4 ms·
Can you provide one modern scientific paper which examines how much nature, and not nurture, can have an effect on variations in achievement and participation i
by allovernow 7y ago
Can you provide one modern scientific paper which examines how much nature, and not nurture, can have an effect on variations in achievement and participation in certain fields? Untill then one cannot handwave all inequities away as simply discrimination. Particularly when we have ample indirect proof that men and women are not equally able to perform certain tasks on average. This isn't a question of superiority, simply different adaptation after millions of years of sexually dimorphic evolution:
1. Male and female score distributions have different averages on certain tests, like spatial reasoning and verbal
2. Brain scans show different structure, which is used to identify trans individuals
3. Hormone concentrations and responses are different (particularly testosterone/estrogen)
4. Members of probably any other sexually dimorphic species, across the kingdoms will show different innate behaviors, and humans have inherited those millions of years of gender specialization - indirectly, wouldn't such innate preferences in humans, if they exist, predispose men and women to different skillsets, on average? Sure, the nature of human intelligence may make it that humans are the exception, but there are far too many other puzzle pieces to assemble before we can take that as fact.
This list is incomplete, and examples are easy to find. The only reason OP had to write such an article, stating what should be obvious, is that because of the pressures of recent politics, our society has come to conflate equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, a result of the denial of even the possibility that gender imbalance may occur in part or in whole without discrimination and bias. The socially acceptable position is that male and female abilities are distributed equally in the absence of social conditioning, and this is simply an unlikely condition if one looks at the facts. Not to say discrimination doesn't exist, but when we set parity quotas we entirely ignore nature in favor exclusively of nurture.
Consider also: if these abilities are normally distributed, as suggested by proxies like IQ, and there is a small difference, say of 5 points in means between men and women, the effects are going to be amplified at the outer edges of the normal curve and the higher average population will be substantially overrepresented a couple standard deviations out.