Are There More Girl Geniuses?
american.com
american.com
Not only are most people not geniuses, but most successful people are not geniuses either. What's with the obsession already?
There are a lot of homely women in women's studies. Preaching these anti-male, anti-sex sermons is a way for them to compensate for various heartaches - they're just mad at the beautiful girls.
Every one of her articles is based on exact same formula: women claim they are disadvantaged, men are disadvantaged.
ARE THERE MORE GIRL GENIUSES?
American boys have become second-class
citizens in the nation's schools.
THE EQUAL PAY DAY REALITY CHECK
The claim that American women face wage
discrimination is groundless.
BASELESS BIAS AND THE NEW SECOND SEX
Claims of bias against women in academic
science are exaggerated; meanwhile men are
becoming the second sex in American higher
education.
WHY CAN'T A WOMAN BE MORE LIKE A MAN?
Evidence of gender bias in math and science
is flimsy at best.
The author is being formulaic. So what? She is a one-issue writer, and therefore her opinions are incorrect?
The author of this article provided infinitely more evidence than you did (something / nothing = infinity). You've provided no evidence that she is selectively picking data which supports her. You also provide no evidence she is incorrect.
All you did is point out that she wrote about similar issues in the past, which would be true of most articles written by most reporters.
By the way, the citation from 1932 that you criticize is consistent with more recent results. For instance:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/321/5888/494
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2889145
I'm going to speculate that your objection to her is more ideological than methodological...
Her citation from 1932 is "IQ Percentage By Gender" and your citation from 2008 (that I think you mean to say supports the 1932 numbers) is "Gender Similarities For Math Performance". Moreover, your citation is behind a paywall so that we cannot see any numbers at all. You are not even comparing apples to oranges, you are comparing apples to some unidentified mass in a bag that we have no way of judging beyond the fact that the bag is labeled "oranges".
And no, I didn't just point out that she is a one-issue writer. Please re-read my post, instead of "speculating" about my ideologies which you know nothing about.
Here is a newspaper summary: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121691806472381521.html
As for your post, my mistake. I missed the "she is a one issue writer, therefore mysoginist" bit probably because I assumed your post had some sort of logic to it.
I'm not taking a side in this, just pointing out the intent of the post.
The Pope and Al Qaeda want to persuade you that their belief system is the best. Galileo wanted to prove to you that the earth revolved around the sun. Two different types of arguments.
And remember that belief of a certain state of objective reality is still, to outsiders, merely belief, not fact, especially in an area like this, which is full of misleading information on all sides.
1) it makes you sound extremely pretentious
2) it's a totally inaccurate characterization of the piece
Seriously, I wish people would stop throwing the word "misogyny" around like an article. Misogyny is the categorical hatred of women. Very, very few people/pieces are actually misogynistic. Someone is not a misogynist because you suspect that they dislike women. In particular, this article is in no way misogynistic by any stretch of the imagination. Not even the quote you provided is misogynistic. It's quite cynical and quite a stretch, but it doesn't signify a hatred of women in any way.
This is something that really pisses me off in general. People need to stop abusing the English language to push their ideological agendas. I'm going to start calling people out on it from now on, and I hope that other HN readers are inspired to do likewise.
What I don't get though, is why my "smacks of misogynism" makes me sound extremely pretentious, while your "characterization of the piece" or "ideological agendas" get a pass? Granted, English is a 2nd language for me but am I wrong that those are equally "big" words?
As for "smacks of misogynism" vs. "characterization of the piece" and "ideological agendas", it's not about the vocabulary that's being used. It's that the phrase "smacks of misogynism" is weaselly--what does it mean? If you think that the author is a misogynist, say so. If you think that the piece is misogynistic, say that. It doesn't help that the piece doesn't, in fact, "smack of misogynism".
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/smack
So to be clear, I meant what I meant, that the author's agenda has a touch of dislike of women in it. What's funny, I bet if you saw a quote where someone said, people in African American Studies are just jealous of the white race's success, you would call that person out as being a flat out racist, yet when you see a quote that says, people in Women's Studies are just jealous of the beautiful girls, you pick on me for merely saying that it smacks of misogyny.
