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.
For example in the course of people saying that marriage limits their freedom, that the years of fun are over after it etc. Especially in progressive circles it seems to be frowned upon and it's regarded as boring and unprogressive if people marry early. It's probably also losing value as people become more secular and the concept isn't tied to their world views as tightly anymore.
On a more general note, I have the feeling that we are losing other useful cultural mechanisms over the course of secularization as well, and we are right at the transition where both spiritual and scientific explanations are regarded as unacceptable. I'm however still hopeful that the work by philosophers like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett can help us building a value system based on naturalism.
As someone raised in an environment that was centered around religion (commune-style, basically), I often worry about how our secular environment will develop as the religious underpinnings of our culture fade away. Our approach to long-term relationships is one thing that sometimes worries me, as is our approach to community-forming.
But as an optimist and a fan of change - change in general, even if it's sometimes bad - I'm really excited to be living in a time where we are free to rediscover and rebuild our world. I hope we can figure out how to keep the things that worked, and find replacements for the things that didn't.
> they are motivated to be productive members of society
The converse has also been proposed; to wit, that societies which systematically disenfranchise young men from the opportunity to reproduce suffer greater social instability. This thesis has been presented as a possible explanation for the willingness of young men in some parts of the world to become suicide bombers.
I know very little about this subject, but my gut feeling is that the systematic disenfranchisement of young men you are referring to has probably little in common with the kind of marriage we find in Western cultures. Regardless of that, I'm also failing to find evidence of this being a prevalent motive among suicide attackers on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attack#Profile_of_atta...
It'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.
I'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 ]. 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.
A large part of the problem is the failure to distinguish between the aggregate and the individual. For the sake of argument let's say that the population of individuals who would make good engineers is 60% male and 40% female. From an aggregate level that's a huge difference. Once you gather enough of people that statistical inferences can be made, the difference becomes obvious. In a classroom, for instance. But at an individual level that difference becomes insignificant. If you grab one boy and one girl at random, there's a very significant chance the girl is better at engineering than the boy. At the individual level, there are much better predictors of whether a person is good at engineering than their sex. Five minutes of conversation wouldn't be authoritative but it would be much more predictive than the individual's sex.
That really is the crux of the matter. Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice, and then if population differences still emerge, that's OK.
Unfortunately there isn't much room for this middle ground. People who want to acknowledge sex difference want to use sex as a filter, e.g. "no women in combat roles." People who want to give everybody a chance also want to even things out, e.g. "Allow women in combat roles, and lower the standards for women so they have just as much of a chance as men have."
> Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice,
Agreed. But the way it tends to work is that if (say) 60% of all engineers are men and the rest are women, then a man more closely fits the idea of an engineer that those people who are in charge of giving the chances have in mind, and so they're more likely to prefer a man to a woman.
You sort of run into this chicken/egg problem though: are women underrepresented in engineering because of what I described above (bad), or do they actually have equal opportunities and simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay), OR do they actually have equal opportunities and are simply not choosing to be engineers just because the profession currently comprises mostly men and they feel discouraged when they see that, even though they're otherwise interested (bad), or etc. etc.
> simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay)
It is not certain that this choice is OK, though. While the causes of gender disparity are undoubtedly complicated, there seems to be some persistent factor in engineering & technology that results greater disparity than in other fields like medicine and law. It is unlikely that current participation levels are at their natural equilibrium; the gender distribution was more balanced in the past than it is today. The problem is not merely that women may "choose" not to enter (or that they choose to leave and not return) engineering, but that the status quo of the community might be actively driving them away. Engineering & tech have a reputation for allowing behaviors and personalities that would not be tolerated in other fields that are more gender balanced.
Finding the natural gender distribution in tech will require actively changing the culture to make it more inclusive and inviting, not merely removing explicit barriers to entry for women.
Yeah, I agree. Whatever the causes are, the best thing we can do is make the tech culture such that as many people as possible feel included as long they choose to be a part of it, so the decision to pursue it or not comes down to personal interest and nothing more.
I hesitate to bring up extreme cases, but the relationship between social darwinism and the rise of the nazi party make many people, including myself, very hesitant to speak about differences in sex etc. Not because we deny their existence, but because we've seen how far large groups of uninformed electorate can be persuaded into supporting some scary stuff because of it. It's just a very tricky subject when it comes to the masses.
EDIT: Clarified to social darwinism from darwinism.
It's not the masses you need to be worried about, hiou. It wasn't the masses gassing people by the millions... it was the elites, who got a few people to go along with them. "The masses" organize poorly... it's the people who are smart enough to successfully do something with their bad idea, but not smart enough to see through the bad idea, that must be feared.
The deep-rooted fear of academia isn't that the masses may do something stupid with the idea of gender differences... it's the fear that they, the academics, will do something stupid. (Again. Although, not the same literal people, of course.)
It's not just "academics". It's anyone who can take an idea and successfully run with it, without stopping to notice all the signs that are yelling at them "Stop! This isn't working as you expected!" Academia merely happens to have a large concentration of such people, for structural reasons. (The "ivory tower" is a real effect, and it is both a good thing because it permits concentration and focus, and a bad thing, because it begets people too stuck in their theories and smart enough to "explain away" anything, until it is much too late.)
This is not something "the masses" do, because "the masses" do not have the ability to successfully run with an idea and gather enough power to impose it.
It's not just the holocaust, either. There's a huge history of 20th-century "social engineering" that rather a lot of people would rather forget, because it pretty uniformly went badly. See also "eugenics" for another reason that academics are afraid to think too hard about how people may be different or how genes may determine things about people... and not entirely without reason. "The masses" did not impose eugenics. In fact a lot of eugenics had to be hidden from the masses.
With power comes the power to screw up. Academics have a lot of power. It would be strange if they'd never screwed up.
Academics have approximately zero power. This is the craziest conspiracy theory I've seen in a while, because it's just so obviously wrong. Oh yes, college professors need to be kept in check because otherwise they'll go out and kill all the Jews. WTF?
Go research where Lenin came from. Go research who did eugenics, and where they got their ideas from. Go research the origin of a lot of the Nazi figures and where their ideas came from. (Not just Hitler.)
Express all the humorous strawmen you like. How do you think these things happen? In the 20th century, the only bad social engineering event I can think of that could even remotely be considered the outgrowth of a broad movement of the masses is sort of Nazi-ism. Everything else was led by somebody with an idea from academia. "The masses" don't originate many ideas, and in the era of the all-powerful State (which the 20th century is firmly in), "the masses" don't run around committing genocide, or doing any of the things they may have done in previous social systems, because all that power is now reserved to the State.
And the State and academia have always been attached at the hip, as they are today. How else would it be? Do you think it's some sort of bizarre coincidence that the dominant ideology of academia today and the dominant ideology of the State are exactly the same? Of course they are... they're causally connected. (Where do the "technocrats" in technocracy come from? Certainly not the farm!)
As for this being "conspiracy" theory... no, it's just an understanding of how the world actually works. It may happen to explain this opinion of mine, but that's only because as a ground fact of the current world it explains lots of things. Academics wield power through the State. It's clear as daylight... it would be some sort of bizarre theory that they don't. What would that even look like?
Oh yes, the dominant ideology of academia is the same as that of the state, which is why academics universally agree that anthropogenic global warming is real while the government can't even agree on whether climate is changing at all, let alone the cause. This must be why universities are chronically underfunded and professors are constantly scrambling for their next research grant. This must be why roughly nobody in the top levels of government has so much as a PhD. The tight link between the two explains why governments persist in outlawing drugs even though research shows it's more effective to legalize them. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Looks to me like Lenin graduated from university but didn't go anywhere near an advanced degree. I'm not sure which Nazis you're referring to but I'm not aware of a particularly large number of university professors among the ranks of the top Nazis.
I agree with mikeash on this. It's not the academics that are committing crimes. And anyway, I'm tired of people telling me whether a certain idea is right or wrong. I just want to hear the evidence, and I think that's how most "academics" are.
Sure, academic don't rove about with black helicopters and guns, but academia has the ear of industry, politics and government for good reason. Applied academics has the ability to predict outcomes, grow economies, win wars and generate massive revenues.
But it also has the ability to go horribly wrong. It's undeniable that Nazi eugenicists modeled their ideology after the American eugenics movement, encouraged by American academics and NGOs.
Some academics have the ear of powerful people. Some don't. Like in any other field.
Academia tends to be where far-out ideas come from, just because it's an environment that encourages it. Some of those ideas will be discovered by people in power and used to shape policy. Other will not. To blame academia for this or point to this process as evidence that academics are powerful seems an awful lot like being afraid of language because language can be used to convince people to do bad things.
I agree. Language is just a form of communication, it can be used or misused.
It would be a fiction to downplay the power of academics in modern society. Academics has the power to mold and frame the minds of the next generation of leaders, alter government policy and to influence an entire populace from childhood.
