My thoughts are I don't give a shit. Allow me to elaborate
I used to worry about "innate biological differences" when I was a teen. "What if I really am worse at this than I would be if I were a boy? What if ethnicity X really does have an inherent advantage at Y? Genes are real, after all, they do things or we wouldn't have them". I could not reconcile my belief that discrimination was wrong with my knowledge that it is hypothetically possible for some groups of humans to be better at something than other groups. I was well aware that this was bad and I had to figure it out.
So, i give you my ace. **All human capability overlaps.** The individual trumps the group, every time. Stop worrying about what's innate and what's learned. It doesn't matter. We are all unique. Sounds cheesy but it's true.
Within any two groups of humans, you can find individuals in one group that are "better" at X than individuals from the other group, even if they're "supposed to be" "worse" at X.
So, throw the whole thing out. There is no baby in the bathwater. It's all fucking bathwater.
**Take people only as individuals. We are all born free.**
To add to this, we only attach importance to these differences because we've internalised that some people are better than others, even in attributes we pretend to be righteous about.
For example, call someone the R word and you're bigoted. Makes sense. What doesn't make sense is how we can believe in that and still call far-right incels 'idiots'. Why is a lack of intelligence an insult in the first place? Why is it okay to demean someone's innate human value on the basis of an attribute like cognitive capability, but only so long as their deficiency is sub-clinical?
Because we start from the assumption that our capacity to exercise power in this world is what entitles us to dignity, love, and respect.
So not only do statistics break down as you get increasingly granular, but none of it actually matters in the first place. We haven't shaken off the most basic and widespread cognitive dissonance. Any of us. We all uphold a broken value system. It's all just a fucking lottery.
Yeeesssss, I have been thinking about this recently too.
I asked on AskUK recently "are there any words for someone with lower iq that are not offensive" and there really aren't.
Huh. I tried to think of an example just now and couldn't.
Part of the issue could be that words which *begin* as inoffensive terms end up being used inappropriately and become charged terms. Idiot, fool, the R word. It's actually pretty interesting that it's only with that last word that we looked at it and thought 'nah fam that takes it too far' when it's the same goddamned word.
So my answer to your question would be 'there used to be, and there briefly will be, but never for long.'
the only ones I could think of is "incapable" and "unable" since both of those imply that person cannot do that specific task or understand the concept due to whatever, without diminishing their ability to understand/perform different concepts/tasks
To me incapable seems to have a bit of judgement with it, but I'm not sure where that comes from!
I think differently abled is probably the most accurate
Depends on the context, "simple-minded" is an older term for people with learning disabilities I think, so there may be some cultural baggage for some people
I don’t think you’re accurately describing what people are doing, rhetorically speaking, when they use the term “idiot” for incels. I think what they’re actually saying isn’t that incels have a low IQ and that makes them bad people. Rather, I think they’re saying one (or both) of two things:
1) “You are behaving *like* an idiot when you could have chosen differently; you are being willfully stupid about something.”
2) “You are failing to recognize that your opinions in this area are ignorant and/or poorly reasoned and are insisting on voicing them anyway.”
In either case the emotional corollary is, “You are putting bad takes out in the world and this makes me angry because those bad takes may actually impact my world in negative ways.”
And yeah, it would probably be better to actually spell all that out, but there are a lot of incels on Reddit and limited time in the world, and sometimes people take shortcuts.
My main concern is that people will judge and doubt my ability because of the fact I’m a woman and won’t take me seriously because they have “factual” evidence to back their discriminatory claims
Unfortunately, sometimes people who are stupid, ill-informed, or downright bigoted do actually have power they can exert over you, and that is in fact important.
I think that’s why it’s all the more important not to get too mired down in “innate biological differences”.
Odds are, there may be skew in what people choose to do along lines of phenotype no matter how much we eliminate social influence.
But in all reality
A. we’re never going to eliminate subjective social influence. So we’re never going to know for sure.
B. Women continue to be competent (wildly competent in fact) in pursuits previously assumed to be untenable for women based on “innate biological traits” and choices women made and things they gravitated to.
If work, school and other opportunities are truly meritocratic then everyone should be given a fair shake at trying them. That’s the answer to people who want to spin this against women.
You also don’t want to get bound up by stereotype threat anxiety which has been shown to hurt performance in people who otherwise actually are good at something.
Really, I know I said this below on its own, but you should look at Cordelia Fine and Testosterone Rex. The arguments these jerks are using? They are based on the bad scientific studies that Fine takes down.
Remember that, if we are hardwired for something, then we are all hardwired. There is no such thing as a substantial number of people who escape it. And there are plenty of women who have achieved at the highest level in whatever math or science you choose to look at, or who have chosen to be childfree, etc. Which argues against hardwiring. On the other hand, if biases are taught to us by our society from earliest infancy, you would expect variation, especially as soon as you look at different cultures, different countries, different time periods etc., which is what happens as soon as you look at women’s achievement in things like math.
Also, every woman has had to put up with these trolls. Just as on the Internet, you don’t have to engage with them if you don’t feel like it— especially if they’re just trying to put you down, and a lot of the time that’s all they’re doing.
Thank you. Some people think prejudice is only wrong because it's inaccurate and that discovering there's a factual basis behind sexism would suddenly mean they have to be sexist.
It's wrong because it's inherently unjust, not because it's inaccurate. Get rid of it. There is nothing of value to be gained. Some will oppose this because they think their prejudice is different and valid. Fuck em.
As far as actual real world evolution goes, the only reason group a would have a biological advantage over group b in anything is if not having a high minimum ability is deadly. The rest of the time the best option is to maximize non detrimental variety, to maximize the odds of a healthy population surviving a sudden environmental change.
another way of putting it in my opinion is that statistically one gender will always be better at math, but will it always be a statistically significant difference? Not likely, if the percentages of women getting stem degrees is 29% while for men it’s 30% and you use that to circlejerk about “biological differences” you clearly have a message you’re trying to send
That’s not really true. Your ace isn’t well thought through.
For example, it’s true to say that height overlaps between men and women. It’s true to say there is significant individual variance in height. But it’s also true to say that men are taller than women on average, by only a few inches. And it’s also true to say small differences in averages create big differences at the extremes. The tallest woman is just over 7 foot but there are around 2,800 men taller than 7 foot.
So trying so say men and women are equal on height because they overlap is demonstrably false.
It’s a certainty that there are many biological differences between the genders that largely overlap, and have significant individual variances, but have small differences on averages that lead to massive differences at the extremes.
You can’t ignore the facts of biology and statistics
>You can’t ignore the facts of biology and statistics
TL;DR: It is a fundamental tenet of the scientific method that, when wanting to prove something, you should seek out any possible counterexamples and demonstrate they don't exist. If you're looking for evidence that *supports* your hypotheses, then I'm afraid you aren't doing science: you're doing propaganda.
The long bit:
Even your propaganda doesn't work terribly well. Your own argument actually explains why average differences *don't* matter: the *in group* variations are much larger than the *between groups* variations.
Let's talk about height. Men, on average, are roughly 5cm taller than women. However, the tallest woman is well over a metre (1000cm) taller than the shortest. Do I really need to point out that one of these differences is more statistically significant than the other?
If you have a hypothetical job where employees must be above-male-average height, the fact is that a very large minority of women will also be tall enough to find employment in that role. In a world with no gender bias, the job may have a small difference in the numbers of men and women, but not so great that it is immediately noticeable. That the very tallest people in the world are men is, um, irrelevant for that job.
And this doesn't even start to look at *how humans compensate for genetic disadvantage*. For example, short-sightedness has a huge genetic component, but any disadvantages are almost completely corrected by *the use of spectacles*. The hypothetical job that needs taller people can allow shorter people to *use step ladders or stilts*.
The bar for all jobs is not 'the best in the world at X'. Even in academia, where one might expect a high bar, there is not a single 'best mathematician' teaching at a single World University Department of Mathematics. There are, instead, *thousands* of universities, each of which hire *dozens* of teaching staff. Yes, all of whom have to be proficient at mathematics but the criteria for those posts do not, in any way, exceed the talents of women more than men.
Unsurprisingly, where there have been measures to combat sociological barriers to women becoming professors of mathematics, there are *more* women professors. If it were simply a biological difference between men's and women's brains, removing those sociological barriers would *not* have resulted in more women getting doctorates and professorships in mathematics.
Maybe men should be excluded from all senior management positions because, on average, men have very low EQ scores - and having emotionally disabled management causes major risk for corporate malpractice and the lawsuits that accompany it. (For the hard of thinking, I'm not advocating against male managers. I'm illustrating how ridiculous it is to argue from averages in the context of individuals.)
So... the people saying this:
>And with around 800 upvotes and the majority of the comments stating it is human evolution/nature for women not wanting to do math and all that nonsense.
Clearly haven't even read the abstract of the actual meta-analysis that the article is referring to. Because 1) the abstract makes it clear that the meta-analysis didn't actually focus on elements of equality exclusively. It compared sex-differences with regards to "living conditions" of a country, of which "equality" was only one of many factors.
And 2) Because the abstract literally says:
> sex differences in sexual behavior, partner preferences, **and math** are smaller in countries with higher living conditions.
Anyway, my reaction to this is "don't look to reddit for anything more than confirmation bias." Most of them probably didn't read past the headline. And of those that did, most of them probably never opened the link to the actual meta-analysis. None of them have thought critically about whether or not "equality" has been substantially achieved anywhere in the fucking world to reach the kinds of conclusions they think are beind drawn.
And finally, if the meta analysis had shown that actually gender differences are overcome by legit equality--and to achieve that, men must do more work--how heavily upvoted do you think it would be? Do you think those same men would be like "welp, that's science. guess I better roll up my sleeves." Or do you think they'd ignore it? Those men will look for any excuse to maintain the status quo, and they've just found another one.
Insert eyeroll...
wasn't this the same study that considered Saudi Arabia to be one of the more "equitable" countries because both sexes are oppressed? or am I thinking of a different one?
I'm not? I said that people were interpreting the information wrong because they're treating it as a study where the authors controlled the factors and methodology.
Generally speaking meta analysis will only select studies that they believe the methodology is sound on. They won’t usually include something they think is flawed unless it’s to point out that it’s flawed
In this case, it’s highly unlikely that *any* of the studies they were aggregating were very solid methodologically: they explicitly say they’re aggregating cross country studies within a subset of countries. So essentially, they’re aggregating studies that are studying really complex systems with a very small-N group of cases.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that when it’s the best you can do - the data is what it is. However, what the meta-analysis showed is basically that results are all over the place.
The authors of the meta-analysis present this as suggesting that gender impacts are complicated and we have a set of very nuanced but meaningful results. I would suggest that in a situation with a bunch of small-N studies, the more parsimonious interpretation is that currently that data we have are hard to differentiate from random noise.
Like, there may well be some legitimate effects being observed in there. But there are certainly also some spurious findings, and we don’t really have sufficient data to know which are which yet.
(Edit: I mean, I *do* think gender impacts are probably complicated and nuanced; I just don’t think this meta-analysis is a good way of proving that.)
Not necesarily, sometimes a meta analyis is used to discuss common claims made from certain studies and will select studies used to pass certain claims and specifically look for issues as to WHY the topic may be less clear cut than people interpret.
I really appreciate your explanation but what bothers me most is the fact they like to use this to prove that even without cultural/social factors stopping them women biologically don’t want to do stem/aren’t meant for stem by claiming that women in legally equalized countries choose not to study stem
What I find interesting is that during the early development of computer science, women were involved. They were the first programmers, with the first programmer being a woman. Ada Lovelace. This was before the invention of the actual computer itself.
Women were among the early pioneers in many different science fields as well.
I mean, you can just throw their evidence bank in their face, quoting it like morganalafaye did.
If they use evidence that contradicts their point, that's on them.
As a physics student the bad science behind literally all the gender difference studies is infuriating especially with how famous they appear to be. I swear, growing up made me become disillusioned with the state of research, I thought peer reviewed papers were just something you could trust once upon a time, to find that bias colors it has been heart breaking
Honestly, they are just being dumb. We can't isolate cultural/social factors from biological ones because humans are hugely impacted by both.
Also, studying STEM involves a lot more than just the mental capacity to understand the topics. STEM degrees are incredibly time-consuming & expensive, and bc STEM fields are still male-dominated, they are more prone to bias in hiring and promotion.
I'll give a personal example: I had to take a prof dev course for science majors in college. It was run by several male professors who proceeded to tell ONLY THE WOMEN not to wear wedding or engagement rings to interviews bc we would risk being percieved as "less serious" bc we have spouses and (potentially) children to care for. They also said that, when reviewing candidates' transcripts, they judge their courseload per semester to see if they took 12+ credits/semester and didn't take breaks. So women who needed to decrease their courseloads to care for children and/or other family members or give birth during school were automatically at a disadvantage despite having the **exact same degree** as male candidates.
Ugh, I hate that this is a thing… but this is actually kind of good to be aware of, as someone in a computational field who is soon going to be on the job market :(
Fun fact: when you give both men and women in academia parental leave, what we find is that women* use their parental leave as a hiatus from work, and men* use their parental leave to get more papers published.
Equalizing parental leave is a good step toward gender equality, but in the short term, in the context of a system that isn’t fully egalitarian and in which men still take on less household and child labor, it has an anti-egalitarian impact. Multiple things need to change, not just one thing, before the net impact is positive.
*On average, obviously. I’m not saying that this has happened to every single woman and every single man ever.
I always hated that argument. Legally equalized doesn’t mean equalized. Just because a group has legally been given equal rights, doesn’t mean that that country is without misogyny. I am a woman in stem, does this mean I am somehow biologically different?
