From among our most German friends, I found this article on WeiterGen on women in science that led to an article by one of my favorite scientists, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, that I found rather disappointing.
She describes her experiences as a woman in science of a previous generation, in which the discrimination was much more overt. She experienced seeing her work given to the credit of her male peers, of working under bosses who told her that women couldn’t do as well in science, and of working to the top of her profession to find a paucity of female colleagues and to find herself as the exception that proves the rule. You’ve got to admire her for overcoming all that to achieve far more than most of us privileged males.
The end of the article is also good, in which she urges men to be more aware of gender issues, and points out that there are persistent differences in women’s roles in society that we need to actively overcome; I’m also impressed that she’s putting her money where her mouth is and has founded the Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Foundation, which provides fellowships to women scientists specifically to help them balance conventional family obligations with research.
There’s a part in the middle that bugs me, though. She’s arguing that it’s OK that we don’t necessarily get that perfect 50:50 ratio in every field, and I agree with that … I just find why she thinks that should be so to be troubling.
Men and
women are different by nature, not
only because of their education or
the roles traditionally ascribed to
them by society. Of course, I do not
think that women are in any way
less intelligent than men or do not
have the capacity to do excellent
science in principle. It is not a matter
of skills or talent, but according
to my observations the strengths,
aims and interests of women differ
from those of many of their male
contemporaries, at least on average.
I know many women who share
my disgust for the personal pride,
vanity and narrow focus of some
successful male colleagues and in
turn appreciate the more considerate,
broad-minded way some female
colleagues do their science. I
understand women who hate to push
themselves forward, or who are not
willing to narrow down their spectrum
of interests, including family and
friends. I have often experienced
that women in my family — much
more so than men — have a hard
time understanding my passion
for science, while they are more
interested in social issues, art and
music.
Men and women are different, obviously, and there may well be intrinsic differences that will steer the sexes in different directions. That’s not a problem. But you know, claiming that women have a “more considerate, broad-minded” approach to science really isn’t that much different from a Larry Summers claiming that boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls. It’s not necessarily true, even in average or in natural inclination, and it perpetuates a stereotype.
An individual woman ought be able to be ambitious, pushy, vain, and focused and succeed in science without her approach being considered in conflict with her gender. It isn’t. Similarly, an individual male researcher can be considerate and giving and helpful without betraying his sex. I want women to succeed in science because I don’t want anyone to be hindered in their careers by the imposition of stereotypes, and let’s not have women graduate students walk into a lab under the shadow of an expectation that they have to be the liberal nurturers of the research group, the ones who’ll be interested in art and music more than the nerdy males. It’s a nice reputation to have, I’m sure, but it’s also an imposition of an unfair expectation on women that we don’t place on men.
Subtle sexism…
I was on a flight about a year or so ago and got into a conversation with a woman who does some kind of cell biology work at Harvard. We got to chatting, and I asked about gender issues. One of the things that struck me most was when she described giving papers to seminars with the folks she worked with. They discussed her attire. They discussed what she had worn in presenting a paper a year earlier.
Now, guys, how many of you would want people focusing not on what you said, but what you wear?
But sexism is dead, right?
I thought it was because women had cooties?
Somebody obviously hasn’t met my ex.
I have two small kids in mommy-and-me classes, and my wife and I observe there that – on average – the boys play with trucks and the girls play with dolls. On average (this cannot be said too many times). It’s on average. From an evolutionary perspective I could have hypothesized that to be so, on average (if I hadn’t heard someone say it first). I don’t really think that should be such a controversial statement. Sorry for pushing a stereotype, but if that’s the way it is…
P.S. On average!
I have two small kids in mommy-and-me classes, and my wife and I observe there that – on average – the boys play with trucks and the girls play with dolls. On average (this cannot be said too many times). It’s on average. From an evolutionary perspective I could have hypothesized that to be so, on average (if I hadn’t heard someone say it first). I don’t really think that should be such a controversial statement. Sorry for pushing a stereotype, but if that’s the way it is…
P.S. On average!
My right-wing parents accuse me of wanting “quotas” whenever I comment that women are underrepresented in my calculus classes. They refuse to understand that I am not looking for males and females to be equally represented in math. I’m looking for them to feel equally welcome to pursue it. As noted in the thread on the Wiley comic strip, even today there are cultural pressures that tend to direct women away from the non-Barbie subjects.
Bjorn- it isn’t even necessarily an evolutionary adaptation (I strain to think what benefit truck-playing tendecies would have specifically for men, way back in the dawn of homo sapiens) studies have shown that people react to infants differently (even the same infant) depending on what sex they are told the child is. We are inculcated with appropriate behaviors from birth (and now, in the womb).
This nonsense about men and women having essential natures which predispose one sex to doing all the fun, exciting, powerful and income-generating stuff and the other sex “naturally” wants to live vicariously though the babies (be they children or grad students) relies on constant reinforcement and confirmation bias. Those who play well in gender roles confirm the roles, those who don’t, are explained away…
It’s very sad that we see this kind of essentialism still today.
I don’t think Nüsslein-Volhard even realizes the negative light her generalizations put on females as well as males. Like many sexual stereotypes, hers is unfair to both genders at the same time. There was a time when people fully embraced social roles and pretended that they were natural and God-given. It’s always been troubling to me that people are still having trouble shedding this concept.
Jesus, that’s stupid. It’s like they see her as a little kid playing scientist, and they think it’s just so adorable but of course they don’t have to take anything she says seriously. Haven’t we grown past this yet? Guess not. :(
Damn that Carl Linnaeus! We just can’t get beyond that taxonomic need to force everything under a definable label. The problem here isn’t the group attributes that define the individual, since the spetrum of attributes of each group is so variable, it is each individual’s attributes, reguardless of gender, that must be considered.
Defined gender roles in any field of endeavor (besides childBEARING) is always murky and subject to cultural changes. Pots and pans and sewing machines were once only in the domain of men as a profession, as was performing on stage, singing in choir, being a secretary,etc., ad naus…
Anyone who steps outside of gender relegated roles may be subject to ridicule or persecution, I would add the word “historically” but we still have cultural and social biases. We place unfair expectations on both genders but we become inured to the ones that aren’t exposed as politically incorrect.
Just a side note: we throw around the word “stereotype” without reference to “archetype”. We sometimes claim archetypical attributes are stereotypical ones just because we perceive them as bad…
It can both be true but not biological. Summers’ statement was implying a biological condition, and one which wouldn’t even make sense. Wouldn’t playing with dolls lead one toward biology and medicine more than playing with trucks? Nüsslein-Volhard’s statement refers, I suspect, to the sort of informal training women tend to get in listening to both sides (men tend toward hearing themselves and other men and ignoring women — not all of them, but a lot). Also women see things from a point that’s outside the classic white male position (I’m talking about North America and Europe here, which is my experience). This makes it easier in some ways to see some of the holes in arguments that might not be recognised by those white males.
This is also true of other “outside” groups. It’s one reason I think many new and good ideas over the past 40 years have come from women, gays, and Marxists. You see this in anthro, where, for instance, a young woman with children who’s in graduate school in the 1960s could read Levi-Strauss or ideas about human evolution and say “where are the women and children” and “why do they assume those women aren’t really doing anything”. It’s why Robert Murphy could study a group for years and not get something obvious which was immediately spotted when he got married and his wife Yolanda started studying those people with him (and he felt pretty stupid about that, but was smart enough to recognise she was right, just as he was smart enough to recognise the talent of that young wman with children in grad school).
“Wouldn’t playing with dolls lead one toward biology and medicine more than playing with trucks?”
As I understand it, Biology isn’t one of the sciences that has much trouble attracting a representative proportion of women.
Hypatia’s girl-
Betty Friedan claimed “the brain is not sexed” way back in the 70’s. She turned out to be wrong as we learned in brain and role studies and the 80’s & 90’s. Catch up.
I don’t see the problem with this “boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls” thing. From an evolutionary perspective, it seems obvious to me.
Of course, the dolls have no relation to this silly ideas about child nurturing. It’s not about childcare, it’s about witchcraft. All women are witches by instinct, and this comes from our cave-dwelling ancestors, among whom all the spell-casting tasks were reserved to women. Of course, in our current, politically-correct civilization, the voodoo doll is not tolerated anymore and has to me euphemized into the cutey, cuddly, baby-doll. But the truth behind it is just one needle away.
Same for the boys. At that far-away time, the only truck drivers were men. Of course, the trucks were made of tree trunks and stone slabs assembled with vine ropes. And they were tracted by tame mammoths, just like it’s shown in the documentary “10,000 BC”. Which compensated rather nicely the fact that the wheel hadn’t been completely invented yet.
See ? Evolutionary psychology does make sense !
I dunno…why must we always throw in these qualifiers about men and women possibly maybe sorta being different in their aptitudes? Does it really make any damn difference in how they should be treated? I think everybody should just wait until we’ve removed our overt and covert sexual discriminations and then, you know, just see how everything shakes out. THEN maybe we can start probing the innate sex differences as an academic matter.
While I do agree that there is a big difference in the numbers of male scientist vs female scientists and the success rates of each I think that there are other things going on here than just “sexism”. I do not know any question of this type or any other type that has a single simple solution or explanation.
There are negative effects to a system that is so waited toward competition as much is a market based one such as ours.
Truth is truth facts are facts regardless of who discovered them or who wrote them up first.
Publish or parish?
Does that foster understanding? Or does it foster secrecy and encourage self centered action and at least defensiveness leaving aside other unethical behavior (plagiarism, fraud or worse).
What would be the nature of scientific understanding be if open cooperation was more emphasized instead of competition.
As an example look at computer science I would be willing to bet that the secrecy we are forced into as a result of “market forces” have held back the development of software.
All programs in essence have to start from scratch instead of standing on the shoulders of giants I have heard it described as standing on each others feet.
just taking a broader look
Hypatia-girl, you condescending piece of bleep. My boys are attracted to large trucks. None of the girls that I have heard of are. I am totally disinterested in trucks of any kind, and so if my wife. You are right that this all may have nothing to do with adaptation, but how do you know it doesn’t? How do you know that they are caused by reinforcement and confirmation bias? I posit that you think so purely because it is politically correct to do so. Behaviorism is dead, as jsn alludes to above. That everything we become is by nurture is preposterous.
