It reminds me of an interesting hypothesis I've read about the other day that the concept marriage plays a significant role in the success of our culture as it counteracts this difference. It allows more men to reach a social status at which they are motivated to be productive members of society. So we are possibly actively destroying a pillar of our culture as we are devaluing marriage.
I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.
The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing.
Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers. The differences are there as early as one day after birth [ http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf ]. Primate studies show the same differences with our relatives.
Everyone should be able to pursue any career they want to, but there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.
A large part of the problem is the failure to distinguish between the aggregate and the individual. For the sake of argument let's say that the population of individuals who would make good engineers is 60% male and 40% female. From an aggregate level that's a huge difference. Once you gather enough of people that statistical inferences can be made, the difference becomes obvious. In a classroom, for instance. But at an individual level that difference becomes insignificant. If you grab one boy and one girl at random, there's a very significant chance the girl is better at engineering than the boy. At the individual level, there are much better predictors of whether a person is good at engineering than their sex. Five minutes of conversation wouldn't be authoritative but it would be much more predictive than the individual's sex.
Having lived through so much of the polictically correct conditioning about equality of everybody I became pretty numb to it. Then having a child and seeing the stark difference between play habits of boys and girls made me think about it again. Anecdotal, of course, although consistent with many other people's anecdotes, which starts to look like data after a while.
Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct.
In my experience, the nastiest transphobes are the ones who believe gender is a social construct. They're called TERFs. They can't wrap their minds around the fact that we prove their pet theories wrong, so they stalk, harass, and doxx us.
While what you are saying is partial true, the picture of genetics vs nurture is much more complex. I would recommend a excellent lecture series at (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&index=1&list=PL4...) which goes into quite into depth about the subject.
For example, while there are clear differences at birth, nurture can permanent shutdown genes. Additionally a lot of activators for genes are triggered by mental thought process and the environment around individuals.
To make a car analogy, we could assume that faster cars are more often breaking the speed limit than slower cars, and we might very likely find this to be true in practice regardless of the actually speed limit. From there we need to be careful to conclude that its the fault of the car when a driver choses to ignore the law, or that just because the acceleration is faster and it is easier to drive fast in a fast car a person is not conscious in their choice.
Our faulty assumptions become clear when viewing other societies. For example, in the former USSR, 58% of engineers were women. In China, 40% of engineers are women, where less than 47% of the population are women. The communist countries placed a greater emphasis on gender equality in workforce. Sharp differences between west and the east are evident in other occupations such as medicine.
In the study cited, the mean age of the babies (neonates) was 3 days. That's enough time for babies to be influenced by adult interactions. Babies have been shown to be handled differently by adults based on their gender. Female babies are spoken to more, whereas male babies are handled more.
In the study, a substantial number of babies exhibited behaviors associated with the other gender. I would resist talking about a real sexual dimorphism when gender is not determinative of social vs mechanical preference.
> I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.
Indeed, it's such a taboo that it's brought up here every time the subject is discussed here.
Unless you would take all your information from radicalfeminist.com, I never saw a reputable news channel denying there would be differences between sexes. Actually, I see this meme of "Gender differences are taboo!" MUCH more often than I see the actual behavior so decried in actual action.
> Everyone should be able to pursue any career they want to, but there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.
Even the word "disparity" (instead of difference) assumes that there should be some sort of parity between sexes. And I use "sexes" because "gender" is likely incorrect in reference to genetics. Unless they find some genetic link to it, in which case a lot of arguments will need to cease.
Yeah the challenge is the way we attach value judgements to the different things genders tend (generalization) to be better at.
This is purely anecdotal, but in my extended family many members believed the "we're all the same" view. I was given whatever toys I wanted whether they were considered masculine or feminine. It challenged people to see me grow up and be obsessed with heavy machinery - something they obviously saw within a masculine stereotype.
> gender disparities across different occupations.