I see your point that academics has been demonized at times, however I think it's more appropriate to judge it on outcomes.
You don't understand, recognizing sex differences leads to industrial-scale mass murder, just like it has in every human society that has ever recognized sex differences. Wake up sheeple!
I think clear-headed thinking along with a moral foundation of compassion for everyone is going to work out better in the long-run than attempting to skirt around possible truths deemed 'dangerous'.
I think they're talking about social darwinism. The idea that "survival of the fittest" can be naively applied to politics is a pretty easy way to convince people to commit genocide.
It appears you're right. However, I find it puzzling that it's mentioned here, since the gulf between "there are some genetic differences between the sexes" and "let's attempt to improve the human gene pool by murdering any group we find displeasing" is so great that they barely have any relationship at all.
Given that procreation requires one man and one woman to participate, it's going to be really hard to practice eugenics based on genetic differences between the sexes.
Sex-selective abortion is not eugenics. Nobody with even the most cursory understanding of human reproduction thinks that you'll permanently alter the gene pool by selecting one sex over another. This is totally unrelated, and I'm rather sad that I managed to get not one but two replies bringing it up, as if it were somehow relevant. The quality of this discussion is just astonishingly bad.
Beside selective abortion and embryo selection, it's already possible to derive gametes of both kinds from stem cells of arbitrary sex in mice, and it will most likely be possible to do the same with human cells soon.
Mice that descend from two males or two females have already been created in the lab.
You still need wombs, but they can be grafted and will probably be farmed from stem cells in the future too.
It's not about murdering people. The problem is, if you support policies that disadvantage people based on their genetics, you can gradually dehumanize those people. The (real) disadvantages of that outweigh the (supposed) advantages.
But if you are disadvantaging people that have objectively inferior genetics? Do you actually lose anything? Otherwise, are those people taking advantage of medical advances that prevent their deficiencies from being fatal?
Celiacs, for instance, seem to be a group that in previous generations succumbed to their condition, if not directly than indirectly because of general unfitness.
To be honest, as a survivor of childhood lymphoma, I ought to be dead, had I been born even 25 years earlier. I question whether my genetics have enough offsetting benefits to counter that predisposition to life-threatening cancer for any of my offspring.
Advanced medical care is part of the environment in a first-world country now. I'm sure a fish would think us genetically inferior for our dependence on air to live, but we don't see it that way. A dependence on advanced medical care is ultimately no different. Assuming civilization doesn't collapse, I'd expect various dependencies on medical treatment to gradually arise in the population, but there's nothing objectively wrong with that.
OK, but the gulf between that and "there is some genetic differences between the sexes" is still so large that you'd need a powerful telescope to see from one to the other.
As much as I disagree with your overall viewpoints, I'll agree on this one you have here. For a lot of individuals, the gap that you mention is huge such as to not have an immediate, explicit effect, and for one particular reason:
Something as simple as validating and completely "accepting" the notion that "there is[sic] some genetic differences between the sexes" requires individuals to throw out entire swathes of subsequent ideas/notions/etc, if we were to be logical about things. I.e. You now have "Men and women are equal but ..." or "Men and women are equal except when...", instead of the pure and logically consistent "Men and women are equal".
If you ask me, the entire thing (sex-differences topic) is starting to smell full of tiny errors and corner-cases. Perhaps we're on the verge of a paradigm shift happening once people clarify their ideas, without exceptions and acceptable-errors:
Equality isn't about people being literally identical. Nobody actually believes that. There are troubling facts like how men as a rule have a really hard time becoming pregnant that nobody denies.
Equality is about equal treatment. It's about judging the individual on their own merits, not some group they happen to belong to. "Men and women are equal" doesn't mean women are equally muscular and men can have babies. It means that when writing a law, selecting an employee, or counting a vote, you don't change your approach based on whether the person is a man or a woman.
There is nothing wrong with saying, for example, most of our warehouse workers are men because more men are able to do the heavy lifting required. There's nothing unequal about that. What equality demands is that you never say, I will not consider you for a warehouse job, regardless of your actual strength, because you are a woman and all women are too weak for it.
And (at approximately same time) rejection of darwinism has stopped soviet regime from inducing famines, using slave labour and purges. Except it did not.
4th comment from the top of the thread and we've already reached Godwin's Law.
Have you ever wondered how the electorate becomes uninformed? Certain information is declared off-limits because of what it might make people think or do.
> Unfortunately there isn't much room for this middle ground. People who want to acknowledge sex difference want to use sex as a filter, e.g. "no women in combat roles." People who want to give everybody a chance also want to even things out, e.g. "Allow women in combat roles, and lower the standards for women so they have just as much of a chance as men have."
I've literally never heard the latter argument made by any proponent of women in combat roles. The closest I've seen is calls for the requirements for certain combat roles to be reviewed for appropriateness to the real requirements of the specific role; most proponents of relaxing blanket restrictions on women in combat roles I've heard will explicitly accept that, for most roles, any reasonable set of standards will still make it easier for men.
Where have all the different standards for men and women in the armed forces come from, then? The Army and Navy both have different physical fitness standards for men and women. I didn't look up other branches but I don't expect them to be any different. I wouldn't expect there to be a big push for different standards because that's already where things are now.
> Where have all the different standards for men and women in the armed forces come from, then?
They came when women were first admitted to the armed forces at all, and are contemporaneous with the rules barring them from combat roles. They are not the product of pressure to include them in combat roles.
Roles (including, but not, AFAIK, limited to, combat roles) within the military can have physical standards above the minimum standard for the branch of service, and no one that I know of that has argued for removing the restriction on women serving in combat roles has advocated against gender-blind role-specific standards.
There are two separate reasons for fitness standards.
The first is the one you're probably thinking of - you need to be so strong or so fast in order to do your job.
The second is more subtle, along the lines of "we want soldiers to have the discipline and willingness to follow rules that physical fitness signals." This is why they want a drone pilot, for example, to meet physical fitness standards.
Really, the military should have three fitness standards: one for all male soldiers, one for all female soldiers, and another for the soldier's specific speciality.
That really is the crux of the matter. Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice, and then if population differences still emerge, that's OK.
Yup. One of the things that annoys me most about prejudice and such is that it is inefficient. For a well-run and rich (economically, socially) civilization, we ideally want everyone to excel to the best of their best ability. To find the best use for everyone's talents. We want everyone to find their own niche, irrespective of their gender, race, orientation, etc.
> Unfortunately there isn't much room for this middle ground. People who want to acknowledge sex difference want to use sex as a filter, e.g. "no women in combat roles." People who want to give everybody a chance also want to even things out, e.g. "Allow women in combat roles, and lower the standards for women so they have just as much of a chance as men have."
Actually, I would say the vast majority of people not currently writing a post on an internet forum fall in some middle ground there. Like, the vast, vast majority.
Where do they do that? Even the notorious punching bag of Affirmative Action is intended to make up for prior bias, not force equal outcomes regardless of all merit. (Whether it actually does that is another question, but "try to enforce" is all about intent.)
You probably assume that the test is unbiased unless proven otherwise, and that any discrepancy is therefore likely to be actual differences in the underlying populations. The court is merely assuming the opposite: that discrepancies in the test results are a result of bias in the test itself unless proven otherwise.
They aren't trying to force equal outcomes, they're trying to make sure that if a test produces worse results for minorities then it had better be because of actual differences in the population and not subtle bias in the test.
There's a slightly stronger argument to be made in this space. Signs of technical competence "screens off" the effect of gender. That is, once you've had that five-minute conversation with someone, learning their gender doesn't give you any additional information about their engineering competence.
Actually, no. When you pick out an individual there's still a 60% chance than one is better than the other given no other information than their sex. That's how statistics works.
But I agree that it's better not to make the prejudgement at all. The problem is that there are many things that are true in the aggregate but we can't acknowledge them because we are scared of demotivating people. Is that the best we can do?
That is not how statistics works. This is how you reverse a conditional probability (Bayes's Rule):
P(B|A) = P(A|B) * P(B) / P(A)
If A is "female" and ~A is "male", and B is "good engineer", then what we know , including ancestor post's assumption, is this:
P(A|B) = 0.4 (the population of known-good engineers is 40% female)
P(A) = 0.5 (the population as a whole is 50% female)
We can further assume, arbitrarily, that P(B) = 0.02 (one in every fifty people make good engineers). So the likelihood that a person is a good engineer given that they are female is P(B|A).
> We can further assume, arbitrarily, that P(B) = 0.02 (one in every fifty people make good engineers). So the likelihood that a person is a good engineer given that they are female is P(B|A).