Hypatia-girl, you condescending piece of bleep. My boys are attracted to large trucks. None of the girls that I have heard of are. I am totally disinterested in trucks of any kind, and so if my wife. You are right that this all may have nothing to do with adaptation, but how do you know it doesn’t? How do you know that they are caused by reinforcement and confirmation bias? I posit that you think so purely because it is politically correct to do so. Behaviorism is dead, as jsn alludes to above. That everything we become is by nurture is preposterous.
jsn@11: There is a paradigmatic male and female brain. None of us has either, but most of us fall into one general brain gender class or the other. I can’t remember if it’s closer to 10 or 20% of men and women whose brains fall into the opposite gender class, but that’s a significant number of people.
And while there are average differences between male and female brain structure, function, and chemistry, all of these are affected by experience, and all of these are not binary values, but ranges with great variance. You can’t look at a brain image and tell with certainty the gender of its owner.
Whoa, bit of a strong reaction there. Sadly for you, she’s right. Observing the behavior or people in society and then declaring that this is at all indicative of the inherent nature of whatever groups they happen to belong to, be it gender, race, etc., is silly. Social conditioning accounts for far, far more of our behavior than some people give it credit for.
Uh, what, pz? There’s nothing different between men and women that any psychological test battery can determine with any degree of accuracy. if there’s any actual difference it’s in nurture versus nature. You did the same thing she did, you just phrased it differently. saying that there’s a difference means there’s a difference. Just because you’re not saying that “girls wear skirts because they’re dainty” doesn’t mean that the road of implications eventually leads there.
I could give a good god damn about societal programming, i rail against the common sense whenever possible; I’ve met smart women and smart men. I’ve also met dumb women and dumb men. It’s all the same, really.
Man, isn’t trying to be non-sexist a true BITCH?
Damn.. “doesn’t mean that the road of implications does not eventually lead there” is how that should have read. 26 hours awake does interesting things to thought processes.
There’s a variation of feminism called “difference feminism” — it argues that women are not only different than men, they’re better, possessing special intuitions, wisdom, and ‘ways of knowing.’ When women go into science, they’re supposed to change it into a more open and gentle forum, where there’s less rigor and criticism and more “acceptance” of outside or marginalized views.
It’s hard to see this as anything other than bigotry against women and an apology for bad theories. But I personally know a bunch of women who embrace it as the new ideal. Naturally, they are all heavy deep into pseudoscientific and spiritual crap. And none of them, thank goodness, are scientists.
@ Carolyn #16
I can’t speak for jsn, but I do agree with what you say. However, if his point is that there are statistical differences (not categorical ones) between male and female brains he’s right on that.
It makes the need to give the benefit of every bit of every doubt to “nurture” that he was responding to seem a bit unwarranted.
sastra,
Speaking of Difference Feminism and spirituality, I was Program Faculty in Women’s Studies at a previous school (dual app’t in Soc. and Ethn. Studies). They held a “Women’s Spirituality Conference” every year.
Woo central. Sure, they rejected much of Christianity, but then they went off in these bizarre, “We menstruate every 28 days, the same amount of time for an earth cycle, so we are closer to the earth, more attuned to its needs” blah blah blah. And all changing their names to Rainbow Meadow Starlight or some such crap.
Sure, Bjørn, start a message with “you condescending piece of..” and see what kind of response you get. Way to foster a polite academic discussion.
I hope we may find out someday about biological contributions to behavioral propensity, and we probably will, ten years after we manage to stop getting emotional and insulting each other whenever the topic comes up. 200 posts by 6pm Eastern time, is my guess.
You might want to read this again:
You seem to have missed the “many ” in “many women”. Nüsslein-Volhard doesn’t claim that women (as a group) “have a “more considerate, broad-minded” approach to science”, but only that she’s known many how have thought that. You’re simply mis-representing what she wrote.
Pete: you’re probably right with the comment count. What’s funny, to me at least, is that women have started to believe that they’re somehow different BY NATURE. Get a grip. And what statistical differences are there between female and male brains? CITE YOUR PEER REVIEWED SOURCES.
I’d love to hear how they’ve developed an IQ test or some other psychological test that can determine the sex of the taker to any degree of accuracy (meaning better than a psychic claiming the same thing).
Welcome to my world.
But you know, claiming that women have a “more considerate, broad-minded” approach to science really isn’t that much different from a Larry Summers claiming that boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls.
1. Larry Summers didn’t say that. What Larry Summers said was the same thing that you said:
there may well be intrinsic differences that will steer the sexes in different directions.
2. Boys do play with trucks, and girls do play with dolls. So what?
. Boys do play with trucks, and girls do play with dolls. So what?
And if a boy plays with a doll, we rename it an “action figure”
Obviously, playing with trucks is unlikely to be an adaptation since trucks haven’t been around that long. Presumably you mean that it could be a side-effect of some other adaptation.
This brings to mind the study of toy preferences among vervet monkeys a few years back – the hypothesis of adaptive differences sounds sort of plausible until you ask why vervet monkey males would need to propel objects through space more accurately than females, and why female monkeys would be attracted to pink hairless babies and cooking pots?
“for pushing a stereotype, but if that’s the way it is…”
And I’m sure it has nothing to do with what the parents have given them to play with in the past, or who they see playing with such toys in the commericals, or what adults tell them they should be playing with.
Nah, it’s not bigorty, it’s just biology.
C’mon. Dig a little deeper.
My boys are attracted to large trucks. None of the girls that I have heard of are.
Exhibit #1 in the demonstration that sexism is far from dead in Scandinavia. My daughter loves trucks. She likes dolls too, but trucks were her first love and still a serious interest. Her two best friends in the building, both girls, also love trucks. I suspect that if you’ve never met a girl who is into trucks it’s either because you haven’t looked or because you’re living in an environment so sexist that the girls get the interest beaten out of them, hopefully not literally, by the time they are old enough for you to notice them.
http://xkcd.com/385/
She turned out to be wrong as we learned in brain and role studies and the 80’s & 90’s
Source?
The key to the middle of her article is “according to my observations”
An observation by NV is an observation, and prob’ly a damn good one.
Are female brains different from male brains?
It would seem that there might be certain talents that males have and certain talents that females have, based on roles in society shaped by some 20 to 50 thousand years of evolution. I mean, why do women not have muscle mass and men do? The chemistry doesn’t haf to work that way, but it does. No tissue, no part of the body is immune to sexual dimorphism.
If your null hypothesis is that there are no differences between male and female brains, bet you are going to haf to have a pretty big sample to disprove it, and most the studies that do so seem mired with poor controls. But on the other hand, if your H1 hypothesis is that there is a difference, again you’ld need a large sample size, and controls became the issue.
So, to my thinking, to say that there are _no_ differences is as troubling as saying there are. We don’t know what we are doing when we measure brains or abilities.
(Of course if we could do that, there might be fewer people dropping out of college…. )
Do we wish to know? That is a different question.
We women have the weird problem of you know… Popping babies out once in a while. It’s probably hard to deal working vs the need (and probably duty) of staying home with the baby for a while, or even raise it to maturity. Yea, I know guys can do it, but let’s face it… Most kids when they are young call out to their mamas. And psychologically, I’m pretty sure girls and boys are different. We bawl a lot more than guys. It’s no stereotype really. But you know, we pretty much always end up learning how to deal with it.
…Still, workmates on PMS… That’s just a pain in the ass. I know how to control mine but so many women are in denial! Raise the question “Geeze woman, are you in PMS?” and they’ll want to tear your head off… All because of a simple physical disturbance.
I still was pissed off as a kid when I kept getting barbies when I had asked for a ninja turtle. There’s a massive difference here!!! But oh well, now I’m compensating for that by buying a shitload of Megaman toys. :P And I dare call that a collection.
They’re not toys! They’re ACTION FIGURES!
This brings to mind the study of toy preferences among vervet monkeys a few years back – the hypothesis of adaptive differences sounds sort of plausible until you ask why vervet monkey males would need to propel objects through space more accurately than females, and why female monkeys would be attracted to pink hairless babies and cooking pots?
It would also have been a lot more plausible if the monkeys had been wearing diapers or something. Given that the observers knew perfectly well whether the monkey they were observing was male or female, one can’t reasonably say that the study eliminated the possibility of social bias confounding the results.
“:”Most kids when they are young call out to their mamas”
Because mama is always the one to comfort them while dad is not. Societal conditioning.
“We bawl a lot more than guys”
Because men are trained not to cry – it’s weak and girly. Men are only allowed two emotions in patriarchy – anger and lust.
And the PMS thing – is there any woman alive who hasn’t had her concerns, objections or problems dismissed with “are you on the rag?” It’s dismissive and sexist bullshit, which is why women get angry with the statement.
Are these things supposed to convince that there is no sexism and that these differences are not based in it?
I have two small kids in mommy-and-me classes, and my wife and I observe there that – on average – the boys play with trucks and the girls play with doll
I wonder if any of the little boys grew up in a pink room decorated with fluffy unicorns?
We gender code a lot for infants… from their colors to their first toys and so on. I remember when I was doing some research on literacy coming across some papers in peer reviewed journals that found that speech maternal speech patterns from the moment of birth are different for boy and girl offspring, and that boys are more likely to be engaged in rough and tumble pay even at an early age than girls are. The interesting thing was the the studies showed the same disparity in parental behaviors between male and female infants in homes that considered themselves aware of gender issues and self reported providing a gender neutral environment.
Many of you are misrepresenting both Dr. Nüsslein-Volhard and PZ’s response. Dr. N-V is the one who attributed differences in attitude towards aggressiveness and the like to natural sex difference, even if she did not say it was true of ALL women. And PZ did not bother denying that – because it might well be true that there are such differences, statistically, and they might well be more nature than nurture (although that’s a false dichotomy in any case). What PZ did say is that such differences don’t matter a damned bit – whether it’s true or not, the perpetuation of the stereotype is pernicious because it encourages essentialist thinking about the sexes as groups when the only thing that should matter is any given scientist’s individual character, abilities, and achievements.