I guess it would depend on the occupation. For example, I don't see much difference between nurses and doctors in terms of something that could be quantified as a gender-specific preference. It seems to me that the idea of "nurses are women, doctors are men" came about more from the idea that women were "too stupid" to be doctors and that it was a "man's job." Even today many doctors look down on nurses (as 'below' them; people whose opinions don't matter), and men that decide to become nurses also face a uphill battle of social acceptance.
I thought the 'there is no differences' thing was debunked completely?
There will always be warriors against everything who will claim gender is just conditioning or whatever and probsly get eyeballs and publishing as a result. Happily you can completely ignore all that and lead a happy and productive life knowing the gender you were born with has a big factor in determining what you choose to do in your life.
Is the percentage of women in STEM low in all STEM degrees in the US? I'm Spanish and math and chemistry usually have a 50/50 or >50% of women here. Not sure if those are considered STEM at all in the US.
> Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.
No, its not. Just about everyone, on all sides of the gender issues debates expressly acknowledges that sex-correlated differences exist, though the nature, extent, invariability, and policy relevance of those differences is endlessly debated.
The idea that the existence of differences is a "taboo" is simply a strawman constructed by one side to pretend to be a victim of suppression and avoid meaningful engagement on specific issues.
> there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.
On the one hand, anyone that ignores/denies the influence of different hormones [1] on body and mind is simply ignorant. On the other hand you can question how relevant hormones can be to a deeply cultural concept as 'career choice'. On the one hand tiny differences can accumulate over a lifetime, but on the other hand tiny differences can also cancel out and its hard to say what it will add up to via so many layers of indirection.
Accepting the existence and influence of physical differences does not imply having to accept all cultural differences. Some may indeed result unavoidably from the physical differences, while others may be impossible to link to physical differences.
Given differences in the relation between men and women, and career preferences, across cultures, I suspect the distribution of men and women over careers is often dominated by contingent cultural factors. I definitely believe this is the case for STEM careers.
[1] As an example of an undeniable physical difference, not the defining difference
"it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers"
Either you're being hyperbolic in which case I can't really parse your comment because I don't know which points you're serious about, or you actually believe that there is no relationship between the specific toys children play with and their development, which ignores a massive body of reasonably well conducted research in developmental psychology.
>The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing.
I think it's the right political conclusion, even if the reasoning is questionable.
Just because you could conduct research to root out differences in populations of females and males, it doesn't mean that you should. What's the point? It seems to be that these arguments are used to justify gender disparity in occupations, achievement, etc.
> Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.
The problem is that correlating things with sex (even when such a correlation seems apparent) is just as bad as correlating things with race, ethnicity, religion, age, index finger length, eye color, and pretty much anything else.
> The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing.
Gender is, by current academic definition, a cultural construct, an identity. Sex, i.e. "plumbing", is the definition of the difference between biological men and women. People with trans operations do not deny their chromosomes, and I'm sure they'd be the first to assure you about the hormonal differences between the sexes.
The problem people are grappling with is ascribing identity assumptions based on sex. You haven't listened carefully enough to understand the difference between gender, sex, identity, etc.
The linked article explicitly does not take any stance on that. What the article points out is that males are more extreme in their traits, eg. exceptionally tall or exceptionally short, which in no way means that there are average differences. Even if the deviation is different, the mean may be the same.
Not that I'm saying that those differences are or are not there, but to say that the current differences are entirely due to biological differences would seem a bit naive to me.
I fully agree with this and often make this argument, usually to 100+ downvotes on reddit and elsewhere. My only addition would be that there's probably as much deviation within the genders as between them. But that doesn't make gender a meaningless thing. The frequency of those aspects is important too. Only, say, 10% of women are "butch" personality types but 90% of men are. So holding up a butch woman as an example and going "See, see gender is meaningless" is unconvincing.
I think eventually society will sober up and realize that when we talk about social aspects, more than likely we're talking about personal types. Certain ones simply exist with higher frequency per gender.
