Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How to discuss gender inequalities

I see a large number of problems with your post. First of all, you misrepresent what Bostonian has stated as something easier for you to argue against. You substitute "100% biological" for "mostly the result of differing interests and aptitudes".

Secondly, you don't in any way address how much of the discrepancy you believe could be explained by biology, although you seem certain that it's less than 100%, and thus your straw-man of Bostonian's position must be wrong. Are you open to the idea that bias explains less than 100% of the discrepancy? If not, why?

Then you go on to mock Bostonian's position (or rather, your straw-man of it, I suppose) and deride some unspecified group of people for their failure to extrapolate a more equal aptitude between the sexes in engineering from the increased number of women studying biology. Maybe that extrapolation is right, maybe it's not, but it doesn't logically follow, as engineering is not biology.

Still, there is, I believe, a certain amount of wisdom in your post. The question of how we know when society as a whole is operating without bias is a good one. For some people the answer is as easy as looking at the statistics. If certain groups of people are over or under represented in a field or position, then that constitutes direct evidence of bias. For others, the question is much more complicated.

Perhaps levels of interest and aptitude differ between groups, but the differences have been exaggerated by bias. Perhaps bias is being applied to counter natural differences. Unless we can estimate what the bias-free results should be, either belief is equally silly, right?

But what if estimating bias-free results is simply too complicated? Where does that leave us? Are we to jump to the conclusion that that bias-free results would be equality, and anything differing from that ought to be criminal? Or do we criminalize only acts of discrimination for which we have evidence outside of mere statistics?

And what do we tell our children? I suppose many people will make their own estimates for what they believe the bias-free results would be (with differing amounts of supporting data), and work from there. Some of these people will accuse those starting with a different estimate as operating with a nefarious bias.

They only know what they've seen. Of course they become biased. DD has never seen a female US president and is adamant that the highest office a woman can attain is the first lady's. This especially makes sense when you visualize the setup of one of her favorite museums. In one grand exhibit, great men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stand tall surrounded by their artifacts of great power. In the next room over are the dresses worn by the first ladies.

Actually, they can be tested just like any other hypotheses. There are many examples of species changing behavior and even progenys' physical attributes in response to social stimuli. One of the best known is the change in locusts from sedentary individuals to mass migrating clouds.


Infanticide and war/executions were the two main means of birth control throughout history. Birth control is one of those "socio-evolutionary" practices that has deep roots in "survival." You can starve and die or you can kill some or all of your kids - or kill your neighbors and take their stuff. The use of infanticide among the Innuit, for example, is well documented. Scarcity in tribal societies almost always led to organized total war - and the evidence of "genocide" is deep in the paleo-archeological record across all societies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide


Medieval Europe was nearly destroyed by a series of political crises, followed by famine due to the start of the little ice age, and then the plague. This did completely destroy the social fabric and almost wiped out the Church. "Morals" went out the window.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Distant_Mirror

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Late_Middle_Ages


Which "significant" cultures are those? I can't think of any. Rearing kids imposes huge costs and task specialization is required to ensure survival.

Everyone likes to talk about relaxed views about sex until a 300 lb jealous husband is sitting on you doing the ground and pound. Or you get a disease. Or feelings get hurt. Or a jealous wife expels another woman from the group or a "homebreaker" does the reverse - causing great discord. Or the kids get hurt.

There is extensive, quantitative research on "socio-biology" and human social organization.

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/sear/pdfs/who%20keeps.pdf

Obviously a bias-free result would be representation by equal proportion. That's simple mathematics. In a world where 52% of the population is female, any results less than 52% female involves bias of some sort.

One bias in play is that men feel threatened by women who make more money, which encourages women to seek lower-paying jobs. STEM jobs are seen as quite lucrative.

Another bias in play is that boys are encouraged to build, tinker, and fix things at early ages. Girls are encouraged to play with dolls.

Another bias in play, as has been mentioned earlier, is the lack of gender role models for STEM fields. Little girls can be inspired by Jane Goodall to pursue biology. Where's the female Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds? Where were the women in the Apollo program?

It was mentioned that girls have an aversion to math. Guess what? It's not biological, it's social: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...-differences-caused-attitudes-women.html

Bias, bias, everywhere.

Don't throw up your hands -- show them more. Explain that Hilary Clinton came very close to being the 2008 Democratic nominee and likely would have won the general election if nominated. I think she lost not because she was a woman but because some primary voters were turned off by her initial support of the war in Iraq and enthused about a different kind of "first". The "fragile flower" theory that women rule out careers because of mistaken beliefs they held as small children underestimates their rationality.