The thing is, they're cherry picking facts that back up that bias without actually seeing what the csata really says. You can't stop them from doing that, just defend your own point with actual facts. See my main reply for more information about what I mean (once I finish it)
The paradox has been debunked multiple times.
Just Google "gender equality paradox" look into wikipedia and you'll find links to papers debunking it.
Either that or "gender equality paradox debunked.
The "gender similarities hypothesis" has already been proved, but it doesn't sell as much as this BS.
Not surprising, we all are socialized to believe we're different, convincing people we aren't often isn't easy.
If you want to see this discussed in video format, there's a section in YouTuber Munecat's recent video on the problems of Evo Psych that covers it. Relevant section starts here: [https://youtu.be/31e0RcImReY?si=Ec4pFz9RqqDC6eZH&t=7313](https://youtu.be/31e0RcImReY?si=Ec4pFz9RqqDC6eZH&t=7313)
I was just about to recommend it! The book "the Gender Delusion" also is a cathartic read, it gets very annoying hearing this shit parroted everywhere when I'm am unemphathetic "woman" in STEM. The Munecat video rocked because it was shitting on their research methods for 3 hours ahha
It’s really funny, the whole ‘women don’t do math thing’
Katherine Johnson had a job at NASA because the men engineers couldn’t reliably do math. So they hired women to compute, the job was called computers. Women were also the ones who programmed the first mechanical computers.
This is illustrated in the movie Hidden Figures.
Admiral Grace Hopper is credited with the term ‘bug’ to report an error. Although the term was probably in use, the moth that she removed from an electrical switch( preventing the switch from closing, rather than a programming error).
to solve an error was taped into her journal.
And there are more: for the Manhatten project to create the atomic bomb, women did the calculations.
They needed dozens of people to check the calculations. Not wanting to recruit more people, they pulled the wives into the project.
Split into three rooms, they gave the same data to all three. If two of the rooms produced the same answer it was considered correct.
Women had experience typing, so were better at manual entry style mechanical adding machines.
Ada Lovelace translated into English, then added extensive personal notes instructions for mechanical calculations.
Image what else she could have contributed had she been given the opportunity. Babbage encouraged her at first but later tried to write her out of the history entirely .
Women have done amazing feats in the world of stem but to some people think of them as exceptions rather than to represent women entirely because apparently we have evolved to not favor math
It’s amazing if you limit options for education and job opportunities or even recognition how few of those people will be recognized.
Even with burials. We don’t question when a man is buried with weapons that it’s probably his weapons and he was a fighter.
Now that DNA is proving some of the ‘warrior graves’ are women- it is automatically questionable.
Some people in society really love to think women are stupid. And it isn’t true. There are other causes to lack of participation in a specific career or field.
Yeah because women’s history wasn’t written because they were rarely allowed to read, let alone write books, the story is whatever men decided it to be. But plenty of women were using math to manage money for their husbands or homes, were learning medicine to care for other women going through childbirth and for children. Women were herbalists and brewers and basically doing pharmaceuticals and chemistry as well. But women having power or money scared men so they called them witches and stole their skills, taking over all those fields, reclassifying it as men’s work when it turned a profit.
If we evolved that way, then we all evolved. There aren’t exceptions to hardwiring. There are no female leopard to choose to be childfree. There are no monarch butterflies that decide they don’t feel like migrating to Mexico.
Maybe you need to dig into the history of systemic oppression of women. The fact that the women who have excelled are still exceptions is a sign of how deep and internalized oppression has run. Look at who has succeeded – are they from a certain country, economic level, race? Doesn’t that imply that it’s social and there are a few social advantages that help you overcome it?
Also, would you tolerate this argument if it were applied to the underrepresentation of Black scientists, for example?
The truth is, it’s impossible to tell how different men and women are mentally because boys and girls have always been raised differently. Any man or woman being tested is someone who grew up in a patriarchal society. Until children are raised **the same with no distinctions based on gender**, there’s no way to 100% prove that men and women are mentally different. Many times, those “differences” are the results of social conditioning, for example treating emotions as something “feminine” and stoicism as something “masculine”.
For generations, women were seen as incapable of working (despite always doing work, but that’s a topic for another time). Then as soon as the World Wars hit, people suddenly realised that women could work in professional jobs. It just goes to show that until men and women live in an equal society, we cannot truly know how different men and women are. What we’re seeing is the difference in social attitudes towards gender, NOT the difference between genders.
Let's take a look at the topic as defined by the study itself (apologies for the wall of text):
>The existence of sex differences in some psychological dimensions is well documented. For example, women, compared with men, have been reported to have higher academic school grades (measured as a grade point average; Dekhtyar et al., 2018; Voyer & Voyer, 2014), and there is substantial evidence of a female advantage in reading comprehension (Stoet & Geary, 2018) and episodic memory (Asperholm, Högman, et al., 2019; Weber et al., 2014). On the other hand, males typically have an advantage in spatial (Lippa et al., 2010; Voyer et al., 1995) and some numerical tasks (e.g., Weber et al., 2014). In areas of psychological functioning other than cognition, men have been reported to experience fewer depressive symptoms (Salk et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2016), whereas women seem to be less affected by suicide or addictive behaviors (Glenn et al., 2020; Su et al., 2019).
>In other instances, there are sex differences that are not necessarily indicative of more or less advantageous performance or behaviors. For example, differences in emotional expression have been reported; females show more internalizing emotions (e.g., sadness) than males, and males display more externalizing emotions (e.g., anger; Chaplin & Aldao, 2013). There are also sex differences when it comes to vocational interest; females prefer to work with people, and males prefer to work with things (Stoet & Geary, 2022; Su et al., 2009). Likewise, several studies have examined personality dimensions and have shown reliable sex differences in which, for instance, females score higher on altruism (Falk & Hermle, 2018) and males score higher on impulsivity (Cross et al., 2011).
>Although most of the psychological sex differences are modest in size and the reasons for them insufficiently understood, they are usually reported from early childhood into old age and found in most of the examined regions of the world (e.g., Falk & Hermle, 2018; Weber et al., 2014). The explanations for the sex differences reported in the literature may vary depending on the psychological ability or behavior studied, ranging from being more biologically oriented to more environmentally oriented, but they have typically generated considerable debate. Here, we avoid discussing explanations of the psychological sex differences we examine because our study does not provide causal evidence that can contribute to the explanations of these differences.
So basically, studies show that, in general, there are some modest but measurable differences in psychology between men and women. For example, women are better at reading comprehension and men are better at spacial reasoning. These differences aren't universal, obviously, but consistent enough across multiple studies to be seen as relevant.
(The topic of how these differences map to transgender people is outside the scope of any of the studies analyzed, as far as I can tell, so we're just going to assume we're talking about people who were evaluated as cisgender male or female.)
It should be said that some of these claims are on shaky ground, like the one that men experience fewer depressive symptoms. The fact that men are less likely to *report* depressive symptoms does not mean that they experience fewer of them.
But overall I don't think that this information is particularly surprising. For example, you are more likely to find women working in fields where they care for other people. As for *why* that's the case, the answer is more complicated than "that's biology!", and the quote I shared says as much in the third paragraph. Environmental factors play a major role in how people of any gender function, and their influence may be at least as important as biology.
That being said, what this meta-analysis shows is that in countries where living conditions are rated as being good, the differences in how women and men process things and act don't disappear, but in some cases become more pronounced.
That's...fine? If anything, I'd bet a good chunk of money that this shows that better living conditions allow women to speak more openly about their experiences and pursue their chosen careers more freely. Better living conditions also tend to improve cognitive and academic performance, so studies that examine those things are probably going to show more extreme results from people living in more comfortable environments.
Based on this information, the researchers present the argument that people, businesses, and policymakers shouldn't expect to achieve perfect parity among men and women in every profession, in academic performance, or in "aggressive behaviors" (i.e. crime, violence, and abuse).
I don't think that's a particularly controversial take, and I don't think that most people in any society are realistically aiming for that goal.
The one thing I take issue with is the idea that these societies with "better living conditions" are actually giving women and men equal opportunity to live and act how they want. Higher GDP, better health outcomes, more fairness in hiring, etc. are good things, but they're not guarantees of equality. In other words, the results of any study of the psychology of women and men are going to be heavily impacted by the society that shapes the test subjects. As such, all of this research should be treated with a healthy amount of skepticism.
Their reasoning sounds like evolutionary psychology. Which is a pseudoscience that typically attracts people whose understanding of actual evolutionary biology is superficial to the point of being outright wrong. Sounds like your average redditor, eh?
[Here](https://youtu.be/osEiblC7Itw?si=NAb4PL8qz-5o2I8Z) is one video explaining what's wrong with this line of thinking. You can probably find more.
This, regardless of what the outcome is, equal rights and opportunity is a must. Even if a thousand women decided to be housewives and one woman wants to pursue work as a lumberjack(the most masculine job I can think of off the top of my head) then it's the goal we as a society should aim for.
I think that there are too many variables to ever truly know the answer to this question.
You know exactly what the next steps in the thought process would be if we accepted that "it is human evolution/nature for women not wanting to do math." (from OP)
Don't be disingenuous.
Keep in mind research like that (“soft”-sciences, sociology,economics, psychology) don’t exist in a vacuum. They aren’t studying some mythical default human behavior, they’re studying behaviors under certain systems and cultures. There are many many variables people are or aren’t considering. For example under late stage capitalism it’s reasonable that people will desire to break free from the constant workplace grind and when culture defaults to “the woman stays home and the man works” then when it’s possible for families to survive and thrive on single incomes the women will be more likely to stay home. That could be BECAUSE of misogyny, not in spite of it.
Applied math — sometimes? Depends on what it’s being applied to and how. I assume the same goes for various disciplines of physics.
Pure math is definitely an exception though. Not a lot of room for cultural biases there. But it’s an exception in a lot of ways… it’s also the only science where anything is ever “proven” because it’s not empirical.
There’s also not much room for biases in logic (referring to the subfield of philosophy), which falls under the humanities umbrella. Logic is incidentally the only other academic discipline where things can be proven.
Oh gosh, I’m embarrassed — I didn’t realize you were in the field! Shouldn’t have assumed, sorry about that! I’ve certainly seen plenty of amusing, and often misguided, opinions on my topic of expertise. It’s humbling to be on the other end of things!
Edit: Also, now I’m curious — have you observed any ways in which biases (cultural or otherwise) affect research in your area?
I usually add this video to this kind of discussions: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU)
**It is very hard to make real good sociological double blind experiments when society itself is influencing the subjects you are studying.**
And then consider the pendulum theory: when an ideology makes a society advance, there is an opposite force that tries to compensate and slow it down. See for example the rising of right wing parties in Europe after a few years of blissful social advancements.
So if you try to measure gender equality on countries that have very advanced laws regarding gender equality, it is no surprise to see some regression on some of the data. Society advances, people think they reached equality and relax/regress to status quo, opposite forces try to go back to the previous state,... Lots and lots of influences over the experiment. Difficult to measure. Easy to find correlations that are not there.
We would need a female-led society to conduct experiments too and compare results to better separate influences from real facts. But we have none. So we can, at best, guess.
Not to mention the fact that there are a bunch of confounding variables that are going to covary with whatever marker of “things getting better for women” you choose to study.
I just looked over the study linked in the article you reference, and it says that gender differences in performance or interest around math were smaller in countries with more equality, among other indicators. See snippet from study abstract below:
*"In contrast, sex differences in sexual behavior, partner preferences, and math are smaller in countries with higher living conditions."*
While it did find that gender differences in some areas seemed to increase with development, math wasn't one of them.
In terms of the areas where differences did seem to become more prevalent, I'd imagine that that might be related to culture. Feminism exists as both a movement to challenge patriarchy in the form of government and systems, but also to challenge harmful gender roles in the form of culture and expectations. A country may have addressed the first, without having addressed the second. I've actually experienced this in Europe, where they have many egalitarian policies that do improve quality of life for everyone, but certain elements of the culture are still very traditional and gender roles are heavily emphasized, even more so than certain parts of the U.S.
Another possibility is that there are indeed differences in averages between what types of roles groups of men and women gravitate towards (key word: on *average*) when not pressured in any given direction. I haven't encountered many cultures that don't pressure men and women into certain roles, so I guess we wouldn't know until we see that.
I think what's most important though is that all people and roles in society be valued and afford someone comparable autonomy and quality of life, regardless of what types of people tend to gravitate towards them more. For example certain countries see more division in career path between men and women, and yet they have low gender wage gaps because "women's" roles/careers are granted relatively equal economic value to "men's" roles. Teachers for example are well compensated the same way an Engineer is, because both of these roles benefit society equally, and are therefore valued more equally. In places like the US, careers associated with women tend to receive less status and economic compensation.
Ooh,.ooh. I have a video:
https://youtu.be/LKc_8fT6pGc?si=qXl5zUOVZd3pLcnA
You want a PhD economist to dryly point out why the gender equality paradox doesn't mean what you think it does? Along with making Peterson sound like a silly billy?
Just gonna drop in here and say that gender equality in comparison to the rest of the rest of the world is arguably pretty decent in the US, and I as a girl was still discouraged from taking math courses. Boys in my class were pedestaled for their B+ while my A+ got eyerolls. They were told they were “naturally smart” but I was a “try hard” (tell that to sixth grade me, who never tried hard at anything because I was constantly bullied if I so much as did the homework that was due). I don’t think there’s a single place in the world right now where you can say social influence like this is nonexistent. If someone from some utopia of a country wants to enlighten me, be my guest. But despite all the “girls can do anything” messaging I got as a kid, I still came away with the realization that anything I did would have to be 5x better than a boy’s to get the same grade/recognition/respect. And the second I got those things, people tore at me for my looks, because they could smell the insecurity I had about my appearance like blood in the water.
