Widespread sex differences in gene expression in the human brain (2013)
nature.com
nature.com
As it stands, young boys are medicated with psychiatric drugs for beings boys, and this is deemed acceptable by society. Boys are failing at every step in public institutions, with higher drop out rates at all levels of schooling.
All of this based upon the misguided idea that a Y chromosome is equivalent to an X chromosome, such that sex differences are "socialy conditioned". This madness must stop now, before our children are harmed any further.
Humans are complex, the product of both nature and nurture. We need to recognize and encourage natural differences, but we also need to shut down social conditioning that attempts to enforce a particular set of differences without regard for individual context.
What gulfs?
Men and women are complimentary. The masculine and the feminine interplay between each other and cooperate toward mutual benefit. There is no gulf.
I reject the notion that we somehow have to eliminate the feminine and the masculine, to be left with some sort of androgynous average. That's just nonsense.
And yes, some men can be feminine and some women can be masculine, and we all certainly have characteristics that can be described as one or the other, but they can and should be described as one or the other. Not as some gender-less PC nonsense.
There is nothing wrong with being a masculine man. There is nothing wrong with being a feminine woman. And there is nothing wrong with the array of all the other possibilities. There are no gulfs that need bridging.
Yes, some people may occasionally take it too far in the other direction, as humans tend to do. Forcing a boy to play with dolls against his will is just as bad as forcing him not to. But that's nowhere near as large or widespread a problem as traditional gender-enforcement still is today.
The typical narrative we are fed regarding women's rights is that women decided one day they didn't like being oppressed as they had through the ages and fought for equality which they got. The problem is that this narrative doesn't actually work. It supposes a sort of oppression a few centuries ago that is really hard to support on the evidence, and it supposes an equality today which is just as far off. Also not all feminists have adopted this narrative. Many post-modernist feminists (for example Robbie Davis-Floyd) have not.
It is worth remembering that Jefferson's campaign called Adams (in 1800, LONG before the 19th Amendment) "a hideous hermaphroditical figure, lacking the force and firmness of a man, and the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." Far from the oppressed narrative here, this quote strongly suggests women having important roles in the political discourse. We see this also from letters in the day. Similarly there were whole industries dominated by women before they were industrialized (interestingly depending on time and place this included not only textile manufacture but also brewing, midwifery, and more). So before industrialization, women had businesses. They were entrepreneurs, and strong active players in both politics and the economy.
What happened though is that the women's industries were the ones which were industrialized most heavily and consequently between this and urbanization women were kicked out of the economy. I strongly suspect also that women's political institutions (which were relatively informal but no less effective) were also destroyed. Feminism, women's suffrage, etc. to my mind is a reaction to that sort of inequality that industrialization brought.
On to the issue of complementary natures. The question I think is the question of an aversion to essentialism which is generally seen as constraining. This is, I think, a relatively recent phenomenon. Essentialism which presupposes that women are by nature both more gentle and sensible than men, but that men are more predictable is not so oppressive and that's the sort of essentialism one sees in pre-industrial America. This was not new. Chris Faraone in his excellent study "Ancient Greek Love Magic" talks a lot about drama and love spell formulas in ancient Greece in terms of complementary forms of misogyny and misandry (and contrary to what the male Greek writers thought, women had a lot of power in ancient Greece).
Of course the truth is probably more abstract than was seen by any time and place, but some patterns are unavoidable. If women's political work is behind the scenes, then reliability and keeping one's word becomes very specifically an important male trait (because it is what assures a woman that her interests will be protected), and it means that men largely navigate a social world created by the social entanglements of women.
The complementary natures are not "stay at home and raise kids" vs "go accomplish stuff" but rather "working together and socially" vs "going off by oneself to work alone." This one pattern is extremely common.
I could go on for hundreds of pages, but I will stop here.
One of the recurrent problems though is defining oppression. What usually happens is that folks project assumptions about the way society works based on the US today to times and places that are very different.
Two things I have come to conclude though:
1. In most times and places, power relationships among women have greater variety, complexity, and nuance than power relationships among men (and therefore defy formalization to a larger extent) and
2. Almost anywhere you have patriarchy you also have matriarchy. The two, instead of being opposites, tend to go together.