> What we learn from this is that sex is not a good screening criterion for finding good engineers. You realize an advantage of only 0.8%, not 60%.
if you multiply two numbers (here 0.4 and 0.6) by the same constant (here 0.02 / 0.5) you can't then say "You realize an advantage of only 0.8%, not 60%"... 0.016/0.024 == 40/60.
Re: OP's point ("When you pick out an individual there's still a 60% chance than one is better than the other given no other information than their sex"), I agree that's wrong, but not for the reason given. He's not reversing a conditional probability, but rather asking a question about the unconditional probability (the base rate), so the 60/40 conditional information is not relevant.
If you pick two random individuals, one male and one female, and the IQ average of the two groups is equal (roughly true, from the article), the chance that one has a higher IQ than the other is 50%.
julia> sum([randn() > (randn() * 10) for i=1:1_000_000])
499884
IE assuming that men have 10x the IQ variance, the variance makes literally no difference when comparing two random people.
Your post looks like a non-sequitur to me. But for the sake of math...
For an arbitrary variance multiplier of 10 (std. dev. sqrt(10)), there are no non-imaginary solutions for a high-pass threshold where you can achieve a 60:40 split between two populations that have the same median.
You can get about a 58:42 split, putting your threshold a bit below the common median. But to achieve a 60:40 split, you need one population to have 25 times the variance, or for the populations to have different medians. Above that, you have two possible real solutions for the threshold value.
You can try it yourself, and hopefully my math is correct for this one:
60/40 * erfc( x / sqrt(2))/2 = erfc( sqrt( variance_ratio ) * x / sqrt(2))/2
Since the threshold value equates to a different standard deviation for each population, you can say with some certainty that given the knowledge of which population a person is in, there is a different probability that person is above the threshold value, which works out to be 60% and 40%, respectively. But that's just begging the question, since those are the same numbers you used to work out the threshold value, and you still had to assume values for the medians and variances of both populations.
I'm super confused by this reply. The article says that the stddev of the distribution of male IQ is larger than the stddev of the distribution for female IQ, and also seems to state the mean and median are equal. GGP threw out 60/40 as their believed split of men to women being good engineers. I took this to mean that GGP was saying he believed engineering talent to be independent of gender when IQ was present, and that engineering required a higher than average IQ. More formally:
In that model the 60/40 split comes from a conditional distribution of gender given an IQ above some threshold. So something like:
julia> women = sum([randn() > 1 for i=1:10_000_000])
julia> men = sum([(randn() * 2) > 1 for i=1:10_000_000])
julia> women / (women + men)
0.3395449535000696
Which isn't exactly 60/40, but is fairly close. It says that [iff the 60/40 split is true], the stddev difference needed is less than 2x.
Thanks for presenting this so clearly. However, note that, as you show in this scenario, males are, on a relative basis, 50% more likely than females to be good engineers, knowing nothing else about them other than gender (P(B|~A) = 1.5 * P(B|A)). While the absolute probabilities (and difference in probabilities) are small, the relative improvement in classification error rate attributable to knowing the person's gender could very well mean that gender is still a useful feature to include (among many others! it's not so useful on its own, as you note) in a classifier for good engineers.
If you were writing an automated Bayesian classifier to find good engineers, males would get one measly additional point towards the refer-to-a-human threshold.
In contrast, there are many other hypothetical rules that would be better predictors. Liking Star Wars, 4 points. Star Trek, 9 points. Knowing how much mana a Lightning Bolt costs, 6 points. Owning a 3-wolf shirt, 2 points. Being left-handed, 15 points. Reading HN, 40 points.
Anything you can glean statistically from a population of known-good engineers can be transformed into Bayesian classifier rules, in exactly the same way you can predict an e-mail is spam if it has certain strings in it.
But even including the one point for knowing the sex could be considered sex discrimination, even though it would be totally supported by the math. But since you likely want your threshold value to be high enough to weed out false positives, while still low enough to avoid false negatives, that one point rule is practically a waste of time. The cases where that one point makes a difference will be just those people who barely meet the threshold. If you have two people who are only just barely good enough to be considered good engineers, and otherwise exactly the same, the statistical argument says to prefer the male.
I have never met anyone that is content to hire engineers who are likely to be only barely adequate in preference to those who are likely much better. That hypothetical person is the only one who might care about male or female. Everyone else will be looking for the highest point totals, gained from criteria that are better predictors.
If your classifier also knows that an applicant has a CS degree and hypothetically a higher percentage of females with CS degrees than males with CS degrees are talented. Then the relationship might reverse.
The point is stats about populations often fail to carry over to sub populations.
PS: This flip is actually fairly common in the face of discrimination. Basically, you would expect the first hundred female fighter pilots to be way above average.
1. The selection criteria are the same for different populations, and the there are significant statistical differences in the populations that may lead to the observed result.
2. The selection criteria are the same for different populations, and random noise produced the observed result.
3. The selection criteria are different for different populations.
You cannot assert one without ruling out the others.
In the fighter pilot case, I imagine that it would be easy to disprove #1 and #2. Not all cases of discrimination are so obvious that there are no non-imaginary solutions to the equations that conform to the assumptions of the hypothesis.
It makes some people uncomfortable to face the idea that in order to prove discrimination is occurring, they must first employ accurate statistics for partitioned populations, which may be unflattering to one or more of the partitioned groups. You can't really say "because race" or "because sex" or "because disability" with certainty over "because selection-relevant attribute" using a statistical argument without showing the statistics. But those who attempt to gather accurate statistics are often accused of something-ism and vilified just because some people don't like the results.
Some people just want to work without constantly watching their backs and covering their asses. And that's why we assume independence without having ironclad proof that is also easily understood by the general public. If you're going to suggest that there is something intrinsic to femaleness that causally links to less engineering skill, you had better have a flawless data set with mathematically perfect analysis, and then also invent a psychological "out" which absolves anyone of guilt for relying on the results.
This is why all HR departments suck. Most of their job is covering someone else's ass, and if they choose to use statistics, they must be both factually correct and politically correct.
I don't understand why you are taking the advantage between the two options to be the difference between their probabilities, rather than the ratio. If I am 2% successful at X and you are only 1% successful, I am 0.02/0.01 = twice as successful as you, not 0.02-0.01 = 1% more successful.
As dlss has explained, it doesn't matter what constant you multiply by, the ratio is the same.
I don't understand why you consider this to be a meaningful number. It isn't even a probability any more; it's just a dimensionless ratio.
In your example, your result is 2. That alone tells me it cannot be a probability, as those numbers are restricted to the domain from zero to one.
If you partition the population by sex, the probability of randomly selecting a good engineer from the all-male group is only 0.8% higher than picking from the all-female group. That is the advantage you realize by selecting that criterion for your partition. If you are taking a ratio of conditional probabilities, you are no longer partitioning the probability space by that condition.
Yup, "insignificant" is the wrong word, since it has a specific meaning in statistics, and for that meaning, my paragraph is definitely wrong. How about if I change that word: "But at an individual level, that difference becomes trivial."
I get what you mean, regardless of wording. People should be seen as individuals. I don't know how we can be blind to aggregate differences enough to not be perturbed when we have unequal outcomes but not so cognizant of them that we demotivate people.
But as I write this, I'm arriving at an answer: we need to recognize that people are making choices based upon who they are and what they like.
As I have read this thread, I keep coming back to how we measure competence and ability.
For example, at one point in history our IQ tests included questions based on baseball rules. So someone taking the test that didn't know the rules of baseball couldn't do well – regardless of their mathematical or logical ability, i.e. what the question was supposedly measuring.
In other words, culture can strongly impact both perceptions of ability and measurements of ability, as well as impacting the equitable training and opportunity that people are afforded. I suspect that most differences in most fields are not actual sex differences (i.e. biological), but in fact are social differences based on gender (i.e. cultural based on a person's gender identity).
I recently took an artificial intelligence class that required writing an agent to answer non-verbal IQ test questions. One of the greatest challenges was that some of the questions had ambiguous answers. For example, an axial symmetry in the example frame could be reproduced with either a rotation or a mirror operation in the output frame, and both options were available as candidate solutions.
Naturally, the question came up: how do we define the "right" answer when there are multiple valid choices? As it turns out, the folks who write the test determine the correct answer to these types of question based on the most common response from test takers who get the highest scores on non-ambiguous questions. The thinking goes that if folks who get most of the other questions right largely agree about a preference for one answer over the other, that must be the most correct answer.
The most interesting part of that discussion to me was when a classmate observed that we use human intelligence as a baseline for measuring human intelligence, and then marvel at the extent of our own intelligence; if a machine used more sophisticated logic than a human was capable of to choose a different answer, we would look down on the machine for being less intelligent than man. It reminded me very much of Plato and the shadows in the cave.
Significant is often used in science to mean large enough to be concerned with. So, a 1% chance of death tomorrow is a significant chance of death tomorrow.
