The University of Helsingfors claim that researchers have refuted the Gender-equality paradox is inconsistent with the study and common academic knowledge

Researchers at The University of Helsingfors (UH) have re-tested the Gender-equality paradox (GEP), that women who live in democratic countries choose to follow their biological predisposition when choosing education and work. And according to the University of Helsingfors, they managed to refute the GEP. Is that true? During 2019, the dean at the faculty of agriculture and forestry claimed that pale men suppressed young women in STEM-oriented educations, and exaggerated a claim about livestock's impact on the climate. In 2021, a nutrition researcher at UH reiterated his claim that meat consumption causes colon cancer. The paradox, all these claims had previously been refuted by common academic knowledge. In 2022, Helsingin Sanomat reported that freedom of speech was suppressed at the faculty of agriculture and forestry, and in 2023 the tabloid reported that the research at the University of Helsingfors had collapsed. And when reading the paper behind the current claim from UH, it doesn't say refuted, it says “ were highly heterogeneous”. 13 pages.

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The management at the University of Helsingfors (UH) report that researchers (Ilmarinen and Lönnqvist, 2024) has re-tested and refuted the Gender-equality paradox (GEP), that is, the common academic knowledge that women who live in democratic countries typically choose to follow their biological predisposition when choosing education and work. The implication: they typically avoid Science Technology Engineering, and Math (STEM)-oriented education.

Länk till källan.

The inspiration for the study may originate from the dean of the faculty of agriculture and forestry, who in 2019 jumped on the political correctness bandwagon about STEM by taking the initiative to a seminar about unconscious/implicit bias. And instead of consulting experts on the matter, the dean opted to assign a uralic-finnish female professor in physics from another faculty in Gumtäkt. The professor also subscribed to feminism, the marxist idea that capitalism and men are a threat to women. She also claimed that men with little melanin under the first layer of the skin are suppressing young women in STEM. And if these men didn't accept or understand that, they had to be schooled. When asked about her knowledge about how the minds works, the female professor in physics said she didn't have such knowledge. What could possibly go wrong? Here's my take (Österberg, 2019).

This was of course not something the dean came up with herself, but rather something that had been on the political agenda for a long time. In the 1990s, the management at universities changed from being decentralized and research-based to something called New Public Management. The implication was that politician's and administrative managers could influence the research by putting pressure on research leaders to provide utility for the market. Part of the political/administrative management discourse was that there was a lack of women in STEM. They first tried to recruit young women by applying equality of outcome (affirmative action) as opposed to equality of opportunity (letting the best person have the position). Then they started to blame men ...

One other such utility oriented action was the implementation of UNs Agenda2030, including the climate narrative, that ice in the arctic was melting and the Earth is warming at a rapid speed. Despite lacking knowledge about chrono-stratigraphy, geology, paleo-climatology, and physics, academics in various fields was forced by political/administrative influence to focus on 'mitigation climate change'. Academics around the world with a dissenting opinion had a hard time. Some were even fired (Österberg, 2022 a).

The faculty of agriculture and forestry was no exception. In parallel to the deans seminar on implicit bias and the claim that men suppress young women in STEM, a professor of sustainable food systems published a paper where she claimed that livestock in particular contribute more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere compared to transportation (Tuomisto, 2019):

The dean ordered the claim to be published on the faculty's X (the Twitter):

But common academic knowledge pointed in the opposite direction (Mottet and Steinfeld, 2018):

Link to source.

Ans during spring 2019, the chairman for the Swedish speaking Finnish farm cooperative, Mats Nylund, had published an op-ed labeled Disinformation about food, showing just that:

“according to the Central for Statistics, 74 % of all climate related emissions in Finland originate from the energy sector and the burning of fossil fuels. Only 12% of the emissions originate from agriculture. Of the emissions from agriculture in Finland, it is estimated that 56 percent comes from arable land and 44 percent from livestock production. In plain language, This means that only 5 percent of Finland's climate emissions originate from livestock production”.

Link to source.