That's an absurd argument, but if we accept it, does the fact that 57% of college students are female (citation below) prove that the educational system is biased against men? Is it biased in favor of Asians, who make up less than 5% of the population but are "over-represented" at elite colleges?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/fashion/07campus.html
The New Math on Campus
By ALEX WILLIAMS
New York Times
February 5, 2010

Yes, I'm open to it. But I truly do not think we're at the point yet where we can say, well, hey, we've absolutely done ALL we can, nothing is changing anymore, and now we can pronounce that any remaning differences are biological. Girls' and women's performance on math and science measures is in RAPID flux and is NOT by any means internationally consistent (look at the study Dude posted above), as we might expect if we were looking at a biologically constant issue. Their educational choices WRT the degrees they choose to pursue are also changing rapidly. There have been HUGE changes in 20 years. 20 years!! That is NOTHING. Absolutely and completely meaningless in evolutionary time.

Look at how fast our society is evolving. It's incredible. Our own parents would likely have laughed their heads off at the idea of a serious female contender for president. Let's continue to give it time and to give our young girls opportunity. The good news is that I think they're going to take it anyway, regardless of people who are still wandering around telling them they aren't interested in engineering due to their vaginas. (My own DD won the "build the tallest thing out of these materials in X amount of time" contest at her school's engineering night last year.)

Whoah, fallacy barrage.


Poor analogy.


Red herring. The topic is family planning.

Here's this might help you get back on topic: http://www.uic.edu/classes/osci/osci590/13_2%20Birth%20Control%20in%20Antiquity.htm


And this would explain why I didn't call them medieval morals, I called them Victorian morals, so straw man.


Argument from ignorance.

Just off the top of my head, the Five Nations have been thoroughly trashed by US history, so I doubt you'd consider them significant (and any qualified historian would strongly disagree), so how about Rome?

http://www.womenintheancientworld.com/legal%20status%20of%20women%20in%20ancient%20rome.htm

And here is some basic information about the historic links between sex and religion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_prostitutes


Argument by assertion, and one which clearly holds no water in our society at that.


Red herring again. I offered no argument about current Western culture's attitudes towards sex.


Red herring. Research on how modern societies organize themselves tells us nothing of past societies, especially given the significant amount of homogeneity in the modern world.

No. It shows that biases exist, but it doesn't show that the educational system is necessarily at fault.

For instance, we know that Asians are "over-represented" because they place a premium on advanced education that other cultural groups do not, so they are self-selecting for college. Also, US colleges are taking on a large number of non-resident Asian students, so those numbers need to be considered apart from those drawn from the resident population.

Boys have attractive options for advancement outside of college, most significantly in the armed forces, where strong biases exist to attract boys and repel girls.

Both of these examples of bias influence college numbers without implicating colleges in any way.

All we "can" do and all we "should" do are two entirely different questions, and depending on your perspective, neither necessarily has anything to do with biological differences. Assuming there is a natural difference in mean or variance of mathematical ability between the sexes, can we apply bias to lessen those differences? Sure. Should we? That's opinion.



Just because there is flux, doesn't necessarily mean we are approaching the natural, unbiased result. We may be have been moving away from it the whole time, or we may have started out moving toward it, but overshot it. Also, international consistency doesn't necessarily tell us anything about biology. I can think of numerous genetic traits that vary both in mean and variance across populations. Is anyone going to argue that eye pigmentation is not biological, since it varies in mean and variance internationally?

I read the study that was the basis of the link Dude provided. I found it less than a convincing debunking of higher male variance in mathematical ability. They actually go so far as to plot a histogram of international gender Variance Ratios (VR) that peaks at 1.16, with an inter-country variance of only 0.0054 (I calculated myself from the data. The authors claim a "large" variance without actually stating it.), and go on to argue that the natural variance ratio is 1.0, and the explanation for anything else is bias. The amusing thing is that they implicate bias in exaggerating the natural variance ratio in just about every country tested, and refuse to accept that bias could possibly diminish this ratio in the handful of countries that show a smaller ratio (which could also be caused by sampling error). Of course, they also discount the idea that different countries with different populations could have different biological variance ratios. In effect, they assume that many groups of humans are genetically similar in order to (attempt to) disprove that 2 groups of humans are genetically different.

Additionally, the study was based on knowledge tests rather than ability tests like IQ, and they make the annoyingly ubiquitous mistake of portraying correlation as causation:


I'm not denying it as a possibility... but I can think of numerous other possible explanations that have not been controlled for.



No argument here.



Is anyone arguing that we not give young girls opportunities? I hope we are giving all of our children opportunities to learn and perform, regardless of gender.



Congratulations to your DD. My DD is only three, but if you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up she'll answer either an engineer, or a teddy bear, depending on her mood. As far as I can tell, she has the aptitude for it (engineering, not being a teddy bear... if teddy bears are expected to hug strangers or family members who only visit on occasion then she has little aptitude for that).