I'm a female computer scientist / developer, and after my experience both online, at school, and at work, I would really just rather ignore it. I went to a college with 4:1 ratio of male to female.
I've had periods in my life where I felt like I was the beautiful princess at the school, and periods where I feel like a somewhat disfigured monster with an average intellect. It really sucks when culture places so much emphasis on appearance, and I don't have that when I engage in dialogue and activity online.
The fact that I've been able to think about this since I was maybe 14 years old, on a hypothetical and applicative level, shows that there is more that varies to predicting individual differences than what these tests measure, and what causes are inferred, as the act of measuring may change the outcome. Males may take more risks because culture rewards them if they do, supposedly, and I as a female have sought stability, predictability and consistency in my education. When people are trying very hard to either sleep with you, hit on you, or even screw with you (because for some reason, your existence bothers them), it's very hard to know whether you are learning the truth, or whether the truth has been distorted, made easier to swallow, or prepackaged otherwise, because of your teachers' and classmates' perceptive biases.
I take a lot of risks in learning. I try to avoid taking those risks in real life, because while at one point, I did, I found myself on the precipice of losing almost everything.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, that the individual is different from the aggregate. But even myself, I am a hypocrite, because these are cynical inferences I made along the way, about my education, while I was receiving it. And I made those inferences mostly from having a behind the curtain peek into boys clubs, online. I was judging my classmates and peers by assholes on the internet, and that really isn't right, but neither is it right to assume that a person fits on the distributive curve of which they can be categorized into, based on a very small subselection of data.
Thinking about this has led me to the conclusion, that I really don't know a lot of things, and it seems neither does anyone else. Every point in time can be as unpredictable as infinity. People make so many assumptions about what is stuffed up in other people's heads, what guides how they think, what they do with that knowledge, how it directs them, and the resulting thoughts, the determination of envisioning, assisting, and planning the life paths of others.
My greatest comfort level is being an anonymous blob with no face, on the internet, where I learn a little bit of haskell here and there, and maybe find some elegant nuance and subtlety in code, computational theory, mathematics, philosophy. It's a bit hypocritical for me to share my gender willingly, over and over, but at this rate, I go through probably hundreds of aliases in a year.
Thank you though, for clarifying an important point concisely. The last time sex differences came up on a forum, I don't remember feeling quite so calm.
A cousin of mine with a high IQ (TNS level) and who would be categorized as a 'cute blond' expressed similar laments. Moderately sociable as a kid, reasonably well-heeled, one who loved spending most of her time devouring science and math tomes, conducted experiments on her own; an individual. Then adolescence hit coupled with menarche and amplified social pressure to 'fit in' which caused her sense of strong individualization to wane. In late teens she talked to me about majoring in law or sociology and I questioned: 'is that YOU?' What followed was a long diatribe, de rerum natura, which had the earmarks of a 'something' being repressed. Using salient observations like those opined by Marilyn vos Savant in her old 'ask Marilyn' column it was conceded that individualization and mutualization are sustainable while open-end charity with no sense of culturally enforced mutualization is fatally maladaptive, given received human nature. And the old social dictates evolved for survival in times prior to the advent of modern medicine were just so THEN but this is NOW. And the great seminal inventors and scientists of the late 19th century, almost all of whom were male, were individualists by temperament who while developing their ideas would partition themselves off from the vicissitudes of life for the duration. That exchange was capped-off with a paraphrase of an extract from the 'Bulfinch's Mythology' section 'Glaucus and Scylla'. Glaucus was a river god who developed the hots for a maiden called Scylla, who scorned his every approach. Retreating in to sulk mode he was given a pep talk by a mentor goddess Circe (where the word cereal comes from). To paraphrase: Recognize and objectify your worth. Then realize you are someone to be sought after rather than one who seeks in vain. Be willing to meet people half way. But if they spurn you, spurn them! Why should they disturb your Wa? (Wa = inner harmony (jp); we were both into Japanese and anime). In any event, my cousin segued back into math and IT, is herself, and suffers no fools lightly (IE, abides no BS).
Right. You have to make your laws and policies blind to difference, even though they're necessarily operating at the aggregate level where there are differences, so that individuals don't suffer. An interesting example where willfully disregarding statistics is actually beneficial.
Having 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.
Also check out the work of John Money, who popularised the concept of 'gender as a social construct', and wrecked the life of a young man whose penis had been destroyed by trying to raise him as a girl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer.
If anyone ever fails us to understand how blind spots in our perception and cognition work, one of the best examples is to contrast the intensity of calls for equal treatment for the sexes with the fact that up to 80% by region of American baby boys [1] get a piece of their sexual organs removed shortly after birth.
Moreover, we even allow Mohels to suck the baby's penis clean and have a celebratory meal afterward, called a Seudat Mitzvah [2]. And the fact that babies sometimes contract herpes and die from it [3] doesn't stop it.
So that's a hell of a blind spot, although I won't say it's just academics with power, it's numerous institutions including the religious ones, the corporate ones and even outlaw institutions. The evil that happens to people is the accumulation of all the mundane evil people in institutions do to protect themselves.
(currently finishing Masters in Methodology/Statistics in Psychology) There is evidence of inter-sex differences (and in many areas girls are at advantage), but the provably innate part is small, and the intra-group variance coming from other factors (that may include elements of culture) is much bigger. This allows for conclusions on population, not individual level. On a related note, affirmative action programs seem to work to societies benefit.
And absolutely regardless of John Money being misguided and vilified (I don't think I even heard of him before recent Catholic backlash), gender is a legitimate and in depth academic topic.
Yes, I understand that the means may differ significantly but the variances are fairly large so there is lots of overlap between sexes, just as the article linked by OP discusses. Although, there are many characteristics and they all aren't going to exhibit the same spreads. I wonder if some have significantly smaller variances. The characteristic I keep noticing is how rough young boys are when they play compared to young girls. My small sample shows a very tight variance; young girls are much softer in their play compared to boys. Is that cultural conditioning at such a young age?
Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct.
In my experience, the nastiest transphobes are the ones who believe gender is a social construct. They're called TERFs. They can't wrap their minds around the fact that we prove their pet theories wrong, so they stalk, harass, and doxx us.
Some aspects of gender expression are social constructs, but certainly hard-coded gender identity is real. This is a spectrum, and there are many people who don't identify as either gender, but somewhere between. You don't have to be a TERF to say that something as vague as "science ability" can't possibly be measurably linked to sex or gender. (one of my children is transmasculine, but he also likes to paint his nails and wear glitter. we refuse to assign him any sort of gender expression box, and still respect that he is a boy).
Despite knowing a couple trans people, I'd never seen this term that I recall. Some very interesting reading out there; hard to wrap one's mind around... but worth the effort.
I also got to read about intersectionality for the first time. There are aspects of this I've acknowledged for a long time, just didn't know a word existed for it.
SJWs in general are getting a bad rap from many corners now, and I think some of that is what I'd call a 'natural correction'. When a critical mass of people gets involved with anything, a few inevitably fail to understand alternate perspectives enough to consider how those views might harmonize with their own (due to rabbit holes of dogmatism, subconscious bias, inexperience, stubbornness or whatever else).
To me, it so very often seems to come back to one simple thing-- have you tried putting yourself in your neighbor's shoes lately?
Stalking, harassing and doxxing is indefensible, but not being able to wrap one's head around gender is understandable I think. Often people want, whether trans or not, to express their gender in terms of constructs like name, language, manner of dress etc which are clearly social (sometimes clearly invented in the last 100 years). We have no easy way of deciding how these seemingly superficial things relate to underlying gender.
Trying to explain to a girl who's never seen a kilt why you're "dressed like a girl" is a great exercise for anyone who thinks gender isn't at all a social construct.
Like many things, gender is a mix of both. It's an immutable core wrapped in various social and cultural markers we've come to associate with "masculine" and "feminine". And of course the range of possible cores is more of a continuum than a simple binary flag (even though we like sorting all the arbitrary markers into two neat piles as if that really means anything).
Considering we still largely refused to acknowledge something as intuitively obvious[0] as non-right-handedness less than two generations ago, I wonder how long it will take until we've learned to deal with the fact that gender (and sexuality) is as idiosyncratic as nearly everything else about an individual's identity.
[0]: Seriously. People generally have two hands. Why on Earth should we assume that there's something special about the one that is dominant for most people? Good luck explaining gender and sexuality to a society that can't even imagine not everybody is strictly right-handed.
> Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct.
I don't think the existence of trans people proves anything, in either direction, about whether or not gender is a social construct.
We live in a gendered society. Pointing out that some social roles are completely arbitrary doesn't actually change anything. Gender is in the home, on television, on the radio, in books, on the internet, in schools, and in the streets. It's being taught and reinforced everywhere. I don't think anyone could possibly credibly claim to have independently derived gender from their own innate personal characteristics that they were born with and thus have proved that gender is a biological reality.
