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How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?
- femtardbot 11y agoI remember a famous saying: "if women were in charge, there would be no wars - just a load of countries not talking to each other for a number of silly reasons"
- venomsnake 11y agoLike US-Cuba?
- jacquesm 11y agoDon't feed the trolls.
- femtardbot 11y agoI remember that quote from the film as good as it gets, where the fangirl asks the author how he captures writing for woman's viewpoint so well, he responds saying he takes logic, reason, accountability away from the character, and what she reads is what is left!
- unimpressive 11y agoI know you probably don't care because this is about the lulz to you, but if you have a shred of decency in you I'd like you to consider the reason you made this comment, and consider the social effects it has if somebody makes a comment like this on every such story about this subject that comes up. Or in brief, look at your life look at your choices.
- benihana 11y agoWhy are you trying to lecture a troll? To put it another way: m8, u 8 the b8
- unimpressive 11y agoOh it's not really for them. See, if you don't state the obvious that such people are disgusting little twerps it gets brought up as an example of the things evil tech industry people really think but won't say.
- venomsnake 11y agoYou know people can joke without believing in the stuff the joke is about, right? If someone thinks that the jokes people tell are their believes ... that tells bad stuff about them, not about the jokers.
- Flimm 11y agoHN downvotes jokes, even jokes that are funny, and I prefer it that way.
- venomsnake 11y agoIronically also a great way to perpetuate the nerd stereotypes :)
- mrrrgn 11y agoIt's a great way to keep our community unique and worth visiting. The world is full of vapid joke comments (anyone can make them).
- benihana 11y agoSo you're basically putting on a show for people who are spectacularly wrong about the obvious and loud about it? Don't feed the trolls. That includes the people who think anyone who disagrees with them is a .ist, .phobic troll.
- venomsnake 11y agoAnd what happens if s/he considered the effects and find them negligible/irrelevant/not worthy of caring about them.
- qmalxp 11y agoIs it generally accepted in the relevant scientific communities that male IQ's exhibit more variance than female IQ's? I imagine this type of thing would be easy to verify via e.g. standardized test scores.
- lmm 11y agoIt's quite easy to ignore even very clear evidence when it goes against one's politics. And that kind of result is massively politicised for obvious reasons (e.g. there are clear differences on standardized test scores - but some argue this reflects biases in the tests themselves).
- kirsebaer 11y agoOne bias is so-called "stereotype threat". > negative stereotypes raise inhibiting doubts and high-pressure anxieties in a test-taker's mind... even passing reminders that someone belongs to one group or another, such as a group stereotyped as inferior in academics, can wreak havoc with test performance. http://www.apa.org/research/action/stereotype.aspx http://www.apa.org/research/action/stereotype.aspx http://www.npr.org/2012/07/12/156664337/stereotype-threat-why-women-quit-science-jobs http://www.npr.org/2012/07/12/156664337/stereotype-threat-wh... http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2008/1/29/Stereotype_Threat_Affects_Women_in_Highlevel_Math_Courses_Aronson_Study_Finds http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2008/1/29/Stereotype_Threat_A...
- lmm 11y agoOf course as with everything in this area, there is no consensus; studies have contradictory results and some dispute whether stereotype threat even exists.
- Tuisto 11y agoI seriously doubt "stereotype threat" is going to survive much longer. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022440514000831 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022440514...
- rndn 11y agoThe next article in this series on "Which sex is playing higher stakes reproductive game?" is also worth reading: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differences/201101/which-sex-is-playing-higher-stakes-reproductive-game http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-diff... It reminds me of an interesting hypothesis I've read about the other day that the concept marriage plays a significant role in the success of our culture as it counteracts this difference. It allows more men to reach a social status at which they are motivated to be productive members of society. So we are possibly actively destroying a pillar of our culture as we are devaluing marriage. By the way, Veritasium has a great episode on why women are stripey: http://youtube.com/watch?v=BD6h-wDj7bw http://youtube.com/watch?v=BD6h-wDj7bw
- mattmanser 11y agoWarning: Unskippable advert on video.