Other Common academic knowledge: the Biogenic Carbon Cycle (BCC), which is a process where methane from ruminants transforms into carbon dioxide (CO2) through a chemical process called hydroxyl oxidation. This takes 10-12 years. The same amount of CO2 is consumed by plants at farms via a process we all learned about in elementary school - photosynthesis. Hence, there's a balance of CO2.

When I brought up Dr. Tuomisto's false claim with colleagues at the faculty of agriculture and forestry, the work climate deteriorated; it wasn't popular to question colleagues or the prevailing zeitgeist. And when I published it on X (then Twitter) and included the faculty and Dr. Tuomisto, I was met by silence. It's a phenomenon called stonewalling which is a marker for relational aggressiveness (psychological violence; Crick and Grotpeter, 1995; Hyde, 2005). In April 2022, Helsingfors police department said that Finnish women's relational aggressiveness is a huge issue.

When I later searched for Dr. Tuomisto's article, a correction showed up. It was Dr. Tuomisto herself, who, after I pointed out the inaccuracies in her claim had sent a formal correction to the journal:

“Comparing the greenhouse gas emissions of livestock with the transportation sector was formally misleading”.

In 2021, Dr Fogelholm, a professor of nutrition, also at the Faculty of agriculture and forestry, was interviewed by Finland state media YLE. For some reason, Finnish state media only chose this guy to talk about food and nutrition. Their he claimed:

“- The link between colon cancer and red meat is clear. But when it comes to the other diseases, it can also be about having unhealthy lifestyle habits in general.

According to Fogelholm: there are no disadvantages to reducing meat consumption”.

Link to source.

Dr Fogelholm's claim came two years after the NutriRecs group had published three review papers based on a method called GRADE. The overall implication of the studies was a rejection of the claim that meat and processed meat are bad for health (Han et al. 2019; Johnston et al. 2019; Zeraatkar et al. 2019). Here are the concluding remarks från the three studies:

Han et al. “The possible absolute effects of red and processed meat consumption on cancer mortality and incidence are very small, and the certainty of evidence is low to very low”.

Johnston et al: “The panel suggests that adults continue current unprocessed red meat consumption (weak recommendation, low-certainty evidence). Similarly, the panel suggests adults continue current processed meat consumption (weak recommendation, low-certainty evidence)”.

Zeraatkar et al.: “The magnitude of association between red and processed meat consumption and all-cause mortality and adverse cardiometabolic outcomes is very small, and the evidence is of low certainty.”

One interesting thing to note is that Dr Fogelholm was well aware of NutriRec's three publications. That's because he was one of the few to refute them. This is what he wrote on X (then Twitter) on October 1, 2019:

“Here's a pretty good longer commentary on that beef study (see Prof. Katz's story from the link below). The result was therefore the same as before, just the interpretation differently. It is e.g. value types of research. The best evidence here against meat was completely ignored”.

Another interesting thing to note was that in the same year as Dr Fogelholm went against common academic knowledge, a research group from the same department where Dr. Fogelholm is employed had published the results from a randomized control trial (RCT), that is using the methodological 'gold standard', showing that healthy people who replace parts of animal protein in their diet with vegetarian alternatives develop bone resorption within 12 weeks (Itkonen et al. 2021). A study using the same method and showing a consistent result was published in another part of the world (Tong et al. 2020). A third Study showed that the part of the body that was exposed to risk when eating vegetarian protein is the lower part of the spine (Zheng et al. 2023). And in Finland, another research group showed that men over 40 need to eat meat and eggs to avoid dementia (Ylilauri et al. 2019). Dementia include Alzheimer's disease. Finland has most cases per capita of Alzheimers disease in the world (Österberg, 2022 b). Another review and meta-analysis demonstrated that people who abstain from animal source food also report a high degree of neuroticism, anxiety, and depression (Dobersek et al. 2021, 2023). But maybe most important, two reviews showed that meat is crucial to sustain physical and mental development among children (Adesogan et al. 2020; Balehegn et al. 2019).

A third interesting thing to note is that in 2022, one of the founders of the method used by the NutriRecs group received an honorary doctorate from the medical faculty at the University of Helsingfors.