1. In Middle Eastern cultures, the husband's mother has a very strong matriarchal role to play in the family. These are formally some of the most patriarchal cultures in the world, and in particular the young wife is one of the lowest-status members of the household. (But the highest status is that of the husband and of his mother.)
2. This may seem very anecdotal, but if you have ever watched "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" there is this discussion about head of household vs neck of household. My wife (Chinese-Indonesian) always points to that scene as how women operate in Chinese-Indonesian culture.
First, that you have made it so far in life with such a thorough and articulated idea of what feminism is without even considering that you might have a slightly lopsided perspective, that perhaps your rebuttal to feminism perhaps coincides a little too conveniently with what you believe and doesn't seem to challenge you in any way -- that should be applauded as a feat of human obstinance par excellence.
Also unsurprisingly, when given a chance to substantiate your very large claims you provide an absurd caricature of Arab cultures, and some comment your wife made while watching a movie. It is literally amazing to me that -- unless you are posessed of remarkable self-awareness -- you are able to, given this evidence, continue to adhere to a worldview which is predicated on the supremacy of your beliefs, and that you can continue to believe in that supremacy even having looked over your own writings.
Literally, the only substantiation you have provided are abject speculations. You have simply declared your interpretation of a Jefferson quote to mean whatever you want it to mean, you have not at all demonstrated that women possessed political influence at the time, nor have you attempted to show how very obvious mechanisms against those efforts -- e.g. lack of suffrage, complete lack of female representation -- are mitigated or made irrelevant by any of this.
Your recollection of the history of feminism is pure fantasy, a Potemkin village constructed solely to assuage yourself apparently. That you cannot apparently analyze even to a first order your arguments herein and find them lacking suggest that to me that you are predisposed to accept the products of your own prejudices without much deliberation.
The facile composition of your argument coupled with the smug manner in which you present them, the certitude that you have reached meaningful conclusions with this lazy thinking -- well, I am left astounded.
The citation is "Etching Patriarchal Rule" by Elaine Combs-Shilling, which discusses henna ceremonies and family structure in Morocco.
The observation is that every one of us has lopsided views that, for sake of getting everything done, we must generally assume to be mostly correct.
(Also, I have lived among several cultures.)
I mean, you're correct that nobody can possess true objectivity. But the conclusion to be drawn from that, the better conclusion to me it seems, is that your own ideas need to pass through much more rigorous filters from multiple -- even antagonistic -- perspectives before being suitable for consideration by others.
About supremacy of one's own ideas -- yes we all have this bias. The point is that, knowing that you have this bias, it seems to me that you have not attempted to correct for it at all. As you have presented them, these ideas fall down to even basic opposition.
> why are you limiting your analysis to intra-household dynamics only?
Because before industrialization:
1. Most households were businesses, and
2. Society largely functioned as a union of households, not a union of individuals (Indonesia is still this way, btw). Interestingly this was the basis of Aristotle's social theory and is generally considered to be representative of the Indo-European world before industrialization. From this perspective democracy would mean "one household, one vote" which is a fair summary of the pre-19th Amendment status quo, actually. Obviously this doesn't work if votes are private (and secret) or if women don't have the keys to power by collaborating to get agendas passed.
So intra-household dynamics is the question of power where those are the case.
Edit: the other problem is that extra-household dynamics and gender before industrialization leads to all kinds of apple/orange comparisons. How do you compare political assembly membership with collective plotting on political issues while washing laundry down by the river? Does it matter if the man's wife will likely know how he voted?
Obviously the household exists in a context regarding dealings with other households in a traditional culture so intrahousehold dynamics are important. Again, I said I saw modern feminism and women's suffrage arising as a response to changes in the interhousehold space brought on by industrialization.
This being said matriarchy and patriarchy are almost always a question of intra-household dynamics. The question is, whether women effectively hold the keys to power or whether women are isolated from eachother, unable to effectively organize and make their agendas compelling. A strong matriarchy/patriarchy in the household is a good indication of women being able to do this (again one sees this in Greek material despite the fact that the society was formally patriarchal with formal privileges associated with men only, see the drama of Lysistrata for a dramatic account, but also look at Faraone's works cited above).