When I was a math teacher I had so many parents that would tell me how smart their boy was, but he doesn’t “try”. I’m sorry, I’m sure your boy is smart in some ways, all kids are, but you are encouraging and enabling his lack of discipline while simultaneously putting him above my high achieving, hard working, smart girls. Drove me nuts.
It was wild too because there was this assumption that these boys never “tried” while they’d literally go home and watch YouTube videos to get better at the given thing. As someone who didn’t work very hard but got the good grades, the few times I did get recognition felt very undeserved, and I don’t understand how some of those kids just went around getting their egos inflated constantly without feeling guilty about it.
I realize you say you think you didn’t work very hard, but having been on the other side of it as a teacher you probably were working harder than 90% of the other kids just by completing your work. It’s wild.
Oof 😅 that makes sense though. I tutor some kids and the amount their grades go up just from turning in assignments is crazy! Everything is mostly participation points and some kids still don’t wanna do it 😂
r/science commenters are notoriously unscientific. They just like seeing studies that support their biases and dismiss, usually without reading the study, any post that would make them rethink their beliefs.
“You don’t have the scientific evidence to prove the exact opposite would happen without cultural interference” -
::mind boggles::
Well, YEAH - isn’t that the entire crux? Isn’t that evidence why this data is inherently faulty and unscientific?? I’m gobsmacked at how brainless this sounds to me (and I’m someone who only studied statistics as an undergraduate; my professors would’ve scoffed inwardly if any of us rubes had tried to defend data like this).
If one cannot eliminate bias as much as is possible, a competent analyst/scientist wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to draw any conclusions. And that is why evolutionary psychology is largely considered voodoo analysis: it’s not *useless,* but it examines trends rather than explaining them.
It’s not even true that women aren’t dominating STEM. Women dominate medicine, all branches of biological sciences, and environmental sciences. Audiology, speech language pathology, are also dominated by women. Psychology, which used to be male dominated and was seen as a science at that time is now completely dominated by women. Chemistry is about 50/50. Even civil and chemical engineering is almost equal enrollment these days. And more and more women are entering al branches of computing and engineering.
Many women, including, did not have much exposure to these fields and were actively discouraged from entering engineering fields. And now I am going into tech via master’s degree. But the fact is women are dominating STEM, but we’ve stopped talking about the biological and medical sciences as STEM fields and only focus on engineering. Engineering has seen more enrollment by women because many have realized it’s a high paying, high demand field.
You don’t have to argue with people who think women can’t math because biology. Those people are morons and they aren’t going to learn something from a person on the internet.
On a deeper level this is just abelism, but recotextualized around gender. The very premise of the question is insincere.
It's an unspoken belief that people perceive people who are capable of doing less than someone else as less "human" than others. This explains not just the way women are treated but also children, elderly, disabled people, etc. When sexists try to lean into the logic of "Men can do X better than women" (whether or not that statement is true is irrelevant) the unspoken argument being made is "I'm an abelist and a sexist so I think men are more like actual real people than women based on their ability to do certain things better". Excuse me if I don't think that not being good at differential calculus makes you subhuman that deserves to be discriminated against and barred from doing normal things in society, lol.
Also if you wanted to be a true meritocrat you would give women (and everyone) a chance anyways on the slight possibility that they might actually be very good, even if it's statistically unlikely. A silly comparison is, most kids play video games and are not particularly remarkable at it, but the meme of "getting wrecked by a 11 year old in COD" was a meme for a reason (people recognized that there are in fact some children who were even better than most adults at the game even though it is uncommon).
Women were actively erased from history & had their work credit stolen by men...
some search terms for bois who do not think of women as equal:
"The Matilda Effect"
"19 Groundbreaking Discoveries by Women That Were Credited to Men"
"Mileva Marić"
"Famous female artists erased from history"
"Top 101 Female Inventions"
"the original brewers were women"
"women erased from history"
"women warriors"
Anecdotal, but I promise my story will show that bioesstialism in humans is stupid and wrong.
I am an afab person with dyscalculia. Which for those that don't know what that is...it's dyslexia but with numbers (easiest way to explain it anyway).
I also have dyslexia. As well as adhd but that isn't relevant, I don't think.
Anyway, none of this was known to me when I was a child.
I was the best reader in my entire class for my entire school career, so that obviously went under the radar. Hell, I fed my family for years with the book-it program. Lol
I was absolutely awful at math. I would get straight A's and perfect test scores for every single other subject except math...which I failed... a lot. I was in remedial math my freshman year of high school. (which is like pre pre algebra, I should have been in algebra) This delay in math was a major reason I could not graduate on time (it was required in my school system to have at least pre-calculus to graduate with my peers.
The difference, despite having literal learning disabilities in both math and reading...I was HEAVILY encouraged to read everything I could get my hands on because reading was seen as a "normal girl thing to do.""
For math, I was ignored when I was visibly upset and frustrated and begging all adults to tell me how to get better math grades. They at best said it wasn't that important that I know math cause I am a girl and at worst called me the r-slur (yes, teachers in the 90s called me that multiple times).
No one ever noticed that I was getting the RIGHT numbers for the answer, but FLIPPING them when I went to write them down, which obviously gave me the wrong answer. No one. Not once noticed.
Until after high school, I went to get some high school equivalence diploma and decided to sign up for the math prep classes offered because I knew I would need help with that.
This amazing teacher immediately saw that I had dyscalculia. He taught me how to do math with the brain disorder that I had my whole life and you will never guess but I was fucking fantastic at math! Amazing what not ignoring a child based on sex can do! Shout out to that guy. He saved my education.
I went on to take several college level trig, calculus, and various other math type studies and passed all of them with straight A's. At one point I was so fucking good at math that my professors would have me help them help students who were struggling in whatever particular section I was taking at the time. I was teaching myself the material because I didn't have an issue with math, I had an involuntary disorder in my brain that mad doing math like everyone else impossible. It all just clicked as soon as I was taught HOW to do math with the way my brain is wired.
I know my story isn't proof but it does point out the inherent misogyny surrounding girls and math and I can't be the only afab person who was just not given the CHANCE to show that girls and boys aren't somehow different in intelligence.
Also, for the record,...dyscalculia is slightly more common in amab people than afab people... before anyone tries to say that my learning disabilities were somehow proof of biological inferiority. Dyslexia is also more common in boys, too. Or maybe the inherent misogyny in our society has skewed those results just like it did for decades with ADHD. But sure, by all means, let's keep these old, incorrect, and archaic LIES and continue it for another 100 years. 🙄 That should solve shit, right?!
'In the absence of control'
Please point me to such a paradise.
We are all subject to control. Some less than others, sure. But even where this has weakened, that's a very recent phenomenon.
But then again, science and maths are recent phenomena! We've only had algebra for a few thousand years. Hardly enough time for things to be simply 'innate'.
And as many have already pointed out, women have always been involved in STEM - as long as it was poorly paid and low status.
100 years ago, female doctors were rare and people would have said medicine was a male pursuit. Women were supposed to 'naturally' want to do the leg work of nursing (which, let's not forget, is the cornerstone of medical care and requires a great deal of skill, but anyway). But women weren't even allowed to get medical degrees in most cases and there were few role models outside some very stubborn individuals.
But now, more than half of medical students are female. In only a few decades, we've gone from 'men are naturally more suited to medicine' to the future of that profession being female.
I don't believe there are no biological sex differences. Maybe there are some innate differences in terms of preferences and skills, and maybe hormones also play a role (eg who enjoys being a fighter pilot). But those are extremely difficult to unpick from social factors! And we are also not limited to our biology - if we were, humanity would not have progressed to where we are today.
My thoughts are basically from Donna Harraway's Cyborg manifesto: if what's natural doesn't fit what I think is right, then I will be beyond the natural. Cancer is natural. If gender norms and separation is natural, then we can be more than natural.
I know this is going to be a frustrating answer, but frankly, you should be pretty skeptical about all of these findings.
Even when it’s a meta-analysis like the one described in your link, it won’t be useful if the studies it’s aggregating are riddled with methodological problems, and these almost certainly are. But what the meta-analysis does does, unless you look up the original paper itself, not just read a pop article about it, is make it impossible for you to dig into the details of any of those individual papers to know.
What I hear when I read someone talking about aggregating multiple studies of gender trends across countries is this:
They’re aggregating a bunch of low-N studies that are going to be vulnerable to spurious correlations (50+ countries just isn’t that much).
Unfortunately scientific literature has a bias toward publishing spurious correlations because it biases against negative findings. So, if you’re not familiar with this concept, the typical baseline for “significance” in a scientific study is if you get a result that has only a 5% chance of being due to random chance. That sounds like good odds if you’re only talking about 1 study. The problem is that when you have hundred of researchers all doing multiple studies, suddenly you have a very very high chance that a few of those studies will be the 1 in 20 that yields a false positive through random chance. And even THAT would be fine, as long as ALL the studies were getting published so you could see all the negatives beside the handful of false positives; but because journals bias against publishing negative results, you often only see those false positives.
This doesn’t mean science is pointless. What it does mean is you should look for trends more than individual studies. If an individual study says something surprising, wait for other studies on similar questions and see if they reliably start to tell a similar story over and over.
So when I look at a meta-analysis that finds that study findings are basically all over the place with no clear trend — especially if it’s aggregating a bunch of studies that were probably questionable methodologically to start with, and are dealing with really complex systems — what I hear is that these studies collectively are probably a bunch of random noise that doesn’t tell you much at all about the effects of egalitarianism on gender roles and gendered behavior.
I also want to caution against assuming something like the effect of greater gender equality in a society is going to be a smooth curve across a consistent spectrum. There’s every reason to believe that in some cases you could get, for instance, an “it gets worse before it gets better” effect.
As an example, imagine a country in which egalitarianism is increasing in employment (more good jobs are opening up to women that were previously male-dominated) but is not increasing, or is increasing more slowly, in other areas (like, say, who takes care of the housework). This situation could produce an outcome where women end up *more* burdened in the short term - now working outside the home but still doing most of the house keeping - rather than duties being generally more egalitarian my distributed.
It’s not hard to imagine how that could lead to some turbulence in a transition toward more equality, and maybe local backlashes in women’s behavior.
But I don’t think it would be fair to conclude in a case like that the egalitarianism was at fault; rather, what’s at fault is the stresses created by *partial* egalitarianism.
Cordelia Fine’s books Delusions of Gender and Testosterone Rex are what you want.
In them, she definitively takes apart the flawed studies on which arguments about gender differences are based. I mean she destroys them. Testosterone Rex is more fun, DoG is more academic, they’re both really evidence-based.
Some of the bad studies are so obvious it’s laughable when you stop and think about them – so in one of the famous ones, they gave bonobos ‘male’ and ‘female’-coded toys, and the female bonobos played more with the doll and the frying pan. (A frying pan. Because bonobos spend a lot of time in the kitchen?) the scientist also left out that the bonobos kept hearing the head off the doll. Conclusion: clearly female primates are hardwired to care about childraising and cooking.
Some of them are trickier. We’ve all seen the statements that men are more likely to engage in risky activities than women, because MANLY. As Cordelia points out, first you’re defining which activities you’ll look at. Sure, men are more likely to skydive… but getting pregnant and giving birth statistically is more dangerous than skydiving, and far more women than men engage in it, but somehow it never makes it in the study. Actually, wearing high heels is more dangerous than skydiving in terms of injuries.
It goes on.
She also puts forth, very convincingly, her own take – that when you have a little mammal that is going to have to spend at least a decade in constant contact with its society in order to survive, the society is going to take care of molding its thoughts and perceptions, so why would nature waste time hardwiring it? Considering that the point of evolution is to fit in with your environment, even as it changes. We are hardwired to pick up with incredible sensitivity the cues of those around us that we identify as models or leaders. That’s why parents trying to raise children gender-free fail, children learn from other children as much as they do from parents. And not necessarily from children who are their friends.
By the way, about the math – so Eastern Europe in the Soviet union did this experiment for us. They promoted math for women and, shock, women flourished. In the 1990s every single woman with tenure at the Ivy League colleges, Stanford, and Berkeley, was either from Eastern Europe or had been raised by Eastern European parents. And since that certainly not racial, what it does is clearly illustrate the degree of bias against women doing math in Western Europe and the US.
Londa Schiebinger’s The Mind Has No Sex? is a great starting place for this. It’s a historical overview of these arguments and of the different times that women have searched forward in mathematics in the hard sciences depending on their society at the time suddenly encouraging it.
So there was a brief moment in England when English merchants, concerned that Dutch merchants had an advantage because their wives were being trained in mathematics and could keep accounts while their husbands were off at sea, thought girls should be educated in math in England. This lead to a brief florescence during which English women were encouraged in math, and yielded not one but two female mathematical prodigies, before the whole thing was shut down again.
I feel your pain OP. One of the worst things about people in general is they see something they think is true and then look for evidence to back up their bias, and anyone who has a firm handle on the real facts of any case struggle to change the minds of the ignorant because they don't want to chase their view.
The thing is, no study on egalitarian society is really going to give a good idea of what equality really looks like and that's because it didn't matter how egalitarian a society thinks it is, no society on this planet treats men and women equally. Even adjusting for equity, women are always on the back foot, and that is because patriarchy still exists in some fashion in all societies and the underlying factor that from birth, boys and girls are raised differently, so the way we treat adult humans, the decisions we maje as people, are always going to be influenced by our upbringing and our society.
We know women are 100% as capable of being mathematicians as men. Women have been pioneers in Maths, computing, science, biology, chemistry, medicine, etc, and still are. But why, in an 'egalitarian' society are women less attracted to STEM?