I feel like we're on this long path of migrating away from "default brain" assumptions made about race, nationality, gender, etc and will probably settle on something like the modern day understanding of personiality types. Its scary how well I fit the INTJ mold. The idea that I represent all men or am part of masculine culture is fairly ridiculous. Ladies, I find male ISTJ's and ESTJ's hard to deal with as well.
What's in dispute is that there has been any reasonable natural experiment that has had the power to show that women have any functional cognitive differences with men. This is due to 1) the influence of pervasive beliefs in both experimenters and subjects that women are inferior to men (in often contradictory ways with specifics that vary by culture and over time), and 2) the actions of both men and women who subscribe to those beliefs to punish women for deviating from them. These beliefs are part of a large corpus colloquially known as "common sense," which purport to describe what is "obvious" but tend to simply defend what daddy said from the communists at the university.
The Saudis believe that driving is physically and mentally harmful to women. Dr. Pangloss believes that everything is as it should be.
edit: In addition, I doubt that the study that took place in a bubble that excluded or properly controlled for the influence of overt sexism and anti-female suppression was a group of Scottish IQ tests from 1932. 21 year-old Scottish women had been allowed to vote for at least three years by then. Get with the program you nurturers!
edit2: And to go on forever about this, I'll say how shocked I am to discover that a class of people who were constrained to a certain narrow range of education in a certain narrow range of practical skills intended to lead them to a certain narrow range of outcomes have test scores that tend towards a more narrow range than people outside that class.
Whomever wants a critical look at this kind of "psychology result", I really recommend checking out Cordelia Fine (Oxford, Cambridge, UCL educated) and "Delusions of Gender". She is a fun listen/read and explains really well the flaws in the science/reporting/interpretation of "gender science", from the statistical to the neurological.
Additionally, readers who are not very acquainted should know that PsychologyToday is not a respectable publication in psychology, and is regularly embroiled in issues with propping up "we are telling the truth that nobody wants to hear about white supremacy". If you do not know who Satoshi Kanazawa is, you should look him up, or you can ask the psychology subreddits what their assessment is of that website.
This post veers close to ad hominem, but the way people are processing the OP is very much fallacious as well: a combination of taking a dubious authority on its word, not following up on the stats, and relishing in it confirming everything they want to believe (sexism is over-discussed, we really are different, and it explains most differences we observe). I cannot possibly offer a counter-argument in such meager visual real-estate and with so little captured attention-span, but if anyone is interested in hearing the best counter-arguments (not of the "artsies who believe in the blank-slate" variety), I offer a place to start.
Cordelia Fine is known for ignoring all finding that contradict her worldview. You make it sound like her position represents the consensus... it does not.
"Cleverly written with engaging prose, Delusions of Gender and Brain Storm contain enough citations and end notes to signal that they are also serious academic books. Fine and Jordan-Young ferret out exaggerated, unreplicated claims and other silliness regarding research on sex differences. The books are strongest in exposing research conclusions that are closer to fiction than science. They are weakest in failing to also point out differences that are supported by a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research."
Fine can play the audience well but she does not do well in academic reviews outside of feminist circles.
The first paragraph in the article sounded wrong. It says that "the brain of a woman is composed of two different types of cells. One type has an X chromosome inherited from her mother, and another type of cell has an X chromosome from her father", but I remembered that all cells in a woman have both X chromosomes.
It turns out the correct paragraph should say: "One type has an ACTIVE X chromosome inherited from her mother, and another type of cell has an ACTIVE X chromosome from her father".
Here the excerpt from the relevant linked article, which explains it better:
> A few weeks after conception, one of the two X chromosomes in each cell of a female's body is randomly deactivated. As each of these cells in the developing fetus multiplies, its descendant cells all have the same X chromosome activated. This leads to a patch of cells that all have the same active X chromosome (say, the X from the mother). A different fetal cell may have randomly deactivated the mother's X chromosome, and so all of its descendant cells each have the X chromosome from the father.