The family is also generally a state in miniature. What goes on with the family is a mirror of state power structures (see Elaine Combs-Schilling, "Etching Patriarchal Rule" for some brief discussion of this, but also see "Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich for a psychologist's view). So intra-household dynamics are the among the best indications of political power structures in the whole of society.
In short, whoever has power at home, has power everywhere.
Well, there are things called social norms. That they should be allowed to do such things is also a social norm. I don't see any real argument about one being better than the other.
That you're allowed to post this comment is a social norm. Not allowing you would also be a social norm. Is there no real argument for why you should be allowed to comment?
Yes, I don't. I take a more philosophocal stance to the issue of society than "freedom above everything". That's not to say I'm against freedom, but I understand that they are nuances to that.
For one, everybody acting the way he pleases, even in areas that seem innocuous or totally a personal choice, can have potentially harmful impact to society at large.
Who's to say what's harmless? This requires a notion of harm, and harm to one's customs/preferred way of life/kind of society he wants, is also a kind of harm.
Even something as basic as the right to eat whatever you want (e.g consequences for obesity rates, social welfare costs, etc). So it depends on what the priorities are. Not everybody, and not every culture, puts the individual ahead of society. Nor it is self-evidently right to do so.
>That you're allowed to post this comment is a social norm. Not allowing you would also be a social norm. Is there no real argument for why you should be allowed to comment?
Well, not really. If the goal of the forum was "total openess and free expression for all", there would be an argument against disallowing certain people/comments.
But if a team, X, built a forum for a specific purpose, why should they allow anyone not aligned with that purpose to post in it? People make choices, not only about how they personally live, but also about how other people shall behave if they want to use/live in etc what they've built, from a country to a web forum.
Any evidence of that?
*I'm sure you can cherry-pick unusually liberal examples of either, but you know what I'm talking about.
Perhaps in some very conservative societies.
Where I live I'm confident that a boy who enthusiastically engages in things which actually interest him is at a social advantage over boys who halfheartedly pretend to enjoy in whatever his parents think is normal.
Ballet, for sure. Maybe not dresses so much, at least not if he is doing the wearing, but having an interest in the clothes of his female peers certainly isn't any kind of social problem.
Considering individual variance and societal influence, making assumptions about an individual's capabilities based solely on their sex seems foolish and even harmful.
* Sorry to provide this without citation, I believe the studies are cited in the first section of "Delusions of Gender" if anyone is interested in the topic.
Once one's movement for justice has crossed the line, where there are apologetics for the abandonment of that effort, it is then creating injustice.
Protip: Evolution doesn't actually stop.
Unless that was sarcastic. At which point, carry on :)
Ok, you're right. Things just haven't been as good since we Marxists have eliminated the doctrine of coverture and laws forbidding women to wear pants. (Fact. Look these up.)
A) I'm not Marxist. B) Society in the recent past was far from perfect. C) For your sake, I hope you're trolling and this isn't your best attempt at a reasoned response.
Marx was a progressive (i.e. he saw history as an endless march towards progress). But not all progressives are Marxists.
If you buy the myth of progress, then eliminating divisions in society and traditional institutions like strong families is good because it is good for that sort of individualism which supports a modern corporate economy. on the other hand, if you don't buy it, then you might start asking why family businesses and expecting to retire with the kids are so bad, and why we sacrifice family on the alter of individualism.....
I consider myself to be on the "light side" of post-modernism, namely that side which looks to the premodern past for truth (not the dark side which tends to discount all knowledge).
Yes, I'm sure you can find feminists who think that blah blah blah whatever. Every group, movement, and party on Earth has fringe members. Look at what the majority* believes, not what the furthest extremes say.
No dolls for you, little girl. If you have a Barbie, it better be the one with a computer, web developer Barbie. How about you put down that tutu, and put on these mechanic overalls instead?
This isn't a hypothetical. I have a friend with a strong education who wants to be a teacher. Her parents told her they would be disappointed if she did that. It's an inappropriate profession for an ambitious female, even if it is what she's passionate about.
