Passion GBR covered the brain science about the same way I would have so I'll just add that Steven Pinker is the one who convinced me that there are in fact brain differences. There just aren't any IQ differences. Women's brains are designed *overall* to be better at communication and articulating emotion, and men are *in general* bette…
Passion GBR covered the brain science about the same way I would have so I'll just add that Steven Pinker is the one who convinced me that there are in fact brain differences. There just aren't any IQ differences. Women's brains are designed *overall* to be better at communication and articulating emotion, and men are *in general* better at math and engineering functions, so we may always have some lopsided professions but that doesn't matter, what does is our value judgements about them. Right now, any time cognitive/neuroscientists talk about these brain differences they strike me as going overboard to emphasize this doesn't mean women should be kept out of certain professions (apparently no one worries there are hardly any male hairdressers who aren't gay :) ) or that women are somehow less intellectual than men. The right has traditionally used biological differences to oppress others (like you and me) and that's what the left justly fears - so why not challenge the value judgements rather than the reality?
I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Starship Troopers from the '90s (I may have mentioned this before, can't remember) but it presented a military in which men and women were completely equal and even showered together without the men trying to molest everyone. One of my co-workers said that was utterly unrealistic as in battle, male soldiers would absolutely be concerned with defending female soldiers and that it would be near-impossible to shower with them and not be aroused. I said that's the way it is today but I can foresee something like that happening in the future, once we shed enough of our prejudices and got used to women (and everyone else) as equals. And especially when the traditionalist, misogynist military gets over the idea that women exist to fulfill their sexual needs.
This is why I dislike identity politics as a solution to society's ills. I'd rather we work toward a society in which everyone does what they do best and no one cares if there aren't enough black people/white people/male/female/trans people/gays/Southeast Asians/whatever in a particular profession. I don't care if men are better at me than math - no one told me math is hard, that girls can't do math - certainly my parents never did, but I still sucked at it. (The way I was taught didn't help either - that's on crappy Southern schools in the '60s and early '70s).
I think evolving toward acknowledging differences without judgement is where we need to be. I'm good with lack of gender parity in STEM if every woman who wants to be there is, and is getting the same treatment as everyone else.
I certainly agree with your major points. In particular, our society needs to get over the idea that "our side" needs to suppress or distort true facts, because we are afraid that the other side will misuse such facts. That direction lies tyranny. Like the way that governments allowed *without accountability* to freely censor things for national security, will gravitate into abusing that power to censor embarrassments or challenges to the ruling party. We need to challenge the misinterpretations or false implications, not suppress any "inconvenient truths".
(This also fit's with Steve's questions of "is pretending that trans women are the same as biological women really the only way to support treating trans folks humanely?")
Small dissents.
Today, I would question whether human being (without editing their genomes) are ever likely to en masse avoid arousal from exposure to nakedness. Note how widespread coverage of the loins is cross culturally around the world. I think that may indicate an innate propensity which can only partially and inconsistently be overridden by culture. (For selective groups, it can certainly happen. I'm quite familiar with naturism etc. But what works for a selective subset like that may not work for the broad unselected society; and the military - composed largely of young folks - is going to be closer to the broader society than to naturists. Or perhaps worse.).
I would agree that it would be possible to culturally get past the "male soldiers losing focus due to protecting female soldiers" thing. After all, many cultures without chivalry concepts are willing to sacrifice women more easily than men, so that's obviously easily affected by culture. There are other reasons that women may relatively rarely make good combat soldiers; the major physical differences can be very relevant. How many woman can carry an average or above average weight wounded man over their shoulders? A few, not most. Reports are that standards are often watered down to allow women to pass. That works, in peacetime. (Of course, guiding a drone or repairing a helicopter or flying a plane is quite another matter).
There are some far more practical reasons to gird one's loins no matter where you live: Flies and other annoying critters that find the scent of one's butthole positively heavenly, LOL! We don't have bushy tails to chase them away like horses. In addition, women have a second orifice bugs might find terribly attractive.
We may think it's about keeping men's basest instincts (LOL) in check and I can't swear it isn't, but if I lived in the jungle with a bunch of women I'd still wear a skirt. If I had memory of modern life I'd wear a bra too, because I've always found braless uncomfortable.
When men see nudity all day long it stops being sexualized. Boy oh boy was my long hair sexualized when I was in Turkey; I was followed around by men all day long trying to get into my pants, as was my blonde friend with whom I was traveling. Chinese men sexualized women's feet at one point and Victorian men famously sexualized ankles and legs. And in those jungle/savannah societies, the men clearly don't go around in a state of arousal all day long at the sight of all those naked boobs.