To assert gender is real because you feel some kind of way after being brainwashed your entire life is... well, I guess that's actually very common but I don't think it furthers any kind of understanding or suggests anything about the way things should be.
I support everyone's right to live their lives the way they need to... but gender is entirely about arbitrarily restricting and labeling people's behavior and I can't endorse it--I'd rather live in a world without labels where everyone is allowed the full range of human expression.
Whenever I've heard a suggestion that I should just live as a feminine guy, it just makes me feel sick. Even in a world where no gender stereotypes existed, I wouldn't want to be male. I'd rather not live the rest of my life with a masculine face, body hair, a flat chest, male fat distribution, etc. My transition has nothing to do with social roles and everything to do with my body.
Before I transitioned, I actually had problems recognizing myself in the mirror. It wasn't until I'd been on hormones for half a year that I could actually remember my face.
Also, my own hobbies and interests are more androgynous than anything else, but I probably lean towards being more gender non-conforming as a girl than as a guy.
It is unclear to me as why it contradicts the social construct part of the gender.
Maybe some people negates the physical difference between women and men, but I doubt that it is the majority of people that believe that the social part of the gender is socially constructed.
I don't understand that the fact that you couldn't stand being in a man body (I'm sorry for that BTW and glad you "escaped") does not invalidate the belief that the gender side associated with pink and blue, or which kind of job is socially constructed.
I've always viewed gender & sex as being an issue of parts or lack of parts a human is born with, and gender is their sexual personality or preferences.
Do you believe there are specific (limited in quantity) genders?
I always assumed it was defined by procreation - when we assign gender to individuals of a species - the females lay eggs/give birth, and the males fertilize them.
Why are these labels important to those who use them -- why bother with a "gender" noun and instead use a description of what your sexuality functions as?
That's a pretty ridiculous claim. I'm clearly not going to convince you of anything, but for anyone following this thread you can read http://www.troubleandstrife.org/new-articles/you-are-killing... for what I found was a level-headed explanation of the divide between trans activists and the so called "TERF"s.
What an ignorant comment. Feminism is directly responsible for women getting their rights, like abortion. Saying it is "just as bad as..." is a clueless claim. What wrongs has Masculinism ever corrected?
While what you are saying is partial true, the picture of genetics vs nurture is much more complex. I would recommend a excellent lecture series at (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&index=1&list=PL4...) which goes into quite into depth about the subject.
For example, while there are clear differences at birth, nurture can permanent shutdown genes. Additionally a lot of activators for genes are triggered by mental thought process and the environment around individuals.
To make a car analogy, we could assume that faster cars are more often breaking the speed limit than slower cars, and we might very likely find this to be true in practice regardless of the actually speed limit. From there we need to be careful to conclude that its the fault of the car when a driver choses to ignore the law, or that just because the acceleration is faster and it is easier to drive fast in a fast car a person is not conscious in their choice.
Our faulty assumptions become clear when viewing other societies. For example, in the former USSR, 58% of engineers were women. In China, 40% of engineers are women, where less than 47% of the population are women. The communist countries placed a greater emphasis on gender equality in workforce. Sharp differences between west and the east are evident in other occupations such as medicine.
In the study cited, the mean age of the babies (neonates) was 3 days. That's enough time for babies to be influenced by adult interactions. Babies have been shown to be handled differently by adults based on their gender. Female babies are spoken to more, whereas male babies are handled more.
In the study, a substantial number of babies exhibited behaviors associated with the other gender. I would resist talking about a real sexual dimorphism when gender is not determinative of social vs mechanical preference.
The communist countries placed a greater emphasis on gender equality in workforce.
They also give the individual very little choice in their future career, while the final assignment is based predominantly on (at least in the case of China) the outcome of a single test.
So while it differs from the American process, I don't think you can hold it up as a correct normative solution.
> I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.
Indeed, it's such a taboo that it's brought up here every time the subject is discussed here.
Unless you would take all your information from radicalfeminist.com, I never saw a reputable news channel denying there would be differences between sexes. Actually, I see this meme of "Gender differences are taboo!" MUCH more often than I see the actual behavior so decried in actual action.
> 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.
Even the word "disparity" (instead of difference) assumes that there should be some sort of parity between sexes. And I use "sexes" because "gender" is likely incorrect in reference to genetics. Unless they find some genetic link to it, in which case a lot of arguments will need to cease.
Yeah 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.
> gender disparities across different occupations.
I guess it would depend on the occupation. For example, I don't see much difference between nurses and doctors in terms of something that could be quantified as a gender-specific preference. It seems to me that the idea of "nurses are women, doctors are men" came about more from the idea that women were "too stupid" to be doctors and that it was a "man's job." Even today many doctors look down on nurses (as 'below' them; people whose opinions don't matter), and men that decide to become nurses also face a uphill battle of social acceptance.
Well, it's not just doctors/nurses. You also have dentists/dental assistants, which in my anecdotal experience is pretty heavily a male/female divide.
I will comment, that it seems easier for women to move "up" than for men to move "down." It seems like there is more friction against male nurses/dental assistants than there is against women doctors/dentists.
Where do you think the "friction" comes from? The men themselves?
Honestly, men really should consider these fields. In SF, the median pay for a dental hygienist is almost as high as for a software developer, and median pay is actually higher for a registered nurse (again, in SF, this isn't the case nationally) [1]. Nursing and dental hygiene have less upside, but less age discrimination and better career stability.
If you'd like more career flexibility, would like to be able to work part time, step back from the career track to take care of kids, and get back into it later, dental hygiene and nursing are probably better than software development. This is particularly important if you'd like to be able to have kids and spend time with them, while keeping stable employment and/or not badly harming your future prospects of employment.
[1] US news "best jobs", drill down to pay by region, will provide a summary of BLS data.
>Even today many doctors look down on nurses (as 'below' them; people whose opinions don't matter)
Is that really about gender these days? As a patient, I see it that way too. But that's because the doctor has significantly more education and training.
I thought the 'there is no differences' thing was debunked completely?
There will always be warriors against everything who will claim gender is just conditioning or whatever and probsly get eyeballs and publishing as a result. Happily you can completely ignore all that and lead a happy and productive life knowing the gender you were born with has a big factor in determining what you choose to do in your life.
Is the percentage of women in STEM low in all STEM degrees in the US? I'm Spanish and math and chemistry usually have a 50/50 or >50% of women here. Not sure if those are considered STEM at all in the US.
Our social constructions heavily influence how "Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation," (from grandparent comment). In Spain and Italy and Portugal, math occupies a very different social role than it does in the US. In particular, it's not seen as so thoroughly unfeminine. This is one reason there are so many fabulous women mathematicians from Spain, Italy, and Portugal, and why they stay there rather than moving to the US for academic positions.
I think the GP has a point but sort of a weak understanding of what people are selecting for. We change the characteristics we find most important about many jobs to make them fit the gender roles our society has. It's not the act/job alone, it's the role in society. In Malaysia being a programmer is a job that doesn't require mythical powers, so it's close to 50-50 in gender split. In Italy being a mathematician does not stereotypically require brilliance, Asperger's, or general social ineptitude, so it's ok for women. Being a schoolteacher in the US has shifted from a prestigious starter job for educated men who could keep discipline, "a stepping-stone on [the] way to careers in the church or the law" (colonial times, 1800s) to a job for nurturing women who love children (today) [1]. And we can look at computer science: women went from being the original "computers" and programmers to being... not suited to it (?). Right, not interested. For innate reasons.
Yes math and chem are STEM. In my experience, women were found in greater percentages in the basic science and maths (required for pre-med) and in the life sciences which were geared more towards medical professions.
> Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.
No, its not. Just about everyone, on all sides of the gender issues debates expressly acknowledges that sex-correlated differences exist, though the nature, extent, invariability, and policy relevance of those differences is endlessly debated.
The idea that the existence of differences is a "taboo" is simply a strawman constructed by one side to pretend to be a victim of suppression and avoid meaningful engagement on specific issues.
> there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.
On the one hand, anyone that ignores/denies the influence of different hormones [1] on body and mind is simply ignorant. On the other hand you can question how relevant hormones can be to a deeply cultural concept as 'career choice'. On the one hand tiny differences can accumulate over a lifetime, but on the other hand tiny differences can also cancel out and its hard to say what it will add up to via so many layers of indirection.
Accepting the existence and influence of physical differences does not imply having to accept all cultural differences. Some may indeed result unavoidably from the physical differences, while others may be impossible to link to physical differences.
Given differences in the relation between men and women, and career preferences, across cultures, I suspect the distribution of men and women over careers is often dominated by contingent cultural factors. I definitely believe this is the case for STEM careers.
