I went to a talk given by a doctor from the University of Chicago. She was studying the differences between male and female brains. She did this by studying accident victims. She’d find a man and a woman who had the same physical brain damage and note how they differed. And differ they do! Women and men are definitely wired differently (was a fascinating talk).
In her studies she has found that broadly speaking men tend to be better spatially and women verbally. This by no means discounts a woman being an engineer or a man a first rate novelist or speaker (that should be self evident).
What she did find, and this was interesting, was when she tested the students at the University of Chicago (so remember some of the best and brightest the country has) all gender differences disappeared. Women and men performed equally well at each other’s supposedly “preferred” tasks. Seems smart people blow through gender distinctions.
Cite here. From a journal article in The Psychological Record. Of particular relevance, the third paragraph; male students in the humanities outperformed female engineers at spatial reasoning. Also, note the second author of the article linked to—the chances of misrepresenting the findings of the study are slim.
It’s not in itself an argument for anything, but anyone who holds the “nurture” position could easily account for it and its effects by virtue of the fact that mainstream culture markets cute and cuddly things to little girls in a way which it does not with little boys (the My Little Pony vs. G.I. Joe divide, so to speak).
That is to say, the fact that women are found in large numbers in biology/veterinary medicine/etc. in a way which they are not in physics is not a very strong argument against the “nurture” position, because the response is to claim that fondness for cute and cuddly things is itself culturally-induced rather than innate.
I am female and have always enjoyed math (I have an engineering degree). However, in my profession there are very few women. I can’t say why this is based solely on my personal experience.
However, my husband, who teaches engineering at a university, has had some interesting observations about his students over the years. The women engineering students tended to be much harder on themselves than the men. If the women had trouble with a course, they would say, “I’m not smart enough to be an engineer.” The men would say, “This course is stupid.” A corollary of this is that the women engineers who make it through tend to be really good engineers.
Doing math mostly feels weird and uncomfortable in the brain, like attaching lead weights to my pinkie finger and making my pinkie muscles lift several pounds. There’s a sense of amazement that I can do it at all, and therefore a sense of accomplishment, but it’s coupled to a sense of “I could do so much more with other, far more powerful, parts of my brain”.
IME, women (with all the implied enculturation) prefer practical applications; statistics, economics, finance, allowed error calculations, …
Math, however fun, has to be a means, not an end.
Pure raw enjoyment? First figure out how to raise a statistically significantly number of people with no social input as to gender roles until they are older enough to study math; then identify a metric for ‘enjoyment’; then figure out a way to raise healthy women with no male-direction sexual identity, necessary in a society that assume females naturally dislike math …
Yes, females like playing with patterns too; basic learning is pattern recognition. However, enculturation strongly encourages females to enjoy applied pattern recognition (gossip, biology, economics) rather that so called pure skills (linguistics, astrophysics, theoretical math).
Anecdotal evidence: I recently read that some girls who do well in math are feeling pushed to study it when they don’t want to.
Personal opinion only: most mathematicians I know (including me) seem to be at on the autistic side of normal and most women are on the other side. My wife did very well in math in college (scored ff scale for women and in the 97th percentile for all on the GRE math aptitudes but, despite my best efforts cannot bring herself to show any interest. As an instance I know a rather elementary proof of the fact that always fascinated me, that every positive integer is the sum of four (or fewer) integer squares and I have been trying to show it to her, but no dice.
You guys have it all wrong. It’s not that ALL men are better at math than ALL women, it’s that A FEW men are better at math than ALL the women.
Let me explain. I’m going to use the IQ test (I realize not everyone likes the IQ test, but 1) it’s a very good measure of spatial ability (math skillz) and 2) it’s used everywhere and there’s hundreds of studies based on this test.
So, when comparing average IQ between men and women, there’s no signficicant difference. Maybe a point or two or three, but nothing statistically significant. However, men have a much greater variance (spread) than women. This means that men are more represented at both extremes.
So, all the women took math 101, and those few men represented at the higher extreme are sitting in your physics class.
I do recall a study claiming that while women on average both liked math less and were worse on average at it, the minority that liked math tended to be better than the average of either gender. Assuming that liking math and being good at it are linked traits ( quite possible; much as males tend to be both stronger and to like heavy exertion more, as in sports ), that seems plausible.