About once in a century the world produces a mathematics genius who blazes new trails. The Frenchman Galois was one of them; Euler, Gauss, Cantor, Gödel, a few others. John Horton Conway, inventor of the famous Game of Life, may be one.
1) They are always men (Hypatia, a 5th century Greek woman. may have been one; there have been no other qualifying women in modern times).
2) They all do their best work before the age of twenty.
These are not just brilliant mathematicians, they are off the scale. They're far too rare to draw any statistically valid conclusions from.
Hypatia's father was a mathematician who supported her in her endeavours; many Greek fathers wouldn't have. Hedy Lamarr likely might have been a far greater engineer and inventor had she not been born a few decades later; she was self-taught. Imagine what she might have become had she been formally trained. When she tried to sell her 'spread spectrum technology' invention to the Navy after WWII, she was told she'd be more valuable selling 'kisses and war bonds'. Know you place, little girl!
There were women who wanted to go up into space in the 20th century; they were, as aviators, as accomplished as any man, but NASA and the military always found excuses to not send them even though they came close a few times. Somewhere deep inside the myriad excuses they offered was the one they couldn't admit to themselves, except occasionally to each other: Male astronauts were the new heroes, but if even a *girl* can go up into space, it can't be that hard.
I believe STEM can be more sex-integrated than it is if we remove the barriers for women, including just being more overall supportive of girls who show a knack for STEM skills and talents. I'm not sure it will ever achieve a 50/50 parity. I don't care as long as every woman (or POC)'s talents are being used, along with every white/male's, to the best of their ability.
I wouldn't argue with any of this, but the rarity of female math geniuses is very unlikely just another instance of keeping women down.
Who would argue against fairness in admissions? In STEM work? There has been more progress since 1980 in this kind of equality than in the millennia previous. May it continue to full equality.
I need to add something though and I don't seek to be offensive ... I recently removed myself from a blog community where three members would shoehorn unfairness to women into the most unrelated topics, daily bitter rants that got very old. They could not accept that any man was with them. In this chapter of this forum we're discussing gender issues. I don't deny a word of what you wrote but please don't make a habit of it. Thanks in advance.
My degree is in mathematics and I've been reading the history of mathematics since before my voice changed. I don't think you can make the case that the gender inequality of these trailblazing mathematicians can be lain at the feet of misogyny.
Poetess Emily Dickenson was unpublished in her lifetime; when her writings were discovered she was elevated to the highest esteem in poetry, and that was long before feminism. There have been stellar female mathematicians and physicists (Emmy Noether springs to mind) but the Galois/Gödel class seems reserved to young men.
As for representation in STEM I think it's more complicated than that. I'm a software developer and technical writer (my boss is an American woman though the company is in London) and concede that I have worked with very few women. There are a lot more of them in HR and the business side of the industry than writing code.
As you have said, the super geniuses are too rare to learn more statistically.
But it appears that in many related species, and across a surprising number of dimensions, males tend to have a higher standard deviation then females, so that there tend to be more at the high end and more at the low end even if the mean or mode or medians are basically the same. This can be true of, say, height or speed, and likely intelligence or many specialized aptitudes.
It's possible that this has some evolutionary advantage for a species, where there is a tension and tradeoff between "conforming to what works best today" and "preserving alleles which might help adapt to future changes". Maybe the relatively more expendable males have a slightly different setpoint.
This can mean an unequal distribution of sexes at the top or bottom end, even with equal opportunities and without external discrimination or cultural factors.
And obviously, this does NOT justify any sort of discrimination!! It says nothing about any individual, who may be typical or atypical.
It is however yet another reason to not automatically assume that discrimination can be assumed to be the only explanation for observation of unequal representation in situations requiring relatively rarified skills or interests.
I wasn't arguing that men are solely responsible for keeping women down, or that there'd be more female math geniuses if there were more fathers like Hypatia's. My father, who helped me with my math homework, NEVER taught me I couldn't do math, or that girls couldn't do it well. In fact I *told* him that and he refused to believe it. He was right, of course, and he dragged me through like ten years of math classes until I was no longer required to take them. I was NO budding Hypatia.
I suspect you're right, that there's more going on to the lack of female math geniuses than male holding back, and we're in less position to argue 'misogyny' now because I keep seeing the integration of women and POC in places they weren't in the last ten years. Like corporate websites and leadership pages and in higher-level positions.
I suspect we may spend awhile playing catchup due to historical male obstructionism, but I think we're making progress already. I'm seeing more female CTOs and VPs of IT; ten years ago, women on corporate websites were almost always VPs of Marketing, Communications, and HR. Is it affirmative action or merit? Who knows? Like it was in Hedy Lamarr's time.