- tzs 11y agoIt's YouTube. Whether you get no ad, an ad skippable after 5 seconds, an un-skippable 15 second ad, or an un-skippable longer ad varies. I'm currently getting a skippable after 5 seconds ad. This may also depend on what ad blocker you are using. At least one popular ad blocker [1] sometimes fails to block the "skippable after 5 second" ads but DOES block the "skip this ad" overlay. To make that even more annoying, I think that the "skippable after 5 second" ads are often long ads so the result is people without an ad blocker get 5 seconds of the ad, and people with that ad blocker get get the full thing! [1] I'm not naming it because I was trying out different ad blockers on different machines to see which met my needs best, and I don't recall for sure which one it was.
- Dylan16807 11y agoWhat? There are unskippable long ads? Those are possible? The ad blocker theory makes sense. Though I'll always be amused at some of the skippable hour-long ads youtube has given me.
- 11y ago
- tfinniga 11y agoIt's interesting to realize that if two groups have the same mean but different variability, the higher-variability group will have more outliers, on both the high end and the low end. The danger is a kind of genetic fatalism, assuming that what we should do is just to be determined by our genes and how our bodies work. For example, it's possible for a man to produce many children by impregnating lots of women concurrently. I get the feeling that some men decide that the way that a person wins life is that they reproduce as much of their genetic material as possible, so they try to win. It seems like this kind of justification is used to excuse a wide variety of bad behavior: cheating, rape, women as chattel, etc. It's debatable whether the argument made by the article is actually a real thing, and how much it contributes to the inequality we see in the world. I think social effects have a bigger influence. But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that.
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoI once found a "casual encounters" ad on craigslist, in which a woman sought men to attend a certain type of party, which type I do not remember. I looked it up at Urban Dictionary, the objective of that kind of party is to impregnate as many women as possible. I contemplated attending but then concluded that I want to know who my children are, and that they would want to know who their father is. Even under the best of circumstances it is painful not to know one's father - look at Steve Jobs. I was once invited to have unprotected sex with a complete stranger. She was quite lovely, definitely someone I would want to be with but we just happened to stumble across each other at Burning Man. I expected I would never see her again so I declined.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoI suspect this is not unusual. I was asked to be a sperm donor at a party by a lesbian couple I'd never met before. They were completely serious, but the catch was no contact with the child. The problem with arguments from reproductive psychology is that we know very little about reproductive psychology in history. So modern ideas about female partner choice shaping genetics aren't necessarily a given. It's not unlikely there was plenty of rape, random sex with strangers because why not?, and all kinds of other non-vanilla behaviour. Edit: And there's another issue - the implication that selecting for male variability is more successful as a species-wide reproductive strategy than selecting for high IQ. That may be true, but it's a slightly strange place to end up in, because it implies that both ends of the bimodal curve are equally successful, and there's no selection advantage to being at the top of the curve. (If there were the bimodal would collapse to a standard Gaussian.)
- synthmeat 11y agoAre there or are there no differences is one discussion, sure. A much more interesting one to me is - if yes/no, then what? What does that imply? This articles notes that the answer is yes (but apparently, it's still debatable), but it then goes on into why, which is interesting. I welcome differences. Recognizing and accepting them is the first meaningful step towards any worthwhile societal value adoption.
- golemotron 11y agoI'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time. The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing. Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers. The differences are there as early as one day after birth [ http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf ]. Primate studies show the same differences with our relatives. Everyone should be able to pursue any career they want to, but there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.
- cconcepts 11y agoYeah the challenge is the way we attach value judgements to the different things genders tend (generalization) to be better at. This is purely anecdotal, but in my extended family many members believed the "we're all the same" view. I was given whatever toys I wanted whether they were considered masculine or feminine. It challenged people to see me grow up and be obsessed with heavy machinery - something they obviously saw within a masculine stereotype. EDIT: I'm male
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- iNate2000 11y agoI've noticed the same thing with kids close to me. I wonder how much is (1) subconscious reinforcement of tradition or influences from outside the home.
- geomark 11y agoHaving lived through so much of the polictically correct conditioning about equality of everybody I became pretty numb to it. Then having a child and seeing the stark difference between play habits of boys and girls made me think about it again. Anecdotal, of course, although consistent with many other people's anecdotes, which starts to look like data after a while.
