Too many women in the wrong places: Norwegian navy edition
Meanwhile Russia and China laughing.png
As women increasingly are hired into traditionally male jobs via affirmative action laws or indirect pressure via media, we see more and more incompetence. This is true whether it is academia, the military or the police. Here's a funny example from Norway a few years ago. The Norwegian navy was recruiting more women and celebrating their great success in their own magazine Forsvarets Forum (Forum of the Defense) in April 2017.
We can read a quote from one female navigator named Emilie Jakobsen Ophus:
- Det er en fordel å være mange kvinner om bord. Det blir jo med en gang en naturlig greie og et ganske annerledes miljø, som jeg ser på som positivt.
- It is an advantage to be many women onboard. It immediately becomes a natural thing and a quite different environment, which I see as positive.
She is named a navigator on the KNM Helge Ingstad, which is, well was, a frigate. You can guess where this is going. The article also mentions that 4 out of 5 navigators onboard are female. Fast forward to only the next year and we see this headline:
You can find many sources about this accident, but the story is quite simple. They sailed into a fucking tank ship due to incompetent navigation:
The collision with the KNM Helge Ingstad left a big enough hole in the starboard side of the frigate for the warship to take on water. The crew has been forced to abandon the vessel, The Barents Observer reported. On Tuesday morning, most of the navy ship was already under water.
The warship, one of Norway’s five top modern frigates, was on her way home to Haakonsvern naval base, but it is still a mystery why the well-equipped warship couldn’t avoid colliding with the 250 meters long oil tanker just north of the oil terminal.
The weather was excellent while the waters in the area offer maritime traffic real-time shipping control. Also, there was radio-contact between the vessels when the accident happened.
The nagging question remains as to why the frigate, with all its radars and sensors, could not change course to avoid the collision.
An English summary of the events can be found here. Interestingly, the apparently only male navigator on board, the commanding officer, was asleep when the mistakes were made. The Navy is hiding the names of who were where, so we can only guess at whether everybody involved was a woman, but according to the numbers above, where 4 out of 5 were women, and knowing the CO was asleep, it would appear 100% were female.
From a HBD perspective, this stuff is gruelingly obvious. Not only are women more less interested in these jobs to begin with, but they obviously lack talent compared to men. We know this because spatial ability -- the sine qua non of navigators -- shows a large male advantage even from childhood. The same way men also dominate basically all sports relating to spatial ability, even where physical strength is not an advantage (e.g. race car driving). To quote a random meta-analysis A Meta-Analysis on Gender Differences in Mental Rotation Ability Measured by the Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests: Visualization of Rotations (PSVT:R) (2013):
This meta-analysis was conducted to estimate the magnitude of gender difference in three-dimensional (3-D) mental rotation ability and to investigate how factors related to test administration conditions play a role in varying gender difference effect sizes and threatening validity. Individuals’ 3-D mental rotation ability was measured by the Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests: Visualization of Rotations (PSVT:R). We integrated 70 effect sizes of gender differences in mental rotation ability measured by the PSVT:R which were obtained from 40 primary studies. The results indicated that male participants outperformed females on the test (Hedges’ g = 0.57). The I 2 statistic indicated 41.7 % of variation in effect sizes reflects real heterogeneity. The moderator analysis indicated that male superiority on spatial ability tasks measured by the PSVT:R is related to the implementation of time limits. The gender difference became larger when stringent time limits (equal or less than 30 s per item) were implemented.
You can even find a measurement invariance study confirming this is not due to bias, though there was never any reason to think so.
There's also a meta-analysis on navigation ability specifically A meta-analysis of sex differences in human navigation skills (2019):
There are inconsistent reports regarding behavioral sex differences in the human navigation literature. This meta-analysis quantifies the overall magnitude of sex differences in large-scale navigation skills in a variety of paradigms and populations, and examines potential moderators, using 694 effect sizes from 266 studies and a multilevel analytic approach. Overall, male participants outperform female participants, with a small to medium effect size (d = 0.34 to 0.38). The type of task, the type of dependent variable and the testing environment significantly contribute to variability in effect sizes, although there are only a few situations in which differences are either nonexistent or very large. Pointing and recall tasks (and the deviation scores associated with them) show larger sex differences than distance estimation tasks or learning to criterion. Studies with children younger than 13 years showed much smaller effect sizes (d = .15) than older age groups. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding sex differences in human spatial navigation and identify avenues for future navigation research.
In general, we expect a general weakening of the job performance of these jobs since the women hired are obviously subpar due to different standards in hiring. For instance, Norwegian police physical tests:
Bench press:
Krav for kvinner: 4 repetisjoner med 32,5 kg
Krav for menn: 4 repetisjoner med 60 kg
Almost 50% lower!
Running:
Krav for kvinner: 704 meter på seks minutter
Krav for menn: 802 meter på seks minutter
Only 12% lower for the 6 minute run.
I am sure the violent criminals -- mostly young men -- will run slower and only use one arm when faced with female cops. What a joke!
Last year, the US military released their 1000 page report on some trials with women in combat units. The results are what you expect. Some results at distance:
The samples are too small to care about specific areas, but as we can see, basically all the directions are the same.
Of course, as we live in clown world with no adults in charge, the army is going forward with more women in these roles. The women are busy TikTok dancing in the barracks.
Served 27 years in the American Navy. Another difficulty that was discovered in the deployment of women on ships was that they have a much lower tolerance of heat. My understanding of this is due to less muscle mass (have to work harder under the stress of heavy work) and extra fat which both acts as insulation and is extra weight that must be carried around. On my ship, women in hot areas of the ship (usually ratings that work deep in the bowels of the ship) were constantly coming down with heat exhaustion. The CO talked to the Personnel Officer on the ship. Quietly, without fanfare, women were not assigned into these areas of the ship.
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps is already speculating that the few women who make it into combat roles face the greater likelihood of injury and recommendations have been made for force planning that many women will have to be medically retired before age forty--just as they reach levels of training and experience that would lead to mid-level, and more senior level responsibility as enlisted personnel.
One last practical problem at sea is the average difference in strength. Everything on a ship is heavy, e.g. watertight hatches. If I am injured in a fire and need evacuated, I want people around me who can carry me out. The Navy's solution to date has just been to increase the number of women during drills or to put four women on a fire hose instead of two men. So, depending on the circumstances, where one or maybe two men can evacuate one man, it may take three or four women to do the same. This means other injured may not get evacuated. Women can be valuable assets in the military. But they need to be deployed in areas that make sense and best utilize their skills. So far the American Navy's approach has been to lower qualifications for women and then rig the promotion system with affirmative action. If the balloon goes us, it will needlessly cost lives. But by then the current Generals and Admirals will be working for Gov't contractors and their successors will have to clean up the mess.
It is encouraging to see more and more people willing to speak directly about these issues. However, does anyone have the courage to talk about racial differences?