(By the way, I wish people didn't put words in my mouth all the time. I never said that the piece on its own smack of misogyny, I said that the author's agenda smacks of misogyny. Although an article that uses 1932 data to back up the portrayal of recent trends really is a bit desperate, wouldn't you agree)?
Your African American Studies analogy is totally disingenuous anyway. You are trying to map the author's insinuation that certain types of academic feminists are jealous of beautiful girls to the insinuation that people in African American studies are jealous of * whites . A much more honest analogy would be that what the author said is like a black person saying that members of a particular extreme fringe of the NAACP are jealous of, say, blacks who have had success in business. Would that be racist? No, not at all! * It might be divisive, cynical, unfair, or any number of other things, but it would patently * not * be racist. The statement says nothing about black people as a group; it accuses a particular * political faction * of having ulterior motives.
And that 1932 study used perfectly valid methodology and studied a huge population. Asserting that it * can't * be relevant simply because it's * old * is just more sophistry.
The developing gender gap in the gifted programs of New York City does not signal that girls are smarter than boys. Rather, it exemplifies how well-intentioned government officials and educators can disregard boys’ needs and abilities and unwittingly adopt policies detrimental to boys’ well-being. It is a small part of the long story of how American boys across the ability spectrum and in all age groups have become second-class citizens in the nation’s schools.
We need to wipe out the idea that education is somehow biased towards males now, and fast. The playing field has gone from balanced to stacked in favor of females and it's still being tipped yet further in that direction.
("Why does it matter?" It is, as the article says, fairly well established that variance in male intelligence is larger than female intelligence. It is also fairly well established that progress is made in society in a very unbalanced manner, where most progress is made by the outliers in skill. Throwing away the males because the education system labels the usual male child learning styles pathological because they can't be properly corralled is not the path to a society able to compete on the global stage.)
Even if there is some gender bias in schools, everything else in society is so male-centric that the scale still way tips toward male.
How about child-rearing / anything to do with children? Males are pretty often feared as being pedophiles if they work with kids.
With a couple significant outliers (most in men's favor, but not all), it's actually pretty close. Though I'm not sure what "professionals" relates to.
And really the real question, if you're interested in workforce data is money. There's a huge gap between men and women: http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/paygapgr...
Now of course the standard reply is "they work different jobs". And that's true. Jobs men work tend to pay more. Why is that? Who knows. And if you look at the historic pay of fields like psychology, once dominated by men, it used to pay very well. As women began to play a large role in the field, pay dropped. Did men leave because pay drop or did pay drop because men left? No one knows.
But I still believe my fundamental point. If you're a man and you're not doing as well as you like and it's because you think women have done you in, I just personally have a low opinion of you. Not that you'd care about my opinion, but that's just my take. And I'll raise my kids, to the best of my ability, to not believe that they can't get a fair shot in life because women run the show.
Pay-gaps measuring across the board are rather meaningless, aside from showing a cultural bias for hiring. There's definitely a significant pay gap, but a lot of articles like that one take male-income / num-males and compare it to female-income / num-females. More point-by-point comparisons show a smaller gap per-job (I usually see 5%, sometimes 10%. Significant, but not 25% significant like the article lists). For psychiatry in particular, it's also become an over-crowded field; to compete, and to get the average-joe on their bill, the average-joe psychiatrist must lower their cost.
edit: as linked by tokenadult, I point this out for consideration of the results, but not as an explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#Berkeley_se...
I'm not discounting the entire thing by any means, most of the purpose in the comment is because the issues around child-care are utterly ridiculous. I've run across a fair number of men who have run flat against (spiked) brick walls in their attempts, followed by rather massive repercussions for simply trying to be single fathers (lost jobs, criminal investigations (finding nothing), near-eviction from their community, etc). I've not heard of parallel situations for females as bad as many of them have encountered, in relatively recent years. Going more years back, certainly, things were blatantly downright misogynistic in many areas.