- minikites 11y agoKeep in mind Psychology Today is about as reliable as the National Enquirer or the Daily Mail.
- nsgi 11y agoWhy? I've always found it to be pretty good.
- kingkawn 11y agoDifferences between genders are not cultural; interpretations of the meaning of those differences are.
- DougBTX 11y agoThis article claims, > Last time we discovered that the brain of a woman is composed of two different types of cells. but if you actually read the last article, it has this example of mixed types of cells: > Surprisingly, there are some human females who also show a rather similar calico pattern ... for a very small number of women, if you were to look closely on a hot day, you would see a calico pattern appear on their skin. The "very small number of women" gets quickly forgotten, suddenly it is all cells in all females: > Females, both in their bodies, and their brains, are a patchwork of two different types of cells and the "very small number" caveat is completely forgotten by the second article.
- Anderkent 11y agoThe "very small number" applies to having visible calico skin pattern, not having two X chromosomes, a random one disabled in each cell.
- speeder 11y agoThis to me looks like the "very small number" refers to the ones where this is visible, not to the amount of them that has somewhere mosaic-style cell patterns. For example it is widely known now that if not most women, all women have mosaic patterns on their retina, this not only explains differences in disabilities (like the ocular albinism in the article, but also daltonism), but in perception: While men can see 3 primary colours, women can see 6, it is of course 2 kinds of each other, but still 6, this might explain why women treat colour differently than men (example: women are more interested in the colour of home decoration and clothes, they give more names to colours than men do, they can choose between two very similar nail polish colours when most men don't notice the difference, and so on). Why is that of course veers in the theoretical, the best guess is that while men is better to track motion, probably because they were the primary hunters, women are better in dealing with other types of food (for example colour is important to figure how good to eat vegetables are... there is a reason why farming corporations improve the colour and shape of their fruits, instead of improving the taste). EDIT: someone posted a video elsewhere on the thread about this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD6h-wDj7bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD6h-wDj7bw
- rootlocus 11y ago
- legulere 11y agoFemale cells have just one X chromosome? That's totally new to me and sounds kind of strange. Also socieconomic status shows higher variability under men than women. This is also a really heavy factor for intelligence and one of the reason why for instance ethnical minorities often perform worse in intelligence tests.
- ReadingInBed 11y agoI think we can agree that there are genetic differences between men and women. The issue is reverse engineering them by cultural results is really hard. We can see the start point (DNA) and the measuring point ( For example: Higher IQ), but how we got there is really complex. Do the genetic differences really mean that much? I honestly don't know, and I think the key here is to study genetics not a genders achievements or test results. DNA is a lot less biased than the culture and world we have created.
- fecklessyouth 11y agoI find it funny that so much scientific research attempts to prove the existence of a biological contrast that's blatantly obvious, but which has been completely deconstructed and obscured by modern literary theory/philosophy.
- unclebucknasty 11y agoMy thought exactly: we've gone so far afield with this ridiculous notion of "sameness" between sexes that we actually now need "serious" research to "debunk" what was so obviously never true. "This just in: women and men are not exactly the same!" The real problem is that our society tends to equate sameness with acceptability as its preferred mode of "tolerance". This has the paradoxical effect of re-inforcing the negative ways we view our differences (e.g. discrimination). That is, the desire to claim that we are all exactly the same is an implicit statement that it would be somehow problematic if we were not. So, the fact that we are obviously different means that we are attempting to sell oursleves a lie that we never buy, while allowing our negative feelings about our very real differences go unchecked.
- ufo 11y agoThe problem is that while on average there are significant differences between men and women, the individual variation within men and within women is so much larger than these sex-based differences that sex is not a good predictor for behavior in the majority of the cases.
- ThrustVectoring 11y agoIt depends on the difference. For grip strength, the median male is approximately equivalent to an elite female athlete.
- ufo 11y agoI was thinking more about behavioral differences. For physical things like strength or height there is a very noticeable difference between the sexes.