We may *never*, in the best of future times, acheive parity with men in certain spaces, but that's okay, as long as the next baby Hypatia is allowed to pursue her talents and skills without being flayed alive by ignorant Christians :)
Passion GBR covered the brain science about the same way I would have so I'll just add that Steven Pinker is the one who convinced me that there are in fact brain differences. There just aren't any IQ differences. Women's brains are designed *overall* to be better at communication and articulating emotion, and men are *in general* better at math and engineering functions, so we may always have some lopsided professions but that doesn't matter, what does is our value judgements about them. Right now, any time cognitive/neuroscientists talk about these brain differences they strike me as going overboard to emphasize this doesn't mean women should be kept out of certain professions (apparently no one worries there are hardly any male hairdressers who aren't gay :) ) or that women are somehow less intellectual than men. The right has traditionally used biological differences to oppress others (like you and me) and that's what the left justly fears - so why not challenge the value judgements rather than the reality?
I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Starship Troopers from the '90s (I may have mentioned this before, can't remember) but it presented a military in which men and women were completely equal and even showered together without the men trying to molest everyone. One of my co-workers said that was utterly unrealistic as in battle, male soldiers would absolutely be concerned with defending female soldiers and that it would be near-impossible to shower with them and not be aroused. I said that's the way it is today but I can foresee something like that happening in the future, once we shed enough of our prejudices and got used to women (and everyone else) as equals. And especially when the traditionalist, misogynist military gets over the idea that women exist to fulfill their sexual needs.
This is why I dislike identity politics as a solution to society's ills. I'd rather we work toward a society in which everyone does what they do best and no one cares if there aren't enough black people/white people/male/female/trans people/gays/Southeast Asians/whatever in a particular profession. I don't care if men are better at me than math - no one told me math is hard, that girls can't do math - certainly my parents never did, but I still sucked at it. (The way I was taught didn't help either - that's on crappy Southern schools in the '60s and early '70s).
I think evolving toward acknowledging differences without judgement is where we need to be. I'm good with lack of gender parity in STEM if every woman who wants to be there is, and is getting the same treatment as everyone else.
I certainly agree with your major points. In particular, our society needs to get over the idea that "our side" needs to suppress or distort true facts, because we are afraid that the other side will misuse such facts. That direction lies tyranny. Like the way that governments allowed *without accountability* to freely censor things for national security, will gravitate into abusing that power to censor embarrassments or challenges to the ruling party. We need to challenge the misinterpretations or false implications, not suppress any "inconvenient truths".
(This also fit's with Steve's questions of "is pretending that trans women are the same as biological women really the only way to support treating trans folks humanely?")
Small dissents.
Today, I would question whether human being (without editing their genomes) are ever likely to en masse avoid arousal from exposure to nakedness. Note how widespread coverage of the loins is cross culturally around the world. I think that may indicate an innate propensity which can only partially and inconsistently be overridden by culture. (For selective groups, it can certainly happen. I'm quite familiar with naturism etc. But what works for a selective subset like that may not work for the broad unselected society; and the military - composed largely of young folks - is going to be closer to the broader society than to naturists. Or perhaps worse.).
I would agree that it would be possible to culturally get past the "male soldiers losing focus due to protecting female soldiers" thing. After all, many cultures without chivalry concepts are willing to sacrifice women more easily than men, so that's obviously easily affected by culture. There are other reasons that women may relatively rarely make good combat soldiers; the major physical differences can be very relevant. How many woman can carry an average or above average weight wounded man over their shoulders? A few, not most. Reports are that standards are often watered down to allow women to pass. That works, in peacetime. (Of course, guiding a drone or repairing a helicopter or flying a plane is quite another matter).
There are some far more practical reasons to gird one's loins no matter where you live: Flies and other annoying critters that find the scent of one's butthole positively heavenly, LOL! We don't have bushy tails to chase them away like horses. In addition, women have a second orifice bugs might find terribly attractive.
We may think it's about keeping men's basest instincts (LOL) in check and I can't swear it isn't, but if I lived in the jungle with a bunch of women I'd still wear a skirt. If I had memory of modern life I'd wear a bra too, because I've always found braless uncomfortable.
When men see nudity all day long it stops being sexualized. Boy oh boy was my long hair sexualized when I was in Turkey; I was followed around by men all day long trying to get into my pants, as was my blonde friend with whom I was traveling. Chinese men sexualized women's feet at one point and Victorian men famously sexualized ankles and legs. And in those jungle/savannah societies, the men clearly don't go around in a state of arousal all day long at the sight of all those naked boobs.
Male arousal by breasts is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Covering the genitalia probably has more to do with their vulnerability than the potential for arousal leading to rape.
About once in a century the world produces a mathematics genius who blazes new trails. The Frenchman Galois was one of them; Euler, Gauss, Cantor, Gödel, a few others. John Horton Conway, inventor of the famous Game of Life, may be one.
