I already answered cited this in my post above. The study rather clearly shows societal differences can have distinct effects on female mathematical scores on tests.
Nothing vague about it.
Sure, environment matters - most obviously if you’re kept in the house all day then you’re not going to learn differential equations. But the fact that there is parity in countries including the US suggests that this is not a major factor here. And I note that in your cite there is no mention of the difference in variance, which is the more important issue when we’re talking about having more males at the top and bottom of the social heap. (There’s a 5-percentile cutoff but that’s not high enough to get you a professorship.) I’d also note that the study has shown a large advantage for girls in reading and literature; were this another thread I’d note the disparity between efforts to get girls mathing and efforts to get boys reading, which is a much larger gap.
But as pertains to this thread, my contention remains that the difference in violent crime has a great deal to do with larger male variance in IQ, and social rewards, from men and women, for men being aggressive.
Why are you completely hung-up on variance? You seem to be suggesting it is the only relevant measure for this.
Further, most studies show the “average” between male/female cognitive abilities to be roughly equal. Are we to set public policy or seek to affect societal change based on the outliers or the middle of the bell curve?
I do not see innate intelligence as being the reason for male aggressiveness. Certainly lack of education seems to correlate with violence but that is not the same as being innately dumb. Males may have a broader intellectual range from retarded to brilliant but most fall in the middle and are “average” and not particularly smarter/dumber than women. At least I doubt enough to correlate for the difference in violent crime.
While I cannot speak on the correlation of intelligence and violence, I think you are overstating the importance of the average and its meaning. If intelligence and aggressiveness are related than the variance would be more telling than the mean. If there is a greater ratio of outliers of intelligence there would be a greater ratio of outliers in the aggressiveness.
Think of the two curves with the same area and centered on the same location one being flatter (greater variance) , then draw an arbitrary line that is not the center where intelligence leads to violence, the area under that curve closer to the extreme will be greater (thicker) This implies that if the correlation is true there will be a greater number of violent incidences involving the population with the flatter curve.
Personally, I think that societal pressures (men not reporting violence from women and the stigma against men being partnered with more physically large/strong women), physical pressures (aggressive women not being able to inflict violence on larger, stronger men), and culturally influenced emotional pressures (women not inflicting violence on men for fear of retribution, “traditional:rolleyes:” gender roles as defined by society which vilify women who speak out against their partners) would muddy this correlation significantly to the point that it could not possibly be a dominant correlation. This however is based on my own sexist male point of view.
There is also the fact that women being violently assaulted by men is traditionally more common in our society. I would wager the number of children who grew up in houses where the men were the abusive partner is far larger due to the far stricter and more well defined gender roles that existed in the past. Gender roles that were not only enforced at home, but at school, church and other public venues.
Add the true dichotomy of the roles to stigma attached to women reporting domestic crimes and “she deserved it” attitude of men in the past. What do you get? In my opinion you get generation upon generation of little boys thinking its okay to do whatever they want to women and little girls who see their mothers being cowed by aggressive and violent fathers. Teenage boys who are excused for sexual crimes, and teenage girls who “had it coming”.
I think the legacy and differences in physical characteristics is more telling than innate qualities. I hope this trend is decreasing, but right now it’s too soon to tell. Since more and more people are reporting who might not have done so in the past, it makes it difficult to see if we are getting better, worse or maintaining some absurd status quo.
This sounds like it is dangerously close to degenerating into yet another “why do nice guys finish last” threads.
As a general rule, men (and women for that matter) who are aggressive and domineering are going to be more successful at ANYTHING than someone who is meek and humble. The simple reason is that the more agressive person is going to proactively take steps to go after their goals. The meek and humble person on the other hand will just sit there and be dominated and later bitch about it online.
We don’t agree as much as you think we do. For one thing, I’m a moderate socialist. Additionally, regardless of whether Summers’ statements were correct or incorrect, it was absolutely inappropriate for him to make those remarks. He was the head of Harvard, with decision-making power over hiring, firing, tenure, etc., not a researcher studying intelligence and gender. Given our society’s historical, and ongoing, difficulties with gender equality, discussions of possible innate differences should be handled very cautiously.
Personally, I think the idea of gender should be irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what’s between a person’s legs unless you’re trying to have sex with them. The only purpose I see in trying to discover and define “natural” differences between genders is to maintain their separation - girls over here, boys over here. It maintains expectations that girls will act this way and boys will act that way, it minimizes the much greater similarities among us, and it makes invisible everyone who doesn’t fall neatly into one box or the other. We should be past the idea that certain characteristics are “masculine” or “feminine.”
Addendum:
That, for better or worse, is true, and is why so many successful people in any field tend to have obnoxious personalities. We raise our children with the idea that nice people will be rewarded and mean people will be punished, but it’s just not true.
Nice as an ideal but ignores the obvious realities as posed in the OP.
If there are no meaningful differences between males and females (beyond sexual equipment) then why are men dramatically over represented in our prison population and particularly for violent crimes?