- RodericDay 11y agoWhomever wants a critical look at this kind of "psychology result", I really recommend checking out Cordelia Fine (Oxford, Cambridge, UCL educated) and "Delusions of Gender". She is a fun listen/read and explains really well the flaws in the science/reporting/interpretation of "gender science", from the statistical to the neurological. http://blip.tv/slowtv/delusions-of-gender-p1-cordelia-fine-4256927 http://blip.tv/slowtv/delusions-of-gender-p1-cordelia-fine-4... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_Gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_Gender https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8031168-delusions-of-gender https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8031168-delusions-of-gen... Additionally, readers who are not very acquainted should know that PsychologyToday is not a respectable publication in psychology, and is regularly embroiled in issues with propping up "we are telling the truth that nobody wants to hear about white supremacy". If you do not know who Satoshi Kanazawa is, you should look him up, or you can ask the psychology subreddits what their assessment is of that website. This post veers close to ad hominem, but the way people are processing the OP is very much fallacious as well: a combination of taking a dubious authority on its word, not following up on the stats, and relishing in it confirming everything they want to believe (sexism is over-discussed, we really are different, and it explains most differences we observe). I cannot possibly offer a counter-argument in such meager visual real-estate and with so little captured attention-span, but if anyone is interested in hearing the best counter-arguments (not of the "artsies who believe in the blank-slate" variety), I offer a place to start.
- nshepperd 11y agoI don't see how these links are a relevant counterpoint; they all seem to focus on claims about averages, that the OP deliberately did not talk about.
- RodericDay 11y agoHer work is critical of various pillars of gender science, and most definitely does not refrain from tackling the "Greater Male Variability" hypothesis that gets so much mileage these days. One such excerpt: > In a Science study of over 7 million United States schoolchildren, Janet Hyde and her team found that across grade levels and states, boys were modestly more variable than girls. Yet when they looked at the data from Minnesota state assessments of eleventh graders to see how many boys and girls scored above the 95th and 99th percentile (that is, scored better than 95 percent, or 99 percent, of their peers) an interesting pattern emerged. Among white children there were, respectively, about one-and-a-half and two boys for every girl. But among Asian American kids, the pattern was different. At the 95th percentile boys’ advantage was less, and at the 99th percentile there were more girls than boys.[15] Start to look in other countries and you find further evidence that sex differences in variability are, well, variable. Luigi Guiso’s cross-cultural Science study also found that, like the gender gap in mean scores, the ratio of males to females at the high end of performance is something that changes from country to country. While in the majority of the forty countries studied there were indeed more boys than girls at the 95th and 99th percentiles, in “in some countries females are equally or more variable, or are as likely as boys to make it into the 95th percentile.“ > (Penner 2008; Machin & Pekkarinen 2008). These latter authors stress the strong pattern of greater male variability, but the boy/girl ratio (shown in parentheses) at the top 5 percent of maths ability was more-or-less equal in Indonesia (0.91), Thailand (0.92), Iceland (1.04) and the UK (1.08). Penner found greater female variability in the Netherlands, Germany and Lithuania. For useful discussion of these data, see (Hyde & Mertz, 2009)."
- dataker 11y agoScientifically studying sex should be a top priority for our society. In both ends of the spectrum, but particularly in radical feminists, theories are influenced by ideologies and politics, hurting society at large. Recently, a feminist(president of a feminist university group) told me males were incomplete females(XY would be an incomplete version of XX) and, for that reason, they should have their instincts and behaviour suppressed. Edit: As some have mentioned, the girl referred to the SCUM manifest http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm
- DamnYuppie 11y agoThat sounds quite radical. Do you happen to have a link to this article? If so I would be interested in writing the board of trustees for that institution.
- damoncali 11y agoIt's not too hard to find some pretty far out folks from all walks of life where I went to school (CU Boulder). I heard the same thing and more from the students there, and that was 20 years ago. I got a chuckle out of it at the time, but they were very serious about it.
- unimpressive 11y agoYou know, comments like this would be a lot more credible if they had some sort of evidence to go along with them besides "I had this friend..." or "I got told one time by an x/y/z...". FWIW, the particular perspective you're quoting is straight out of the SCUM manifesto: http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm "The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples."
- dataker 11y agoThanks for mentioning it, I had no idea of its existence.