I can’t think of a better illustration of how pernicious it is than the fact that everyone can immediately see the truth behind this cartoon:
http://www.viruscomix.com/page330.html
We should avoid promoting any of the stereotypes that perpetuate the sexist assumptions embedded in our society. It would be far better for all of us to work towards a world where no one would get the joke behind the “Opposite World” that the cartoonist invents.
And psychologically, I’m pretty sure girls and boys are different. We bawl a lot more than guys. It’s no stereotype really. But you know, we pretty much always end up learning how to deal with it.
The Stanford neurobiologist Ben Barres says that when he started taking hormones in preparation for his sex-change surgery, one of the first things he noticed was that it was much more difficult for him to cry.
(Incidentally, he also started hearing better reviews of his work — a colleague was heard walking out of his talk shortly after the surgery saying, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”)
Suddenly the gender identity issues I went through as a teen make a lot more sense. When I was a kid I was always trying to put dolls into trucks.
Great article.
“In our society, features of attractive women traditionally
concern beauty or social skills rather than intellectual achievements.”
“I realise that I intuitively shielded my success from my
colleagues and friends as much as possible in order to avoid provoking them.”
Massive generalizations (based on stories my favorite female tells me):
A lot of men fear and dislike smart women.
Men are very big on bluster: they have to make what they do seem IMPORTANT, always making damned sure they get lots of recognition and credit. Me, me, me.
A lot of times, it’s completely unconscious bnehavior. Sometimes, it reflect deliberate antagonism towards women.
The best hope of putting an end to this kind of behavior is if men and women of more enlightened natures don’t let the denser men off the hook when they behave in a discriminatory fashion, whether in large matters or small. It takes a lot to wake the dumb idiots up (being a dumb idiot, I know).
It’s difficult because the jerks are everywhere, they practice discrimination in all areas of their life, and they will return to their clueless male stupor no matter how many times they are reminded of their obnoxious behavior.
@genewitch #25: Here are a couple of imaging studies that found statistical anatomical differences between male and female brains:
Evolving knowledge of sex differences in brain structure, function, and chemistry.
Cerebral asymmetry and the effects of sex and handedness on brain structure: a voxel-based morphometric analysis of 465 normal adult human brains.
The existence of anatomical differences don’t strictly imply anything about behavioral or cognitive differences, but they do at least lend a bit of favor to the hypothesis that such differences exist.
As for IQ, I’ve never heard of any study that involved predicting whether individuals were male or female based on the score, but there have been several that compare distributions. From what I’ve seen the averages are typically the same, but the variability tends to be higher in males.
Here is one of the studies that has that conclusion.
I’ll check up on what people have to say of course, but I’m not dedicated enough right now to do anything like back and forth debate on the topic. I just wasn’t sure if your request for sources was for me or for someone else, so I thought I’d at least give a couple of references to try and honor it. Hope they are useful one way or another.
Stephen (#17), note, I said on average (#4). How in the world do you know that “social conditioning accounts for far, far more of our behavior” than nature? This is the shaky basis of this whole discussion, people just stating beliefs like these as if they were facts.
Windy (#29), I don’t think it is so unlikely that playing with trucks has something to do with an adaptation. Boys needed to learn different things than girls, and as a result they still focus on playing with different things. But, as you say, could be a side-effect too.
Dianne (#31), I am from Denmark, but I live in California, where my observations were made. I do know that some girls play with trucks, and I for one used to play with dolls (not action-men). Yes, there are exceptions to this otherwise quite clear trend. Also, I have been trying to think of a calm response to your last sentence, but it has not been forthcoming, so I’ll just skip that, except to note it really has nothing to say about the nature/nurture debate.
Dorid (#38), I of course agree that nurture means something for gender-roles. Just not everything. That was my point.
P.S. On a different topic: Saying “condescending piece of bleep” is hardly anything that people on this blog aren’t already used to. PZ himself doesn’t hesitate to call people demented fuckwits and all sorts of other fun stuff, so please don’t give me that crap. And Hypatya’s Girl’s response to my post was condescending.
Stephen (#17), note, I said on average (#4). How in the world do you know that “social conditioning accounts for far, far more of our behavior” than nature? This is the shaky basis of this whole discussion, people just stating beliefs like these as if they were facts.
Windy (#29), I don’t think it is so unlikely that playing with trucks has something to do with an adaptation. Boys needed to learn different things than girls, and as a result they still focus on playing with different things. But, as you say, could be a side-effect too.
Dianne (#31), I am from Denmark, but I live in California, where my observations were made. I do know that some girls play with trucks, and I for one used to play with dolls (not action-men). Yes, there are exceptions to this otherwise quite clear trend. Also, I have been trying to think of a calm response to your last sentence, but it has not been forthcoming, so I’ll just skip that, except to note it really has nothing to say about the nature/nurture debate.
Dorid (#38), I of course agree that nurture means something for gender-roles. Just not everything. That was my point.
P.S. On a different topic: Saying “condescending piece of bleep” is hardly anything that people on this blog aren’t already used to. PZ himself doesn’t hesitate to call people demented fuckwits and all sorts of other fun stuff, so please don’t give me that crap. And Hypatya’s Girl’s response to my post was condescending.
They discussed her attire.
Welcome to my world.
…and mine.
I thought all those “on averages” in Bjorn’s original comment were part of a clever parody, and I was going to suggest that he also mention that some of his best friends are women. He was being serious?
I mean, “on average” this, and “on average” that. I still say, so what? What is the big important point that is being made by declaring that there are Differences between male and female brain and body chemistry “on average”?
Gender expectations is an oft misapplied sociological distinction. Though certain cultures may develop certain expectations for the different sexes, such differences aren’t apparent in the physiology but in the behaviorisms of said culture.
It sound like Nüsslein-Volhard has been duped into thinking that in a specific distribution females have a tendency to being more right-brained (eg. worldly, artful, etc.) and males have a tendency of being more left-brain (eg. analytic, logical, etc). We all know that this characteristic isn’t correlated to sex specifcally but to upbringing. Depending on what one was exposed to during mental development, you’ll be “more strong” in one region of the brain versus the other. I thought this was well-known in childhood development circles.
But I digress. It’s disheartening to have read that small imprescise blurb. I am glad she is championing the cause of briding sexual disparity in the sciences and become exemplary of a successful woman in science, but her reasoning is off just slightly in certain areas. Just my two cents.
Red Fox (#45), PZ said
So I say, yes, I do think it is true that boys etc., on average. After stating that, I would add that I also do not think these differences are 100% socially conditioned, nor 100% given by nature. Somewhere, unknown, in between.
Red Fox (#45), PZ said
So I say, yes, I do think it is true that boys etc., on average. After stating that, I would add that I also do not think these differences are 100% socially conditioned, nor 100% given by nature. Somewhere, unknown, in between.
Hear, hear!
Can we still think of blacks as intellectually inferior though since they don’t score as well on IQ tests?
I do know that some girls play with trucks, and I for one used to play with dolls (not action-men).
In your prior post you said, “My boys are attracted to large trucks. None of the girls that I have heard of are.”, which suggests that you believe that only boys play with trucks.
Yes, there are exceptions to this otherwise quite clear trend.
Do you have any evidence other than anecdote for calling this a “clear trend”? The only study I’ve seen on the issue suggests that differences in play style between boys and girls arise only after the children are of an age to notice and respond to social expectations.
Also, I have been trying to think of a calm response to your last sentence, but it has not been forthcoming,
That’s because, as a man, you’re too emotional to come up with one. (/sarcasm.)
so I’ll just skip that, except to note it really has nothing to say about the nature/nurture debate.
Actually, it does. Observer bias is a well described phenomenon: most people will see what they expect to see if given the chance to. That’s why we have things like “double blinding” and controls in science. Stereotype threat–the tendency of people to perform in the ways that are expected of them–is also well described. One interesting thing to note about stereotype threat is that men will perform worse on a test if they are told that men and women perform equally well on this test. So men apparently depend on being thought superior to perform well. Perhaps that accounts for the vigorous defense of sexism seen in this normally rational crowd. Be that as it may, I only wish that the bit about kids having the desire to play with the “wrong” toys beaten out of them was exageration or an insult to you or whatever you took it as. Unfortunately, it is an observation–and an experience. As a child, I had teachers slap me for reaching for the “wrong” toy. My parents came to my aid pretty quickly and so I was relatively well protected against that behavior. Others…were not so lucky.
Boys do play with trucks, and girls do play with dolls. So what?
And if a boy plays with a doll, we rename it an “action figure”
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | March 17, 2008 2:02 PM
♥ MAJeff. ^_^
Since we’re back to the anecdata are inescapable, I never played with dolls but loved my building blocks, therefore men are bad at civil engineering, QED.
Erm, there was supposed to be a “which” in that post between “anecdata” and “are.” It seems to have gone AWOL.
“That’s because, as a man, you’re too emotional to come up with one. (/sarcasm.)”
No no, replace “emotional” with “rageoholic”.
I …loved my building blocks
Me too! Therefore it’s not just an anecdote, it’s a case series! Men are definitely terrible at civil engineering.
Male scientists are characterized by personal pride, narrow focus, and vanity? Plus narrow-minded and inconsiderate? Those statements aren’t about sexism towards females, they are a simple jab at guys in the sciences, who frankly, in my personal experience, do not fit quite so well into the stereotypes and averages we all keep having to mention to justify our sexist prejudices and hunches.
Every feature of an organism has “something” to do with an adaptation, broadly considered. Adaptation is a technical term in biology – it doesn’t mean much to suggest that something might be an adaptation for an unspecified purpose. What, exactly is the adaptation here, and what for?
I had a few action figures (1986 Cobra “Snow Serpent” and Father Mulcahy and Klinger from M*A*S*H), but mostly played with Lego® or active games like tag and dodgeball with girls as well as guys. I wasn’t adverse to playing house, (even less so to playing doctor with a girl, even if it only consisted of getting ‘injections’ with a ball-point pen) and have a brief memory of having an imaginary baby to whom I was the mother (named San Diego, for some reason).
