After a talk I did last week, a young man came up to me to ask me various questions about feminism, gender, #MeToo. At most events, I encounter at least one or two such young men. One of the things he wanted to impress upon me was that data can help you predict everything. Moreover, data overwhelmingly mirrors evolutionary biology and shows that gendered behaviours are hard-wired. Data can help us understand most things of course. For instance, my data from encountering many such young men (always young men) had taught me not to react to his tone. These conversations often feature an insistence the world cannot change, alongside a deep desire for guaranteed proof that things could be better.

When proof is open-ended, requiring slow exploration—that is, it 'feels' true but cannot be tangibly proved right away—it seems to become both, alluring and suspicious.
He informed me that he had annoyed another speaker at the event with such questions. "I mean just because I'm rude doesn't mean it's not true, right?" he added. "Sure," I laughed. "But just because it's true doesn't mean you have to be rude, right?" To have a statement of interpretation presented in a logical format gave him pause, but he switched to warning me that most people who work with data and algorithms are men, of privileged identities, who had bad skills with wooing women and so, if women were all going to choose a certain type of man (100 women choosing the same one man, but not any of them) there was going to be mayhem, naturally, also known as the incel movement.