As to the last paragraph, that's a better way of putting it than your original post. I overall agree :)
I was shocked by (a) how much domestic abuse happens, (b) how violent it is, and (c) how much leeway the men get. Officers routinely push the women to not press charges, because it will "likely escalate the situation" or frankly, "we probably can't do anything until he kills you or worse, and that doesn't benefit you does it?".
And the crazy thing is that in the US domestic abuse is about as good as it gets worldwide. In other countries men can kill their wives if they have affairs or even get raped. And if you count the number of victims of sexual violence in this country, women far outnumber men.
There is, however, a massive selection bias in the stats for abuse in particular. Where men are abused, they're either congratulated (if sexually) or told to "man up" (not selected specifically because you used it, but because it's the phrase). There's a lot of evidence (and growing) that it's far more common than is admitted, though I'm not at all implying it's as much as women get abused.
It's another of those situations where, instead of support, men live with it or are ridiculed where women are protected (lies by should-be-protectors aside). If you look at it with a bit of history in mind, it's pretty obvious why this exists: men were the only ones with any real power and wouldn't allow abuse, and they were more unchecked in their own abusing.
But I think this argument is symbolic of the debate. You think men don't get the support they need by society for sexual abuse and that women are protected. Whereas I think women are abused more frequently, and the protection mechanisms are controlled by men.
My sympathies rest with all victims, but I just have trouble sympathizing with men as a group.
edit: but as I've said elsewhere, I'm an idealist, and I recognize that such a thing isn't ever going to actually happen to total equality. I just think it's something which should be aimed for, explicitly, instead of using the "but there aren't as many <group X>es with <problem Y>" ethical crutch. Especially for something like this, where the only wall is purely a cultural one, not one where there isn't enough funding to do more.
I really do not understand why you appear to be putting the onus for getting good, even-handed education on the children and not the system.
A lot of people get imbalanced education. Blacks do. Overweight kids probably. Ugly kids probably even do. Men don't, at least not that I've ever seen. I think it's literally 10x more likely that you get discriminated against because you listen to Lady Gaga than because you're male.
The derivative with respect to x of x^2 is 2x regardless of what gender you are. The Americans won the Revolutionary war regardless of what gender you are.
Since young girls have a greater ability to sit still than young boys, they score higher.
*- That 1) gifted and talented programs in New York are tending to have more female students, and 2) this cannot be explained by suggesting that there are more gifted and talented girls.
That's a very good question. I think the study of application to graduate departments at the University of California: Berkeley (often used in statistics textbooks as an example of Simpson's paradox) showed that what initially appeared as a bias in favor of male applicants was actually, when analyzed department by department, neutral admission or bias in favor of female applicants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#Berkeley_se...
The self-selection involved in applying or not for a special program is surely relevant to analyzing bias, as you correctly point out. A different issue that other commenters here mention is whether participation in a school program at early elementary age has any necessary relation to adult career paths at later ages.
And this is supported by a graph from 1932? I'm not saying it isn't true, but surely there is more recent data to support one of the "best-established findings" of that field.
here is what a group of Scottish psychologists found in 2002 when they analyzed the results of IQ tests given to nearly all 11-year-olds in Scotland in 1932
The graph then, would seem to indicate that the sort of tests that determine a child's eligibility for entrance into the gifted programs in New York either a) do not track with IQ tests or b) filter out children with IQs lower than say 95 (therefore making more girls eligible than boys).
She goes on to suggest that the gifted programs are more targeted to girls - things like verbal-oriented tests and needing to "sit still" for periods of time.
Other testing programs since then have showed a slow, steady rise in the average IQ, called the Flynn effect. However the relative shapes of the male and female histograms have been quite constant. (Ditto for the relative shapes of the racial curves.)
There has been some convergence, that is lessening of a gap, among race and ethnicity groups in the United States as a matter of group averages.