[1] As an example of an undeniable physical difference, not the defining difference
"it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers"
Either you're being hyperbolic in which case I can't really parse your comment because I don't know which points you're serious about, or you actually believe that there is no relationship between the specific toys children play with and their development, which ignores a massive body of reasonably well conducted research in developmental psychology.
>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.
I think it's the right political conclusion, even if the reasoning is questionable.
Just because you could conduct research to root out differences in populations of females and males, it doesn't mean that you should. What's the point? It seems to be that these arguments are used to justify gender disparity in occupations, achievement, etc.
> Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.
The problem is that correlating things with sex (even when such a correlation seems apparent) is just as bad as correlating things with race, ethnicity, religion, age, index finger length, eye color, and pretty much anything else.
The reason that is important for group differences to be studied and known is because the group level is where discrimination (and accusations such) seem to be studied.
If someone wants to hire the tallest 50% of the population to be fruit pickers and fairly evaluates every member of the population resulting in a 90% male workforce, how can they defend themselves against accusations of discrimination? In such an instance, it would be important to understand the height differences in male and female populations.
What about the most intelligent 5% of the population being best suited for STEM fields? With fair evaluations would that result in even splits across sex (or race, for that matter)?
Even with self selection, people are going to select into roles they are best suited for.
Does the Jamacian ACTN3 gene variation result in more Olympic gold sprinters, or is it a result of racial discrimination?
Articles like this on HN and the interest in studying differences between different groups is at least partially a direct result of pressure and accusations of discrimination based on sex/race distributions of groups.
I agree, ideally evaluating each person should be done on an individual level. I also think evaluating issues of discrimination should be done on an individual level.
> 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.
Gender is, by current academic definition, a cultural construct, an identity. Sex, i.e. "plumbing", is the definition of the difference between biological men and women. People with trans operations do not deny their chromosomes, and I'm sure they'd be the first to assure you about the hormonal differences between the sexes.
The problem people are grappling with is ascribing identity assumptions based on sex. You haven't listened carefully enough to understand the difference between gender, sex, identity, etc.
The linked article explicitly does not take any stance on that. What the article points out is that males are more extreme in their traits, eg. exceptionally tall or exceptionally short, which in no way means that there are average differences. Even if the deviation is different, the mean may be the same.
Not that I'm saying that those differences are or are not there, but to say that the current differences are entirely due to biological differences would seem a bit naive to me.
You managed to misquote BADLY the article to support your point.
The article opens stating that there are TWO types of gender differences, one, like Height (that you quoted wrongly) is when the mean changes.
The other (like IQ) the distribution changes.
Then the article focus on theorizing why that second type happens, and don't discuss the first (wisely for the author, the same website used to have other authors on the subject, and they were all fired after public outcry after focusing on the first type of differences).
Indeed, I wasn't really trying to quote the article when I was talking about height, I just took a bad analogy on my own (certainly influenced by what I just read, but that's not the point). Sorry for the confusion.
hence, if you sample either tail of the distribution you get on the average more men than women. and sampling one of the tails is exactly what selective schools/companies/sports clubs/etc tend to do.
More extremes in males is true, but height was exactly one problem where the mean really deviates and the curve is pretty much the same. IQ was one where males have way more extremes than women.
I fully agree with this and often make this argument, usually to 100+ downvotes on reddit and elsewhere. My only addition would be that there's probably as much deviation within the genders as between them. But that doesn't make gender a meaningless thing. The frequency of those aspects is important too. Only, say, 10% of women are "butch" personality types but 90% of men are. So holding up a butch woman as an example and going "See, see gender is meaningless" is unconvincing.
I think eventually society will sober up and realize that when we talk about social aspects, more than likely we're talking about personal types. Certain ones simply exist with higher frequency per gender.
I feel like we're on this long path of migrating away from "default brain" assumptions made about race, nationality, gender, etc and will probably settle on something like the modern day understanding of personiality types. Its scary how well I fit the INTJ mold. The idea that I represent all men or am part of masculine culture is fairly ridiculous. Ladies, I find male ISTJ's and ESTJ's hard to deal with as well.
What's in dispute is that there has been any reasonable natural experiment that has had the power to show that women have any functional cognitive differences with men. This is due to 1) the influence of pervasive beliefs in both experimenters and subjects that women are inferior to men (in often contradictory ways with specifics that vary by culture and over time), and 2) the actions of both men and women who subscribe to those beliefs to punish women for deviating from them. These beliefs are part of a large corpus colloquially known as "common sense," which purport to describe what is "obvious" but tend to simply defend what daddy said from the communists at the university.
The Saudis believe that driving is physically and mentally harmful to women. Dr. Pangloss believes that everything is as it should be.
edit: In addition, I doubt that the study that took place in a bubble that excluded or properly controlled for the influence of overt sexism and anti-female suppression was a group of Scottish IQ tests from 1932. 21 year-old Scottish women had been allowed to vote for at least three years by then. Get with the program you nurturers!
edit2: And to go on forever about this, I'll say how shocked I am to discover that a class of people who were constrained to a certain narrow range of education in a certain narrow range of practical skills intended to lead them to a certain narrow range of outcomes have test scores that tend towards a more narrow range than people outside that class.
Whomever 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.
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.
Cordelia Fine is known for ignoring all finding that contradict her worldview. You make it sound like her position represents the consensus... it does not.
"Cleverly written with engaging prose, Delusions of Gender and Brain Storm contain enough citations and end notes to signal that they are also serious academic books. Fine and Jordan-Young ferret out exaggerated, unreplicated claims and other silliness regarding research on sex differences. The books are strongest in exposing research conclusions that are closer to fiction than science. They are weakest in failing to also point out differences that are supported by a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research."
Fine can play the audience well but she does not do well in academic reviews outside of feminist circles.
I'm not sure if you read the review you're linking but it's not a "bad review". It points out, as you quoted, where the books are "strongest" and "weakest", and is generally complimentary to the works reviewed. And as the author of the review points out to explain Fine's omissions:
"…whereas sex differences are reliably found in several areas of research, none of the differences support essentialist claims that girls and boys need separate educations based on their brain types, that one sex is better suited to become engineers, or that one sex is inherently more intelligent—to name just a few of the ideas being promoted under the guise of 'science'."
Halpern is being overly courteous. Fine denies the very existence of evolved human sexually dimorphic psychological adaptations, significant (physical) brain differences between men and women etc.
"Nothing short of stopping research on the topic would seem to satisfy her."
This is so ridiculous, I chuckled. This is from her conclusion on the aforementioned book:
"But also, to those interested in gender equality there is nothing at all frightening about good science. It is only carelessly done science, or poorly interpreted science, or the neurosexism it feeds, that creates cause for concern."
And her work is all about that. It's funny to me that she's done a very large review of tons of experiments, down to methodological aspects such as the way babies are held in supposedly controlled settings, and people try to slander her as some kind of anti-science advocate.
No doubt there are scientific flaws in Fine's work, but even as this article states:
"…popular books are written to appeal to a broader audience, and in that respect both Jordan-Young and Fine have succeeded. Prompting laypeople to adopt a more critical view of overly simplistic views of complex data sets is a goal any scientist can support, and for that we applaud their efforts."
The "overly-simplistic views" referenced by the reviewers are exactly the ones approvingly quoted in this article by Psychology Today, and to which Fine is, appropriately, being offered as a counterpoint.
Her 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)."
This analysis ignores both the (1) base rate, and (2) practice effect. The problem with using gender-neutral percentiles is that the proportion of males and females may not be 1:1. So, even if the percentage of women in the 99th percentile is higher than that of men, men could actually be more likely to be in the 99th percentile than women.
That is, they found p(women | 99th) / p(men | 99th) whereas they're claiming they found p(99th | women) / p(99th | men).
Regarding the second, it could be that the women were studying more, and thus not represent a genetic trait. In order to settle whether differences are genetic, you would have to compare performance from the same amount of effort.
I'm interested to see how the research continues in the future. It seems there is a lot of taboo around the subject, and I hope that doesn't dissuade scientific debate.
> Regarding the second, it could be that the women were studying more, and thus not represent a genetic trait. In order to settle whether differences are genetic, you would have to compare performance from the same amount of effort.
I think this is an important objection, but you stop far shy of its true implication. If just studying more would skew the results, then you cannot reasonably say that the method used has any significant power to detect the influence genetic traits.
What is tested in a standardised test is arguably the combined effect of societal environment and genes, and considering that the field of the interaction between gene expression and the host environment (Epigenetics) is only just starting, even the genetic component might not be some static contribution.
The 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.
Thank 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!
I 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.
My 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.
The 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.
Well, I'm not so sure how constructive it is to try making behavioral predictions about people based on general categories (race, sex, etc.) in the first place. I think it's far more useful to seek understanding and respect.
It'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.
I 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.
I 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.)
Technically it's still a unimodal curve (single mode, roughly at the center of the distribution - i.e. ~= mean, median), it's just that the variance is increased.