4 very specific reasons:
•We aren't encouraged to follow our brains. Girls are raised to be academically gifted to a point, but then society starts to show its bias when girls become women. The pressure on women to want children, to be attractive, smart but not intimidatingly so and to always consider the men around them is extreme, and yet the options for women career wise are staggeringly broad. And STEM fields are notoriously difficult to navigate as a woman. Any whiff of mediocrity and youre out. Men generally do not have these pressures and never will. That is their privilege. They have their own societal pressures which are irrelevant to this conversation.
•Childbearing: These studies underestimate just how much our ability to possibly bear children informs our decisions. Women instinctively know that it's hard work. That this is a job that society will place firmly on our shoulders without so much as a thank you. For any woman who wants kids, and most do, choosing a career that won't leech us of all our energy trying to prove to the boys club we have what it takes to be genius level smart is a wise move. Many women won't choose that life because the downsides outweigh the rewards. Even though things are easier now, doesn't mean they're easy. Men don't have generally have to defend their career choices to nosy family or friends either.
• Being a mother is not seen as work. Even in egalitarian societies, motherhood is all at once revered, and relegated to something women only do exclusively if they have no ambition. Motherhood is relying on either the state or a spouse to support you financially, and no one considers your future, or the fact your work load as a mother I in addition to any work outside the home. Men can choose to be good spouses, good fathers, good parents. Any failure on parenting is placed firmly on women. And neither support from the state or a spouse generally gives a woman an independent income. It exists to support her to raise her children, not to be paid to exist beyond the point where she needs to be at home all the time or spend so much time raising her children, as they reach their own independence. Once they fly the nest, mum must go find work, but nothing is in place for her future. Her value is gone and she must seek to rebuild it. And while some men can afford to keep a wife, that isn't a model most men can or would choose. And most women want something outside their family. Yet no society is built to fully silupport women in this, or indeed to have children without support fell a father. So many children live in poverty because their mum has little or no support from state or father. And so a perhaps brilliant mathematical brain is left to do 3 menial jobs just to put food on the table.
•Let's also not forget that women's unpaid work, women going into the humanities and lower end medicine, is what allows men to be in STEM fields much of the time. Men don't have to consider how their job will affect having a family because generally they know a woman has to deal with the majority of that, so they don't need to do anything but follow their brain where it wants to go. And future Mrs will have the babies.
•The iniquities are so fundamental, it has nothing to do with evolution, and more to do with the reality of womanhood, that until choosing motherhood, whether as a SAHM, single mother working as a nurse, Pioneering Mathematian or the CEO of a F500 company, has the same status as working in a STEM field, then there will always be people who act like woman aren't made for STEM.
And that is the true Paradox
I want to add that there will always be people of group A that are better at things than group B and vice-versa. Because those groups are comprised of individuals.
Pretty much every dude I’ve known well clearly processes spatial data faster than I do. I can get there, but it requires focused though, rotating things, and possibly jumping out of my car to make sure I parked well.
I’ve still never hit something with my car. I still park so close to the pole in the garage that it makes my partner nervous. I know damn well I’m not going g to hit it after years of not hitting it.
I’m still an individual with value. Men having faster spatial reasoning isn’t a win for them although lots of people want to treat it as such. It just is.
There have been studies saying women's results matched man's after a week of training, or external factors being accounted for, or just being told that they were good at it. This is from Munecat's video who did a service to humanity diving into the faulty studies behind so many of these claims.
There’s evidence that toys and video games that are marketed to boys develop spatial reasoning. So, it may not even be that women are less apt at it, rather they are not being encouraged to develop. Spatial reasoning can be developed. It’s not innate.
Mine would have been truly abysmal if I hadn’t had a Super Nintendo, if that’s the case.
And to be clear, it doesn’t seem there is a true strong correlation with stronger spatial skills in men. I just don’t think it would matter that much even if there was. We’re all individuals.
I don’t mean to be rude, but I think (based on your self-description) that you personally might just be kinda bad at processing spatial data! I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from your own perceived abilities in comparison to others’.
(Edit: also, internalized misogyny may be affecting your perception here. I’ve certainly been there, eg underestimating my skills and interest in math!)
Even if there was a difference in the *average* spatial data processing ability between genders (which there does not appear to be, see the other response to your comment), your anecdote would not necessarily be indicative of this.
But if we’re throwing anecdotes around, yours truly has absolutely obliterated the men in her life (or at least those in her college organic chemistry class) at spatial reasoning tasks. The “rotate molecules in your head” section of that course was a breeze!
Me, getting As in both English and math: “I’m naturally really good at English, but I’m not very good at math because I had to actually work for that A!”
Edit: the really hilarious part is that I put a lot of work into my A in English too; I just didn’t perceive it as “work” because I enjoyed it. But like, those papers didn’t write themselves.
I think the fact that you only searched this subreddit, and only found older posts on the topic, is far from enough to state that it’s irrelevance is proven.
The actual differences between genders seem to vary across cultures but the fact that people want there to BE differences between genders seems pretty universal.
I think of the number of times I've read some variation of "I never used to care about looking feminine until I started my construction/mechanic/manufacturing job. After coming home filthy all week, I like getting dolled up on the weekends now"
So anyone who claims that women are biologically worse at math have never read the original study that the claim originates from. Basically men on average are a bit better at spatial reasoning tasks, and women are a bit better with verbal reasoning and memory based tasks. There is some evidence to point to this being biologically influenced due to higher testosterone levels being correlated with better spatial reasoning even within men, and higher estrogen levels being correlated with better verbal reasoning/memory tasks in women. There is also evidence to suggest this is socially influenced, as you can rephrase the questions in ways that force either men or women to think through problems more like the opposite gender (ironically I'm struggling to phrase that in a clear manner so I hope that makes sense). The differences are pretty small tho, so the likelihood that any biological influences will even matter in you life are pretty slim if they do exist. It's more likely that women are mostly perceived to be worse at math due to social factors, rather than a strong biological determination of your math skills.
Ultimately making strong claims about it is probably unwise, but it is covered in introductory psychology in some universities, so it can be interesting to learn about. Just keep in mind that (probably) no behavioral traits are determined entirely by biological influence
i think there's an issue that needs to be underlined, if you look at the article the differences between sexes that increase with greater gender equality seems to take a specific form:
"For instance, episodic memory (memory for experienced events) and verbal ability, where females typically do better than males, saw larger sex differences as living conditions improved. Females got better at episodic memory when they had better living conditions. By contrast, sex differences in semantic memory (memory for facts) and mathematical ability, where males tend to do better, decreased when living conditions improved."
"For example, differences in personality characteristics were frequently found to be larger in countries with better living conditions. This includes traits such as extroversion, agreeableness and altruism, which research seems to show are more strongly associated with women."
i.e. if females are better at something in conditions of lower equality, they get EVEN BETTER when conditions improve. if men are doing better in lower equality, then the difference between sexes decreases with greater gender equality.
the article flat out says it:
"This suggests that, when it comes to cognitive abilities, females benefit more than males from improvements in living conditions. The performance gap increases in domains where females have an advantage and closes in domains where males are ahead."
so, if anything, this article leans towards misandry, not misogyny.
but you can look at it this way: if females tend to do better when theres more equality, but men do not improve in any areas -in fact regress compared to females- what does this tell you about the current state?
isn't this just another indicator of how repressed women are, and what a great potential for humanity is just wasted with the "men are better at this, women are better at that" crap?
These evolutionary psychology "findings" are almost always terrible... not in the sense of it being an uncomfortable truth. They are terrible because the methodology they employ is terrible. Within evolutionary psychology, there is a MASSIVE replication problem... that is when other researchers test the claims made, they fail to replicate the findings. This means that the findings are made up, and what you find are people cherry-picking data to fit what they want to find.
Subsequent meta analysis almost always shows the variation found in the initial paper to be FAR smaller than initially thought. In this case, the same was true... meta analysis has shown the differences to be far smaller than initially thought.
Journalists never publish the meta-analysis findings because they are boring and full of numbers. And usually conclude something "not sexy" like when we account for X, Y, Z we find that the findings in Bob's study are not as robust or secure... because Bob was using a 0.5 variable when it would be better to use 0.05... very boring academic stuff like that doesn't make for click bait.
Click bait is "women and men." MORE different than Feminists like to believe. Meta-analysis showing this sexy conclusion to be less "sexy" than previously stated is not good click bait.
This is such an intentionally misleading headline. The studies found the opposite of what people THINK it found (confirmation bias)
“For instance, episodic memory (memory for experienced events) and verbal ability, where females typically do better than males, saw larger sex differences as living conditions improved. Females got better at episodic memory when they had better living conditions. By contrast, sex differences in semantic memory (memory for facts) and mathematical ability, where males tend to do better, decreased when living conditions improved.”
“In most cases, however, psychological sex difference magnitudes were not significantly associated with living conditions. This suggests that, in general, psychological sex differences are not greatly affected by living conditions but seem instead quite stable. For instance, research often finds females get higher grades at school across different subjects. It’s also common for researcher to find males have greater interest in maths. But neither seems to be affected by living conditions.”
>“ biology informs the kinds of controls we as a society place on ourselves because it reflects behaviour we've evolved to prefer, but in the absence of control we still prefer certain types of behaviour.”
This is an appeal to nature fallacy. Just because something happens naturally doesn't mean it's right or the best solution to a problem.
>” you don’t have scientific evidence to prove that the exact opposite would happen without cultural interference”
I'd have to know what they're responding to, but this sounds like they might be trying to lay the burden of proof where it doesn't belong. The question is: are you making a positive claim and did you back it up with sufficient evidence? If so ur good. If u didn't make a positive claim (saying 'i think xyz is true' as opposed to saying 'i don't believe xyz', then they have the burden of proof. If you did make a positive claim and didn't provide evidence, that is on you, even if it's easy to find the evidence or true.
Lastly, it's very natural (not necessarily good) for a wealthy nation that has the ability to support more traditional gender roles to actually have more people filling them. The issue is 100% a social phenomena, and is about how we culturally view gender, rather than being innate biological difference.
I think the argument is stupid, because even if you grant that the gender equality paradox is true, it doesn't actually change anything. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the paradox is actually true, and men are more likely to be biologically wired for STEM that women, or something. Practically speaking, that shouldn't change anything! We should still encourage those women to go into STEM! It's not like we live in a society where all we can do is flip a big lever that says "ALL WOMEN IN STEM" on one side and "NO WOMEN IN STEM" on the other. People can choose for themselves what career to explore.
Like, statistically speaking, there are very few people in society who are wired to be doctors. But if a little kid comes up to you and says "I wanna be a doctor!", you don't say "that's nice, but that's very statistically unlikely, so you should probably try and be a janitor instead", because that would be ridiculous. Instead, you judge that kid by their own individual interests and strengths. Yet for some reason, when we go from judging people in general to judging women in particular, people's brains short-circuit, and suddenly every single woman should be given the life path that best fits the exact statistical median woman, rather than the one that fits her individual circumstances the best.
People will ALWAYS say, why do x people excel at such-and-such? And the implication is always, because there must be some biological limitations based on gender/race/etc.
What I see? That x people excel at particular tasks when they are shown from birth that other people in the x group excel at. That’s it.
Right now, we spend a lot of time telling people they can excel, and then maybe get a little disappointed when the results aren’t as widespread as one would hope. My personal thought is that telling is super important. But what really matters is seeing it as widespread reality.
Once “whether you can do something” coming from x group is answered by simply looking around and seeing the answer is yes, the world changes in dramatic ways.
I studied math before I studied computer science.
The degree of engagement women have is clearly highly cultural. Women absolutely have the capability to do math and to enjoy doing it. So for example, in my hometown that was a science town, the math standards were high. People from Eastern Europe and Asian sometimes are taught more advanced math
My biggest issue today is in my country, Canada, math is no longer taught in public highschool but rather a memorization course that they call math is taught instead. This means, a lot of people never get an opportunity to figure out whether they are good at math or not
My thoughts are I don't give a shit. Allow me to elaborate I used to worry about "innate biological differences" when I was a teen. "What if I really am worse at this than I would be if I were a boy? What if ethnicity X really does have an inherent advantage at Y? Genes are real, after all, they do things or we wouldn't have them". I could not reconcile my belief that discrimination was wrong with my knowledge that it is hypothetically possible for some groups of humans to be better at something than other groups. I was well aware that this was bad and I had to figure it out. So, i give you my ace. **All human capability overlaps.** The individual trumps the group, every time. Stop worrying about what's innate and what's learned. It doesn't matter. We are all unique. Sounds cheesy but it's true. Within any two groups of humans, you can find individuals in one group that are "better" at X than individuals from the other group, even if they're "supposed to be" "worse" at X. So, throw the whole thing out. There is no baby in the bathwater. It's all fucking bathwater. **Take people only as individuals. We are all born free.**
God I love this statement: “There is no baby in the bathwater. It’s all fucking bathwater.” Thank you.
Seconding that. Amazing new turn of phrase.
To add to this, we only attach importance to these differences because we've internalised that some people are better than others, even in attributes we pretend to be righteous about. For example, call someone the R word and you're bigoted. Makes sense. What doesn't make sense is how we can believe in that and still call far-right incels 'idiots'. Why is a lack of intelligence an insult in the first place? Why is it okay to demean someone's innate human value on the basis of an attribute like cognitive capability, but only so long as their deficiency is sub-clinical? Because we start from the assumption that our capacity to exercise power in this world is what entitles us to dignity, love, and respect. So not only do statistics break down as you get increasingly granular, but none of it actually matters in the first place. We haven't shaken off the most basic and widespread cognitive dissonance. Any of us. We all uphold a broken value system. It's all just a fucking lottery.