Thank you for posting that. I read this paragraph and the weak language instantly made me wonder this was doing on HN. I would not consider those two "types" of cells.
I don't understand how this passes for publishable material. I could have written better when I was 17, and I was a terrible writer back then!
I find it funny that so much scientific research attempts to prove the existence of a biological contrast that's blatantly obvious, but which has been completely deconstructed and obscured by modern literary theory/philosophy.
It's interesting to realize that if two groups have the same mean but different variability, the higher-variability group will have more outliers, on both the high end and the low end.
The danger is a kind of genetic fatalism, assuming that what we should do is just to be determined by our genes and how our bodies work. For example, it's possible for a man to produce many children by impregnating lots of women concurrently. I get the feeling that some men decide that the way that a person wins life is that they reproduce as much of their genetic material as possible, so they try to win. It seems like this kind of justification is used to excuse a wide variety of bad behavior: cheating, rape, women as chattel, etc.
It's debatable whether the argument made by the article is actually a real thing, and how much it contributes to the inequality we see in the world. I think social effects have a bigger influence.
But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that.
Is it generally accepted in the relevant scientific communities that male IQ's exhibit more variance than female IQ's? I imagine this type of thing would be easy to verify via e.g. standardized test scores.
> However, if it is simply a fact that males are generally more variable than are females on many traits, why is this true?
> Since a male can have more offspring than a female--but also has a greater chance of being childless... natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males.
This is on the money. Women are generally the choosers when it comes to sex, since eggs are expensive, and sperm is cheap. Nature therefore needs to try many different "keys" to see which ones are good at fitting into the "lock", to draw a crude analogy.
Men may seem more "privileged" as they dominate the top of most fields. But one must also realize that many men are nature's failed experiments, and live lives of despair, filled with homelessness, crime, and drug abuse, as well as downright social failure. Problems occur when policy makers selectively see the former, and disregard the latter.
I think we can agree that there are genetic differences between men and women. The issue is reverse engineering them by cultural results is really hard. We can see the start point (DNA) and the measuring point ( For example: Higher IQ), but how we got there is really complex. Do the genetic differences really mean that much? I honestly don't know, and I think the key here is to study genetics not a genders achievements or test results. DNA is a lot less biased than the culture and world we have created.
I understand a lot of HNers and redditors believe race and gender are not purely social constructs. This is a contentious topic but I really appreciate Neil DeGrasse Tyson's comment.
For those who don't have the three minutes, the "punchline" is: "I know those forces are real, and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there's equal opportunity, then we can have that conversation."
Can we conclude, then, taking that as our sample, that programming is naturally "women's work"?
If the preponderance of women in programming at that time was just a fluke then it's not unimaginable that the preponderance of men in programming at this time is also a fluke.
Are there or are there no differences is one discussion, sure. A much more interesting one to me is - if yes/no, then what? What does that imply? This articles notes that the answer is yes (but apparently, it's still debatable), but it then goes on into why, which is interesting.
I welcome differences. Recognizing and accepting them is the first meaningful step towards any worthwhile societal value adoption.
I have found it to agree with my experience and explain eg why there are so few women in tech and women entrepreneurs. (Hint: it has to do with desire for risktaking, long hours, and long periods of silent work with abstractions)
> How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
Really the article explains how
on some measure two populations
can have the same average on the
measure but still be different.
The answer is obvious: The two
distributions are different,
e.g., the two standard deviations
can be different.
Not mysterious.
But the stuff in the article about
human female brains and calico cats
is really nice to know.
But the article is one in a
series, and one of the articles
there, maybe the next one,
discusses how the distribution
and mean of number of children
per person is different
for men and women. Okay.
But the article has some
graphs of distributions, and,
very sadly, insists on
drawing the distributions
as bell curves. Yup,
bell curves and in particular
Gaussian densities were swallowed
whole at about 1930
by much of
the social sciences and
educational statistics
and is often still
accepted.