If we could put our finger on why guys end up committing more crimes then maybe we could find ways to mitigate whatever it is and lower the crime rate. That is a worthy goal (making no comment here on if it can actually be achieved).
ETA:
Reminds me of a quote from Daddy Warbucks which went something like: “You are only nice on the way up if you plan on coming back down again.”
The question posed by the o.p. is, if I may criticize without prejudice, somewhat trite. Even a passing familiarity with the sociology of violence and fear will realize that the way in which men and women perceive threats and respond with violence is fundamentally different. It’s an old saw but an appropriate one to state that, “Men fear being laughed at by women. Women fear being killed by men.” The reasons for this are involved, but they stem from the differing, pre-society roles that women and men play, and are largely reflected in the territorial behavior of other large land mammals, particularly opportunistic scavengers. When men do violence to women, it is generally to dominate and intimidate, just as they do to other men in a posturing scenario (what Rory Miller calls the “Monkey Dance”). When women to violence to men (which is rarer, although hardly unheard of, especially in the domain of domestic violence) it is generally more vicious and calculated to do injury, because their evolutionary goal is to survive a potentially fatal encounter.
Anyone who wants to understand the roles that men and women play in violent situations would do well to read Gavin DeBecker’s The Gift of Fear and Rory Miller’s Meditations on Violence.
Stranger
Well, there are two issues that we’re discussing in this thread: the innate differences, if any, in the intelligence and personalities of men and women; and why men commit more violent crime than women. In discussing the former, it’s useful to compare how men and women are socialized. Considering the extremely high number of Black men in prison, it would probably also behoove us to look at how Black men are socialized as opposed to White men. It’s possible a study of differences in brain chemistry between men and women would also be helpful, but I think it would be more useful to study the differences between men in prison and men who have not gone to prison.
While strict numbers may be true, I am not sold on the idea that proportion of violent felons is higher amongst blacks in prison compared to whites in prison. Also this line of thinking would require a methodology to remove or account for greater amount of poverty and the looming spectre of institutional racism.
I agree with this with the addendum that there be three strata in the comparison:
men not in prison
men imprisoned for violent crimes (assault, rape, domestic violence, armed robbery)
men imprisoned for non-violent crimes (burglary, tax evasion, etc)
I think that poverty, racism and socialization are so tightly intertwined that it’s probably impossible to talk about differences in socialization without also discussing the other two. Regarding your first point, I went looking for some statistics on violent crime and race. I found this Bureau of Justice study (warning: pdf) that looked at violent offenders in large urban areas. Page three has statistics on race:
So there’s a gap, but not a huge one. There’s also a table that breaks down violent offenders by race and age; interestingly, in the under-18 age bracket, Blacks make up a much larger percentage of offenders than Whites do, but the gap narrows for older offenders, until Whites overtake Blacks as the largest percentage of violent criminals at the 40-and-over age range.
Bringing this back to the gender issue, the gap between the percentages of male and female offenders is much larger - page two has this info:
A statistic like does, admittedly, give the impression that the problem lies somewhere in the differences between men and women. However, it’s important to remember that only a small percentage of men are every convicted of a violent crime (see various statistics on this page), and any differences we find between men and women would not necessarily be relevant to the issue of why more men than women commit violence. Differences between men who are and are not violent, on the other hand, are obviously more likely to be germane.
That certainly sounds good to me.
From what I’ve read and observed, how children are raised with respect to how they treat others and how they expect to be treated themselves is more a function of socioeconomic class than anything else.
I’d bet this is a big part of it. If we set aside all cultural and psychological issues, we’re left with the fact that the average man is bigger and stronger than the average woman. If a man of average size and strength gets it into his head to go around beating people up and stealing their wallets, he’s going to have an easier time of it than a woman of average size and strength who had the same violent idea. She’ll encounter more potential victims strong enough to fend her off than he would. If our aspiring female criminal is a rational person, she’ll realize that unarmed mugging isn’t the smartest way for her to go.
Now, this does raise the question of why firearms haven’t leveled the playing field for female criminals. If our aspiring female mugger used a gun, she’d find even the biggest and strongest of men a lot more willing to hand over their wallets. Yet women are far less likely than men to commit acts of armed violence – there’s actually a bigger gender gap when it comes to armed violence than unarmed violence. This indicates that there are powerful factors beyond just rational expectation of failure that are causing women to be more averse to violence than men.
Size difference may still play a role, though. For instance, an average-sized woman with a gun might rationally know she could take on a big but unarmed man yet still have an instinctive fear of fighting someone bigger than she is. It may also be that most violent criminals work their way up from unarmed to armed violence, so women are less likely to get started down that path than men. I don’t think either of these could account for the whole gender gap in armed violence, but they could explain a portion of it.
Beyond that portion we have cultural and psychological factors, the ones I set aside at the beginning. It would take more time than I’ve got to begin addressing those. But before one goes down the rabbit hole of whether behavioral differences in men and women are more due to cultural influence or innate psychological differences between the sexes, I think it is important to acknowledge that differences in average physical size do give men an advantage when it comes to violence.