I see nothing in that history that would predict I would grow up to be a heterosexual male with slight cross-dressing tendencies.
I …loved my building blocks
Me too! Therefore it’s not just an anecdote, it’s a case series! Men are definitely terrible at civil engineering.
Posted by: Dianne | March 17, 2008 3:48 PM
I also used my Legos to build war harnesses for my dinosaurs so that the Lego people could ride them into battle, which means men are also terrible at military tactics, mechanical engineering, human factors and ergonomic engineering, and paleontology.
Shit, this sociological meta-analysis is way easy! Why’d I bother getting an advanced degree in aerospace engineering?
Ah, that explains the surprisingly frilly decor at your last pants party. ;)
Shit, this sociological meta-analysis is way easy!
That must be why I’ve spent half of today “working on my dissertation” by laying on my bed crying.
Windy, not every feature of an organism has something to do with an adaptation, but let’s not discuss evolutionary theory (if you really want, let’s do it in private: [email protected]).
The point is that playing with trucks could be an adaptation, or a by-product of one, and if it is, then there could be a natural, evolutionary reason why boys play with trucks more so than they play with dolls. Admittedly we don’t know if that’s the case, but it is definitely a reasonable hypothesis.
Windy, not every feature of an organism has something to do with an adaptation, but let’s not discuss evolutionary theory (if you really want, let’s do it in private: [email protected]).
The point is that playing with trucks could be an adaptation, or a by-product of one, and if it is, then there could be a natural, evolutionary reason why boys play with trucks more so than they play with dolls. Admittedly we don’t know if that’s the case, but it is definitely a reasonable hypothesis.
Shit, this sociological meta-analysis is way easy!
That must be why I’ve spent half of today “working on my dissertation” by laying on my bed crying.
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | March 17, 2008 4:01 PM
If you can work Lego people on Tyrannosaurs into it, I’m sure your dissertation committee will sign off in a snap.
“It would also have been a lot more plausible if the monkeys had been wearing diapers or something. Given that the observers knew perfectly well whether the monkey they were observing was male or female, one can’t reasonably say that the study eliminated the possibility of social bias confounding the results.”
And some people will constantly ignore any study that contradicts their view that there exists no actual differences between boys and girls.
Biases work both ways Dianne, you know…
My embryology prof (EP) tells of trying to find speakers for a conference last year. She circulated the proposal with a request that the suggesters explicitly try to include women speakers, and to a man, they responded they couldn’t think of any female scientists who’d be appropriate.
EP: Well, what about Dr. A?
Colleague: Oh, yeah, she’d be really good, I forgot about her.
EP: And how about Dr. B?
Colleague: Oh, yeah, she’s good too; I just forgot about her.
EP: And Dr. C?
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Yeah, about that–I’ve been wondering just how they measure it.
That must be why I’ve spent half of today “working on my dissertation” by laying on my bed crying.
I can’t quite decide which response to go with here…
1. That’s because men are too emotional for advanced degrees. Why don’t you go lift something and not worry your pretty little head about it and you’ll feel all better.
Or…
2. Admit that I’ve spent a good deal of today “working” on my paper by snarling at people on this thread.
Dianne, if it’s any consolation to know you’re not alone in that, I can tell when writing deadlines are really getting to me by the frequency of my going to Pharyngula, looking for fresh meat. :)
And some people will constantly ignore any study that contradicts their view that there exists no actual differences between boys and girls.
Studies such as…I’ve asked for data several times and gotten nothing but anecdote. Come on, surely there’s at least a poorly controlled study out there somewhere proporting to prove that boys play with trucks more.
I’m sure others will be curious too. What would be an example of a feature of an organism that has nothing to do with an adaptation, broadly considered (like I clearly specified?) And why shouldn’t we discuss evolutionary theory in a discussion on adaptations?
(Unless of course you are waxing philosophical and consider the tendency of daisies to float or similar (like Dennett in one example.) But that’s clearly a different kind of feature than the tendency of boys to play with trucks)
Windy, look up `drift to fixation’.
(And, Bjørn, what’s this about not being able to discuss evolutionary biology? On *this* blog?)
I agree with what some others have said, that this nature versus nurture debate is basically unknowable and completely beside the point. Whatever drives our preferences in toys or careers, prejudice is unacceptable, especially for a group of people who are supposedly trained to be wary of bias. It’s an embarrassment and a black eye for the entire scientific community.
Now that I’ve said my peace on that, I love developmental psychology. So, even though I think it’s irrelevant to the question of prejudice, I just can’t help but join in. ;-)
I remember a study (E. Erikson, 1951) that found both young boys and girls enjoy playing with blocks, but that girls tended to built low, enclosed structures while boys tended to build tall, dare I say phallic, structures. So boys are probably better at designing skyscrapers and girls are better at planning gated communities. (For the humor impaired the study is real, the conclusion is a joke.)
I recall another experiment (no reference handy), which placed young children (ages 12-24 Mo.) in a room with their mother, with the two separated by a glass half-wall. The boys would tend to try to get to their mothers by beating on the glass, find away around, or otherwise defeating the barrier. The girls on the other hand had a more effective strategy, when the reached the barrier they would sit down and cry, at which point the mom would walk over and pick her up.
This tells me two things. One, that if it’s not nature then the cultural bias starts so young as to be indistinguishable and two, that girls are smarter than boys.
Dianne (#49) , you said
I meant in that mommy-and-me class. My mistake for not being clear there. Again, I am aware of some girls playing with trucks, and I myself, as a boy, played with dolls (but I swear I don’t do that sort of thing anymore!).
No, just personal observations and other anecdotes. Perhaps I am deluding myself. You are of course correct that observer bias might play a role here. But it sounds like you would take that so far as to say that is all there is. Do you not also find that boys play more with trucks (etc.) and girls with dolls (etc.) on average?
Dianne (#49) , you said
I meant in that mommy-and-me class. My mistake for not being clear there. Again, I am aware of some girls playing with trucks, and I myself, as a boy, played with dolls (but I swear I don’t do that sort of thing anymore!).
No, just personal observations and other anecdotes. Perhaps I am deluding myself. You are of course correct that observer bias might play a role here. But it sounds like you would take that so far as to say that is all there is. Do you not also find that boys play more with trucks (etc.) and girls with dolls (etc.) on average?
A female boss (the best one I have had btw) once told me off (nicely) for being too helpful. A nice example to support PZs point that it is dangerous to attempt to generalise. But then I am a biologist and am married to a woman with one degree in maths and another in computer science, so sod sex stereotyping.
Escuerd Yes there are a lot of women in Biology, more than men at undergrad and PhD level, but the numbers tail off the higher up you get. Not many of them make FRS or FNAS, I know I worked for one for one of the former.
Also I know about the dolls/action figures thing 35 or so years ago when I wanted an Action Man my mother apparently had to persuade my dad it wasn’t ‘just a doll’ ;-) All I knew was I wanted one, he came with both a frogman and a deep sea diver suit, and a tent and a WWII Russian uniform and kit and….
Hi Nix. Sure, we could discuss it here on this blog, but I just think discussing fixation theory would be a bit much – on this thread. But since Windy asks:
Neutral theory is at the same time a mature and active field of research. Examples of features gone to fixation via founder effect and drift:
Hi Nix. Sure, we could discuss it here on this blog, but I just think discussing fixation theory would be a bit much – on this thread. But since Windy asks:
Neutral theory is at the same time a mature and active field of research. Examples of features gone to fixation via founder effect and drift:
An individual woman ought be able to be ambitious, pushy, vain, and focused and succeed in science without her approach being considered in conflict with her gender. It isn’t.
Well, of course it isn’t, not in the sense of being proscribed. But, to the extent that women tend to have a different reproductive strategy from the likes of me, we can expect that it influences their attitudes and interests, whether within science or no. Mere acknowledgment of the influence of gender on behavior/outlook etc. doesn’t discourage female scientists in general, nor mandate expectations for individual female scientists, for a number of reasons. Nor should it be allowed to justify sexism, event the sort of unconscious sexism that seems to manifest itself only when people are directed to consciously look for outstanding candidates who are not male or white or whatever is favored by the hidden bias…as was discussed here in a different thread, recently.
With ref to boys/trucks, girls/dolls. I also observed what went on at my daughter’s nursery school. I noticed that if a boy picked up a doll, nobody said anything at all. If a girl picked up a doll, the adults would ask her it’s name, how it felt, what it was doing, what it wanted to wear, … Of course they didn’t know they were doing it.
Not that this has anything to do with women and science. Personally, I think the only way for women to achieve parity in science or any other career is to ‘facilitate’ men’s participation in all those other important, but unpaid tasks of life, e.g. kids, cleaning, cooking, you know what I mean. And for all employers to realise that there are limits on the availability and flexibility they can demand from their employees of either sex in terms of hours and travel.
Personally, I think the only way for women to achieve parity in science or any other career is to ‘facilitate’ men’s participation in all those other important, but unpaid tasks of life, e.g. kids, cleaning, cooking, you know what I mean.
This is one of those interesting points. We do facilitate mens participation in such things as cooking–particularly if it’s part of the formal economy. Go look at most professional kitchens; they tend to be overwhelmingly male-dominated.
I am aware of it, but it’s not a feature of an organism, it’s a feature of a population.
Those *have to do with* adaptations like the immune system. You didn’t get my point: that it’s easy to say that boys playing with trucks might have something to do with an adaptation, but it doesn’t mean much. Adaptation for what and how does/did it affect fitness?
That a northern elephant seal is homozygous is as much a feature of the individual organism as one of the population. I don’t get why you make this distinction, Windy. And please be more specific: in what way does a feature that has gone to fixation via drift have to do with an adaptation? Hypothetical example: that a cow has a black spot on it’s back instead of a white spot does not need to have any adaptive value, or have anything to do (e.g. via pleiotropy) with other traits that are adaptive. Also, I really don’t get your point about “adaptation for what…”. It would be great to know such details, but that does not mean that we cannot posit that there probably is an adaptive reason why girls play with dolls. Or, I could just say (i.e. hypothesize) girls play with dolls because it helps form neural networks that enable them better to take care of children later in life, and it thus affects their fitness positively (don’t tell me I need to make up numbers too).