Scientifically studying sex should be a top priority for our society.
In both ends of the spectrum, but particularly in radical feminists, theories are influenced by ideologies and politics, hurting society at large.
Recently, a feminist(president of a feminist university group) told me males were incomplete females(XY would be an incomplete version of XX) and, for that reason, they should have their instincts and behaviour suppressed.
Female cells have just one X chromosome? That's totally new to me and sounds kind of strange.
Also socieconomic status shows higher variability under men than women. This is also a really heavy factor for intelligence and one of the reason why for instance ethnical minorities often perform worse in intelligence tests.
[+] [-] rndn|10 years ago|reply
It reminds me of an interesting hypothesis I've read about the other day that the concept marriage plays a significant role in the success of our culture as it counteracts this difference. It allows more men to reach a social status at which they are motivated to be productive members of society. So we are possibly actively destroying a pillar of our culture as we are devaluing marriage.
By the way, Veritasium has a great episode on why women are stripey: http://youtube.com/watch?v=BD6h-wDj7bw
[+] [-] golemotron|10 years ago|reply
The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing.
Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers. The differences are there as early as one day after birth [ http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf ]. Primate studies show the same differences with our relatives.
Everyone should be able to pursue any career they want to, but there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geomark|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amyjess|10 years ago|reply
Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct.
In my experience, the nastiest transphobes are the ones who believe gender is a social construct. They're called TERFs. They can't wrap their minds around the fact that we prove their pet theories wrong, so they stalk, harass, and doxx us.
[+] [-] belorn|10 years ago|reply
For example, while there are clear differences at birth, nurture can permanent shutdown genes. Additionally a lot of activators for genes are triggered by mental thought process and the environment around individuals.
To make a car analogy, we could assume that faster cars are more often breaking the speed limit than slower cars, and we might very likely find this to be true in practice regardless of the actually speed limit. From there we need to be careful to conclude that its the fault of the car when a driver choses to ignore the law, or that just because the acceleration is faster and it is easier to drive fast in a fast car a person is not conscious in their choice.
[+] [-] wesnerm2|10 years ago|reply
Our faulty assumptions become clear when viewing other societies. For example, in the former USSR, 58% of engineers were women. In China, 40% of engineers are women, where less than 47% of the population are women. The communist countries placed a greater emphasis on gender equality in workforce. Sharp differences between west and the east are evident in other occupations such as medicine.
In the study cited, the mean age of the babies (neonates) was 3 days. That's enough time for babies to be influenced by adult interactions. Babies have been shown to be handled differently by adults based on their gender. Female babies are spoken to more, whereas male babies are handled more.
In the study, a substantial number of babies exhibited behaviors associated with the other gender. I would resist talking about a real sexual dimorphism when gender is not determinative of social vs mechanical preference.
[+] [-] Kelly2|10 years ago|reply
Indeed, it's such a taboo that it's brought up here every time the subject is discussed here.
Unless you would take all your information from radicalfeminist.com, I never saw a reputable news channel denying there would be differences between sexes. Actually, I see this meme of "Gender differences are taboo!" MUCH more often than I see the actual behavior so decried in actual action.
[+] [-] lowmagnet|10 years ago|reply
Even the word "disparity" (instead of difference) assumes that there should be some sort of parity between sexes. And I use "sexes" because "gender" is likely incorrect in reference to genetics. Unless they find some genetic link to it, in which case a lot of arguments will need to cease.
[+] [-] cconcepts|10 years ago|reply
This is purely anecdotal, but in my extended family many members believed the "we're all the same" view. I was given whatever toys I wanted whether they were considered masculine or feminine. It challenged people to see me grow up and be obsessed with heavy machinery - something they obviously saw within a masculine stereotype.
