I can’t abide the sexual stereotyping. Look I’m a male who hates sports but my mother loves them. I’m a one woman man who has absolutely no desire to have multiple partners. I can read Jane Eyre and Starship Troopers and love them both, I cried at the end of Titanic but love reading about war and military history. Where do I I fit in to this either/or mold?
A lot of this male/female brain difference is bogus as well, the brain studies that made the headlines a few years ago actually proved the opposite. In four tests males/females showed the same brain activity in problem solving in three of them and the fourth showed something like 28% of females the same as male. So the difference in brain function was in 1/4 of the established tests. BTW medical science has now real understanding of how the brain works anyhow so even if these tests did show huge difference I don’t know what conclusions could be drawn from them.
—Somewhere in the middle of the curve. No one has said that all men act one way and all women act another way; there are subtle differences and generalities. No one will fit into one group or the other 100%.
“A lot of this male/female brain difference is bogus as well, the brain studies that made the headlines a few years ago actually proved the opposite.”
—This is news to me, and I keep up on this subject, having a background in biology and psychology. Male and female brains are PHYSICALLY DIFFERENT. This has been proven conclusively and has never been contested. That doesn’t mean that brain FUNCTION always differs.
Has anyone read the recent book “As Nature Made Him?” Has some interesting things to say on this very topic.
To backup Eve you can simply look at groups of people with physical brain damage (as was mentioned before). People with very similar damage differ drastically in the effects of that damage when separated along gender lines.
To some extent I agree with you. I’ve never seen any suggestions of better or worse, right or wrong on these studies. Men’s and women’s brain just seem to be different.
An interesting experiment the doctor I listened to showed us two simple tests.
There is a drawing of a beaker filled with water. The next several pictures show the beaker tilted in various fashions. You have to pick which drawing shows the liquid inside the beaker tilted in the proper fashion in relation to the tilted beaker.
Something like 90% of men will get this right while only 15% will (I forget the exact numbers here but it was a remarkable separation close to what I show here).
You’re shown a list of words for 20 seconds. The words are covered up and you have to write as many words as you can remember.
I don’t remember how this one was scored but women do MUCH better than men in this test.
Neither of the two examples above have anything to do with intelligence. The doctor gave the beaker test to a woman with a confirmed genius IQ and she got it wrong. All her test showed was a statistical variance in the abilities of men and women.
As to those who want to break the gender mold the doctor relayed an amusing problem with her studies. Her students at the University of Chicago, men and women both, skew the statistical findings shown above all out of whack. Both show almost identical abilities with no variance based on gender. Says something about U of C students I guess. Still, if you do this for the whole population those numbers will stand-up.