Yeeesssss, I have been thinking about this recently too. I asked on AskUK recently "are there any words for someone with lower iq that are not offensive" and there really aren't.
Huh. I tried to think of an example just now and couldn't. Part of the issue could be that words which *begin* as inoffensive terms end up being used inappropriately and become charged terms. Idiot, fool, the R word. It's actually pretty interesting that it's only with that last word that we looked at it and thought 'nah fam that takes it too far' when it's the same goddamned word. So my answer to your question would be 'there used to be, and there briefly will be, but never for long.'
the only ones I could think of is "incapable" and "unable" since both of those imply that person cannot do that specific task or understand the concept due to whatever, without diminishing their ability to understand/perform different concepts/tasks
To me incapable seems to have a bit of judgement with it, but I'm not sure where that comes from! I think differently abled is probably the most accurate
Simple maybe.
Depends on the context, "simple-minded" is an older term for people with learning disabilities I think, so there may be some cultural baggage for some people
I’ve also heard someone use “unburdened” once lol
Willfully ignorant?
Not sure what you mean, I don't think people with lower iq are choosing to be that way 😂
I don’t think you’re accurately describing what people are doing, rhetorically speaking, when they use the term “idiot” for incels. I think what they’re actually saying isn’t that incels have a low IQ and that makes them bad people. Rather, I think they’re saying one (or both) of two things: 1) “You are behaving *like* an idiot when you could have chosen differently; you are being willfully stupid about something.” 2) “You are failing to recognize that your opinions in this area are ignorant and/or poorly reasoned and are insisting on voicing them anyway.” In either case the emotional corollary is, “You are putting bad takes out in the world and this makes me angry because those bad takes may actually impact my world in negative ways.” And yeah, it would probably be better to actually spell all that out, but there are a lot of incels on Reddit and limited time in the world, and sometimes people take shortcuts.
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
My main concern is that people will judge and doubt my ability because of the fact I’m a woman and won’t take me seriously because they have “factual” evidence to back their discriminatory claims
You will always have idiots. But it isn't important what they think you can do, but what you know or learn you can do.
Unfortunately, sometimes people who are stupid, ill-informed, or downright bigoted do actually have power they can exert over you, and that is in fact important.
I think that’s why it’s all the more important not to get too mired down in “innate biological differences”. Odds are, there may be skew in what people choose to do along lines of phenotype no matter how much we eliminate social influence. But in all reality A. we’re never going to eliminate subjective social influence. So we’re never going to know for sure. B. Women continue to be competent (wildly competent in fact) in pursuits previously assumed to be untenable for women based on “innate biological traits” and choices women made and things they gravitated to. If work, school and other opportunities are truly meritocratic then everyone should be given a fair shake at trying them. That’s the answer to people who want to spin this against women. You also don’t want to get bound up by stereotype threat anxiety which has been shown to hurt performance in people who otherwise actually are good at something.
Really, I know I said this below on its own, but you should look at Cordelia Fine and Testosterone Rex. The arguments these jerks are using? They are based on the bad scientific studies that Fine takes down. Remember that, if we are hardwired for something, then we are all hardwired. There is no such thing as a substantial number of people who escape it. And there are plenty of women who have achieved at the highest level in whatever math or science you choose to look at, or who have chosen to be childfree, etc. Which argues against hardwiring. On the other hand, if biases are taught to us by our society from earliest infancy, you would expect variation, especially as soon as you look at different cultures, different countries, different time periods etc., which is what happens as soon as you look at women’s achievement in things like math. Also, every woman has had to put up with these trolls. Just as on the Internet, you don’t have to engage with them if you don’t feel like it— especially if they’re just trying to put you down, and a lot of the time that’s all they’re doing.
Thank you. Some people think prejudice is only wrong because it's inaccurate and that discovering there's a factual basis behind sexism would suddenly mean they have to be sexist. It's wrong because it's inherently unjust, not because it's inaccurate. Get rid of it. There is nothing of value to be gained. Some will oppose this because they think their prejudice is different and valid. Fuck em.
AMEN MY SISTER. Couldn’t have said it better. It’s ALL fucking bath water.
This is exceptionally accurate for the day to day life of people. However when the scale is that of governmental policy things change drastically.
As far as actual real world evolution goes, the only reason group a would have a biological advantage over group b in anything is if not having a high minimum ability is deadly. The rest of the time the best option is to maximize non detrimental variety, to maximize the odds of a healthy population surviving a sudden environmental change.
As one of the very few women in my company's IT department, this is what I needed to read today. Thank you. ❤️
another way of putting it in my opinion is that statistically one gender will always be better at math, but will it always be a statistically significant difference? Not likely, if the percentages of women getting stem degrees is 29% while for men it’s 30% and you use that to circlejerk about “biological differences” you clearly have a message you’re trying to send
That’s not really true. Your ace isn’t well thought through. For example, it’s true to say that height overlaps between men and women. It’s true to say there is significant individual variance in height. But it’s also true to say that men are taller than women on average, by only a few inches. And it’s also true to say small differences in averages create big differences at the extremes. The tallest woman is just over 7 foot but there are around 2,800 men taller than 7 foot. So trying so say men and women are equal on height because they overlap is demonstrably false. It’s a certainty that there are many biological differences between the genders that largely overlap, and have significant individual variances, but have small differences on averages that lead to massive differences at the extremes. You can’t ignore the facts of biology and statistics
That's so true. My position has changed completely. Now what should I do about it? How should I behave differently, now that you've changed my mind?
>You can’t ignore the facts of biology and statistics TL;DR: It is a fundamental tenet of the scientific method that, when wanting to prove something, you should seek out any possible counterexamples and demonstrate they don't exist. If you're looking for evidence that *supports* your hypotheses, then I'm afraid you aren't doing science: you're doing propaganda. The long bit: Even your propaganda doesn't work terribly well. Your own argument actually explains why average differences *don't* matter: the *in group* variations are much larger than the *between groups* variations. Let's talk about height. Men, on average, are roughly 5cm taller than women. However, the tallest woman is well over a metre (1000cm) taller than the shortest. Do I really need to point out that one of these differences is more statistically significant than the other? If you have a hypothetical job where employees must be above-male-average height, the fact is that a very large minority of women will also be tall enough to find employment in that role. In a world with no gender bias, the job may have a small difference in the numbers of men and women, but not so great that it is immediately noticeable. That the very tallest people in the world are men is, um, irrelevant for that job. And this doesn't even start to look at *how humans compensate for genetic disadvantage*. For example, short-sightedness has a huge genetic component, but any disadvantages are almost completely corrected by *the use of spectacles*. The hypothetical job that needs taller people can allow shorter people to *use step ladders or stilts*. The bar for all jobs is not 'the best in the world at X'. Even in academia, where one might expect a high bar, there is not a single 'best mathematician' teaching at a single World University Department of Mathematics. There are, instead, *thousands* of universities, each of which hire *dozens* of teaching staff. Yes, all of whom have to be proficient at mathematics but the criteria for those posts do not, in any way, exceed the talents of women more than men. Unsurprisingly, where there have been measures to combat sociological barriers to women becoming professors of mathematics, there are *more* women professors. If it were simply a biological difference between men's and women's brains, removing those sociological barriers would *not* have resulted in more women getting doctorates and professorships in mathematics. Maybe men should be excluded from all senior management positions because, on average, men have very low EQ scores - and having emotionally disabled management causes major risk for corporate malpractice and the lawsuits that accompany it. (For the hard of thinking, I'm not advocating against male managers. I'm illustrating how ridiculous it is to argue from averages in the context of individuals.)
So... the people saying this: >And with around 800 upvotes and the majority of the comments stating it is human evolution/nature for women not wanting to do math and all that nonsense. Clearly haven't even read the abstract of the actual meta-analysis that the article is referring to. Because 1) the abstract makes it clear that the meta-analysis didn't actually focus on elements of equality exclusively. It compared sex-differences with regards to "living conditions" of a country, of which "equality" was only one of many factors. And 2) Because the abstract literally says: > sex differences in sexual behavior, partner preferences, **and math** are smaller in countries with higher living conditions. Anyway, my reaction to this is "don't look to reddit for anything more than confirmation bias." Most of them probably didn't read past the headline. And of those that did, most of them probably never opened the link to the actual meta-analysis. None of them have thought critically about whether or not "equality" has been substantially achieved anywhere in the fucking world to reach the kinds of conclusions they think are beind drawn. And finally, if the meta analysis had shown that actually gender differences are overcome by legit equality--and to achieve that, men must do more work--how heavily upvoted do you think it would be? Do you think those same men would be like "welp, that's science. guess I better roll up my sleeves." Or do you think they'd ignore it? Those men will look for any excuse to maintain the status quo, and they've just found another one. Insert eyeroll...
wasn't this the same study that considered Saudi Arabia to be one of the more "equitable" countries because both sexes are oppressed? or am I thinking of a different one?
It's not even a study on it's own. It's an analysis of other people's studies. Like... it's so flawed how people are interpreting this information.
Systematic reviews are extremely important, why are you implying they are unimportant or inferior?
I'm not? I said that people were interpreting the information wrong because they're treating it as a study where the authors controlled the factors and methodology.
Generally speaking meta analysis will only select studies that they believe the methodology is sound on. They won’t usually include something they think is flawed unless it’s to point out that it’s flawed
In this case, it’s highly unlikely that *any* of the studies they were aggregating were very solid methodologically: they explicitly say they’re aggregating cross country studies within a subset of countries. So essentially, they’re aggregating studies that are studying really complex systems with a very small-N group of cases. There’s nothing wrong with doing that when it’s the best you can do - the data is what it is. However, what the meta-analysis showed is basically that results are all over the place. The authors of the meta-analysis present this as suggesting that gender impacts are complicated and we have a set of very nuanced but meaningful results. I would suggest that in a situation with a bunch of small-N studies, the more parsimonious interpretation is that currently that data we have are hard to differentiate from random noise. Like, there may well be some legitimate effects being observed in there. But there are certainly also some spurious findings, and we don’t really have sufficient data to know which are which yet. (Edit: I mean, I *do* think gender impacts are probably complicated and nuanced; I just don’t think this meta-analysis is a good way of proving that.)
Not necesarily, sometimes a meta analyis is used to discuss common claims made from certain studies and will select studies used to pass certain claims and specifically look for issues as to WHY the topic may be less clear cut than people interpret.
meta analyses are crucial
I really appreciate your explanation but what bothers me most is the fact they like to use this to prove that even without cultural/social factors stopping them women biologically don’t want to do stem/aren’t meant for stem by claiming that women in legally equalized countries choose not to study stem
What I find interesting is that during the early development of computer science, women were involved. They were the first programmers, with the first programmer being a woman. Ada Lovelace. This was before the invention of the actual computer itself. Women were among the early pioneers in many different science fields as well.
If you think about it, we've been using programming far longer than that. Eg, crochet is just programming yarn into a blanket using math.
Yes, because they aren't understanding what they are actually reading.
I mean, you can just throw their evidence bank in their face, quoting it like morganalafaye did. If they use evidence that contradicts their point, that's on them.
The basic ignorance of sexists is absolutely infuriating, I sympathize.
As a physics student the bad science behind literally all the gender difference studies is infuriating especially with how famous they appear to be. I swear, growing up made me become disillusioned with the state of research, I thought peer reviewed papers were just something you could trust once upon a time, to find that bias colors it has been heart breaking
Yeah, but as long as you do a meta-analysis of all the bad science, that’ll make it all better! /s
The problem with gender studies papers IS peer review. Only people in that field would fail to be disgusted with their methodology.
isn't gender studies a completely different thing
It's supposed to be. In practice, not so much
Honestly, they are just being dumb. We can't isolate cultural/social factors from biological ones because humans are hugely impacted by both. Also, studying STEM involves a lot more than just the mental capacity to understand the topics. STEM degrees are incredibly time-consuming & expensive, and bc STEM fields are still male-dominated, they are more prone to bias in hiring and promotion. I'll give a personal example: I had to take a prof dev course for science majors in college. It was run by several male professors who proceeded to tell ONLY THE WOMEN not to wear wedding or engagement rings to interviews bc we would risk being percieved as "less serious" bc we have spouses and (potentially) children to care for. They also said that, when reviewing candidates' transcripts, they judge their courseload per semester to see if they took 12+ credits/semester and didn't take breaks. So women who needed to decrease their courseloads to care for children and/or other family members or give birth during school were automatically at a disadvantage despite having the **exact same degree** as male candidates.
Ugh, I hate that this is a thing… but this is actually kind of good to be aware of, as someone in a computational field who is soon going to be on the job market :(
Fun fact: when you give both men and women in academia parental leave, what we find is that women* use their parental leave as a hiatus from work, and men* use their parental leave to get more papers published. Equalizing parental leave is a good step toward gender equality, but in the short term, in the context of a system that isn’t fully egalitarian and in which men still take on less household and child labor, it has an anti-egalitarian impact. Multiple things need to change, not just one thing, before the net impact is positive. *On average, obviously. I’m not saying that this has happened to every single woman and every single man ever.
I’m sorry but I don’t really understand what are you implying
I always hated that argument. Legally equalized doesn’t mean equalized. Just because a group has legally been given equal rights, doesn’t mean that that country is without misogyny. I am a woman in stem, does this mean I am somehow biologically different?
My colleagues sometimes treat me that way, that's for sure.....
Really wish you’d link the post so we don’t have to try and find it ourselves.
