For reference, this is Peterson's original article. (I mentioned it in my article, but when I went to retrieve it just now, I realized that my link was broken. Apologies for that. I have fixed the link in my article.) https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-the-gender-scandal-in-scandinavia-and-canada
Peterson did not explicitly define the term competence in this essay. He did not provide that definition to the reader. He may have his own private secret definition, but I don't know why I should believe that his private definition exists or that it is good and correct.
Peterson begins his essay with 126 words bragging about his lecture tour. (N/A.) Then, 1440 words saying that men and women have innate differences. (This part of his argument is N/A for my purposes here, except I note that it generally seems to contradict he second part of his argument.) In his 485-word “Part Two,” he says it is “a statistical certainty” that a gender quota prevents the selection of the “most competent” politicians.
He never defines competence. He never even clarifies that there are different kinds of competence and that only political competence is relevant here. He implies, but doesn’t state directly, that competence might be about “intelligence,” “conscientiousness,” and what people write on their “resumes, including education and accomplishments.” Nor does he explain why he believes that “competence” appears, on average, equally across men and women and why we should not, rather, expect it to be one of those supposed innate differences between the sexes that he discussed in the first part of his essay. The two halves of the essay undermine each other. He doesn't resolve that tension.
In this essay, Peterson argued against gender quotas. He did not acknowledge nepotism, nor any other reason why men might have privilege; to the contrary, he complained that "prejudice" against women is merely "hypothetical" and that he doesn't assume that "patriarchy" conveys any "generally undeserved privilege" to men. He did not acknowledge that it is a possibility that the best cabinet might be something other than an exact reproduction of the proportion of current elected MPs (which in this case was 26% women, 74% men). His actual words were that it is a "statistical certainty" that the best cabinet would reflect the gender distribution of the pool of MPs from which they were drawn—so the cabinet should be 26% women, 74% men. He doesn't support this claim nor consider possible objections or alternatives.
If you believe the ideal gender distribution in politics is 50/50 and that there is a way to reach equal gender representation without gender quotas, fine—but here, Peterson did not offer a method for increasing women's participation in politics. He only offered a method for decreasing it (getting rid of the quota).
In my article, I pointed out that Peterson did not define the term "competence" and did not provide adequate justification for his claim that gender quotas result in a less competent political class.
If you have definitions and justifications on these topics, that's super, but that's no credit to Peterson's 2018 essay in the National Post. The definitions and justifications aren't there.
The point of my article was that, given that Peterson didn't define his own terms or argue well in this 2018 essay, it doesn't surprise me that he projects these shortcomings on scientists today in 2022. He alleges that scientists don't know what they're talking about. But it is the case that Peterson himself doesn't know what he himself talks about.
