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Of course, if doing more things that involve spatial reasoning makes you better at spatial reasoning (which seems like a very likely assumption), this becomes a circular argument. (Did you read the Gender Differences section of that Wikipedia article?)



Yes, I did read the Gender Differences section of that article. You will note that I stated what research shows about population differences and did not wade into the more controversial question about why those differences exist.

That said, I have found that on controversial subjects, people grab every sliver of support for their own ideas, and ignore data that might contradict it. The more heated the debate, the harder it is to find a neutral data driven point of view. So rather than engage with the argument that I made, you grabbed on to, "But it might still be social and not biological!" And thereby bypass the argument that the gender discrepancy in engineering can be explained by population differences in ability and not by bias within engineering departments.

That said, articles like https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2015.0001... are highly suggestive that on this particular item there really could be a biological component to it.


You are a HS senior with good grades, test scores, and a decent essay. That's all the engineering school expects for admission. There is no explicit test for spacial reasoning ability, other than your ability to compete at your specific high school, your ability to take the SAT, and your ability to write a boilerplate 5 paragraph essay (probably strongly dependent on whether you use a writing coach or test prep service). You managed to continue to get decent grades in college and land an internship every summer. That's all the FANG expects for hiring.

No spacial reasoning is tested for entry level engineering jobs. Only academic performance which is dubious in its correlations to job performance, and your ability to network during undergrad.

Back to the gender disparity. If all it comes down to for jobs is your grades being decent, and it's not like genders skew in any direction here, and your ability to network, then in my eyes the elephant in the room is the effectiveness of networking. I don't think there is a big difference between nervous women and nervous men talking to recruiters about their first job, so the difference must be in the recruiter's biased perception of the candidate based on their gender.

I think spacial reasoning ability, even if it's stratified by gender as you claim, therefore has no effect on entry level job placement at all.

If you are really curious and want to explicitly prove that testosterone levels affect spacial reasoning, you have to set up an experiment that isolates these variables and not a meta analysis on populations full of confounding variables. You need an experiment.

A good experiment could be to develop a task that assayed spacial reasoning in female rats. You have your control rat, and one you treat with testosterone. Then you see if there is a difference in the ability to complete the task and test for significance. Until that experiment is done, and maybe it has been done already, I'd call this conclusion 'hand wavey,' at best.


First, the rat experiment that you want has actually been done. In rats, testosterone improves spatial reasoning. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081396/ for verification.

Secondly an inability at spatial reasoning definitely is going to make engineering courses much, much harder. So your claim that there is no effect on getting to entry level engineer is overstating your case by a lot.

That said, there is a documented difference between men and women that affects a first hire. And that difference is that the whole "fake it until you make it" attitude is more commonly found among men than women. So there is actually a significant difference between nervous women and nervous men talking to recruiters about their first job. Not sure how important it is, but it should not be discounted.

Do you have followup questions?


It could be explained by lots of things — my point was that population differences in abilities that can be learned will obviously result if the population doesn’t have a uniform opportunity to practice those abilities uniformly, so it’s hard to avoid explaining the lack of learning by the lack of abilities without becoming circular.

It’s biological fact that brains are extremely plastic, and I’m sure we all know (or are) people who have rendered “innate” talents or lack thereof irrelevant by the application of study and practice. If cultural biases limit practice in a population, that population will certainly skew lower in ability as a result.


Question. What evidence would it take to convince you that there are real biological differences?

In the hypothetical, yes. Absolutely. Social differences can explain a lot of what look like biological differences.

The opposite is also true. Biology may cause large differences.

These two explanations are also not necessarily in conflict. Biological factors may work through social dynamics. For example hormones can change our actions which affects our immediate social environment at impressionable ages.

That said, evidence suggests that testosterone levels during puberty affects our spatial reasoning abilities for the rest of our lives. Given the very large difference in testosterone levels between men and women, this suggests a biological explanation of the measured gender difference.




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