There are other traits than IQ which promote the success of the species.
Even if unintelligent, physical strength and endurance enable one to hunt, to flee from predators.
Sharp eyesight and sensitive hearing.
Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells.
> Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells.
That's not quite right. Being heterozygous for the sickle-cell trait produces reduced symptoms from malaria (but not immunity), while being homozygous for the trait produces sickle cell disease and and, consequently, greater vulnerability to malaria (since malarial infection, in addition to its other effects, frequently produces sickle cell crises in persons with sickle cell disease.)
A recent study found that those with blue eyes are predisposed to alcoholism. Doubtlessly that will lead to employment discrimination against those with brown eyes, as management types like to party.
I once read that every human society that had agriculture also had beer. We have had agriculture for roughly 12,000 years.
> 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.
I don't think that intelligence is the most important factor for those positions, so let's talk about researchers and university teachers instead. Do you really think that society would be better if less intelligent people would be better represented there?
Well, there is a reason why I chose those examples.
I'm not arguing for diversity at all costs, which seems like what you're arguing against.
I'd say in general having researchers and university teachers that are intelligent is good. Diversity is also good. There should be a balance - I think that diverse researchers and teachers can solve problems that a homogenous group of researchers would never solve.
For example, what problems do researchers tackle? They tend to choose problems that they see, and may never try to solve problems that affect other groups. Or they may choose solutions that only work for people like themselves.
For example, a lot of computer graphics algorithms like face recognition don't work well for black faces. Even more troublesome, many cameras (both digital and film) have a dynamic range that works well for white faces, but poorly for black faces.
Another example, the amount of research into male birth control vs. female birth control is very uneven.
Would it be worth it to have slightly less intelligent but much more diverse researchers and teachers? Would society as a whole be better off?
It has to be a balance, but I'd bet the answer is 'sometimes yes'.
All of this is somewhat beside my main point, which is that I think it's simplistic to say that society and morality should only be determined by genetics.
There's a huge assumption built into this, about what dimensions of diversity are virtuous. Our society places great value on showing diversity on scales of gender and race, and to a lesser extent also on religion and more recently, gender identity.
Why are these demographics the ones for which we should be endeavoring to ensure diversity? Why shouldn't we strive to find a balance between, say, people from an urban background versus those from a rural background? Or people with fluency in various languages? Or "morning people" versus
"night people", or those who prefer to file things versus those who stack papers on their desk, or left- versus right-handed?
Having variations along all these dimensions, and countless others, would also bring greater variation in world view, and thus presumably improve the pool of ideas that could drive their work. So why is it that seeking diversity in race and sex is paramount, while finding someone from out in the countryside is never even thought of?
I think the general principle is that societal decision makers should be roughly representative of the people whose lives are impacted by the decisions.
Of course it's possible to take this too far.
As for why race and gender are considered important, I think it's probably because they are easy to measure, and there has been a lot of discrimination. Most of the other demographics are probably pretty evenly represented? I've never heard of someone getting passed over for promotion or housing because they were left-handed.
The city/country split is a good point. There is some provision for that in many political systems, with different geographical regions being represented based on population, but it's far from a perfect system.
But what is striking, we now consider such quotas as blatant discrimination, rather than good affirmative actions for the (really or allegedly) underprivileged groups.
> For example, a lot of computer graphics algorithms like face recognition don't work well for black faces.
There's probably less contrast to be used in edge detection.
> Even more troublesome, many cameras (both digital and film) have a dynamic range that works well for white faces, but poorly for black faces.
The dynamic range is limited by objective factors and the automated exposure setting takes into consideration what gets more pixels in the frame - usually not a human face.
Certainly for university teachers we don't want to solely go on 'intelligence'. Looking back at my university career the correlation between how good a teacher someone was and how they ranked globally as researchers within their field was at best very weakly correlated. In fact I think hiring undergraduate lecturers based on their research performance is a pretty flawed idea, but that's a different debate.
> 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.
Which in practice means help relatively successful women crack "the glass ceiling", while the men who find themselves in the bottom of the lower half of the distribution in some sense by societal standards can get stuffed.
My Russian instructor at Caltech was the victim of Bride Abduction while vacationing in Soviet Georgia when she was fifteen years old. Her, uh, "fiance's" mother failed to understand why Valentina was unhappy about it.
Is 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.
One usual citation is Global Sex Differences in Test Score Variability (DOI: 10.1126/science.1162573).
It uses standardized test scores. I quote findings below. Remarks inside parentheses are mine.
"The third column in table S1, reports the estimated male/female variance ratios with standard errors in parentheses. In all but five countries (There are 41 countries) we can reject the hypothesis that the variance ratio is equal to one at 5% level. In all the countries where this hypothesis is rejected, the variance ratios are larger than one indicating that the male variance in reading is higher than the female variance."
In other words, male variance > female variance with 95% significance level in 36 countries, and no statistically significant difference in 5 countries. There is no countries where female variance > male variance with statistical significance.
There are various interpretations of this result. The usual interpretation is that there is a sex difference in variability. Another interpretation is that since variability difference is not universal (in 5 countries it is not statistically significant), variability difference is cultural. The later interpretation is argued in PNAS paper cited below.
Reading the supplementary material (since that isn't paywalled) I not that these are not IQ tests, but results from mathematics and reading comprehension tests.
I also found this little thing that implies that the score distributions aren't symmetric (I think):
"There is no clear pattern in the male to female ratios at the bottom 5% of the math distribution. This ratio is different from one in only 15 countries but in some countries it is larger than one and in others smaller. On the other hand, at the top 5% the ratio of boys to girls is larger than one in 35 countries with the highest estimated ratio in Korea (2.55). In these 35 countries, boys are clearly over-represented at the top end of the math distribution. The quantile differences at 5th and 95th quantiles confirm the same finding, with no clear pattern at the 5th quantile but positive and significant differences in all but five countries at the 95th quantile. "
Doing a quick test, I took some random normal numbers with variance ratio 1.4, and found that the variance ratio is not very sensitive to if I calculate it using the full sample, the bottom half or the top half. In other words, for a normal distribution the reported ratios for the 5th and 95th quantile should be the same within the errors, but this is never the case for mathematics so the scores simply aren't normal.
> Another interpretation is that since variability difference is not universal (in 5 countries it is not statistically significant), variability difference is cultural. The later interpretation is argued in PNAS paper cited below.
How do they reach this conclusion? 36 for, 5 against at 95% significance level would expected given random variation, no?
A significance level says very little, if anything, about the probability of getting an "insignificant" result given that the null hypothesis is false. That's all about statistical power. It's entirely possible that those "5 against" were just underpowered (sample size too small). Or that the sample sizes were systematically too small, and those 5 just happened to be the ones that failed to reach statistical significance. Or that the study was actually well-powered and the difference really is localized geographically.
Either way, a 95% significance level by itself tells us little about how we should interpret those 5 against.
I should look at this study more carefully before commenting, but I would assume there are genetic as well as cultural differences in those 5 countries with no statistical male/female IQ difference.
Yes, it is generally accepted. But people don't like it. For example it explains why there are more men in high-status positions, which again, people don't like, and try to rail against ("We need more women in XYZ!").
> Yes, it is generally accepted. But people don't like it. For example it explains why there are more men in high-status positions, which again, people don't like, and try to rail against ("We need more women in XYZ!").
It's important to remember that high IQ and high-status positions don't correlate. High IQ is no indicator for success in live. If you actually measure people with higher societal status, you'll probably find quite a few with high IQ. But we must not interpret that in any way, because that's hindsight bias: We don't see all the high-IQ people not in high-status positions.
Psychologically, the more relevant variable for success in live is motivation.
(As a sidenote, IQ itself is by no means an objective measurement. The theories of intelligence are and were strongly influenced by the respective world views of its creators. Cattell for example, the inventor of fluid and crystallized intelligence, most probably differentiated between both as a way to explain racial differences: Everybody has crystallized intelligence, but only the white have highly developed fluid intelligence. He distanced himself from his early views a few months before his death, but the theory remained popular for many decades.)
> > Psychologically, the more relevant variable for success in live is motivation.
> Which is still pretty small compared to who your parents are (in terms of the upbringing offered to you and the connections it offers).
It quite looks like it, yes. That's why I prefixed that with "Psychologically". I actually had written more or less your answer after that, but then deleted it because I didn't want to derail the thread :)
There's a 60/40 male/female split in that graph for people with IQ's of 140. First, you don't need an IQ of 140 to have a high-status position. Second, the male/female ratio for high-status positions is much higher than 60/40.
If OP's explanation of this difference is correct then you would expect (at least some) other mental traits to also have a higher variance in men. It wouldn't be just IQ.