We tell girls to work 80 hours a week. Forget about a family, unless you can squeeze it in somewhere in your late 30s. And pick up a nice male profession, like programming. Don't even think about being a housewife or a yoga instructor.
The message is to act like boys, not useless girls.
You are describing the imposing of traditional roles based on gender (in your case, that of boys on a girl) which is exactly what feminism is against.
And the message of "Lean In" and the like is very much against the traditional female lifestyle. Prioritizing family over work is called "leaning out" and criticized.
What the debate is usually about is inequalities in social power relations and whether these can be attributed to what you call 'social conditioning' or biology. This paper doesn't contribute anything to that question.
You seem to suggest that people are completely determined by their biological setup, and that there are no influences from society. I don't think that's right.
The argument I've encountered goes more like this: Because there has been historical oppression, we can't easily distinguish the influence of that from biology and should remove the oppression before we come up with biological theories that justify the oppression. That seems reasonable to me.
I completely agree with your original post but it's hard to deny there's a turd in the feminist kool-aid bowl and no one is willing to pull it out.
I am sorry, I don't see how that would be the same as "denying any difference between men and women". Do you really think, or even have proof which shows, that playing with dolls or wearing dresses is biologically, not socially, "male"?
A lot of clothing conventions for males in past centuries would pass as "female" today. Until the late 19th century it was common for small boys to wear dresses, see [1] for an example.
Besides, I myself played with dolls as a small boy and as far as I can tell did take no harm. That might be different if those boys grow up around homophobic people who bully them for playing with dolls or wearing dresses.
[1]: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-st...
Personally I am not really sure if there even is something like a predisposition for sexual preference. Does someone have recommended readying about that?
A) Queerness and sexual preference aren't equivalent ideas.
B) Saying something is a predisposition is saying it's a product of nature+environment. There are clear cases of socialization(Greeks, Papua New Guinea). On the other hand the drive to procreate is pervasive, overpowering, and considered nature.
C) I don't downvote. But I imagine it's because this thread is orthogonal to the dialogue.
There isn't a logical conflict there of course, sexuality could be a social construct despite gender not being that simple, ...it just seems odd to me. I suspect that sexuality, like gender, is not that simple.
The concept of sexual orientation is a social construct. Unquestionably. It's an idea that's pretty much unique to our culture (modern western countries primarily). Other cultures throughout history had different concepts that were quite different.
The fact that different people experience sexual or romantic attraction differently, and that not everyone is simply attracted only to the opposite sex, is not a social construct. It's a fact.
So it can be both. Just like gender is both.
Add to that the fact that identity carries with it social constructs offered by society, cognitive and psychological individual factors, etc, and that this does not rule out some biological factors regarding how the individual relates to the rest of these.
So "merely" meaning to the exclusion of other factors, sure. But that doesn't mean that the social constructs might not even be at the forefront.
I belive there were some experiments with babies by Trond Diseth that showed that babies have a natural tedency towards interacting with gender specific toys.
Also, it's a fact of life that men who lose their temper in any he-said-she-said conflict often receive a knee-jerk judgement from those around them, which makes it difficult for onlookers to evaluate their case from first principles. (Such knee-jerk happens to females in other contexts.)
We're still subject to many illusions from the same Victorian age mentality that deemed wolves "bad" and that killing them off was an environmental good.
That's an idealization that's not congruent with the historical culture and behavior of many feminists.
Up until the 80's feminism was heteronormative and transphobic. In fact, transphobia is still a huge problem in the community.[1] These are just the more concrete examples. For most of its history feminism has been a straight white upper middle class movement. The perspective of those not fitting this demographic have been marginalized within feminism at some point.
>I hate that the label itself is gendered and I wish it would be changed, but the principles of "feminism" include "Men's Rights". Breaking "Men's Rights" out as a separate topic only muddies the waters, dilutes the efforts for the same goals, and introduces a divide that shouldn't be there in the first place!
Masculism was started by a group of feminists who were kicked out of National Organization for Women(N.O.W) for advocating equal custody in divorce. Gender Studies is inclusive in theory but not in practice.
Imagine if the History department had an aggregation of white supremacists. They were allowed to have their own department, their own academic journals, and even held positions of power like Dean. Would their more inclusive peers not hold some responsibility in enabling these bigots? I know you're pointing out the good side of gender studies but you're also being apologetic and enabling radicalized feminism.
