If you knew that females are not the same as males, and are born that way, how would you possibly use this information?
There are a couple of use cases I can think of:
Making assumptions about a member of a group based on the statistics of the group.
Targeting your own output/product/service for things that most people in a group would like.
Looking for a specific type of person in groups where they are more likely to be a member of due to group statistics.
It doesn’t matter if females are different on average to males, doing 1 is always bad idea. If you look at 10 properties that 95% of the group would fall in the (min,max) range of each one, at least 40% of members of that same group would have at least 1 or more of the 10 they would not fall in the 95%. That is just statistics. So even if you have stuff that 95% of women share, if you make 10 assumptions about a woman, you will likely get one wrong.
Doing 2 is fine and you should use statistics to target a larger audience. That is a fact of life/capitalism. If most men like makeup women are gonna use it. If most women like men with suits, men will use that.
Doing 3 is sometimes Okay (like placing job offers in tech forums etc), but it depends if you know exactly what you are looking for, which is usually not the case.
Yeah, actually. I’m going to violate habit and agree with Darren Garrison on this one.
If there are at least statistical differences-by-population between the sexes (and I believe that there are), I am not insulted by the default expectation of people that, when encountering a male person, they anticipate man or boy behavior.
It’s all about expanding people’s awareness to the exceptions to the rule. So when you hear hoofbeats and see stripes, you think zebras, not horses in pinstripes.
There are gender differences. Very much so. There is a mountain of evidence no matter what some people say. Study evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, it will turn you into a believer.
Here are some good books on both subjects:
Why Women Have Sex
Evolutionary Psychology, Fifth Edition
The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality
Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Sexual Psychology and Behavior
A Mind of Her Own
The Mating Mind
The Way of Men
For a quick introductory, read James Damore’s memo and follow his twitter page.
What a fruitful approach to discussion. Declare you are right. Dismiss people who disagree out of hand from the start, and reference a bunch of books by their title only.
And then to really show you know what you’re talking about, show that your path to the “correct” understanding of the much debated and contentious field of evolutionary psychology is an engineer and his tweets.:smack:
Yes, and for every thread that suggests reading in evolutionary theory, posters should also read creationist accounts of human origins.
Non-science should always be given equal standing with science. After all, there’s no reason to pay attention to scientific consensus if a non-expert doesn’t believe in it.
And because that previous post is bound to be misinterpreted, let me put on the record now:
I don’t know exactly what the scientific consensus is here.
I don’t know whether the previous posters “cites” are legitimate, or full of shit.
But that simply doesn’t matter here. Presumably there is a scientific consensus of some sort around this matter. That consensus? It’s going to come from experts, not noobz on the side rationalizing empty cultural arguments for why they don’t have to listen to scientists.
Anybody can make up an argument that’s compelling to them personally, and their closed-minded friends, about all the reasons they can ignore scientific evidence from people who actually study the matter directly. That is, and will always be, a totally bogus way of approaching this issue. Lots and lots and lots of scientists are feminist. (I imagine the majority of them.) They might have good scientific arguments in favor of one theory, instead of the other. They might disagree with the consensus. The consensus might even be wrong.
But ignorant people on the sideline don’t get a vote. And they sure as hell don’t get to impugn an entire scientific community based on their favorite ideological readings and blogs.
Feminist studies scholars aren’t ignorant noobz. They’ve shifted scientific consensus a few times with their critiques. They’ve made the science community more aware of their own biases including in primatology and related fields which is what we’re discussing here.
The study linked in the 2nd paragraph of the OP, meanwhile, is pretty consistent with the scientific consensus but it goes into more depth and makes a more explicit conclusion, which is not that there are no biological sex differences at the brain level but that the differences that do exist take this form:
• there are no brain structures that are found in all (or nearly all) male brains and absent from all (or nearly all) female brains, or vice versa.
• there is a shitload of variation in each sex, with many observable features and structures present in one brain and not in another; within the framework of that wide range of variation, there are certain “constellations” of features that are somewhat more common in male brains than in female brains, and others that are somewhat more common in female brains than in male brains.
• all of the feature constellations that are more common in male brains than in female brains are absence in some male brains and present in some female brains; and all of the feature constellations that are more common in female brains than in male brains are missing from some female brains and can be found in some male brains.
Their conclusion is that there does not exist a “male brain and a female brain” in the vernacular sense of them being fundamentally different.
This is a good post, thank you for putting the effort into it.
I have no way of knowing that, just as I have no way of directly knowing whether the cite-dump from the previous poster is consistent with the consensus. And I’m pretty sure you have no way of knowing that either.
Even in economics, I’d be reluctant to judge the consensus on any given matter by a string of papers or my own feeling from talking with economists. The problem is that people cite a load of literature that backs up their view, while ignoring the other string of literature that argues a different perspective. There can even be multiple in-groups, each participating in a sort of circle-jerk of citations as they continually reference each other’s works. When this happens, it’s easy to cite an entire tradition in the literature, without that tradition necessarily representing a majority viewpoint. Or sometimes, even a sensible viewpoint.