Just guessing of course, but I'd say testosterone is probably responsible for a good number of men filling high-status positions, see the sources on this page for effects on behavior:
20% of Congresspeople and 5% of CEOs are women; to explain that, you would need 3 independent traits (ie, no correlation between traits) with a 40/60 split strongly tied to Congresspeople (ie, everyone who is a Congressperson shares this trait) and 7 for businesspeople.
You could go the other way and assume that it is all explained by a single trait -- give Congresspeople an IQ of 150, CEOs 160, and just assume that the trend in the chart continues and the overrepresentation of males is even higher at the further extremes.
This, however, runs into the problem that we've measured the IQs of Congresspeople and CEOs. Congresspeople are starkly average, with Representatives averaging 101 and Senators 98, so unless you believe that half of Congresspeople are below 50 and half above 150, the expectation based on this research is that more than half of Congresspeople should be women. Likewise, CEOs only average -- optimistically -- 130, where the gender split is only 46/54.
That only really shows a general strong positive correlation between some measures of intelligence and some measures of success. It doesn't really say anything about if small fluctuations in the extremely high end of intelligence has a noticeable effect.
We're assuming that men dominate the tails of the intelligence distribution. So the real question is, does being in the top 1-2 percentile make you much more likely to succeed in so called high-status positions compared to 'only' being in the top 5-7 percentile.
It'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).
> 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.
Of course as with everything in this area, there is no consensus; studies have contradictory results and some dispute whether stereotype threat even exists.
Intuitively it made much sense for me when I was in high school and trying to figure out the world.
People perceive high, even extreme intelligence as some beneficial trait, but I don't think that's how we should look at things. Evolution does not care about men as much as it does about women. Man can be far from being best fit for raising children and still forward his genes to next generation. Women need to be much more optimized, stable. Too high or too low intelligence is a neurological flaw in men that makes them worse parents from evolutionary perspective but they can get away with it. Women can't.
It might change after many generations of society that takes care of children of deranged or disinterested mothers. Having extra copy of X chromosome sure does help with stability but there are many examples in biology where simple obvious mechanism are overruled by special contraptions forced by evolution to result in the opposite of what simple logic would dictate.
Helicopter parents = bad parents, usually = high intelligence parents. Same thing can be true in reverse.
The GP is arguing that men have the luxury to propagate their genes even if they do not make good parents, while women have to be a good parent in order to make their offspring survive to adulthood.
>> Man can be far from being best fit for raising children and still forward his genes to next generation.
> This would seem to predict that men show less variance than women in whether or not they forward their genes
Not necessarily. Ratio of variance of whether women and men forward their genes is influenced with many factors. Extreme men can have less variance then equally extreme women, but average women can have less variance because there is very few extreme women. Also what I'm referring to is about times that shaped modern day men and women. Child of extreme woman had very small chances of surviving back then. Child of extreme man would have had better chances.
> Why would too high intelligence make someone a worse parent?
I'd want to back that up with something solid but only things that come to my mind are anecdotes of absent minded geniuses, emotional volatility associated with intelligence, social misalignment that could get a person in serious trouble (Archimedes?) or simply loosing interest in own 'plain' children.
Just FYI: many papers available onlines are actually preprints/drafts, because the researchers are much freer to distribute them, than the actual published papers bearing journal branding.
I think that some ideas gain traction because they fit well into people's narrative, even when the evidence is not yet strong enough for real trust in them.
>strong correlation exists between a country's measures of gender inequity and the size of the math gender gap both at the mean and the right tail of the distribution
1. How does that correlation disprove it? It's entirely consistent with one common cause for all inequalities.
2. "Mean gender gap" is for people who did school-related tests, mainly PISA, not the general population. If the greater variability is true there will be much more severely mentally retarded males unable to even read. Depending on the size of the effect, the different mean could in fact confirm the hypothesis (that the mean is the same but std is greater).
3. No analysis whether the distribution of countries' result is consistent with greater variability for the whole human population. Especially jarring when they mention Iceland, a country so small that there are many individual schools elsewhere with more students than they have.
>These findings challenge the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, which, if valid, should hold for all representative populations, regardless of ethnicity or nationality.
4. That's an entirely unwarranted assumption (in addition to 3). Are Asian-Americans in particular really representative of a general Asian population (with an American culture)? What about brain drain? The more recent the immigration, the harder it's to get in; simplifying for the sake of an example, if you only allow those with a X234 mutation in a B5 DNA location, don't be surprised when there's zero variability in a B5 location.
Even without a filter, why should the standard deviation in math skills be identical between genetically different populations? The identical variability should be true for the X-chromosome in general, not math-skills in particular.
The weak point in all of this is the definition of IQ - since there is no obvious one the motivated researchers can manipulate it to have more or less difference in both value and variation between the sexes (or other groups).
One can certainly argue that "IQ" is just whatever IQ tests measure. Despite this there are a lot of correlations involving IQ that mean that IQ tests are at least partially capturing something that's interesting. And IQ tests are fairly standard which means that it's not so easy for researchers to manipulate them.
> 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.
I 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.
I 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.
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."
The 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. :/
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.
That'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.
It 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.)
Are 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.
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)
> 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.
Scientifically 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.
You 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...".
"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."
That 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.
It'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.
Female 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.
I'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).
Suppose greater male variance is true, how should feminists respond? Well, if they think more high IQ females would be good, there are things like embryo selection and iterated embryo selection that would vastly overwhelm greater variance.
If you combined iterated embryo selection with sex selection against males, you could vastly increase the number of genius women.
So even if you grant greater variance, this is all very impeachable by technological means, and technological means are just extensions of human means. Reality is allowed to differ from ideology and almost always does. However, ideology with technology can change reality. Those ideologues that refuse to interface with technology lose much of their power to shape reality in the manner their ideologies prescribe. Combine that with the fact that biology is becoming increasingly mutable and you have neat science fiction idea: ideologies competing to redesign humans in their image.
You don't have to reach into science fiction to see this. The concept of biopower outlines how modern ideologies mold human life to their structures.
Feminism has always been allied with radical and revolutionary biopolitics. It does not need eugenics and futuristic bioengineering to be so. Furthermore, the idea that feminists give a shit about sex-linked variation is nonsensical and I really hope I did not give that impression in my parent comment. It's quite the opposite. The whole point I was trying to make was that feminists don't care about this level of difference, that their ideology is engaged at the structural level of society and that this engagement is completely unintelligible without deeper criticism.
I think it is a terrible summary, but I'll assume it's because of a failure to communicate on my part.
(3) does not follow from (2) and (1) together. What does follow is a need to analyse the argument further. I didn't make this analysis, I only sketched it in broad outlines. Let me put out my thoughts in a different way:
A) There is no causal link established between measured sex-linked variation in humans and social organization in humans, beyond the obvious one that the distribution of physical size and strength is strongly bimodal and this can be observed as an underlying basis for many social relationships.
B) And yet, the argument is made. The argument is made and it is presumed to be rational, objective, air-tight, and deductive. In fact, it is an abductive argument: It claims that sex-linked variation is the most likely and simplest basis for the observed social organization that leads to the stratification of society based on binary genders in bourgeois society.
I am specifying bourgeois society and assuming we are talking about modern capitalist societies, because that's the one I live in and the one I have most to gain in analyzing, and also the one whose ideology and real power dominates the planet as a whole.
C) I can accrue a great deal of data that demonstrates corroborated observations that the dynamics of gender in bourgeois society are actively maintained through institutional and systemic structure. This data ranges from the scientific, collected in aggregate, to the personal experiences of a diverse group of individuals.
A huge amount of human effort and ideology goes into gender as a social structure. This expenditure of labor and thought is prescriptive in nature, not descriptive. The argument being made neither explains their existence nor their dynamics because it solely describes variation at a very basic level between human beings. If human beings just naturally organized themselves along the gender lines we see, there would be no need for institutions, social mores, and propaganda to maintain those lines. What we see historically though, is that these lines were drawn by human hands, then dug out, then built upon with concrete, and then stringed up with barbed wire. The argument does not take this historical and sociological context into account and does not even try to exempt our present societies from that context.
D) This situation is incongruous. The argument is not only given more strength than it merits, its conclusions are essentially determined within the philosophical framework it is formulated in, and further it does not account for social and personal observations about gender dynamics. A criticism of the underlying ideology that produces and reproduces this argument is required. I conjecture that the underlying ideology is neoliberal rationality and sketched what that means.
I think danharaj's point was that the effects of sex-linked variance -- regardless of how big they are -- have not been shown to be meaningful compared to the other factors that affect human society. However, it gives the illusion of scientific rigor to use observable sex-linked variances to explain our social condition; in reality there are many possible alternative explanations that are never addressed, and many confounding variables that aren't controlled.
I 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.
Oh 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.
You 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.
> 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.
This 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).
That very small number of women are those on which you can observe the pattern on their skin. However, the two types of cells (the cell calico pattern) are present in all females.
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