EDIT: I'm male
[+] [-] pyre|10 years ago|reply
I guess it would depend on the occupation. For example, I don't see much difference between nurses and doctors in terms of something that could be quantified as a gender-specific preference. It seems to me that the idea of "nurses are women, doctors are men" came about more from the idea that women were "too stupid" to be doctors and that it was a "man's job." Even today many doctors look down on nurses (as 'below' them; people whose opinions don't matter), and men that decide to become nurses also face a uphill battle of social acceptance.
[+] [-] brc|10 years ago|reply
There will always be warriors against everything who will claim gender is just conditioning or whatever and probsly get eyeballs and publishing as a result. Happily you can completely ignore all that and lead a happy and productive life knowing the gender you were born with has a big factor in determining what you choose to do in your life.
[+] [-] carapat_virulat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
In all honesty, I see more consistent whining about 'feminism taking over' than I do actual gender politics in day-to-day HN.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|10 years ago|reply
No, its not. Just about everyone, on all sides of the gender issues debates expressly acknowledges that sex-correlated differences exist, though the nature, extent, invariability, and policy relevance of those differences is endlessly debated.
The idea that the existence of differences is a "taboo" is simply a strawman constructed by one side to pretend to be a victim of suppression and avoid meaningful engagement on specific issues.
[+] [-] Confusion|10 years ago|reply
On the one hand, anyone that ignores/denies the influence of different hormones [1] on body and mind is simply ignorant. On the other hand you can question how relevant hormones can be to a deeply cultural concept as 'career choice'. On the one hand tiny differences can accumulate over a lifetime, but on the other hand tiny differences can also cancel out and its hard to say what it will add up to via so many layers of indirection.
Accepting the existence and influence of physical differences does not imply having to accept all cultural differences. Some may indeed result unavoidably from the physical differences, while others may be impossible to link to physical differences.
Given differences in the relation between men and women, and career preferences, across cultures, I suspect the distribution of men and women over careers is often dominated by contingent cultural factors. I definitely believe this is the case for STEM careers.
[1] As an example of an undeniable physical difference, not the defining difference
[+] [-] jrs235|10 years ago|reply
http://amzn.to/1NKVQ6d
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|10 years ago|reply
"it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers"
Either you're being hyperbolic in which case I can't really parse your comment because I don't know which points you're serious about, or you actually believe that there is no relationship between the specific toys children play with and their development, which ignores a massive body of reasonably well conducted research in developmental psychology.
[+] [-] backprojection|10 years ago|reply
I think it's the right political conclusion, even if the reasoning is questionable. Just because you could conduct research to root out differences in populations of females and males, it doesn't mean that you should. What's the point? It seems to be that these arguments are used to justify gender disparity in occupations, achievement, etc.
I like Dan Dennet's response to this question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beKC_7rlTuw&feature=youtu.be...
[+] [-] lectrick|10 years ago|reply
The problem is that correlating things with sex (even when such a correlation seems apparent) is just as bad as correlating things with race, ethnicity, religion, age, index finger length, eye color, and pretty much anything else.
It disadvantages those in the arbitrarily-designated outgroup, and subjects everyone to the Fallacy of Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition.
Which means that you're STILL ideally stuck on evaluating each person on an individual level, anyway.
Correlating things to something like blood serum testosterone level would make more sense to me, than an entire sex.
[+] [-] lexcorvus|10 years ago|reply
I'd argue that race-based differences are even more taboo. But it's close.
[+] [-] paperrr1|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] duaneb|10 years ago|reply
Gender is, by current academic definition, a cultural construct, an identity. Sex, i.e. "plumbing", is the definition of the difference between biological men and women. People with trans operations do not deny their chromosomes, and I'm sure they'd be the first to assure you about the hormonal differences between the sexes.
The problem people are grappling with is ascribing identity assumptions based on sex. You haven't listened carefully enough to understand the difference between gender, sex, identity, etc.