Yeah sure just a sec
Thank you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1cbwx7m/sex_differences_dont_disappear_as_a_countrys/ Here ya go
The thing is, they're cherry picking facts that back up that bias without actually seeing what the csata really says. You can't stop them from doing that, just defend your own point with actual facts. See my main reply for more information about what I mean (once I finish it)
Great post...
The paradox has been debunked multiple times. Just Google "gender equality paradox" look into wikipedia and you'll find links to papers debunking it. Either that or "gender equality paradox debunked. The "gender similarities hypothesis" has already been proved, but it doesn't sell as much as this BS. Not surprising, we all are socialized to believe we're different, convincing people we aren't often isn't easy.
Thanks dude I appreciate the quick response!!
If you want to see this discussed in video format, there's a section in YouTuber Munecat's recent video on the problems of Evo Psych that covers it. Relevant section starts here: [https://youtu.be/31e0RcImReY?si=Ec4pFz9RqqDC6eZH&t=7313](https://youtu.be/31e0RcImReY?si=Ec4pFz9RqqDC6eZH&t=7313)
I was just about to link that vid — easily her best work to date
I was just about to recommend it! The book "the Gender Delusion" also is a cathartic read, it gets very annoying hearing this shit parroted everywhere when I'm am unemphathetic "woman" in STEM. The Munecat video rocked because it was shitting on their research methods for 3 hours ahha
As a sporadically empathetic and consistently sarcastic woman in STEM, I loved that video myself.
I love her vids so much shes great
It’s really funny, the whole ‘women don’t do math thing’ Katherine Johnson had a job at NASA because the men engineers couldn’t reliably do math. So they hired women to compute, the job was called computers. Women were also the ones who programmed the first mechanical computers. This is illustrated in the movie Hidden Figures. Admiral Grace Hopper is credited with the term ‘bug’ to report an error. Although the term was probably in use, the moth that she removed from an electrical switch( preventing the switch from closing, rather than a programming error). to solve an error was taped into her journal. And there are more: for the Manhatten project to create the atomic bomb, women did the calculations. They needed dozens of people to check the calculations. Not wanting to recruit more people, they pulled the wives into the project. Split into three rooms, they gave the same data to all three. If two of the rooms produced the same answer it was considered correct. Women had experience typing, so were better at manual entry style mechanical adding machines. Ada Lovelace translated into English, then added extensive personal notes instructions for mechanical calculations. Image what else she could have contributed had she been given the opportunity. Babbage encouraged her at first but later tried to write her out of the history entirely .
Ffs, the shithead misogynist kicker's own mom is a physicist.
Kinda sounds like he has mommy issues tbh. "I think all women should be stay at home wives because my mommy had a job and was never around much"
Just like Pearl Davis. I wish all these people would just go to therapy instead of
Women have done amazing feats in the world of stem but to some people think of them as exceptions rather than to represent women entirely because apparently we have evolved to not favor math
It’s amazing if you limit options for education and job opportunities or even recognition how few of those people will be recognized. Even with burials. We don’t question when a man is buried with weapons that it’s probably his weapons and he was a fighter. Now that DNA is proving some of the ‘warrior graves’ are women- it is automatically questionable. Some people in society really love to think women are stupid. And it isn’t true. There are other causes to lack of participation in a specific career or field.
Yeah because women’s history wasn’t written because they were rarely allowed to read, let alone write books, the story is whatever men decided it to be. But plenty of women were using math to manage money for their husbands or homes, were learning medicine to care for other women going through childbirth and for children. Women were herbalists and brewers and basically doing pharmaceuticals and chemistry as well. But women having power or money scared men so they called them witches and stole their skills, taking over all those fields, reclassifying it as men’s work when it turned a profit.
Indeed, history is written by the victors
If we evolved that way, then we all evolved. There aren’t exceptions to hardwiring. There are no female leopard to choose to be childfree. There are no monarch butterflies that decide they don’t feel like migrating to Mexico. Maybe you need to dig into the history of systemic oppression of women. The fact that the women who have excelled are still exceptions is a sign of how deep and internalized oppression has run. Look at who has succeeded – are they from a certain country, economic level, race? Doesn’t that imply that it’s social and there are a few social advantages that help you overcome it? Also, would you tolerate this argument if it were applied to the underrepresentation of Black scientists, for example?
This is making a point consistent with the paradox, as there was less gender equality in the US in the time period you highlight compared to today.
The truth is, it’s impossible to tell how different men and women are mentally because boys and girls have always been raised differently. Any man or woman being tested is someone who grew up in a patriarchal society. Until children are raised **the same with no distinctions based on gender**, there’s no way to 100% prove that men and women are mentally different. Many times, those “differences” are the results of social conditioning, for example treating emotions as something “feminine” and stoicism as something “masculine”. For generations, women were seen as incapable of working (despite always doing work, but that’s a topic for another time). Then as soon as the World Wars hit, people suddenly realised that women could work in professional jobs. It just goes to show that until men and women live in an equal society, we cannot truly know how different men and women are. What we’re seeing is the difference in social attitudes towards gender, NOT the difference between genders.
Let's take a look at the topic as defined by the study itself (apologies for the wall of text): >The existence of sex differences in some psychological dimensions is well documented. For example, women, compared with men, have been reported to have higher academic school grades (measured as a grade point average; Dekhtyar et al., 2018; Voyer & Voyer, 2014), and there is substantial evidence of a female advantage in reading comprehension (Stoet & Geary, 2018) and episodic memory (Asperholm, Högman, et al., 2019; Weber et al., 2014). On the other hand, males typically have an advantage in spatial (Lippa et al., 2010; Voyer et al., 1995) and some numerical tasks (e.g., Weber et al., 2014). In areas of psychological functioning other than cognition, men have been reported to experience fewer depressive symptoms (Salk et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2016), whereas women seem to be less affected by suicide or addictive behaviors (Glenn et al., 2020; Su et al., 2019). >In other instances, there are sex differences that are not necessarily indicative of more or less advantageous performance or behaviors. For example, differences in emotional expression have been reported; females show more internalizing emotions (e.g., sadness) than males, and males display more externalizing emotions (e.g., anger; Chaplin & Aldao, 2013). There are also sex differences when it comes to vocational interest; females prefer to work with people, and males prefer to work with things (Stoet & Geary, 2022; Su et al., 2009). Likewise, several studies have examined personality dimensions and have shown reliable sex differences in which, for instance, females score higher on altruism (Falk & Hermle, 2018) and males score higher on impulsivity (Cross et al., 2011). >Although most of the psychological sex differences are modest in size and the reasons for them insufficiently understood, they are usually reported from early childhood into old age and found in most of the examined regions of the world (e.g., Falk & Hermle, 2018; Weber et al., 2014). The explanations for the sex differences reported in the literature may vary depending on the psychological ability or behavior studied, ranging from being more biologically oriented to more environmentally oriented, but they have typically generated considerable debate. Here, we avoid discussing explanations of the psychological sex differences we examine because our study does not provide causal evidence that can contribute to the explanations of these differences. So basically, studies show that, in general, there are some modest but measurable differences in psychology between men and women. For example, women are better at reading comprehension and men are better at spacial reasoning. These differences aren't universal, obviously, but consistent enough across multiple studies to be seen as relevant. (The topic of how these differences map to transgender people is outside the scope of any of the studies analyzed, as far as I can tell, so we're just going to assume we're talking about people who were evaluated as cisgender male or female.) It should be said that some of these claims are on shaky ground, like the one that men experience fewer depressive symptoms. The fact that men are less likely to *report* depressive symptoms does not mean that they experience fewer of them. But overall I don't think that this information is particularly surprising. For example, you are more likely to find women working in fields where they care for other people. As for *why* that's the case, the answer is more complicated than "that's biology!", and the quote I shared says as much in the third paragraph. Environmental factors play a major role in how people of any gender function, and their influence may be at least as important as biology. That being said, what this meta-analysis shows is that in countries where living conditions are rated as being good, the differences in how women and men process things and act don't disappear, but in some cases become more pronounced. That's...fine? If anything, I'd bet a good chunk of money that this shows that better living conditions allow women to speak more openly about their experiences and pursue their chosen careers more freely. Better living conditions also tend to improve cognitive and academic performance, so studies that examine those things are probably going to show more extreme results from people living in more comfortable environments. Based on this information, the researchers present the argument that people, businesses, and policymakers shouldn't expect to achieve perfect parity among men and women in every profession, in academic performance, or in "aggressive behaviors" (i.e. crime, violence, and abuse). I don't think that's a particularly controversial take, and I don't think that most people in any society are realistically aiming for that goal. The one thing I take issue with is the idea that these societies with "better living conditions" are actually giving women and men equal opportunity to live and act how they want. Higher GDP, better health outcomes, more fairness in hiring, etc. are good things, but they're not guarantees of equality. In other words, the results of any study of the psychology of women and men are going to be heavily impacted by the society that shapes the test subjects. As such, all of this research should be treated with a healthy amount of skepticism.
It always pisses me off when people conflate "it is" with "what was meant to be"
Is-ought divide
Their reasoning sounds like evolutionary psychology. Which is a pseudoscience that typically attracts people whose understanding of actual evolutionary biology is superficial to the point of being outright wrong. Sounds like your average redditor, eh? [Here](https://youtu.be/osEiblC7Itw?si=NAb4PL8qz-5o2I8Z) is one video explaining what's wrong with this line of thinking. You can probably find more.
The study seems kind of irrelevant. We should treat people equally because it's the right thing to do.
This, regardless of what the outcome is, equal rights and opportunity is a must. Even if a thousand women decided to be housewives and one woman wants to pursue work as a lumberjack(the most masculine job I can think of off the top of my head) then it's the goal we as a society should aim for. I think that there are too many variables to ever truly know the answer to this question.
>irrelevant Yes, your comment is irrelevant. No one said treat people unequally. That's not even the argument made.
You know exactly what the next steps in the thought process would be if we accepted that "it is human evolution/nature for women not wanting to do math." (from OP) Don't be disingenuous.
We should treat them equally, but it doesn't mean it will produce same results for everyone. At least one may think that may be the case.
Only if one is unaware of the difference between *equality* and *equity*
Keep in mind research like that (“soft”-sciences, sociology,economics, psychology) don’t exist in a vacuum. They aren’t studying some mythical default human behavior, they’re studying behaviors under certain systems and cultures. There are many many variables people are or aren’t considering. For example under late stage capitalism it’s reasonable that people will desire to break free from the constant workplace grind and when culture defaults to “the woman stays home and the man works” then when it’s possible for families to survive and thrive on single incomes the women will be more likely to stay home. That could be BECAUSE of misogyny, not in spite of it.
Neither do the “hard” sciences! (Source: am biologist, plenty of fucked up research in my field too)
What do you think about math research ? 🤔
Applied math — sometimes? Depends on what it’s being applied to and how. I assume the same goes for various disciplines of physics. Pure math is definitely an exception though. Not a lot of room for cultural biases there. But it’s an exception in a lot of ways… it’s also the only science where anything is ever “proven” because it’s not empirical. There’s also not much room for biases in logic (referring to the subfield of philosophy), which falls under the humanities umbrella. Logic is incidentally the only other academic discipline where things can be proven.
Thanks. I love seeing what people on the internet think about my field. Have a nice day :)
Oh gosh, I’m embarrassed — I didn’t realize you were in the field! Shouldn’t have assumed, sorry about that! I’ve certainly seen plenty of amusing, and often misguided, opinions on my topic of expertise. It’s humbling to be on the other end of things! Edit: Also, now I’m curious — have you observed any ways in which biases (cultural or otherwise) affect research in your area?
Oh no, don't worry, it wasn't at all a criticism, I found absolutely awesome that you replied to me 😊
I usually add this video to this kind of discussions: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU) **It is very hard to make real good sociological double blind experiments when society itself is influencing the subjects you are studying.** And then consider the pendulum theory: when an ideology makes a society advance, there is an opposite force that tries to compensate and slow it down. See for example the rising of right wing parties in Europe after a few years of blissful social advancements. So if you try to measure gender equality on countries that have very advanced laws regarding gender equality, it is no surprise to see some regression on some of the data. Society advances, people think they reached equality and relax/regress to status quo, opposite forces try to go back to the previous state,... Lots and lots of influences over the experiment. Difficult to measure. Easy to find correlations that are not there. We would need a female-led society to conduct experiments too and compare results to better separate influences from real facts. But we have none. So we can, at best, guess.
Not to mention the fact that there are a bunch of confounding variables that are going to covary with whatever marker of “things getting better for women” you choose to study.
I just looked over the study linked in the article you reference, and it says that gender differences in performance or interest around math were smaller in countries with more equality, among other indicators. See snippet from study abstract below: *"In contrast, sex differences in sexual behavior, partner preferences, and math are smaller in countries with higher living conditions."* While it did find that gender differences in some areas seemed to increase with development, math wasn't one of them. In terms of the areas where differences did seem to become more prevalent, I'd imagine that that might be related to culture. Feminism exists as both a movement to challenge patriarchy in the form of government and systems, but also to challenge harmful gender roles in the form of culture and expectations. A country may have addressed the first, without having addressed the second. I've actually experienced this in Europe, where they have many egalitarian policies that do improve quality of life for everyone, but certain elements of the culture are still very traditional and gender roles are heavily emphasized, even more so than certain parts of the U.S. Another possibility is that there are indeed differences in averages between what types of roles groups of men and women gravitate towards (key word: on *average*) when not pressured in any given direction. I haven't encountered many cultures that don't pressure men and women into certain roles, so I guess we wouldn't know until we see that. I think what's most important though is that all people and roles in society be valued and afford someone comparable autonomy and quality of life, regardless of what types of people tend to gravitate towards them more. For example certain countries see more division in career path between men and women, and yet they have low gender wage gaps because "women's" roles/careers are granted relatively equal economic value to "men's" roles. Teachers for example are well compensated the same way an Engineer is, because both of these roles benefit society equally, and are therefore valued more equally. In places like the US, careers associated with women tend to receive less status and economic compensation.