Also in 2022 an anonymous researcher contacted Helsingin Sanomat, claiming that the dean at the faculty of agriculture and forestry had suppressed freedom of speech at the workplace (Parikka, 2022).

In 2023, Helsingin Sanomat published more bad news - the research at the university of Helsingfors had collapsed (See dark blue line, Bäckgren, HS, 2023).

One key aspect for academic work, i.e.  exploring to discover and generative learning, is leadership that use learning goals and decentralization to promote the work climate (Ekvall och Ryhammar, 1999; Österberg, 2004, 2012). But it seems like New public management's strive for utility by political correctness has suppressed the work climate at the University of Helsingfors. That means you need to apply not only epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010) about any claim from UH, but also disjunctive reasoning (Stanovich, 2009).

What does science say about STEM and gender, and did Ilmarinen and Lönnqvist's study really refute the Gender-equality paradox?

Well, 21 years ago, Dr Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychopathology, wrote in the Guardian - They just can't help it:

“My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems. I call it the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory”.

Ergo. Common academic knowledge is that men's and women's psycho-physiology differ to some extent.

Two years later, a meta-analysis was published, testing the Gender similarities hypothesis (Hyde, 2005). The result showed few differences between men and women, for example, whilst men are more openly aggressive towards other men, women are more relational aggressive (think domestic violence). Hyde also found a small one-tailed effect of gender on mental rotation (men are slightly better at mental rotation compared to women). Other than that, most things were similar between the genders.

Ergo. Common academic knowledge is that men's and women's cognitive capacity are more similar than dissimilar.

Six years later, a study measuring personality differences by gender was published. The results show that women worry more about the future compared to men (Wiesberg, 2011).

Ergo. Common academic knowledge is that men's and women's temperament/personality differ, especially when it comes to neuroticism.

Another seven years later, a paper was published showing a two paradoxes:

1. on the one hand, the paper supported the Gender similarities hypothesis (Hyde, 2005), and Dr. Baron-Cohen's (2003) discrimination between the male and the female brain.
   
   
2. On the other hand, the result showed that if women in democratic countries get to choose, they typically avoid STEM to a greater extent compared to women living in autocratic countries. This was referred to as the Gender-equality paradox (Stoet and Geary, 2018).

“The gender-equality paradox is the finding that various gender differences in personality and occupational choice are larger in more gender equal countries. Larger differences are found in Big Five personality traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, depression, personal values, occupational and educational choices. This phenomenon is seemingly paradoxical because one would expect the differences to be reduced as countries become more gender egalitarian.[1] Such a paradox has been discussed by numerous studies ranging from science, mathematics, reading, personality traits, basic human values and vocational interests” (Wikipedia).

In 2023, a review of gender-equality paradox was conducted:

“The findings show that the mathematics gender gap from the PISA and TIMMS assessments, is not linked to composite indices and specific indicators, but gender differences are larger in gender-equal countries for reading, mathematics attitudes, and personality (Big Five, HEXACO, Basic Human Values, and Vocational Interests)” (Baldocci, 2023).

So, like the dean's approach - going against common academic knowledge by blaming women in democracies avoidance of STEM on men and rewarding false claims about livestock and climate, and the researcher who went against common academic knowledge about meat and health, what's the likelihood that Ilmarinen och Lönnqvist study on Gender-equality paradox really refuted common academic knowledge? The easiest way to answer that question i, of course, to go to the source - the study:

“The results were highly heterogeneous. For some characteristics, men’s and women’s country-level means varied identically as a function of country-level gender equality (no paradox). For other characteristics, there were differences in how men’s and women’s means varied. Whether these differences could be described in the rhetoric of the paradox varied. More pertinent is the necessity of deconstructing difference score predictions into their constituent components before attempting to answer questions regarding a paradox” (Ilmarinen and Lönnqvist, 2024).

Again, University of Helsingfors has exaggerated and reported what looks like a false positive, that is, going against common academic knowledge.

Conclusion. Like so many other claims, the current claim by the University of Helsingfors, that researchers managed to refute the Gender-equality paradox, goes against common academic knowledge.

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