[+] [-] EmanueleAina|10 years ago|reply
The linked article explicitly does not take any stance on that. What the article points out is that males are more extreme in their traits, eg. exceptionally tall or exceptionally short, which in no way means that there are average differences. Even if the deviation is different, the mean may be the same.
Not that I'm saying that those differences are or are not there, but to say that the current differences are entirely due to biological differences would seem a bit naive to me.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|10 years ago|reply
I think eventually society will sober up and realize that when we talk about social aspects, more than likely we're talking about personal types. Certain ones simply exist with higher frequency per gender.
I feel like we're on this long path of migrating away from "default brain" assumptions made about race, nationality, gender, etc and will probably settle on something like the modern day understanding of personiality types. Its scary how well I fit the INTJ mold. The idea that I represent all men or am part of masculine culture is fairly ridiculous. Ladies, I find male ISTJ's and ESTJ's hard to deal with as well.
[+] [-] pessimizer|10 years ago|reply
What's in dispute is that there has been any reasonable natural experiment that has had the power to show that women have any functional cognitive differences with men. This is due to 1) the influence of pervasive beliefs in both experimenters and subjects that women are inferior to men (in often contradictory ways with specifics that vary by culture and over time), and 2) the actions of both men and women who subscribe to those beliefs to punish women for deviating from them. These beliefs are part of a large corpus colloquially known as "common sense," which purport to describe what is "obvious" but tend to simply defend what daddy said from the communists at the university.
The Saudis believe that driving is physically and mentally harmful to women. Dr. Pangloss believes that everything is as it should be.
edit: In addition, I doubt that the study that took place in a bubble that excluded or properly controlled for the influence of overt sexism and anti-female suppression was a group of Scottish IQ tests from 1932. 21 year-old Scottish women had been allowed to vote for at least three years by then. Get with the program you nurturers!
edit2: And to go on forever about this, I'll say how shocked I am to discover that a class of people who were constrained to a certain narrow range of education in a certain narrow range of practical skills intended to lead them to a certain narrow range of outcomes have test scores that tend towards a more narrow range than people outside that class.
[+] [-] RodericDay|10 years ago|reply
http://blip.tv/slowtv/delusions-of-gender-p1-cordelia-fine-4...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_Gender
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8031168-delusions-of-gen...
Additionally, readers who are not very acquainted should know that PsychologyToday is not a respectable publication in psychology, and is regularly embroiled in issues with propping up "we are telling the truth that nobody wants to hear about white supremacy". If you do not know who Satoshi Kanazawa is, you should look him up, or you can ask the psychology subreddits what their assessment is of that website.
This post veers close to ad hominem, but the way people are processing the OP is very much fallacious as well: a combination of taking a dubious authority on its word, not following up on the stats, and relishing in it confirming everything they want to believe (sexism is over-discussed, we really are different, and it explains most differences we observe). I cannot possibly offer a counter-argument in such meager visual real-estate and with so little captured attention-span, but if anyone is interested in hearing the best counter-arguments (not of the "artsies who believe in the blank-slate" variety), I offer a place to start.
[+] [-] lxop|10 years ago|reply
http://www.uvm.edu/~tribeta/Articles/Sex%20stereotypes%20Hal...
"Cleverly written with engaging prose, Delusions of Gender and Brain Storm contain enough citations and end notes to signal that they are also serious academic books. Fine and Jordan-Young ferret out exaggerated, unreplicated claims and other silliness regarding research on sex differences. The books are strongest in exposing research conclusions that are closer to fiction than science. They are weakest in failing to also point out differences that are supported by a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research."
Fine can play the audience well but she does not do well in academic reviews outside of feminist circles.
[+] [-] nshepperd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danmaz74|10 years ago|reply
It turns out the correct paragraph should say: "One type has an ACTIVE X chromosome inherited from her mother, and another type of cell has an ACTIVE X chromosome from her father".