That a northern elephant seal is homozygous is as much a feature of the individual organism as one of the population. I don’t get why you make this distinction, Windy. And please be more specific: in what way does a feature that has gone to fixation via drift have to do with an adaptation? Hypothetical example: that a cow has a black spot on it’s back instead of a white spot does not need to have any adaptive value, or have anything to do (e.g. via pleiotropy) with other traits that are adaptive. Also, I really don’t get your point about “adaptation for what…”. It would be great to know such details, but that does not mean that we cannot posit that there probably is an adaptive reason why girls play with dolls. Or, I could just say (i.e. hypothesize) girls play with dolls because it helps form neural networks that enable them better to take care of children later in life, and it thus affects their fitness positively (don’t tell me I need to make up numbers too).
Yes, it does, unfortunately. You can’t say that something is “probably” adaptive if you have no idea of a mechanism etc.
OK, a hypothesis is good. Do most girls in all cultures play with dolls? What about boys and trucks?
To verify the hypothesis takes some work, as you note. But why is the onus on me to show that play preference has something to do with nature, anymore than someone else has to show it is all nurture? Why is “all nurture” the accepted null hypothesis? All I wanted to argue was that both nature and nurture plays a role in how children play. And let’s not here ignore that “trucks” and “dolls” should be understood as placeholders for “boys play in some ways” and “girls play in some ways”. I hypothesize that on average these two are not identical, even when there is no social conditioning, and this is due to the mechanism of selection favoring those that play the things that make them better at performing certain important tasks as adults.
And that is going to have to be the end of me on this thread.
To verify the hypothesis takes some work, as you note. But why is the onus on me to show that play preference has something to do with nature, anymore than someone else has to show it is all nurture? Why is “all nurture” the accepted null hypothesis? All I wanted to argue was that both nature and nurture plays a role in how children play. And let’s not here ignore that “trucks” and “dolls” should be understood as placeholders for “boys play in some ways” and “girls play in some ways”. I hypothesize that on average these two are not identical, even when there is no social conditioning, and this is due to the mechanism of selection favoring those that play the things that make them better at performing certain important tasks as adults.
And that is going to have to be the end of me on this thread.
If anyone else has done 4 years of psychology in college, feel free to step in!
Bjorn, without going to deeply into why it most likely is not nature, there have been posts prior that support the idea that from birth the child will receive input based on their sex. An example i read in a book about sex psychology (as in the UNF UNF UNF type of sex) said that most fathers with a boy and a girl at the beach will lift the girl above the waves, and hold out his arm to let the boy brace the waves. Roughhousing male children while doting over female children also contributes. there’s a million and one reasons. “you’re mommy’s little man” “you’re mommy’s little girl” — i mean come on, it’s encoded in the language.
I’m on the women’s side here. Well technically i am on advancement of the specie as a whole’s side here – but let’s not split hairs. Just because dolls are what girls play with (ever heard of group mentality? that would explain the mommy-and-me anecdotal examples), doesn’t mean that it’s ingrained somehow.
Women and men, as far as brain functioning at it’s core, have never been shown conclusively to be different. If you consider every human a shell that reacts to stimulus based on past experiences, then of course the reactions and actions taken are going to be different between males and females. but that doesn’t mean that women are any less capable or intelligent or whatever other scale you want to use for cognitive/psychological function.
Seriously. Give it a rest, you guys arguing this are really starting to depress me with your deeply ingrained sexism. (it might not be obvious to you, but i’m reading it loud and clear!)
Oh and as an aside, all this “playing with dolls/trucks to do things as an adult” or whatever… i was led to believe that what most girls did with dolls was make them hump. Was i lied to?
What sort of preparation is that? preparing them to hump? and i suppose that boys playing with army figurines is preparing them to murder in their adult life? cowboys and indians /cops and robbers… it’s all just preparation for violence while the womenfolk sit at home with a bun in the oven from their preparation for humping?
this is what some of you sound like. Just sayin.
This is right on the spot. Great job. :)
I’m interested in NV’s claim that the open discrimination that she experienced has become rare in the sciences. Since this does not seem to be the case in my field (analytic philosophy), I’m wondering what scientists here have to say about it. Is she right that open sexism is now rare?
I posted this on the other thread, too – if you think you don’t stereotype women and men and academic fields, go take Harvard’s Implicit Association Test. The link goes to the disclaimer page, then proceed and select the gender/science test. Prepare to be surprised by your results.
Interesting topic. I took it upon myself to Google a bit…
Source:http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein/cerebro-homens.html
“When all these investigations began, scientists were skeptical about the role of genes and of biological differences, because cultural learning is very powerful and influential among humans. Are girls more prone to play with dolls and cooperate among themselves than boys, because they are taught to be so by parents, teachers and social peers, or is it the reverse order?
However, gender differences are already apparent from just a few months after birth, when social influence is still small. For example, Anne Moir and David Jessel, in their remarkable and controversial book “Brain Sex” (11), offer explanations for these very early differences in children:
“These discernible, measurable differences in behaviour have been imprinted long before external influences have had a chance to get to work. They reflect a basic difference in the newborn brain which we already know about — the superior male efficiency in spatial ability, the greater female skill in speech.”
But now, after many careful controlled studies where environment and social learning were ruled out, scientists learned that there may exist a great deal of neurophysiological and anatomical differences between the brains of males and females.”
Oh, and the Gender/Science IAT?
“Your data suggest little or no association between Male and Female with Science and Liberal Arts.”
They reflect a basic difference in the newborn brain which we already know about — the superior male efficiency in spatial ability, the greater female skill in speech.”
So that’s why all of the good speechwriting, scriptwriting, technical writing, and journalist/columnist jobs go to women! It’s because we have such better speech skills! Oh, WAIT…
Gender/Science IAT
My score was slight association with Female/Science and Male/Liberal Arts, which did surprise me. I expected my association to be the other way around, if only because the vast majority of scientists and engineers I have spent my life around are male. I’m pretty used to being one of only two or three women scientists/engineers in the room. And that’s been true for me, for over 30 years.
Interesting test.
Don Kane #34:
“It would seem that there might be certain talents that males have and certain talents that females have, based on roles in society shaped by some 20 to 50 thousand years of evolution. I mean, why do women not have muscle mass and men do? The chemistry doesn’t haf to work that way, but it does. No tissue, no part of the body is immune to sexual dimorphism.”
As a girl who grew up with baby dolls, trucks, slot cars, chemistry and erector sets, I can say a lot of the stereotypical behaviors are indeed culturally influenced. Your inclusion of “chemistry” and “muscle mass” is also misguided.
Started ballet when I was 3. Yes, that’s a ‘girly’ thing. But by the time I had to choose between the civic ballet and college (for… science!), I chose science. Still, after 15 years’ worth of serious physical training, I could have put my muscle mass up against any male my size and won handily. That has translated into being muscled rather than doughy all my life. My daughter was also an athletic child is still well-muscled pushing 40. Either of us could beat a similar height-weight man our age on muscle mass.
Meanwhile, I had three sisters who were not athletic. They all suffer/ed weight problems and while really ‘soft’ when young, aged to be quite saggy. We share a lot of genes, so I don’t believe that’s a big factor.
While there is certainly sexual dimorphism in humans, there are small people and large people of both sexes. Sexual dimorphism isn’t responsible for why some people are fit and strong while others are chubby and soft.
“So that’s why all of the good speechwriting, scriptwriting, technical writing, and journalist/columnist jobs go to women! It’s because we have such better speech skills! Oh, WAIT…”
What does that have to do with anything? A suggestion of innate structural differences in male and female brains is not the same as denying that factors other than those differences play a role in social outcomes.
Wow. You are being completely disingenuous if you are trying now to say that quoting a googled article about hard-wired differences in male/female brains didn’t have anything to do with the point of gender discrimination in science. Appeal to biological differences is the first refuge of defense of societal divisions of jobs. Why else did you bring it up if not to bolster the argument that biological differences are indeed a determining factor in social outcomes?
Ten years ago I attended graduate school at a major university. The dean of our department was very active in research and was a “well respected” member of the research community. He was president of an international organization that encompassed my field of study. He was a patronizing ass to all of the women in our program (not many were admitted).
At one point I came to him about a study that I wanted to conduct. He treated me like a child. He explained how my little mind didn’t understand the complicated nature of science. Three months later an almost exact replica of the study appeared in a major journal–obviously someone else’s little mind didn’t understand the field either.
But this wasn’t the worse of the many sexist things he did. That prize goes to the time that a friend of his came to the university to give a guest lecture. He inserted a playboy crotch shot in the middle of his friends slide presentation. Ha ha ha ha. That was really funny. To this day I regret that I was too young to feel that I had the power to do anything about this major ass.
I eventually dropped out of the program.
“Appeal to biological differences is the first refuge of defense of societal divisions of jobs. Why else did you bring it up if not to bolster the argument that biological differences are indeed a determining factor in social outcomes?”
Of course they are, and I never suggested otherwise. They are not the sole determining factor. Why the false dichotomy? Does anyone really believe the argument is nature VS. nurture anymore?
I suppose that the overrepresentation men in firefighting is not a societal division based on biological differences?
I am a woman and I think there are some innate differences between the sexes but only for the reason that female fetuses tend to have lower exposures to testosterone in utero. It in known that testosterone exposure changes the way the brain develops.
I imagine that I (as a woman) was exposed to A LOT of testosterone in utero. One of the correlates of this is a longer 4th finger in comparison to the 2nd finger. Mine is significantly greater. This is quite common in women who excel in running sports–especially short to middle distances and I was ranked internationally in these events. It also corresponds to being a “tomboy”, spatial ability, risk-seeking and systemization. And, I believe in my heart that it has something to do with being completely unable to put a wardrobe together!
