm thinking about was very much like this.

So, the quality of group discussions seemed less than the sum of the quality of their contributing minds. But the individual people were often funny.

Stories too good to be true

Somebody told the story of a guy who figured out a unique way to bring his shoes into a foreign country. You see, he found it impossible to buy shoes in his size (13) in that country. No stores had them. He brought some footwear from the US, but when it wore out, he was left in a quandary. He could ask his friends in the US to send him shoes, but then he would have to pay exorbitant tarifs imposed on foreign goods. So he asked friends to mail him two separate packages containing a single shoe each. His host country's customs officers didn't know what to make of a package containing a single shoe, so they let him have it without imposing a tariff. Whether that's believable or not, I can't tell. It sounds a bit too much like one of those apocryphal tales of out-of-the-box thinking, that management books are rife with.

Don Baker's talk on Universal Darwinism

One of the more interesting things at the LoneStaRG was ACA's own Don Baker's presentation "Universal Darwinism: How Computer Science has Validated the Theory of Evolution". It can be summed up in a few sentences thus. Computer simulations can help to study evolution, which is hard to study otherwise, because it occurs very slowly in nature. The benefit flows both ways: the principles of evolution applied to computer science have lead to creation of a class of algorithms called genetic algorithms. I have to admit, I've already heard or read most of the points mentioned in his talk (as is more and more often the case with public science lectures I go to. Is that a downside of ed-joo-ma-cating myself, or what? But it was neat to see them summed up all in one place. The most interesting part of the talk were examples of designs that genetic algorithms have come up with, such as the hemispherical coverage antenna, and the load-bearing truss.

Hemispherical coverage antenna - Don Baker lecture on Universal Darwinism

Load-bearing truss - Don Baker lecture on Universal Darwinism

As Don noted, some of those designs seem really non-intuitive; they don't look like anything a human designer could have come up with, but their superiority was confirmed in real-world tests.