Comment by apricot7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apricot7 | Hacker News Reader

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Is it really ridiculous to suggest that gender differences would be minimized in a more equal society?

It depends on how we define "equal". Imagine a human society in which the physical strength of men and women are equal, and are kept equal through academic and government policy.

On one hand, that's an equal society. On the other hand, that's a tyrannical society which forcibly boosts girls and women at the expense of boys and men.

I think the Wikipedia article you linked to tends to support the theory that girls are receiving special treatment—countries in which girls are closing the gap in mathematics also tend to be the countries in which girls are extending their gap in reading.

You specifically mentioned Sweden as an example of equality. In Sweden, girls slightly outperform boys in mathematics, AND girls outperform boys in reading by a much larger margin than boys outperform girls in mathematics in any country.

Why is that touted as an example of equality?

Equality isn't about eliminating differences across different groups. When I argue for a more equal society, I'm not saying everyone should be made to be identical, I'm saying everyone should be treated equitably.

If you read the last article I linked. Pay close attention to this part:

"When participants were told that they were about to perform a working memory task (which included math operations as a kind of distractor) to get norms for student, men and women performed equally. But when the same test was given with the information that this was a test of complex mathematics in order to compare males and females, performance in female participants dropped almost 30 percent."

This suggests to me an inequitable society. A society where at a young age women are already taught that they aren't supposed to be good at math.

The top five countries where women scored better than men are Malta, Albania, Trinidad and Tobago, India, and Kyrgyzstan. Do you have any evidence of educational policies favoring women at the expense of men in these countries?

As to the reading gap, of course this is an issue. Just as much effort that is put into bringing math scores to parity should be spent on the reading gap. Sweden is an example of equality, because even though there are plenty inequitable parts of their society they actively work to make those equitable. What is your preferred model of an equitable society, or do you simply think that equality inevitably means oppressing the dominant class?

Quinnchr, I can't reply to you, so I'll reply here instead.

This suggests to me an inequitable society. A society where at a young age women are already taught that they aren't supposed to be good at math.

The article you linked had a different take—that women are more adversely affected by pressure than are men.

The article had a different take, because I don't think your hypothesis is true: And I went through the American public school system very recently. There wasn't a single year in which it wasn't drilled into our heads by predominantly female teachers how much better girls are than boys at everything. Boys were the victim of daily jabs. There wasn't a single year in which we weren't told that the only reason girls have been traditionally worse at math is because mean boys make girls think they're worse.

This article...

http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/06/do-teachers-really-discrimi...

...mentions something that I witnessed personally. Teachers tend to despise boys who act like traditional boys. Those boys are treated more harshly. Their answers are never given the benefit of the doubt. They're mad to feel like failures.

So I think the meme of "girls are taught they suck; boys are taught they're great" doesn't apply to the United States, and opposite has likely been true since the 70s or 80s.

Sweden is an example of equality, because even though there are plenty inequitable parts of their society they actively work to make those equitable

I think they spend a lot of time and money giving special treatment to girls and women, trying to close innate performance gaps. If they wanted to be truly equitable, they'd do the same for boys (and maybe they're starting to, and we'll soon see results).

But even if Sweden were to do that, what then? They've spent a lot of time pursuing equal results, as though it's a goal in and of itself. Why should it be?

If you have two people, one of whom innately excels at math and the other innately excels at editing prose, why not encourage and foster those skills instead of fighting against them? Specialization isn't a bad thing; it's necessary for real progress to be made.

Why do you make the implicit assumption that innate performance gaps (in things like math and editing prose especially) fall along gender lines? A better null hypothesis is that there is no connection between gender and these skills.

By the way, I'm sorry you felt mistreated by teachers because of your gender. That's wrong.

If it was a result of pressure why would the disparity only show when they were told it was a math test? Are you suggesting women have an innate anxiety to doing math?

I'm going to shy away from the anecdotal as that will get us nowhere, I will say though my experience was very different than yours.

As for teachers discriminating against men. This is absolutely a legitimate men's issue, but it's largely an intersectional issue. Middle class white men in general aren't the ones being discriminated against, it's largely an issue of race and to a lesser extent class.

Sweden has a ton of social programs specifically for men as well. In what ways are Swedish women receiving special treatment? Do you consider anything other than the status quo special treatment?

I'm not sure why equality isn't a legitimate goal in itself. Would you say the same thing in the 1960s about the nascent civil rights movement? I'm generally of the opinion that no class or group of people should be treated as inferior. If you still need a reason, economically speaking there is a strong positive correlation between gender equality and GDP per capita.

What purpose does proving that women/men are innately better at certain things hold? At best it's a generalization, there will always be women and men who preform better in non-standard ways. What purpose does a generalization like that serve? Of course women and men can have innate differences, but why must it depend on the biological sex? There are huge variances in hormonal levels and physiology across a single sex, do you really think there are innate characteristics common to all women?

As to the reading gap, of course this is an issue. Just as much effort that is put into bringing math scores to parity should be spent on the reading gap. Sweden is an example of equality

Sweden is an example of girls doing 20 points better relative to boys in both math and reading compared to the US. And the pattern generally holds for the other countries as well. Take the sum of the math and reading gaps, and that value is more stable (min 29, max 64), compared with the gaps for math (-15 to +32) and reading (10 to 72). If anything, this data raises the probability that I assign to the proposition that girls and boys on average have different natural aptitudes.

"On the other hand, that's a tyrannical society which forcibly boosts girls and women at the expense of boys and men."

First of all, as others have pointed out, equality does not mean forcing everyone to have equal abilities. Equality means not pre-judging anyone's abilities based on irrelevant characteristics like sex or race. Second of all, arguments like yours always clue me off that the person making the argument is operating under the default assumption that boys and men are better than women and girls in general and that assuming that they just might be equal for any given task until proven otherwise is tyranny. Let me guess: MRA?

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