- danmaz74 11y agoThe first paragraph in the article sounded wrong. It says that "the brain of a woman is composed of two different types of cells. One type has an X chromosome inherited from her mother, and another type of cell has an X chromosome from her father", but I remembered that all cells in a woman have both X chromosomes. It turns out the correct paragraph should say: "One type has an ACTIVE X chromosome inherited from her mother, and another type of cell has an ACTIVE X chromosome from her father". Here the excerpt from the relevant linked article, which explains it better: > A few weeks after conception, one of the two X chromosomes in each cell of a female's body is randomly deactivated. As each of these cells in the developing fetus multiplies, its descendant cells all have the same X chromosome activated. This leads to a patch of cells that all have the same active X chromosome (say, the X from the mother). A different fetal cell may have randomly deactivated the mother's X chromosome, and so all of its descendant cells each have the X chromosome from the father.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Swannie 11y agoThank you for posting that. I read this paragraph and the weak language instantly made me wonder this was doing on HN. I would not consider those two "types" of cells. I don't understand how this passes for publishable material. I could have written better when I was 17, and I was a terrible writer back then!
- pinaceae 11y agoThe perfect topic to debate on HN with its diverse readership and well-qualified audience. Jesusfuckingchrist.
- kelukelugames 11y agoI understand a lot of HNers and redditors believe race and gender are not purely social constructs. This is a contentious topic but I really appreciate Neil DeGrasse Tyson's comment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inz1sdhsMCU
- rflrob 11y agoI wish I could up vote this more! For those who don't have the three minutes, the "punchline" is: "I know those forces are real, and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there's equal opportunity, then we can have that conversation."
- kelukelugames 11y agoThe counter is this happened a few decades ago and these forces are no longer present or diminished. I agree things are better but they are still a factor. Someone just called Asians robotic in front of me the other day. Had to educate him on stereotypes. :/
- not-hacker-news 11y ago1. no hacking at all 2. article from 2011 How does this qualify as "hacker news"?
- danharaj 11y agoI'd much rather prefer to lurk Hacker News but these comment chains have just been so exasperating. I'd like to know how many people actually believe that science is engaged in a widespread effort to dissimulate the truth of sex differences? Everyone knows that there is a sexual dimorphism in humans. It's not that pronounced compared to other species. Our dimorphism is not anomalous amongst great apes, nor is it indicative of much: Our closest relatives are Chimpanzees and Bonobos where the former form hierarchical male dominated communities while the latter form egalitarian communities. Let me ask some questions just as an efficient way of throwing up historical and social context. These questions are rhetorical and aren't even the best questions to ask. I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking up the best questions. I think a few examples are enough to convey the general line of inquiry I'd like to show is possible. Do the differences between humans caused by sexual variation account for the structure of our society? If yes, when did this become the case? Was it the case in 1800 United States of America when married women could not own property? Was that caused by some sort of sex-linked genetic variation? Was it the case in the 1940's when lobotomies were in vogue, and most of the operations performed were on women? Do women have some sort of sex-linked genetic flaw that leads to brains that need to be lobotomized? Is the nuclear family a primordial family unit optimized for the innate sex-linked variations between humans that form viable reproductive pairings, or is it optimized for the division of labor and capital of bourgeois society? When exactly were the unimpeachable doctrines of male supremacy promulgated by law, church, and capitalism purged from our consciousnesses, our institutions, our social networks, our education centers, our philosophy, our _science_ so that society immediately restructured along more _objective_ lines where all individuals realize their full potential and enter into the social relationships most suitable to their essential nature? Because that is the subtext that speckles this page. That male supremacy was banished from human reason and what remains is a hegemony based on some _rational_ _objectively verifiable_ sex-linked variation that is unimpeachable by human means. The power structures in which this truth is intelligible, that verifies and reproduces this truth is left implicit, because it is normalized in so many social groups, HN intersecting with a great many of them. I don't think I am capable of deconstructing this logic, but I will just throw out my conjecture: This is the neoliberal paradigm squaring its beliefs in the free market, meritocracy, minimal governance, the free flow and concentration of capital, dissimulation of relations of power, the privatization of ever more institutions, the application of market rationality to all spheres of human activity, an epistemology based on private institutions and capitals competing in a market of ideas, and the