Every feminist and their mom is quick to point out how feminism is inclusive whenever this discussion comes up. Very few of them actually stand up to transphobia, misandry, and countless other forms of bigotry in their circles.
To be a feminist, one must advocate for women's rights at a bare minimum.
Everything else is completely up to the individual, and the fact is there exist lots of schools with contradictory opinions on major social issues. Sex-positive/sex-negative, pro-traditional femininity (lipstick feminist)/anti-traditional femininity, pro-trans/transphobic (TERF), political lesbian, separatist, postmodernist (the prevailing type of feminism in mainstream journalism and academia today), pro-life/pro-choice, complementarian and so on.
Bottom line is, let's stop treating feminism like some omnibenevolent movement for equal rights, and as if radicals are just "fringes who don't make a difference". This is not true anymore. Feminism got derailed decades ago. Go read any large feminist publication like Feministing or Jezebel, and it embraces the toxicity of postmodern feminism.
This ignores the fact that "feminism" is not a coherent movement.
Bingo.
BTW, anyone who thinks it is a coherent movement needs to read this feminist critique of obstetrics(which expands to a critique of modern medicine and mainstream feminism):
"Birth as an American Rite of Passage" by Robbie Davis-Floyd. Better to read the second edition than the first.
You might not find it as enlightening, but it offers a pretty rational approach.
> I hate that the label itself is gendered and I wish it would be changed, but the principles of "feminism" include "Men's Rights". Breaking "Men's Rights" out as a separate topic only muddies the waters, dilutes the efforts for the same goals, and introduces a divide that shouldn't be there in the first place!
In my opinion and based on my own readings, I think that feminists want to maintain a monopoly on philosophy of gender equality. Yes, I said philosophy; feminism is an ideology. And while there is nothing wrong about ideologies, there can be many ideologies about the same subject. Thankfully for feminists, though, ideologies about gender can be divided into:
- Different feminist paradigms - Sexists and homophobes
At least as far as most people are concerned. But maybe somebody wants to create a new philosophy of gender, a philosophy that might be in part mutually exclusive w.r.t some feminist "dogmas"? Well, great; now the feminists can readily shoot down these ideologies because they are "sexist", merely because of the fact that some of their views oppose some of the common feminist views. Hey, if it's not feminism, or it contradicts some feminist viewpoints, then it surely must be sexist, since feminism is the perfect incarnation of egalitarianism... right?
It isn't surprising that some women want to have a wider forum for discussing things that pertain to women in particular (that is; people that identify as women). Gender equality or not, most women probably have experiences that are different from men in some regards, and vice versa. So how about men have something like a Men's Right's movement, or whatever you want to call it? Nope, they say; we already have this thing called feminism. You shouldn't need anything else. OK, so say you give up on having a male community, even though women can have their own female communities, and try to assimilate into some feminist community. Now you have to just hope that they accept you as an equal, not just as a male ally.
But yeah, feminism is all you'd ever need. A real swiss knife for tackling anything related to gender...
Likewise, feminists believe their ideology is based upon the principle of not hating women, therefore disagreement with their ideology amounts to misogyny. But they aren't revealing their interlocutors as misogynists; they're revealing themselves as Ayn Rand.
[1] There is considerable controversy about the lengths to which Ayn Rand would go to condemn people for their irrationality due to personal disagreements, but treat this story as a parable; its literal truth is beside the point.
If that were true, it would be called "humanism".
Is that sufficient?
is that abuse?
I don't think you can really 'force' a child to play, so I discount the part about playing with dolls being potentially 'abusive'.
While I certainly advocate that parents have the right to dress their kids in varied styles, I would highly advise against certain styles. "It doesn't matter" perhaps legally, but it does matter socially. (I work in an inner city school; I'm aware of at least two serious suicide comments by kids whose ages are in the single digits, at least partly due to social status.)
I basically agree with you. But, please do it anyway. It could be interesting.
How do we remove something we can't cleanly delineate? The answer is pragmatically, but while holding to our other principles.