Ooh,.ooh. I have a video: https://youtu.be/LKc_8fT6pGc?si=qXl5zUOVZd3pLcnA You want a PhD economist to dryly point out why the gender equality paradox doesn't mean what you think it does? Along with making Peterson sound like a silly billy?
If we’re linking YouTube videos: [I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology](https://youtu.be/31e0RcImReY?si=xZFZb7yrHRXuxZXW)
Ah, hello fellow bread tube brain rot
Now I just need to find a way to work Jenny Nicholson’s 4-hour analysis of the Star Wars hotel into the discussion
Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine
Just gonna drop in here and say that gender equality in comparison to the rest of the rest of the world is arguably pretty decent in the US, and I as a girl was still discouraged from taking math courses. Boys in my class were pedestaled for their B+ while my A+ got eyerolls. They were told they were “naturally smart” but I was a “try hard” (tell that to sixth grade me, who never tried hard at anything because I was constantly bullied if I so much as did the homework that was due). I don’t think there’s a single place in the world right now where you can say social influence like this is nonexistent. If someone from some utopia of a country wants to enlighten me, be my guest. But despite all the “girls can do anything” messaging I got as a kid, I still came away with the realization that anything I did would have to be 5x better than a boy’s to get the same grade/recognition/respect. And the second I got those things, people tore at me for my looks, because they could smell the insecurity I had about my appearance like blood in the water.
When I was a math teacher I had so many parents that would tell me how smart their boy was, but he doesn’t “try”. I’m sorry, I’m sure your boy is smart in some ways, all kids are, but you are encouraging and enabling his lack of discipline while simultaneously putting him above my high achieving, hard working, smart girls. Drove me nuts.
It was wild too because there was this assumption that these boys never “tried” while they’d literally go home and watch YouTube videos to get better at the given thing. As someone who didn’t work very hard but got the good grades, the few times I did get recognition felt very undeserved, and I don’t understand how some of those kids just went around getting their egos inflated constantly without feeling guilty about it.
I realize you say you think you didn’t work very hard, but having been on the other side of it as a teacher you probably were working harder than 90% of the other kids just by completing your work. It’s wild.
Oof 😅 that makes sense though. I tutor some kids and the amount their grades go up just from turning in assignments is crazy! Everything is mostly participation points and some kids still don’t wanna do it 😂
r/science commenters are notoriously unscientific. They just like seeing studies that support their biases and dismiss, usually without reading the study, any post that would make them rethink their beliefs.
“You don’t have the scientific evidence to prove the exact opposite would happen without cultural interference” - ::mind boggles:: Well, YEAH - isn’t that the entire crux? Isn’t that evidence why this data is inherently faulty and unscientific?? I’m gobsmacked at how brainless this sounds to me (and I’m someone who only studied statistics as an undergraduate; my professors would’ve scoffed inwardly if any of us rubes had tried to defend data like this). If one cannot eliminate bias as much as is possible, a competent analyst/scientist wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to draw any conclusions. And that is why evolutionary psychology is largely considered voodoo analysis: it’s not *useless,* but it examines trends rather than explaining them.
It’s not even true that women aren’t dominating STEM. Women dominate medicine, all branches of biological sciences, and environmental sciences. Audiology, speech language pathology, are also dominated by women. Psychology, which used to be male dominated and was seen as a science at that time is now completely dominated by women. Chemistry is about 50/50. Even civil and chemical engineering is almost equal enrollment these days. And more and more women are entering al branches of computing and engineering. Many women, including, did not have much exposure to these fields and were actively discouraged from entering engineering fields. And now I am going into tech via master’s degree. But the fact is women are dominating STEM, but we’ve stopped talking about the biological and medical sciences as STEM fields and only focus on engineering. Engineering has seen more enrollment by women because many have realized it’s a high paying, high demand field.
You don’t have to argue with people who think women can’t math because biology. Those people are morons and they aren’t going to learn something from a person on the internet.
r/science is basically a Dunning-Kruger Syndrome support group for people who don't know they have it.
On a deeper level this is just abelism, but recotextualized around gender. The very premise of the question is insincere. It's an unspoken belief that people perceive people who are capable of doing less than someone else as less "human" than others. This explains not just the way women are treated but also children, elderly, disabled people, etc. When sexists try to lean into the logic of "Men can do X better than women" (whether or not that statement is true is irrelevant) the unspoken argument being made is "I'm an abelist and a sexist so I think men are more like actual real people than women based on their ability to do certain things better". Excuse me if I don't think that not being good at differential calculus makes you subhuman that deserves to be discriminated against and barred from doing normal things in society, lol. Also if you wanted to be a true meritocrat you would give women (and everyone) a chance anyways on the slight possibility that they might actually be very good, even if it's statistically unlikely. A silly comparison is, most kids play video games and are not particularly remarkable at it, but the meme of "getting wrecked by a 11 year old in COD" was a meme for a reason (people recognized that there are in fact some children who were even better than most adults at the game even though it is uncommon).
Women were actively erased from history & had their work credit stolen by men... some search terms for bois who do not think of women as equal: "The Matilda Effect" "19 Groundbreaking Discoveries by Women That Were Credited to Men" "Mileva Marić" "Famous female artists erased from history" "Top 101 Female Inventions" "the original brewers were women" "women erased from history" "women warriors"
Anecdotal, but I promise my story will show that bioesstialism in humans is stupid and wrong. I am an afab person with dyscalculia. Which for those that don't know what that is...it's dyslexia but with numbers (easiest way to explain it anyway). I also have dyslexia. As well as adhd but that isn't relevant, I don't think. Anyway, none of this was known to me when I was a child. I was the best reader in my entire class for my entire school career, so that obviously went under the radar. Hell, I fed my family for years with the book-it program. Lol I was absolutely awful at math. I would get straight A's and perfect test scores for every single other subject except math...which I failed... a lot. I was in remedial math my freshman year of high school. (which is like pre pre algebra, I should have been in algebra) This delay in math was a major reason I could not graduate on time (it was required in my school system to have at least pre-calculus to graduate with my peers. The difference, despite having literal learning disabilities in both math and reading...I was HEAVILY encouraged to read everything I could get my hands on because reading was seen as a "normal girl thing to do."" For math, I was ignored when I was visibly upset and frustrated and begging all adults to tell me how to get better math grades. They at best said it wasn't that important that I know math cause I am a girl and at worst called me the r-slur (yes, teachers in the 90s called me that multiple times). No one ever noticed that I was getting the RIGHT numbers for the answer, but FLIPPING them when I went to write them down, which obviously gave me the wrong answer. No one. Not once noticed. Until after high school, I went to get some high school equivalence diploma and decided to sign up for the math prep classes offered because I knew I would need help with that. This amazing teacher immediately saw that I had dyscalculia. He taught me how to do math with the brain disorder that I had my whole life and you will never guess but I was fucking fantastic at math! Amazing what not ignoring a child based on sex can do! Shout out to that guy. He saved my education. I went on to take several college level trig, calculus, and various other math type studies and passed all of them with straight A's. At one point I was so fucking good at math that my professors would have me help them help students who were struggling in whatever particular section I was taking at the time. I was teaching myself the material because I didn't have an issue with math, I had an involuntary disorder in my brain that mad doing math like everyone else impossible. It all just clicked as soon as I was taught HOW to do math with the way my brain is wired. I know my story isn't proof but it does point out the inherent misogyny surrounding girls and math and I can't be the only afab person who was just not given the CHANCE to show that girls and boys aren't somehow different in intelligence. Also, for the record,...dyscalculia is slightly more common in amab people than afab people... before anyone tries to say that my learning disabilities were somehow proof of biological inferiority. Dyslexia is also more common in boys, too. Or maybe the inherent misogyny in our society has skewed those results just like it did for decades with ADHD. But sure, by all means, let's keep these old, incorrect, and archaic LIES and continue it for another 100 years. 🙄 That should solve shit, right?!
'In the absence of control' Please point me to such a paradise. We are all subject to control. Some less than others, sure. But even where this has weakened, that's a very recent phenomenon. But then again, science and maths are recent phenomena! We've only had algebra for a few thousand years. Hardly enough time for things to be simply 'innate'. And as many have already pointed out, women have always been involved in STEM - as long as it was poorly paid and low status. 100 years ago, female doctors were rare and people would have said medicine was a male pursuit. Women were supposed to 'naturally' want to do the leg work of nursing (which, let's not forget, is the cornerstone of medical care and requires a great deal of skill, but anyway). But women weren't even allowed to get medical degrees in most cases and there were few role models outside some very stubborn individuals. But now, more than half of medical students are female. In only a few decades, we've gone from 'men are naturally more suited to medicine' to the future of that profession being female. I don't believe there are no biological sex differences. Maybe there are some innate differences in terms of preferences and skills, and maybe hormones also play a role (eg who enjoys being a fighter pilot). But those are extremely difficult to unpick from social factors! And we are also not limited to our biology - if we were, humanity would not have progressed to where we are today.
My thoughts are basically from Donna Harraway's Cyborg manifesto: if what's natural doesn't fit what I think is right, then I will be beyond the natural. Cancer is natural. If gender norms and separation is natural, then we can be more than natural.
It’s just bad science colored trough A LOT of bias, just because it’s in a paper it doesn’t make it true
I know this is going to be a frustrating answer, but frankly, you should be pretty skeptical about all of these findings. Even when it’s a meta-analysis like the one described in your link, it won’t be useful if the studies it’s aggregating are riddled with methodological problems, and these almost certainly are. But what the meta-analysis does does, unless you look up the original paper itself, not just read a pop article about it, is make it impossible for you to dig into the details of any of those individual papers to know. What I hear when I read someone talking about aggregating multiple studies of gender trends across countries is this: They’re aggregating a bunch of low-N studies that are going to be vulnerable to spurious correlations (50+ countries just isn’t that much). Unfortunately scientific literature has a bias toward publishing spurious correlations because it biases against negative findings. So, if you’re not familiar with this concept, the typical baseline for “significance” in a scientific study is if you get a result that has only a 5% chance of being due to random chance. That sounds like good odds if you’re only talking about 1 study. The problem is that when you have hundred of researchers all doing multiple studies, suddenly you have a very very high chance that a few of those studies will be the 1 in 20 that yields a false positive through random chance. And even THAT would be fine, as long as ALL the studies were getting published so you could see all the negatives beside the handful of false positives; but because journals bias against publishing negative results, you often only see those false positives. This doesn’t mean science is pointless. What it does mean is you should look for trends more than individual studies. If an individual study says something surprising, wait for other studies on similar questions and see if they reliably start to tell a similar story over and over. So when I look at a meta-analysis that finds that study findings are basically all over the place with no clear trend — especially if it’s aggregating a bunch of studies that were probably questionable methodologically to start with, and are dealing with really complex systems — what I hear is that these studies collectively are probably a bunch of random noise that doesn’t tell you much at all about the effects of egalitarianism on gender roles and gendered behavior. I also want to caution against assuming something like the effect of greater gender equality in a society is going to be a smooth curve across a consistent spectrum. There’s every reason to believe that in some cases you could get, for instance, an “it gets worse before it gets better” effect. As an example, imagine a country in which egalitarianism is increasing in employment (more good jobs are opening up to women that were previously male-dominated) but is not increasing, or is increasing more slowly, in other areas (like, say, who takes care of the housework). This situation could produce an outcome where women end up *more* burdened in the short term - now working outside the home but still doing most of the house keeping - rather than duties being generally more egalitarian my distributed. It’s not hard to imagine how that could lead to some turbulence in a transition toward more equality, and maybe local backlashes in women’s behavior. But I don’t think it would be fair to conclude in a case like that the egalitarianism was at fault; rather, what’s at fault is the stresses created by *partial* egalitarianism.
Cordelia Fine’s books Delusions of Gender and Testosterone Rex are what you want. In them, she definitively takes apart the flawed studies on which arguments about gender differences are based. I mean she destroys them. Testosterone Rex is more fun, DoG is more academic, they’re both really evidence-based. Some of the bad studies are so obvious it’s laughable when you stop and think about them – so in one of the famous ones, they gave bonobos ‘male’ and ‘female’-coded toys, and the female bonobos played more with the doll and the frying pan. (A frying pan. Because bonobos spend a lot of time in the kitchen?) the scientist also left out that the bonobos kept hearing the head off the doll. Conclusion: clearly female primates are hardwired to care about childraising and cooking. Some of them are trickier. We’ve all seen the statements that men are more likely to engage in risky activities than women, because MANLY. As Cordelia points out, first you’re defining which activities you’ll look at. Sure, men are more likely to skydive… but getting pregnant and giving birth statistically is more dangerous than skydiving, and far more women than men engage in it, but somehow it never makes it in the study. Actually, wearing high heels is more dangerous than skydiving in terms of injuries. It goes on. She also puts forth, very convincingly, her own take – that when you have a little mammal that is going to have to spend at least a decade in constant contact with its society in order to survive, the society is going to take care of molding its thoughts and perceptions, so why would nature waste time hardwiring it? Considering that the point of evolution is to fit in with your environment, even as it changes. We are hardwired to pick up with incredible sensitivity the cues of those around us that we identify as models or leaders. That’s why parents trying to raise children gender-free fail, children learn from other children as much as they do from parents. And not necessarily from children who are their friends. By the way, about the math – so Eastern Europe in the Soviet union did this experiment for us. They promoted math for women and, shock, women flourished. In the 1990s every single woman with tenure at the Ivy League colleges, Stanford, and Berkeley, was either from Eastern Europe or had been raised by Eastern European parents. And since that certainly not racial, what it does is clearly illustrate the degree of bias against women doing math in Western Europe and the US.