refusal to regard as legitimate any theory that posits power structures and modes of truth that do not follow analytically from these doctrines, with systemic inequality. The cause _must be_ the sublimation of truth from the market of _free_ individuals pursuing their rational self-interest, where the market and the pursuits it comprises _define_ truth. As a last note, I don't think I am familiar with much feminist theory that tries to dissimulate sexual differences. In fact, many feminists would probably agree that the most significant and easily verifiable sex-linked variation between people accounts for a great deal of interpersonal inequality between men and women: Men are bigger and stronger and thus have an easier time getting what they want through personal violence. But this is in fact a minor point. There have been a great many societies on this Earth, in spite of their systematic obliteration and assimilation throughout the years, ever accelerating to meet the hunger of capitalist societies for new places and peoples to put on the market. They have had varying levels of equity between people-- there are even non-binary systems of gender, and their existence ought to pique and interest to critically examine the cultural institutions that separate and regulate the biopolitical realities of people in bourgeois society. Feminist theory, by and large, especially the theories of leftist feminists (none of that bourgeois, liberal crap) emphasize systemic inequality, not interpersonal variation. They certainly don't need to resort to such minutiae when so much effective theory and action has been executed against institutionally imposed male supremacy. It seems that it is a tenacious enemy though. Once it can no longer reproduce itself along certain power structures (e.g. church) it will find ways through more contemporarily legitimate power structures (e.g. neoliberal rationality).
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- top1nice1gtsrtd 11y agoThe six primary programmers of ENIAC were all women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC . Can we conclude, then, taking that as our sample, that programming is naturally "women's work"? If the preponderance of women in programming at that time was just a fluke then it's not unimaginable that the preponderance of men in programming at this time is also a fluke.
- LesZedCB 11y agoThat's a misleading trope. The semantics of "programmer" now and then are not a fair comparison. There is now and was then a disparity in the gender distribution of "technically hard" jobs.
- delecti 11y agoIt was initially thought that programming was like sewing, and the "real" work was in the hardware. Then it was realized that programming was very real and significant work, and the men in charge took over those responsibilities. I think all we can conclude is that there's no reason women can't be just as successful at a career in programming as men, aside from social pressures. A statement which probably applies in both directions to nearly all fields. (Not that you were necessarily arguing otherwise, but for the benefit of those less familiar with that history.)
- graycat 11y ago> How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference? Really the article explains how on some measure two populations can have the same average on the measure but still be different. The answer is obvious: The two distributions are different, e.g., the two standard deviations can be different. Not mysterious. But the stuff in the article about human female brains and calico cats is really nice to know. But the article is one in a series, and one of the articles there, maybe the next one, discusses how the distribution and mean of number of children per person is different for men and women. Okay. But the article has some graphs of distributions, and, very sadly, insists on drawing the distributions as bell curves. Yup, bell curves and in particular Gaussian densities were swallowed whole at about 1930 by much of the social sciences and educational statistics and is often still accepted.
- EGreg 11y agoA great article that goes into the effect of differences between men and women is this: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm I have found it to agree with my experience and explain eg why there are so few women in tech and women entrepreneurs. (Hint: it has to do with desire for risktaking, long hours, and long periods of silent work with abstractions)
- zxcvvcxz 11y ago> However, if it is simply a fact that males are generally more variable than are females on many traits, why is this true? > Since a male can have more offspring than a female--but also has a greater chance of being childless... natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males. This is on the money. Women are generally the choosers when it comes to sex, since eggs are expensive, and sperm is cheap. Nature therefore needs to try many different "keys" to see which ones are good at fitting into the "lock", to draw a crude analogy. Men may seem more "privileged" as they dominate the top of most fields. But one must also realize that many men are nature's failed experiments, and live lives of despair, filled with homelessness, crime, and drug abuse, as well as downright social failure. Problems occur when policy makers selectively see the former, and disregard the latter.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- namlem 11y agoVastly exaggerated. IIRC, the standard deviation for males is 15, while the SD for IQ in females is 14.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]