1) They are always men (Hypatia, a 5th century Greek woman. may have been one; there have been no other qualifying women in modern times).
2) They all do their best work before the age of twenty.
These are not just brilliant mathematicians, they are off the scale. They're far too rare to draw any statistically valid conclusions from.
Hypatia's father was a mathematician who supported her in her endeavours; many Greek fathers wouldn't have. Hedy Lamarr likely might have been a far greater engineer and inventor had she not been born a few decades later; she was self-taught. Imagine what she might have become had she been formally trained. When she tried to sell her 'spread spectrum technology' invention to the Navy after WWII, she was told she'd be more valuable selling 'kisses and war bonds'. Know you place, little girl!
There were women who wanted to go up into space in the 20th century; they were, as aviators, as accomplished as any man, but NASA and the military always found excuses to not send them even though they came close a few times. Somewhere deep inside the myriad excuses they offered was the one they couldn't admit to themselves, except occasionally to each other: Male astronauts were the new heroes, but if even a *girl* can go up into space, it can't be that hard.
I believe STEM can be more sex-integrated than it is if we remove the barriers for women, including just being more overall supportive of girls who show a knack for STEM skills and talents. I'm not sure it will ever achieve a 50/50 parity. I don't care as long as every woman (or POC)'s talents are being used, along with every white/male's, to the best of their ability.
I wouldn't argue with any of this, but the rarity of female math geniuses is very unlikely just another instance of keeping women down.
Who would argue against fairness in admissions? In STEM work? There has been more progress since 1980 in this kind of equality than in the millennia previous. May it continue to full equality.
I need to add something though and I don't seek to be offensive ... I recently removed myself from a blog community where three members would shoehorn unfairness to women into the most unrelated topics, daily bitter rants that got very old. They could not accept that any man was with them. In this chapter of this forum we're discussing gender issues. I don't deny a word of what you wrote but please don't make a habit of it. Thanks in advance.
My degree is in mathematics and I've been reading the history of mathematics since before my voice changed. I don't think you can make the case that the gender inequality of these trailblazing mathematicians can be lain at the feet of misogyny.
Poetess Emily Dickenson was unpublished in her lifetime; when her writings were discovered she was elevated to the highest esteem in poetry, and that was long before feminism. There have been stellar female mathematicians and physicists (Emmy Noether springs to mind) but the Galois/Gödel class seems reserved to young men.
As for representation in STEM I think it's more complicated than that. I'm a software developer and technical writer (my boss is an American woman though the company is in London) and concede that I have worked with very few women. There are a lot more of them in HR and the business side of the industry than writing code.
As you have said, the super geniuses are too rare to learn more statistically.
But it appears that in many related species, and across a surprising number of dimensions, males tend to have a higher standard deviation then females, so that there tend to be more at the high end and more at the low end even if the mean or mode or medians are basically the same. This can be true of, say, height or speed, and likely intelligence or many specialized aptitudes.
It's possible that this has some evolutionary advantage for a species, where there is a tension and tradeoff between "conforming to what works best today" and "preserving alleles which might help adapt to future changes". Maybe the relatively more expendable males have a slightly different setpoint.
This can mean an unequal distribution of sexes at the top or bottom end, even with equal opportunities and without external discrimination or cultural factors.
And obviously, this does NOT justify any sort of discrimination!! It says nothing about any individual, who may be typical or atypical.
It is however yet another reason to not automatically assume that discrimination can be assumed to be the only explanation for observation of unequal representation in situations requiring relatively rarified skills or interests.
I wasn't arguing that men are solely responsible for keeping women down, or that there'd be more female math geniuses if there were more fathers like Hypatia's. My father, who helped me with my math homework, NEVER taught me I couldn't do math, or that girls couldn't do it well. In fact I *told* him that and he refused to believe it. He was right, of course, and he dragged me through like ten years of math classes until I was no longer required to take them. I was NO budding Hypatia.
I suspect you're right, that there's more going on to the lack of female math geniuses than male holding back, and we're in less position to argue 'misogyny' now because I keep seeing the integration of women and POC in places they weren't in the last ten years. Like corporate websites and leadership pages and in higher-level positions.
I suspect we may spend awhile playing catchup due to historical male obstructionism, but I think we're making progress already. I'm seeing more female CTOs and VPs of IT; ten years ago, women on corporate websites were almost always VPs of Marketing, Communications, and HR. Is it affirmative action or merit? Who knows? Like it was in Hedy Lamarr's time.
We may *never*, in the best of future times, acheive parity with men in certain spaces, but that's okay, as long as the next baby Hypatia is allowed to pursue her talents and skills without being flayed alive by ignorant Christians :)