The best way to judge a consensus in these cases is a large-ish random-ish sample. There is a loss of sub-sub-sub-specialization from casting a wide net, but sometimes sub-sub-sub-specialization is just a self-selected group of people who happen to be very wrong as they high-five each other at conferences. (Or maybe this problem is worse in econ than in other fields. I can easily believe that.)
Here is a very important fact:
A difference in mean traits is fundamental difference.
If group A has a mean floating at some point, and group B has a mean floating at some different point, then there is a reason that those means are pushed apart by the group difference. That is true regardless of the presence of extensive, or even overwhelming overlap between the groups. This is one of the deep problems people tend to have with statistical descriptions of information. I can tell a group of people that, say, US men have an average height of 5’10" while US women have an average height of 5’4", and someone will point out that their cousin (a woman) is over six foot. No question they’re telling the truth, but it does not affect the calculation of the mean.
Literally any statistical description of a distribution (apart from the full distribution itself) will crunch out some individual variation. Summary stats don’t deal with individuals. They’re inherently dehumanizing, precisely because they’re trying to describe populations as a whole rather than any individual within that population. This can rub people the wrong way. And it’s absolutely right to rub people the wrong way, when some chucklehead relies on group means rather than much more relevant individual evidence staring them in the face during a conversation. When individual evidence is available, there is no point to relying on the group mean anymore.
And yet, when we’re talking about the characteristics of groups, and any potential difference between two groups, summary stats about the group as a whole are deeply and unavoidably relevant and important. If people are wanting all “male” brains to be one way, and all “female” brains to be another way, then that’s like expecting that all men be over 5’8", and all women under 5’6". That’s not how it works. The presence of extensive overlap does not negate the fact that the mean is pushed apart by inherent causal factors.
My limited understanding is that is exactly the case going on here. That is further bolstered (I believe, based on the same limited understanding) by the studies of the brains of transgender people whose brains are on average different from the average of cis people who are assigned the same way at birth. Again: the presence of overlap does not negate the fact that there is a difference in mean. There is a reason that the mean is different, regardless of the overlap.
And most important: it is possible to appreciate the fact – if it is a fact – that the overlap is much more significant than the tails, while also appreciating that the bulk of the distribution is centered at different places.
Your final sentence is completely in accord with my own gut-level understanding of the actual state of sex differences.
As I’ve said before, there’s a genuine difference by populations but also a larger difference within each population and a lot of overlap, hence there are a substantial number of exceptions in each sex that fit the general description of the other more closely than they fit the general description of their own.
The sexes male and female have biological differences, that’s not debatable. Some dictionaries now have adopted a definition for ‘gender’ along the lines “the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).” But if the parenthetical phrase is applied, then by definition ‘gender’ doesn’t refer to biology. (By older definition ‘gender’ refers to words, like those preceded by ‘le’ v. ‘la’ in French and not to people directly).
Although maybe you mean 'I don’t presume there are (systematic practically important) biological differences between (the brains of the) [sexes]". I don’t know if that’s true.
Race differences seem to me a poor analogy because in that case it’s debatable whether there are any practically important systematic biological differences by group genetic background*. Again with the male and female sexes that’s not debatable, whereas if we create a different categorization ‘gender’, then it’s non-biological by definition, but doesn’t mean the factual biological differences between the sexes disappear. What’s subject to debate is whether any behavioral differences between the sexes are (‘strictly’, ‘largely’, etc) biological.
*for example, people of certain group backgrounds being more, or even virtually only, subject to certain diseases. That’s not a ‘social construct’; it’s just that it’s a small part of a big picture of the physical plus social meaning of ‘race’.
The problem is that most traits don’t even have 95% coverage of the group. Also people don’t fully identify with the members of any specific group.
The first issue is that you are insulting the person. If I tell someone I am from X or my age is Y and they would assume that I am or am not religious or are or are not married based on the majority of those groups, even if that is the case, I would take that as an insult, and many people (not all), will, and justifiably so.
In most cases you don’t know why a person would make the specific assumptions that they do on you and often you assume the worst case (stereotyping, which is exactly what this is).
Here is another problem: most people belong to many groups, so lets say you know age, gender and if someone is a gamer or not. Now some trait may be more likely with gamers and the same one can be less likely with females, if you meet a gamer girl, how do you know the attribute of which group will dominate?
The last problem which I mentioned before is this: you don’t usually assume just one trait, you assume several, in which case you are bound to be wrong with some at a very high rate even if the coverage is as high as 95% of the members of a group.
Yes and no. I see more fights about whether this or that group is welcome to shelter under the “queer” umbrella than I see actual conflict between different finely divided sexual minorities. So I don’t think it has quite the right impact of Balkanization.
But I don’t think it’s sustainable, either. Most of the folks who sit comfortably in one of the cis categories aren’t going to spend the mental energy to keep track of all the classifications. The Kinsey scale has survived in large part because it is simple, and even so, there are a lot of complaints about the invisibility of bisexuals. So it seems to impose more overhead than a lot of people are willing to deal with.