On the other hand, my daughter does not have this ratio and I must say raising her was a challenge for me. I did everything I could to try to get her to stop being attached to her dresses (and EVERYTHING had to match–even at 3 years of age). And BARBIE! ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. Don’t think that I didn’t try to discourage that! I used start a countdown watch everytime we played because it felt like someone was pulling my eyelashes out one by one.
The list goes on from there. My mother could not stop me from being a tomboy and I could not stop my daughter from being a girlie girl. So, the averages are probably right but on a case-by-case basis they are probably wrong.
So, lets hear it! If you are a female who seeks to systematize (seek to identify the laws that make a system work) is your fourth finger longer than your 2nd?
It’s not just hormonal, there’s a genetic component to it as well.
“There’s nothing different between men and women that any psychological test battery can determine with any degree of accuracy. if there’s any actual difference it’s in nurture versus nature.”
That is false, absolutely without foundation, and pulled straight from your ass. There are differences in average performance between men and women on many psychological measures. And, no one has conclusively teased apart all of the variables accounting for those differences.
A real clinical psychologist
“I know many women who share my disgust for the personal pride, vanity and narrow focus of some successful male colleagues and in turn appreciate the more considerate, broad-minded way some female colleagues do their science.”
I have also known (quite well) some big-time female life scientists deeply tainted with vanity, pride, condescension, and who couple it with abuse of their subordinates. I think the sentence is awfully close to being sexist.
It is really depressing reading people in here accuse those who are simply suggesting that there may be *some* innate component of sex differences are being sexist for doing so. That those suggesting it seem to be academics makes it a fucking tragedy. What the hell happened to being led by the bloody data? Ignoring data that do not accord with your worldview is NOT being scientific by any possible definition of the word.
You go pursue your research agendas, that’s fine. But the moment you try and limit the research agendas of others by throwing out accusations of sexism is the moment you go beyond the pale. I suggest that you take a close look at how objective you really are, then you might achieve the distance to glimpse exactly how ridiculous you are making yourselves look.
As someone else says, the Nature vs Nature debate died some time ago. It is not either/or it is how much of each. If your research denies this then you are seriously behind the crest of the wave and rapidly being left behind. I shudder to think of what sort of journals you are getting published in….
I know this thread is probably dead by now, but I didn’t have time to post again.
Dianne – One major source isn Dr. John Money and the John/Joan case. Egregious. Look at transgender studies as well. We now know gender identity and sexual identity are not the same. We also know that maternal hormonal fluxuations affect embryos and result in subtle changes in anatomical structures. In my first post above I specifically noted that the ranges of behavior are broad and overlap between sexes, but the androgyny/nurture bias argument is dead.
Just as a planted acorn will only become an oak tree and be as potentially vigorous as it’s genetic inheritance allows, whether it thrives or is stunted depends on it’s environmental conditions – it can never be forced into being an elm.
As far as I can tell, that isn’t even remotely relevant to her actual point. You’re attacking a particularly dumb strawman.
My daughter doesn’t.
There are two basic positions here. One of those is that there may be significant biological differences underlying but we have never been able to test that effectively due to the impossibility of creating an ethical human experiment that adequately controls for social influences, therefore conclusions are premature. This position additionally notes that even if such differences are found, the onus is still on those claiming that they are responsible for the present social inequalities to show that the differences are actually responsible.
The other position is that such differences definitely exist, and that simply establishing that “male and female brains are different” automatically proves 1) that the differences fit perfectly with our cultural stereotypes of male and female roles and abilities; 2) that they fully explain the present inequalities; and 3) that therefore no efforts to correct said inequalities should be made. Stated explicitly the absurdity of this A->B->L->X logical sequence is obvious, of course…
Are you consciously aware that you have a chronic problem with using “is” statements in conclusions that are only supported by “could be” statements?
“As far as I can tell, that isn’t even remotely relevant to her actual point. You’re attacking a particularly dumb strawman.”
/This nonsense about men and women having essential natures… relies on constant reinforcement and confirmation bias. -Hypatia’s girl/
Azkyroth – perhaps you’re right. I sped through the posts yesterday and what I reacted to is encapsulated above. Upon rereading HG’s actual quote (elipses deleted),I conclude you’re somewhat correct, I am guilty of proposing a straw man argument. Mea Culpa. My apologies Hypatia’s Girl.
/2. Boys do play with trucks, and girls do play with dolls. So what?
My daughter doesn’t.
Posted by: Azkyroth | March 18, 2008 9:05 AM/
Your daughter doesn’t what?
I’ve found that many kids play with both but in different ways. It’s much more telling to give children abstract objects such as duplo or mega blocks, simple geometric shapes and non-specific play figures such as weebles or Fischer Price “little people”. What will it ultimately prove? – that it is the individual’s tendencies rather than the gender groups’ tendencies that are important, which was the point of my first post…
….I’d like so see some data supporting THAT assumption.
…and this one. How the hell could environment and social learning have been ruled out in an ethical human experiment?!
Since it has been our experience that people who insist the issue has been settled in favor of crude biological determinism (with or without explicit denials of being “a crude biological determinist”) are invariably motivated by a desire to deny that factors other than inherent biological differences can possibly account for the difference in social outcomes….
It is really depressing that you either don’t understand the difference between “suggesting that there may be *some* innate component of sex differences” and baldly asserting that inherent biological differences do and must account for all observed differences, or expect us to be too stupid to recognize this verbal sleight of hand.
As for being led by the bloody data, what data? Do you actually think it’s appropriate to draw the sort of conclusions the I AM NOT EITHER A CRUDE BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISTs are at this point?
“….I’d like so see some data supporting THAT assumption.”
Feel free to follow the supplied link.
Oh really DrKP @98?
Name one test that when given to 100 males and 100 females of any cohort that when stripped of all identifying information (sex, name, school, hometown, etc)- you just have the test data – that when shown to someone who is trained to interpret those data, that someone can “tease out” which tests went to which sex. WITH ANY DEGREE OF ACCURACY.
“on average” doesn’t mean anything, you could have 50% difference between the tests ON AVERAGE.
this means that a given psychologist can’t take a sample of test scores with answers to any of the major test batteries and then determine if the taker was male.
The only tests i can actually imagine being able to predict gender would be ones that had loaded questions of that nature – and even then considering your sample population you might get false positives. Furthermore, there is one dating site run by a group of mathematicians and behavioral science majors right now, and they have a gender identification test. And it does well – to a degree. But that’s a psychological test meant to determine sex. And i’ve known several people that have taken it that fell in the gray area in the middle. (and the graph shows how varied the responses are when you finish anyhow.) if anything, this shows us that the traditional ideas of gender roles in society are trying to start a paradigm shift. Not that they’re being reinforced, see?
–a research psychology person
also i’d like to say that while there “may be” differences between genders in the brain, just saying that without saying WHAT differences, or how they affect development is the problem.
analogy: “there may be some difference between races in brain physiology”
What differences? what conclusions can we draw? what does it mean?
If i consider the former to be a sexist remark because there isn’t any supporting evidence (and even if there is, it doesn’t mean anything unless it shows us something useful) that doesn’t mean i’m ignoring data. It means that i don’t find the data USEFUL in any way. I have data here showing that people prefer coke to pepsi. What can i do with this? Nothing substantial.
See my point?
It is really depressing reading people in here accuse those who are simply suggesting that there may be *some* innate component of sex differences are being sexist for doing so.
It is sexist. And unscientific. There is no way to reasonably answer the question at this point: the data is too confounded by pervesive environmental differences. Claiming you can get clean data on innate gender differences is like claiming that you can get pictures of dark matter. Not under current circumstances you can’t. There may well be some minor average differences. But there is no way of knowing at this point. At least not as far as I can see. Maybe I’m wrong. Suggest an experiment.
What the hell happened to being led by the bloody data? Ignoring data that do not accord with your worldview is NOT being scientific by any possible definition of the word.
WHAT DATA? I’ve repeatedly asked people to back up their claims for gender differences with data. So far, not a link. Only some vague claims of “well, in my experience boys play with trucks.” That’s complete BS. If you’re going to claim to be scientific at least try to come up with some sort of data. Or admit that it can’t be done yet. “I don’t know,” is a perfectly good answer in science. But “My instinct suggests that it is true and if you disagree you’re ignoring the data” is definitely not.
jsn: Thank you for supplying actual possible data points. Money’s work seems to be mostly on intersexuality, etc. Yes, the brain does (usually) define itself as one gender or another, sometimes at discord to the body’s genitalia. So what? This is by no means evidence that men are better at science or engineering or even playing with trucks. Indeed, one could read his work in just the opposite manner: gender is fluid and depends on many things, including but by no means limited to chromosomal status and genitalia. Some people change genders more than once. Do you really think that their math ability fluctuates with their estrogen/testosterone status?
Five of cups: Exactly zero of the references in your link were both peer reviewed and related to gender differences in infants. Still just anecdote and belief.
I note that those decrying the data are careful to specify humans, knowing full well that there are a plethora of animal studies showing genetic and hormonal based differences. So I suppose that makes two questions:
1. What makes us humans so resistant to those demonstable effects? Why do they NOT apply to us?
2. Can you present us with statistical data quantifying the various nurture based effects that show that there is no room for genetic/hormonal bases? the tools for such analysis are out there, those researching gene/environment interactions in the disease sphere use them all the time…
There are animal studies that show that girl animals have better vocalizations and male animals are better at finding their way home? I must have missed those.
I read this a long time ago so I don’t know the source. It’s well known that in general, men find it easier to visualize turning a 3D object and visualizing the result. Women tend to problem solve: “Well, the A was on the right and it you make a half-turn to the right then it will be on the bottom…” I generalize. BUT.. apparently among the Inuit that difference does not exist. Everyone is good at rotating 3D imaages. Which suggests a difference in upbringing. Perhaps the tendency to shove blocks at boys and dolls at girls has an effect.
What an interesting thread! I myself am interested in the degree to which human minds are or are not “gendered.” My hunch is that they are scarcely gendered at all, and that environment plays the leading role in distinguishing males from females. I’d also like to chime in and agree with everyone who’s remarked that relying on anecdotal accounts of what children like to play with (i.e. trucks versus dolls) seriously ignores the degree to which children are shaped and influenced by the environment in which they are born.