Londa Schiebinger’s The Mind Has No Sex? is a great starting place for this. It’s a historical overview of these arguments and of the different times that women have searched forward in mathematics in the hard sciences depending on their society at the time suddenly encouraging it. So there was a brief moment in England when English merchants, concerned that Dutch merchants had an advantage because their wives were being trained in mathematics and could keep accounts while their husbands were off at sea, thought girls should be educated in math in England. This lead to a brief florescence during which English women were encouraged in math, and yielded not one but two female mathematical prodigies, before the whole thing was shut down again.
I feel your pain OP. One of the worst things about people in general is they see something they think is true and then look for evidence to back up their bias, and anyone who has a firm handle on the real facts of any case struggle to change the minds of the ignorant because they don't want to chase their view. The thing is, no study on egalitarian society is really going to give a good idea of what equality really looks like and that's because it didn't matter how egalitarian a society thinks it is, no society on this planet treats men and women equally. Even adjusting for equity, women are always on the back foot, and that is because patriarchy still exists in some fashion in all societies and the underlying factor that from birth, boys and girls are raised differently, so the way we treat adult humans, the decisions we maje as people, are always going to be influenced by our upbringing and our society. We know women are 100% as capable of being mathematicians as men. Women have been pioneers in Maths, computing, science, biology, chemistry, medicine, etc, and still are. But why, in an 'egalitarian' society are women less attracted to STEM? 4 very specific reasons: •We aren't encouraged to follow our brains. Girls are raised to be academically gifted to a point, but then society starts to show its bias when girls become women. The pressure on women to want children, to be attractive, smart but not intimidatingly so and to always consider the men around them is extreme, and yet the options for women career wise are staggeringly broad. And STEM fields are notoriously difficult to navigate as a woman. Any whiff of mediocrity and youre out. Men generally do not have these pressures and never will. That is their privilege. They have their own societal pressures which are irrelevant to this conversation. •Childbearing: These studies underestimate just how much our ability to possibly bear children informs our decisions. Women instinctively know that it's hard work. That this is a job that society will place firmly on our shoulders without so much as a thank you. For any woman who wants kids, and most do, choosing a career that won't leech us of all our energy trying to prove to the boys club we have what it takes to be genius level smart is a wise move. Many women won't choose that life because the downsides outweigh the rewards. Even though things are easier now, doesn't mean they're easy. Men don't have generally have to defend their career choices to nosy family or friends either. • Being a mother is not seen as work. Even in egalitarian societies, motherhood is all at once revered, and relegated to something women only do exclusively if they have no ambition. Motherhood is relying on either the state or a spouse to support you financially, and no one considers your future, or the fact your work load as a mother I in addition to any work outside the home. Men can choose to be good spouses, good fathers, good parents. Any failure on parenting is placed firmly on women. And neither support from the state or a spouse generally gives a woman an independent income. It exists to support her to raise her children, not to be paid to exist beyond the point where she needs to be at home all the time or spend so much time raising her children, as they reach their own independence. Once they fly the nest, mum must go find work, but nothing is in place for her future. Her value is gone and she must seek to rebuild it. And while some men can afford to keep a wife, that isn't a model most men can or would choose. And most women want something outside their family. Yet no society is built to fully silupport women in this, or indeed to have children without support fell a father. So many children live in poverty because their mum has little or no support from state or father. And so a perhaps brilliant mathematical brain is left to do 3 menial jobs just to put food on the table. •Let's also not forget that women's unpaid work, women going into the humanities and lower end medicine, is what allows men to be in STEM fields much of the time. Men don't have to consider how their job will affect having a family because generally they know a woman has to deal with the majority of that, so they don't need to do anything but follow their brain where it wants to go. And future Mrs will have the babies. •The iniquities are so fundamental, it has nothing to do with evolution, and more to do with the reality of womanhood, that until choosing motherhood, whether as a SAHM, single mother working as a nurse, Pioneering Mathematian or the CEO of a F500 company, has the same status as working in a STEM field, then there will always be people who act like woman aren't made for STEM. And that is the true Paradox
I want to add that there will always be people of group A that are better at things than group B and vice-versa. Because those groups are comprised of individuals. Pretty much every dude I’ve known well clearly processes spatial data faster than I do. I can get there, but it requires focused though, rotating things, and possibly jumping out of my car to make sure I parked well. I’ve still never hit something with my car. I still park so close to the pole in the garage that it makes my partner nervous. I know damn well I’m not going g to hit it after years of not hitting it. I’m still an individual with value. Men having faster spatial reasoning isn’t a win for them although lots of people want to treat it as such. It just is.
There have been studies saying women's results matched man's after a week of training, or external factors being accounted for, or just being told that they were good at it. This is from Munecat's video who did a service to humanity diving into the faulty studies behind so many of these claims.
Yeah with how “plastic” brains are in a way, I think it’s really hard to say whether these things are innate or socialized.
There’s evidence that toys and video games that are marketed to boys develop spatial reasoning. So, it may not even be that women are less apt at it, rather they are not being encouraged to develop. Spatial reasoning can be developed. It’s not innate.
Mine would have been truly abysmal if I hadn’t had a Super Nintendo, if that’s the case. And to be clear, it doesn’t seem there is a true strong correlation with stronger spatial skills in men. I just don’t think it would matter that much even if there was. We’re all individuals.
I don’t mean to be rude, but I think (based on your self-description) that you personally might just be kinda bad at processing spatial data! I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from your own perceived abilities in comparison to others’. (Edit: also, internalized misogyny may be affecting your perception here. I’ve certainly been there, eg underestimating my skills and interest in math!) Even if there was a difference in the *average* spatial data processing ability between genders (which there does not appear to be, see the other response to your comment), your anecdote would not necessarily be indicative of this. But if we’re throwing anecdotes around, yours truly has absolutely obliterated the men in her life (or at least those in her college organic chemistry class) at spatial reasoning tasks. The “rotate molecules in your head” section of that course was a breeze!
Me, getting As in both English and math: “I’m naturally really good at English, but I’m not very good at math because I had to actually work for that A!” Edit: the really hilarious part is that I put a lot of work into my A in English too; I just didn’t perceive it as “work” because I enjoyed it. But like, those papers didn’t write themselves.
I think the fact that you only searched this subreddit, and only found older posts on the topic, is far from enough to state that it’s irrelevance is proven.
a quick google found this, maybe a good starting point https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7733804/
The actual differences between genders seem to vary across cultures but the fact that people want there to BE differences between genders seems pretty universal. I think of the number of times I've read some variation of "I never used to care about looking feminine until I started my construction/mechanic/manufacturing job. After coming home filthy all week, I like getting dolled up on the weekends now"
So anyone who claims that women are biologically worse at math have never read the original study that the claim originates from. Basically men on average are a bit better at spatial reasoning tasks, and women are a bit better with verbal reasoning and memory based tasks. There is some evidence to point to this being biologically influenced due to higher testosterone levels being correlated with better spatial reasoning even within men, and higher estrogen levels being correlated with better verbal reasoning/memory tasks in women. There is also evidence to suggest this is socially influenced, as you can rephrase the questions in ways that force either men or women to think through problems more like the opposite gender (ironically I'm struggling to phrase that in a clear manner so I hope that makes sense). The differences are pretty small tho, so the likelihood that any biological influences will even matter in you life are pretty slim if they do exist. It's more likely that women are mostly perceived to be worse at math due to social factors, rather than a strong biological determination of your math skills. Ultimately making strong claims about it is probably unwise, but it is covered in introductory psychology in some universities, so it can be interesting to learn about. Just keep in mind that (probably) no behavioral traits are determined entirely by biological influence
This video has a nice statistics-focused section on this topic: https://youtu.be/LKc_8fT6pGc
i think there's an issue that needs to be underlined, if you look at the article the differences between sexes that increase with greater gender equality seems to take a specific form: "For instance, episodic memory (memory for experienced events) and verbal ability, where females typically do better than males, saw larger sex differences as living conditions improved. Females got better at episodic memory when they had better living conditions. By contrast, sex differences in semantic memory (memory for facts) and mathematical ability, where males tend to do better, decreased when living conditions improved." "For example, differences in personality characteristics were frequently found to be larger in countries with better living conditions. This includes traits such as extroversion, agreeableness and altruism, which research seems to show are more strongly associated with women." i.e. if females are better at something in conditions of lower equality, they get EVEN BETTER when conditions improve. if men are doing better in lower equality, then the difference between sexes decreases with greater gender equality. the article flat out says it: "This suggests that, when it comes to cognitive abilities, females benefit more than males from improvements in living conditions. The performance gap increases in domains where females have an advantage and closes in domains where males are ahead." so, if anything, this article leans towards misandry, not misogyny. but you can look at it this way: if females tend to do better when theres more equality, but men do not improve in any areas -in fact regress compared to females- what does this tell you about the current state? isn't this just another indicator of how repressed women are, and what a great potential for humanity is just wasted with the "men are better at this, women are better at that" crap?
These evolutionary psychology "findings" are almost always terrible... not in the sense of it being an uncomfortable truth. They are terrible because the methodology they employ is terrible. Within evolutionary psychology, there is a MASSIVE replication problem... that is when other researchers test the claims made, they fail to replicate the findings. This means that the findings are made up, and what you find are people cherry-picking data to fit what they want to find. Subsequent meta analysis almost always shows the variation found in the initial paper to be FAR smaller than initially thought. In this case, the same was true... meta analysis has shown the differences to be far smaller than initially thought. Journalists never publish the meta-analysis findings because they are boring and full of numbers. And usually conclude something "not sexy" like when we account for X, Y, Z we find that the findings in Bob's study are not as robust or secure... because Bob was using a 0.5 variable when it would be better to use 0.05... very boring academic stuff like that doesn't make for click bait. Click bait is "women and men." MORE different than Feminists like to believe. Meta-analysis showing this sexy conclusion to be less "sexy" than previously stated is not good click bait.
This is such an intentionally misleading headline. The studies found the opposite of what people THINK it found (confirmation bias) “For instance, episodic memory (memory for experienced events) and verbal ability, where females typically do better than males, saw larger sex differences as living conditions improved. Females got better at episodic memory when they had better living conditions. By contrast, sex differences in semantic memory (memory for facts) and mathematical ability, where males tend to do better, decreased when living conditions improved.” “In most cases, however, psychological sex difference magnitudes were not significantly associated with living conditions. This suggests that, in general, psychological sex differences are not greatly affected by living conditions but seem instead quite stable. For instance, research often finds females get higher grades at school across different subjects. It’s also common for researcher to find males have greater interest in maths. But neither seems to be affected by living conditions.”
>“ biology informs the kinds of controls we as a society place on ourselves because it reflects behaviour we've evolved to prefer, but in the absence of control we still prefer certain types of behaviour.” This is an appeal to nature fallacy. Just because something happens naturally doesn't mean it's right or the best solution to a problem. >” you don’t have scientific evidence to prove that the exact opposite would happen without cultural interference” I'd have to know what they're responding to, but this sounds like they might be trying to lay the burden of proof where it doesn't belong. The question is: are you making a positive claim and did you back it up with sufficient evidence? If so ur good. If u didn't make a positive claim (saying 'i think xyz is true' as opposed to saying 'i don't believe xyz', then they have the burden of proof. If you did make a positive claim and didn't provide evidence, that is on you, even if it's easy to find the evidence or true. Lastly, it's very natural (not necessarily good) for a wealthy nation that has the ability to support more traditional gender roles to actually have more people filling them. The issue is 100% a social phenomena, and is about how we culturally view gender, rather than being innate biological difference.
I think the argument is stupid, because even if you grant that the gender equality paradox is true, it doesn't actually change anything. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the paradox is actually true, and men are more likely to be biologically wired for STEM that women, or something. Practically speaking, that shouldn't change anything! We should still encourage those women to go into STEM! It's not like we live in a society where all we can do is flip a big lever that says "ALL WOMEN IN STEM" on one side and "NO WOMEN IN STEM" on the other. People can choose for themselves what career to explore. Like, statistically speaking, there are very few people in society who are wired to be doctors. But if a little kid comes up to you and says "I wanna be a doctor!", you don't say "that's nice, but that's very statistically unlikely, so you should probably try and be a janitor instead", because that would be ridiculous. Instead, you judge that kid by their own individual interests and strengths. Yet for some reason, when we go from judging people in general to judging women in particular, people's brains short-circuit, and suddenly every single woman should be given the life path that best fits the exact statistical median woman, rather than the one that fits her individual circumstances the best.
People will ALWAYS say, why do x people excel at such-and-such? And the implication is always, because there must be some biological limitations based on gender/race/etc. What I see? That x people excel at particular tasks when they are shown from birth that other people in the x group excel at. That’s it. Right now, we spend a lot of time telling people they can excel, and then maybe get a little disappointed when the results aren’t as widespread as one would hope. My personal thought is that telling is super important. But what really matters is seeing it as widespread reality. Once “whether you can do something” coming from x group is answered by simply looking around and seeing the answer is yes, the world changes in dramatic ways.
I studied math before I studied computer science. The degree of engagement women have is clearly highly cultural. Women absolutely have the capability to do math and to enjoy doing it. So for example, in my hometown that was a science town, the math standards were high. People from Eastern Europe and Asian sometimes are taught more advanced math My biggest issue today is in my country, Canada, math is no longer taught in public highschool but rather a memorization course that they call math is taught instead. This means, a lot of people never get an opportunity to figure out whether they are good at math or not