Even assuming she’s right, that just looks like a case of self selection to me. Unless NO women liked & were good at math ( or whatever ), I’d expect close to equal scores simply because that’s where that sort of woman is going to go.
And unless you are careful, men and women tend to score about the same simply because they learn over the years to compensate for their weaknesses. I recall a memory based example; women on average are a lot better at remembering collections of miscellaneous objects. But if you ask men and women to take a test for that, they’ll score about the same - the women are better at it, but the men try harder. And neither realizes it, generally - they’ve just learned over their life about how much effort it takes to memorize such things, and have no idea how much effort someone else is putting into it. If you want an accurate test, you have to trick people; for example, ask them to take an unspecified test, keep them waiting in a room with a table full of knickknacks, and THEN ask them what was on the table cold. Do it that way, and women tend to do much better - they get a lot with just a casual look, while the men didn’t know the task and therefore didn’t know to go to the extra effort involved.
This is GQ and not GD, so I hesitate to ask, but, are you seriously rejecting the possibility that there is a woman who is as good at or better than the best male? :dubious: You appear to not only suggest that, but that there are several men who are better than math than any woman is. I would suggest that you avoid using superlatives.
One of the things that makes these studies difficult is that any study that gasp indicates that one group of people might be inherently better at something than another group is immediately denigrated because, by damn it, all people are equal. It’s the height of political incorrectness to observe that men as a whole have better spatial perception and women are better with details. Certainly there will be individuals that fall outside these generalities, but they’re not disproving the results. They’re just the exceptions that fall outside the clusters.
News flash. People are different from the cellular level right on up to the way their minds work. And all the legislation, law suits, and seminars in the world aren’t going to change that.
Sure, people are different. Take any large group, split it into two pieces any way you care (perhaps by sex, perhaps by height or the color of their clothing or just by flipping coins), measure some variable on the two pieces, and you’ll get different averages… the trick is, are these differences significant or accidental? Is there truly a significant inferential or causal relationship between the variable you used to to create the groups and the variable you measured (i.e., what kind of predictive value is given by the differences which happened to contingently manifest in the population studied)? And, even if there is such a link, is this relationship something that matters in most contexts, or is it generally drowned out by the myriad other factors that influence the measured variable? (The answer will vary depending on the particular application). Does this link persevere, disappear, or even reverse in the face of further stratification/conditionalizing on additional information? Etc.
The mere fact that people are different doesn’t mean every measured aggregate difference is worth paying attention to. Some are, some are not. Figuring out which is which for which purposes can be difficult.
I’m not claiming anything is not PC WRT biological differences. But it is fallacious for Bacillus Cereus to claim that no woman can be as mathematically inclined if not more so than the most mathematically inclined man.
Or possibly just one. As I understand the studies/theories suggesting such a pattern hold that only the very most extreme men would be truly beyond any woman. We are speaking of the once in a generation ( or even less often ! ) type minds. Not the “ordinary” geniuses.
It’s only fallacious if it’s wrong. Is it fallacious to say the same about physical strength too ?
Sorry. My posting wasn’t directed to any particular member or message, but rather a general railing about politics and political correctness imposing itself onto what should be truly neutral studies and suppressing the ones that don’t fit their ideals of equality.
My interpretation of what Bacillus Cereus said was that while the math skills of men and women are generally equal, the very outermost performers will be male.
I certainly wouldn’t accept that without a cite or three, but I will agree that it is possible. After all, by some measure, someone has to be the best.
I believe that an analysis of people with savant syndrome and their talents would shed some light as to what skills differing demographics are predisposed to.
When I was a teen, I was enthralled with the Theory of Numbers, and played with it through the latter half of my teens. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I wasn’t able to go to college straight out of high school, where I most likely would have majored in math, even though I’d also been fascinated by genetics since the age of four. By the time I did get to college, I’d had two brain injuries, and math was no longer easy or fun.
However, I retained my interest in linguistics, and was accepted into the Ph.D. program (at the age of 50, partly based on my GRE scores) at what is supposed to be one of the two leading schools as far as linguistics programs are concerned.
In case the question arises in the mind of anyone who thinks that either gender or orientation imparts any bias, I am also very decidedly hetero.