Fascinating article

[ellid]

So much for those "innate differences" between male and female brains. I was particularly bewildered by the use of forty year old research to support the idea of innate sex differences; there's been plenty of on-point research since then, so why use such old articles, unless it's to support a pre-existing theory?

One reason I found this article so instructive was that the "women are naturally empathic, men are naturally good at math" stereotype doesn't square with my experience. Unlike the authors of many of these articles, I spent four years living in a single-sex environment, and what I saw was that women and men are a lot closer in behavior, intelligence, and talent than most people (including scientists) are willing to admit.

Comments

[persevero.livejournal.com]

Have you read Simon Baron-Cohen's 'The Essential Difference'? He's the director of the Autism Research Centre here in Cambridge, and he argues (I'm oversimplifying horribly) that men tend towards systemizing and women towards empathizing, with people with autism falling at the far end of systemizers. He acknowledges that there are female systemizers and male empathizers: I went to one of his lectures where he tried various visual tests on the audience, such as finding buried shapes in complicated pictures, and it looked as if a largish minority of the females could be loosely classified as systemizers, with a smaller proportion of male empathizers (maybe because of the mainly scientist audience). The book contains some of the standard tests they use - identifying emotions from letterbox views of people's eyes, for instance - il_grifone and I beta-tested the DVD version of that one.

I would argue that the best thing that can be done to raise female achievement in science and maths is single-sex schooling. My own school went mixed the year after I left, and a few years later the decent-sized group of female A-level physicists had dwindled to almost none. All girls should go to single-sex schools, and all boys to mixed ones, right?

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Actually, he's one of the scientists who comes in for the most criticism in the article, particularly for his terming certain characteristics "female" despite them being seen in less than half the female brains studied.

I totally agree about single-sex schooling - the proportion of women who go into science, math, engineering, and so on is much, much higher among the graduates of girls' high schools and women's colleges. That's held for over a century despite the admission of women to places like MIT and Caltech.

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

I've argued this for years but the perception of gender stereotypes is so deeply engrained that people don't hear me.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Exactly! Then again, I'm one of the evil, unnatural "exceptions" who always played superheroes instead of house, refused to have dolls, and rendered a male high school classmate speechless when I said I'd rather be dead than have kids.* I also went to a women's college, which made it even worse.









*this was not strictly true, but the choir had been rehearsing this horrible song about a mother fantasizing about her own daughter growing up to be "a young wife with babes of her own" as if this were the equivalent of her kid winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine. I'd just read The Feminine Mystique and thought the song was idiotic, and, well, it just came out after this guy asked me if I wanted to be a young wife with babes of my own. Today I'd probably ask him why he cared since we cordially loathed each other, but back then, well....

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

I was an exception as well but when the number of exceptions reaches critical mass one has to begin questioning the criteria.

I hate that song.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

One of tidbits from that article that I found fascinating is how a researcher dubbed certain brain activity associated with empathy and caring "female" even though less than half of the female subjects in his study exhibited such patterns. It's a beautiful example of gender bias coloring science, and the researcher himself admits in the article that he probably shouldn't have done it.

I think the great secret is that men and women are really very much alike underneath all the cultural underpinnings, both in ability and personality, and that this scares a lot of people.

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

I'm prepared to accept that women are more partial to pink but beyond that...

On second thought, I'm an exception there as well. Drat.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Weirdly enough, pink was considered more suitable for boys during at least part of the 19th century, while blue was favored for girls. No idea why or when the switch occurred.

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

In a study published last year about gender and colour preference, the women (both Caucasian and Asian) showed a greater preference than the men for pink shades. I seem to recall the difference being less marked in Asians.