There are animal studies that show that girl animals have better vocalizations and male animals are better at finding their way home? I must have missed those.
Dianne,
As I stated before that yes, there are ranges, but there are typical and atypical responses within spectra. Money’s biased experiment demonstrates more than gender identity. Brian (John/Joan) exibited typical male responses and aptitude for a boy his age, all while he was unaware that he was genetically male. His scholastic work was atypical when compared with the majority of girls in his class Difference in brain structures HAS to imply some differentiation in utility/cognition. Whether we judge those differences as perjoritives is reflective of our current mind set.
We use Bell curves and other graphs to chart data. Someone stated above that brain scans don’t reveal the sex of the patient, but just as anthropologists can determine sex by relative skull shape and size, brain structures can used to indicate sex (of course, there is always the possibility of error.)
Are the differences math and scientific aptitudes culturally/societally influenced versus biologically based? I can’t answer that. Anecdotally I know that the predominance of students who maintain high GPA’s are female but that minority of males in the group seem to dominate certain fields.
I don’t try to imply any negative judgement on typical gender attributes. I tend to be atypical. I’m just as at home with a table saw and a welding rig as I am with a sewing machine and a stove (my wife hates to cook and refuses to learn to sew because it was culturally “expected” …). Yadda ,yadda yadda
Now, is the main thrust of this thread an ideological argument purporting that there are no differences between male/female aptitudes, or, are there “typical”(that predominant area of the Bell curve when crunching data) differences between male and female aptitudes for science and math? If there is data to support a difference (that has an unpopular oucome), will it be disregarded and viewed as sexism?
Unfortunately, all those who fall outside the Bell Curve are, by definition, marginalized and tend to skew data if weighted too much. Perhaps we must break it down into
strata of remedial, average Joe/Jo and intellectually gifted groups.
Aren’t academically gifted people aberrations anyway? ; )
My wife, mother-in-law (retired chairperson of a university mathematics department), and sister-in-law would if pressed modestly admit they are more mathematically gifted, naturally, than the vast majority of men and women.
Even so, they would also admit that among their students, men in general have a natural superior ability to learn and understand math compared to women.
That is, they know they are exceptions, and that other exceptions exist. They also support efforts to close the gender gap. Perhaps not coincidentally, these women do feel some contempt, to both men and women, who don’t get math. But probably especially to women who “play dumb.”
Anecdotal, sure. Lack of scientific expertise (mathematicians commenting on gender differences), certainly.
But statistics, studies, and, well, reality do show that men and women are different.
But I think we all agree that gifted women should be encouraged to hone and develop their gifts and interests. As does common sense.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that modern developments in education are doing this at the cost of demeaning and denigrating boys.
Meanwhile, Gerry Rzeppa wrote a thought provoking entry today titled Career Women
Brian (John/Joan) exibited typical male responses and aptitude for a boy his age, all while he was unaware that he was genetically male. His scholastic work was atypical when compared with the majority of girls in his class
Published anecdotes are still anecdotes. If you have some evidence that most people with a given type of intersexuality match their genetic sex better than their apparent phenotypic sex, that would be interesting. One person doing so…not so much so.
Someone stated above that brain scans don’t reveal the sex of the patient, but just as anthropologists can determine sex by relative skull shape and size, brain structures can used to indicate sex (of course, there is always the possibility of error.)
A careful reading of an MRI might show some differences between the brains of people of different genders. I seem to remember a suggestion, for example, that men have larger (but less complex) corpus collusums (collusa?). However, there are two problems with this argument: 1. Unless you’re talking about scans of newborns, the brains in question have been influenced by culture and 2. there is, AFAIKA, no known correlation between any of the structural changes seen and mental abilities or lack thereof. If you could find a study demonstrating, for example, that a larger corpus collosum was correlated with better spatial abilities, that might be interesting. Simply saying that the brains look slightly different isn’t convincing because we don’t know what the observed differences mean. If anything.
But statistics, studies, and, well, reality do show that men and women are different.
People (mostly men, sometimes, as above, claiming to be citing women) keep saying this, but they don’t seem to be able to cough up any of these oh-so convincing studies.
Even so, they would also admit that among their students, men in general have a natural superior ability to learn and understand math compared to women.
Based on what? I’m guessing, based on their impression. But impressions can be misleading, even from those who believe that they are being non-discriminatory.
When I was in college one of my professors made the claim that men were more aggressive than women. As evidence for this, he made the further claim that men spoke more often in class. This seemed unlikely to me so I decided to test the theory. For the next week, I recorded who spoke in class and whether they made a spontaneous comment, responded to a question the professor asked the class in general, or responded to a question the professor asked them specifically. (I decided that I simply wouldn’t speak during the experiment unless specifically asked a question, to avoid biasing the experiment. I was never asked to speak.) The results showed that, overall, men did speak in class more than women. However, men and women were about equally likely to speak spontaneously or respond to a general question. Men were about 3X more likely to be specifically requested by the professor to answer a question. So yes, men did speak more often but only because their opinions were solicited more often–not because they were more interested or aggressive on their own. (Incidently, the classes I was taking then included common core social sciences, advanced calculus, physics, and computer science–all traditionally male dominated except for social sci. I later repeated the experiment during a couple of slow sessions in med school–no change in the results.)
Anon @ 96 asks: “So, lets hear it! If you are a female who seeks to systematize (seek to identify the laws that make a system work) is your fourth finger longer than your 2nd?”
I’ll play along with my anecdotes, FWTW. I’m a woman, and my 4th fingers are considerably longer than my 2nd. Freakishly longer, some would say.
My favorite toys were blocks, dinosaurs, clay, crayons, cars, stuffed animals, trains, horses and books. And BARBIE. I loved Barbie because I was fascinated by making clothes for her–I learned to sew and would spend hours planning her wardrobe and designing new outfits. To this day I’m fascinated by how clothes are designed, constructed, and worn. I’m also very fussy about my appearance.
I despised baby dolls, however, and absolutely refused to play with them.
I was far above average in both reading and math as a child. I still am a whiz at 3D visualization, often trumping my engineer hubby’s abilities in that area. I won my high school’s Freshman Science prize and wanted to go into medicine, but that went kaput when one of my high school math teachers told me that I was “wasting the boys’ time” in class because I was a girl, and he then forbade me from asking questions in his class. Same story with my high school chemistry teacher. So I put my focus where it was appreciated (and gender-approved): reading, writing, and art.
Now I work in a fine arts field, and hang around reading science blogs because I miss that stuff.
And now, my toddler son’s favorite toys are blocks, dinosaurs, cars, stuffed animals and books–and pots, pans, and baby dolls. He’s a great “daddy” to his “baby,” and spends lots of time nurturing it. I couldn’t be more proud.
Dianne,
Perhaps a neurologist or two should weigh in; however, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that any empirical evidence contrary to your ideology would not be acceptable to you without a lot of cognitive dissonance to be resolved. The Internet, JAMA,NIMH, and a plethora of Research Institutions are at your disposal. (I’m really not interested in sorting through myriads of abstracts to hash this out on PZ’s blog)
Hormonal differences dictate anatomical differences, to suggest that the brain is somehow exempt is ludicrous. That doesn’t mean one sex is going to be outlandishly superior to the other as a whole on specific tasks or that one sex is (ugh-holds back a little buke) actually the weaker sex (who coined that shit?).
As for your considerable accomplishments in math and science, you have my utmost respect, regardless of your gender. BTW,What was the ratio of men to women in those classes?
Yeah, I know it can be rationalized that women were browbeaten out of taking the courses, but… oh, never mind. This is turning into a labored dialectic.
I just caution you not to skew the data to suit your hypothesis, or reject evidence that doesn’t meet you ideology. That said, I will take my own advice.
Apophenia- The finger length relationship is a recently discovered phenomenon which may correlate with male hormone fluxuations in utero as in the masculinizing of some females and feminizing of some males; sometimes ultra-femenizing of females and ultra-masculinization of males is apparent. What it all means has not yet been definitively determined.
MAJeff … were you on the plane with me last year? It’s so true. I wish it weren’t but it is.
My 4th finger is longer than my 2nd finger, on both hands. I loved blocks, building things in my sandbox, making “potions” and setting things on fire, drawing maps, decorating my dollhouse, and playing elaborate games with Barbies equally well – although the dolls tended to be enacting gothic/sci-fi turgid romance stoies involving war, piracy, privations, political intrigue, gruesome murder, and torrid sex. Hmmm … actually, the Lego castles were full of the same stuff once they got built. But with very elaborate architecture.
And now I’m a scientist who also writes stories. Go figure.
Damn, my spelling is atrocious.
Dianne, this is getting frustrating. for example, #120 william wallace said that two of his family members would admit that women in their classes do poorer than males in her classes.
Have you ever thought that maybe social conditioning and environmental effects (including television) would have an effect on that? Such as, oh, i don’t know, WHAT MAJOR THAT PEOPLE PICK?
Women in high math classes might not be there by CHOICE, they might be forced there by their degree requirements. “i just have to take this last calculus class to get my math out of the way”
People in Colleges tend to do well in subjects they like – this is obvious. I’d do horrid in a art history class, even though i am good at memorizing things and do well on tests. I’d also do horrible in a physical anthro class. fairness!
i typed a lot more but the power went out and this is what firefox saved. suffice to say that i’m not going to change anyone’s mind. but classic and modern psychology is on my side, regardless of what mister clinical psych says.
I think this thread and the one right before it illustrate very nicely what women have do deal with on a daily personal and institutionalized basis, both in science fields and elsewhere.
“have to deal with”, which apparently also includes making typos.
A colleague of mine recently told me about his mother, who was a general practitioner in a smaller town in the late 50s or early 60s. She could not keep enough business, and had to seek additional education/internship to become an anesthesiologist.
According to this vanguard in the woman’s movement, the problem wasn’t sexism from men, it was sexism from women. Most men had no problem utilizing a female GP. Rather, this MD conveyed that it was the the town mothers who didn’t trust their family’s health to a woman doctor.
