Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.posted by l33tpolicywonk at 11:01 PM on July 24, 2008
There may also be elements, by the way, of differing, there is some, particularly in some attributes, that bear on engineering, there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization. I just returned from Israel, where we had the opportunity to visit a kibbutz, and to spend some time talking about the history of the kibbutz movement, and it is really very striking to hear how the movement started with an absolute commitment, of a kind one doesn't encounter in other places, that everybody was going to do the same jobs. Sometimes the women were going to fix the tractors, and the men were going to work in the nurseries, sometimes the men were going to fix the tractors and the women were going to work in the nurseries, and just under the pressure of what everyone wanted, in a hundred different kibbutzes, each one of which evolved, it all moved in the same direction. So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize. There are two other hypotheses that are all over. One is socialization. Somehow little girls are all socialized towards nursing and little boys are socialized towards building bridges. No doubt there is some truth in that. I would be hesitant about assigning too much weight to that hypothesis...If you subtract the clearly disingenuous hemming and hawing, it's pretty clear that what he's trying to say is "women are biologically fitted to be nurses and men are fitted to be engineers." If you read through his remarks, his agenda and viewpoint are pretty clear. He's a sexist and a weasel.
Here are three possible explanations of the observed sex differences in professor (and other top) jobs.He goes on from there, but l33tpolicywonk's description as "one in a series of proposed theories" is pretty fair.
1. In our society, men have an easier time and are more likely to make the (possibly unreasonable) all-waking-hours commitment to a job than women. This is the biggest reason for the observed difference.
2. His speculative and shaky calculations of some unclear and divergent data suggest that three and a half or four standard deviations from the norm, in some unclear measure of ability, there are likely to be more men than women. [This is where I think he might have chosen a different forum to present this idea, and only after strengthening it]
3. It doesn't require socialization for little girls to be more interested in dolls, and little boys to be interested in trucks. [See Gerianne Alexander's monkey study for support of this point.]
What about at the very high end of the scale?Link.
"While we did find more boys than girls above the 99th percentile at a 2-to-1 ratio, still, 33 percent of those kids who are above the 99th percentile are girls," she said.
Hyde's explanation for the fact that boys score higher on average on the math SAT's is that more girls take the SAT, so that the test includes more girls who are lower in the ability distribution.
The variance ratio (VR), the ratio of the male variance to the female variance, assesses these differences. Greater male variance is indicated by VR [greater than] 1.0. All VRs, by state and grade, are [greater than] 1.0 [range 1.11 to 1.21]. Thus, our analyses show greater male variability, although the discrepancy in variances is not large. Analyses by ethnicity show a similar pattern.I'd mark this still in question. I certainly don't think Pinker's hypothesis on sex difference of variencea1 is proven or refuted by this study. A difference of 10% variance is small but significant in the authors' sample. The effect may not be as large as Pinker supposes, but this study does not conclusively prove it false either.
...intra-gender performance differences in reading versus mathematics and in arithmetic versus geometry are not eliminated in a more gender-equal culture. By contrast, girls' underperformance in math relative to boys is eliminated in more gender-equal cultures. In more gender-equal societies, girls perform as well as boys in mathematics and much better than them in reading. [The factor is about 30% better in reading-bh]There's a very interesting data set in the authors' supplemental (PDF). In this, the authors present their base facts and figures, which support their conclusion above. However, they also include data for ratios of girls to boys scoring above 95% (ie above 2 standard deviations from the means) and above 99% (3 standard deviations). In the supplemental, it's clear that there is a linear correlation between the mean sex differences and the sex differences at +2 sd. This implies that any "larger variance" explanation for sex differences must be less than their standard error (about 20%). So the largest variance difference that would still fit this data is less than 15%.
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posted by bluejayk at 10:46 PM on July 24, 2008 [2 favorites]