I’ve read somewhere that various standard deviations are usually much lower for women than men.
For example while women usually score higher in IQ tests, it is more likely for a man to get an extreme (very high or very low) result - bell curve is flatter for men.
Similarly there are less (proportionally) left-handed women than men.
More gay men than lesbians etc…
Is it true? If yes, why is that?
No they are not, but I love them anyway.
Yes, it is true. It occurs for almost every physical and mental trait that can be measured. No one knows why it occurs exactly. The most common hypotheses include the effects of the sex hormones on sexual differentiation.
The reasons seem simple enough to me: It’s because men are more expendable. If you throw the dice on a trait, you might get something that fails, or you might get something that works really well. The more you can afford the possibility of failure, the better the gamble is.
There are also about 4 times as many boys with autism than girls. BUT girls tend to have it more severe.
I think it has to do with the x-chromosome. Boys have only 1 so if that is bad then they have the trait while girls have that extra x to make up for it.
That is only one disorder. The phenomenon occurs on almost every measurable physical and mental measure. It isn’t isolated to humans either. Lab mammals show the same thing. That doesn’t mean that that females in general are inferior to males. It only means that there are a few male outliers at the far ends of both sides of the bell curve that show both exceptional good as well as bad performance on almost all measures whereas females are more tightly clustered towards the middle with few outliers.
Males at the very far right side of the bell curve tend to be noted and remembered. There are also some traits like some measures of verbal ability in which females have both a higher mean and median measure of performance but the absolute top performers still tend to be males because of this phenomenon.
On a side note, while normative does mean pertaining to a standard, the norm, I’ve never seen the word used to be “closest to the norm/least varied.” It just doesn’t feel right to me. It’s not modifiable.
At the same time I’m not sure what the right word would be. You can’t substitute normal for normative in the thread title because that also has the wrong connotations.
Possibly there isn’t a proper word for this. I suggest normly.
“Do females tend to possess more normosity than males?”
Less deviant? (As in less deviation about the mean.)
If true (and I can believe it) …
It makes sense that a possible mechanism could be that the second X provides an additional chance for some regulatory product to be produced. And that the fitness cost of males dieing soon after procreating is less than the fitness cost of females doing such so that the higher payoff but higher risk genetic changes have less in the risk column in males.
Think of the smartest people and the stupidest people.
Groundbreaking physicists tend to be men, but a woman’s last words are rarely “hold my beer” or “watch this…”
Almost all the best champions on “Jeopardy” have been men.
I think in the long run each genders pluses and minuses pretty much equal out.
Btw. Does this phenomenon have a name?
Puberty? I thought women spent most of their time trying to “fit in” (e.g. be average.) That’s how they know which musicians to scream over, what clothes to buy, which app to use, etc.
When boys do this, at least one of them has to be the leader and set the norm for everybody else, even if it’s different than other groups.
Careful, Larry Summers lost his job for wondering about this. He suggested only that it be studied. One woman in the audience said she was ready to puke.
“Do females tend towards the norm (genetically) more than males?” would have been a better thread title, with the geneticallt there for clarification as to which norm you were talking about. I wouldn’t usually quibble about thread titles, but someone asked, and I actually didn’t know what this one meant - I thought it might be about politics.
But yes, they do. There are, relatively speaking, lots of hereditary conditions that relate only to the y-chromosone and few that relate only to the x, either when you consider the number of conditions or the number of people affected. In addition, more boys are colourblind, more boys have classic autism, more boys have dyslexia, etc etc.
It’s more difficult to assess whether there really are more boys born geniuses, since too many cultural effects come into play, but it could well be true (without meaning that no woman can be born a genius, just like it’s not true that women can be autistic).
I’m fairly sure this question is about hereditry, not norms which are imposed on people by culture. Your answer was very IMHO.
Last night when I did some googling on this topic for some follow-up reading, I found a site that claimed that brain heredity comes exclusively from the X chromosome. So the implication was: that the genetic materials of male brains comes only from the mother (cuz the useless Y chromosome doesn’t contribute anything) and the genetic material of female brains is a mix of the mom and dad.
I found this hard to believe and couldn’t find another cite to confirm it. Plus, I’m damned if I can find the original cite, but it looked like a reasonable source.
Can anyone confirm/refute/point me in the right direction for further reading?
At a less anecdotal level, boys are more likely to drop out of school, do poorly in school, etc… More women than men now make it to college (though the flip side of this is that there are more males among top groundbreaking scientists, etc.).
When people say that sort of thing (“ready to puke”, etc.) it’s best to just ignore them, since they clearly aren’t interested in facts.
The expected fitness from a male child is equal to the expected fitness from a female child, except under conditions of very high or low stress. That’s why (at an ultimate level, not a proximate one), the sex ratio in humans is 1:1.
It’s true that that the chances of a male child having very high or very low reproductive fitness are bigger than for a female- males are a more risky investment but also a potentially larger payoff.
Really. If I heard someone sprouting hate speech directed at the crowd being addressed I’d be ready to puke myself.
I don’t think that what Larry Summers said rose to the level of hate speech, but I’m not a woman. Part of the problem with Summers was that he seemingly misused the vast body of actual research, put forth to a population who know far more about the relevant studies that he did.
If you want irony, though, he was an excellent reference for this thread:
No matter. I absolutely believe that hate speech toward women exists. Don’t you?