Here the excerpt from the relevant linked article, which explains it better:
> A few weeks after conception, one of the two X chromosomes in each cell of a female's body is randomly deactivated. As each of these cells in the developing fetus multiplies, its descendant cells all have the same X chromosome activated. This leads to a patch of cells that all have the same active X chromosome (say, the X from the mother). A different fetal cell may have randomly deactivated the mother's X chromosome, and so all of its descendant cells each have the X chromosome from the father.
[+] [-] Swannie|10 years ago|reply
I don't understand how this passes for publishable material. I could have written better when I was 17, and I was a terrible writer back then!
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fecklessyouth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tfinniga|10 years ago|reply
The danger is a kind of genetic fatalism, assuming that what we should do is just to be determined by our genes and how our bodies work. For example, it's possible for a man to produce many children by impregnating lots of women concurrently. I get the feeling that some men decide that the way that a person wins life is that they reproduce as much of their genetic material as possible, so they try to win. It seems like this kind of justification is used to excuse a wide variety of bad behavior: cheating, rape, women as chattel, etc.
It's debatable whether the argument made by the article is actually a real thing, and how much it contributes to the inequality we see in the world. I think social effects have a bigger influence.
But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that.
[+] [-] qmalxp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvvcxz|10 years ago|reply
> Since a male can have more offspring than a female--but also has a greater chance of being childless... natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males.
This is on the money. Women are generally the choosers when it comes to sex, since eggs are expensive, and sperm is cheap. Nature therefore needs to try many different "keys" to see which ones are good at fitting into the "lock", to draw a crude analogy.
Men may seem more "privileged" as they dominate the top of most fields. But one must also realize that many men are nature's failed experiments, and live lives of despair, filled with homelessness, crime, and drug abuse, as well as downright social failure. Problems occur when policy makers selectively see the former, and disregard the latter.
[+] [-] ReadingInBed|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelukelugames|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU
[+] [-] rflrob|10 years ago|reply
For those who don't have the three minutes, the "punchline" is: "I know those forces are real, and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there's equal opportunity, then we can have that conversation."
[+] [-] kingkawn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minikites|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] top1nice1gtsrtd|10 years ago|reply
Can we conclude, then, taking that as our sample, that programming is naturally "women's work"?
If the preponderance of women in programming at that time was just a fluke then it's not unimaginable that the preponderance of men in programming at this time is also a fluke.
[+] [-] synthmeat|10 years ago|reply
I welcome differences. Recognizing and accepting them is the first meaningful step towards any worthwhile societal value adoption.
[+] [-] EGreg|10 years ago|reply
http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
I have found it to agree with my experience and explain eg why there are so few women in tech and women entrepreneurs. (Hint: it has to do with desire for risktaking, long hours, and long periods of silent work with abstractions)
[+] [-] graycat|10 years ago|reply
Really the article explains how on some measure two populations can have the same average on the measure but still be different.
The answer is obvious: The two distributions are different, e.g., the two standard deviations can be different.
Not mysterious.
But the stuff in the article about human female brains and calico cats is really nice to know.
But the article is one in a series, and one of the articles there, maybe the next one, discusses how the distribution and mean of number of children per person is different for men and women. Okay. But the article has some graphs of distributions, and, very sadly, insists on drawing the distributions as bell curves. Yup, bell curves and in particular Gaussian densities were swallowed whole at about 1930 by much of the social sciences and educational statistics and is often still accepted.
[+] [-] namlem|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dataker|10 years ago|reply
In both ends of the spectrum, but particularly in radical feminists, theories are influenced by ideologies and politics, hurting society at large.
Recently, a feminist(president of a feminist university group) told me males were incomplete females(XY would be an incomplete version of XX) and, for that reason, they should have their instincts and behaviour suppressed.
Edit: As some have mentioned, the girl referred to the SCUM manifest http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] legulere|10 years ago|reply
Also socieconomic status shows higher variability under men than women. This is also a really heavy factor for intelligence and one of the reason why for instance ethnical minorities often perform worse in intelligence tests.