Anecdotal, and third hand, of course, but it does illustrate that some of what women have to “put up with” comes from, ahem, women.
From the tyranny of Victorian fashion, to discrimination in the late 50s/early 60s, women have often been their own worst enemies.
And, of course, women’s attitudes towards each other have been in no way impacted by general attitudes towards women that they’ve heard for their entire lives. And if some women think that women in general are inferior, well, they must be right! Doodz, it’s all women’s fault!
Unless and until your third-hand anecdote can provide a convincing mechanism for how women’s sexism caused male professors to refuse to teach my mother in med school in the 50s because she was a woman, that “vanguard in the women’s movement” still has a lot of dots to connect on that particular assertion.
Heads, they win; tails, we lose, Carlie–didn’t you get the memo?
Right, Carlie. It’s all of a piece. It’s pointless to try to lay the blame for this solely at the feet of men, or for them to kick it back over onto our doorstep. Of course it’s a gestalt! Like most -isms of this variety, sexism is a societal imbalance; it’s a meme.
Carlie,
What is it you have to put up with? People stating that men and women are different? That biology may play a part in destiny?
Dianne,
Not peer reviewed you say?
Frederikse, M.E., Lu, A., Aylward, E., Barta, P., Pearlson, G. Sex differences in the inferior parietal lobule. Cerebral Cortex vol 9 (8) p896 – 901, 1999
Harasty J., Double K.L., Halliday, G.M., Kril, J.J., and McRitchie, D.A. Language-associated cortical regions are proportionally larger in the female brain. Archives in Neurology vol 54 (2) 171-6, 1997
Collaer, M.L. and Hines, M. Human behavioural sex differences: a role for gonadal hormones during early development? Psychological Bulletin vol 118 (1): 55-77, 1995
Bishop K.M. and Wahlsten, D. Sex differences in the human corpus callosum: myth or reality? Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews vol 21 (5) 581 – 601, 1997
Shaywitz, B.A., et al. Sex differences in the functional organisation of the brain for language. Nature vol 373 (6515) 607 – 9, 1995
Rabinowicz T., Dean D.E., Petetot J.M., de Courten-Myers G.M. Gender differences in the human cerebral cortex: more neurons in males; more processes in females. J Child Neurol. 1999 Feb;14(2):98-107
Schlaepfer T.E., Harris G.J., Tien A.Y., Peng L., Lee S., Pearlson G.D. Structural differences in the cerebral cortex of healthy female and male subjects: a magnetic resonance imaging study. Psychiatry Res. 1995 Sep 29;61(3):129-35
Boy, that Nature rag sure has let its standards slip.
Why the biological determinism bogeyman? It’s such an easy brush with which to try and tar people. Much better the modern tabula rasa that points to all gender differences being attributable to some mysterious “social influences” on newborns.
This is a bit harsh. IMO, it’s not unscientific to say that there “may be” a difference, the problem is going unnoticingly from “maybe” to “probably”. And a demand for “clean data” in the strict sense would exclude most studies done on animals in the wild.
Anybody who has raised children knows that boys and a girls are different because they are born that way.
Five, the thing is if the history of science has shown us anything, it’s that when scientific studies look at difficult-to-quantify concepts like aptitude and abilities, and said studies have results that conveniently uphold societal norms which function to keep certain members of the society in a lower position than others, then confirmation bias is a GIANT SCREAMING RED FLAG that must be adequately addressed in said studies.(Can we all say ‘phrenology’? I knew we could.) Those kinds of studies need to be held to an incredibly high standard to even be seriously considered. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all.
William wallace, the irony of your name should astound when you realize that the last post you made is one of the fallacy of “only a true scotsman” sort.
Please. give it a rest. your anecdotal evidence is not welcome in this discussion. as the scots say “piss off, you wanker”
So the presumption is that the scientific studies, published in reputable journals, that run contrary to an egalitarian world view yield their results due to some sort of bias on the part of the researchers.
Where does the confirmation bias lie, really?
“the exception that proves the rule” What the hell does that mean?
I think it means something like this: If an attempt to refute a stated “rule” only turn up one or two exceptions, the rule effectively stands. For example, you might legitimately use that phrase if I tried pointing to Condi Rice as proof that the Executive branch of the U.S. Federal government isn’t run by rich white men.
They may. Feel free to demonstrate that they do and answer the questions that have been raised regarding confounding factors.
No. And the fact that you seem to assume that if we can’t, “it’s all biological” wins by default is a large part of why no one here is taking you seriously.
I’m not sure that assumption can necessarily be justified. There are an amazing number of ways to wire an electronic device with the same outputs for a given input, and if we know enough about neuroanatomy and physiology to say with confidence that it isn’t similarly adaptable and open-ended, it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
Do you have a reference for that claim?
Do you have a reference for that claim? ;) (I’m raising a child, incidentally, and remember being one, and my experience doesn’t really support that claim).
Our observations are as follows:
1) there are observable average differences between males and females in terms of perceived and even measured aptitudes and social outcomes.
1a) the perceived differences tend to be greater than the measured differences.
2) we really don’t have enough data to conclusively answer whether these differences are biologically based or the result of social influence (or how much of each).
3) there are good reasons to suspect that these differences probably have a substantial social component.
4) a number of people wish to declare the issue settled in favor of biological determinism and are almost invariably found to be motivated by a desire to confirm their own prejudices and uphold the status quo.
5) these people tend to mischaracterize their arguments as “simply suggesting that there may be *some* innate component of sex differences” when on the defensive, accuse us of believing in a “tabula rasa” strawman, or demand that we disprove their assumption of biological determinism. This does not improve the strength of their arguments.
If any of the people insisting that the observed inequalities between men and women in social outcomes and perceived/measured abilities are biologically determined would like to give me an alternate explanation for why they demand that the issue be considered settled, given the present state of the data, they should feel free to do so.
So the presumption is that the scientific studies, published in reputable journals, that run contrary to an egalitarian world view yield their results due to some sort of bias on the part of the researchers.
You’re misrepresenting my point. First, I said nothing about results that run contrary to an egalitarian world view, I said results that run cozily in tandem with the prevailing societal structure. Second, I didn’t reference a nebulous “some sort” of bias, I was referring to one specific type of bias in one specific area.
And I think we just saw a good example recently that just because something is published in a reputable journal doesn’t make it stellar research. And yes, I do think those types of studies need to be scrutinized very, very closely because the possibility of bias is so high. Otherwise, what Azkyroth said.
Carlie, Dianne, Azkyroth, it’s been a pleasure arguing with you in this arena. The posts have died down to a whimper of protest, i think we can safely say we’ve put it to bed with proper debating technique. :-)
Azky’s comment (#142) is making my Mollantennae twitch.
“Anybody who has raised children knows that boys and a girls are different because they are born that way.”
Yeah, boys have penises, girls have vaginas. Very deep.
“”the exception that proves the rule” What the hell does that mean?”
Here’s a decent source on that:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/exception-that-proves-the-rule.html
apophenia @ 123 and Joolya @ 125…
RE:# 96
Thanks for playing along! I used to play with Barbies too when I was a girl. My brother and I used to shoot them out of trees with BB guns (does that count ;) ). And oddly enough, I love to sew as well but I think it has more to do with constructing something then having a affinity toward style. I wish I had that ability!!!
I think you’ve confused this blog with your own. I’d love to meet you in person, though.
I am not suggesting that this is a definitive argument, but there are beaucoups of these abstracts online. I make NO CLAIMS TO ONE SEX BEING SUPERIOR TO ANOTHER.
(1) Department of Psychology and Medical Anthropology, Institute of Biomedical Sciences «Abel Salazar», University of Oporto, Portugal
Abstract The relative sizes of the brain stem, cerebellum, diencephalon, archicertex and neocortex were investigated in twenty brains of each sex, by determining the percentages of average total brain weights in each case. The differences between the left and the right cortical regions were also compared.
The neo-archicortical ratio was found to be smaller in females than in males. Significantly heavier right neocortex occurred in males than in females. Weight predominance of the right archicortex was found in both sexes.
These findings are suggestive that anatomical differences may contribute to the behaviour pattern differences occurring between male and female.
Have fun. I’m outta here.
Anybody who has raised children knows that boys and a girls are different
Yes–their genitalia are different.
because they are born that way
I assume you mean that they are born “gendered.” If this is what you’re saying, then let’s see some proof. You’d be the first to supply it.
Five of Cups, Are you sure you’re not really The Crack Emcee, the shamelessly misogynist wankstain currently infesting the Vox Day thread at Orac’s blog who’s convinced everyone else is a pinko commie sissy who’s been brainwashed by the Secret Feminist Conspiracy or somesuch? You seem frightfully familiar…
Why is that Laser? In what way have I demonstrated the least bit of misogyny? The knee-jerk stereotyping toward a different viewpoint is just deliciously ironic.
Since when is a recognition of difference a sign of hatred? I’m afraid that you’re showing your own preconceptions, Potato.
“a number of people wish to declare the issue settled in favor of biological determinism and are almost invariably found to be motivated by a desire to confirm their own prejudices and uphold the status quo”
You had me and then you lost me. Show me where on this thread that anyone claimed that biology was the sole contributor to numerical inequities in gender representation in jobs. You love that straw man term, Az, but you seem just as fond of using it yourself.
And how do you even know the relative desires of people holding different viewpoints in this issue? Do you have privileged knowledge? You should enlighten we base creatures who believe that biology contributes to social outcomes on the proper mode of thought.
“these people tend to mischaracterize their arguments as “simply suggesting that there may be *some* innate component of sex differences” when on the defensive”
Again, you stun with your psychic powers. But are you saying that differences between the sexes are entirely due to environmental effects or not?
And no one said the issue was settled. Are you just making up your opponents’ arguments as you go?
Anyone read Baron-Cohen’s “The Essential Difference”?
This Guardian article does a reasonable job of distilling it.
I suspect that those with ideological overrides on both sides of the argument not bother. Apparently you are hardwired for certain viewpoints ;-)