If you wish to find oppression, after following the money, note who is silencing those who are tolerant and sincerely wish to trade in ideas and the truth.
There's a very vocal subset of any group of people that has extreme opinions. Within the feminist movement, the vitriolic anti-male segment has really shrunk since the 1970's, and if anything there is a much bigger subset today that seek to validate and justify traditional gender roles.
In my personal experience, I've encountered a decent number of men who point to innate gender differences to justify the skewed representation of women in engineering. I have also encountered a decent number of feminists who embrace traditional gender roles. I have yet to encounter any feminist of the vitriolic anti-male persuasion, though I read about them in my American Legal History class. In the mainstream media, I've read a few articles along the lines of Susan Patton's regressive letter urging Princeton women to "find a husband" while they had the opportunity to do so at an Ivy League institution, but none of the vitriolic anti-male screeds that people assure me exists.
It's also a tiny and unpopular subsection of the feminist movement. They're outnumbered a hundred to one by dudes who like to use them as strawmen.
> only recently has the value of women in society dropped to that of men.
I don't think that makes any sense. I mean, I literally don't understand what you're trying to say, and none of your assertions seem to be relevant to each other.
Hardly.
Virtually every feminist scandal that attracts any attention whatsoever is about postmodern feminists and their oversensitive antics.
The most popular feminist media, including Feministing and Jezebel, as well as articles on HuffPost and Slate, deal with postmodern radical ideologies.
Academia has also long been dominated by them.
Either they're not some "tiny and unpopular subsection" and actually a majority, or the logically vast majority of "reasonable" (depending on your views) feminists are doing precisely jack shit.
Is this the same viewpoint that says that all Muslims are terrorists because those are the ones that make the news? (Because "Local Mosque-Goers Are Pleasant Neighbors" doesn't sell newspapers.)
Obviously sensationalism sells. But the issue here is that your initial assertion of postmodern feminists being a "tiny and unpopular subsection" is a falsehood. As I said, most popular feminist publications today, both in mainstream journalism and in academia, belong to the former school.
This includes the feminism in the tech industry, the ideology of which is expressed in resources like the Geek Feminism Wiki, perhaps the crown of everything that is wrong with postmodernism summed up into a single anecdotal wiki with virtually no editorial standards beyond "Does it fit in the echo chamber?".
Then, let's face it: when postmodernists and radicals get all the attention, while all the supposed good and moderate feminists receive absolutely none... you have a problem. Your movement is being hijacked. You can underestimate the issue all you want, but the fact is it's the postmodernists who are actually making an influence.
Think about it this way: which sex has historically been unequally represented in the most dangerous jobs? And which sex is STILL the only sex that has to sign up for the draft?
And sure they're relevant.
Well said, but I think you've lowballed this figure.
Is it? Pretty much every discussion here about women in IT is quickly dominated by those voices. See e.g. the recent "bro pages" hate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sex_differences_in...
"The smaller difference in lower body strength may be due to the fact that during childhood, both males and females frequently exercise their leg muscles during activities like running, walking, and playing. Males, however, are socially pressured to enhance their upper body muscles, leading to a wider difference in upper body strength"
----
Thankfully this has since been removed.
Speaking as a male who feels no particular need for higher upper body strength, I've certainly felt pressured at times. Somehow my sister never is.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/why-women-cant-do-p...
Also I may have found the link you were referring to: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19175758
What the debate is usually about is inequalities in social power relations and whether these can be attributed to what you call 'social conditioning' or biology.
Why is this even a question? We already know:
- Powerful men tend to be taller than other men
- Women tend to be shorter than men
There's an understood physical difference that is more than likely playing to unbalance social power relations.
But to get to a substantive analysis, one has to look at what people's options in life are. If women can't seek divorce but can murder their husbands with impunity provided that certain cultural fictions remain intact (the case in ancient Athens, see Chris Faraone's "Ancient Greek Love Magic" covering poisonous love potions as a defence against murder, and note too that a purpose of the potions was to abate anger), then the right to divorce is totally subsumed in more substantial, even extreme, options.
If one accepts substantial realities as the measure of equality, then women are less equal today politically and economically than they were in 1800.
You aren't sporting much evidence to justify a righteous rant against your "angry emotional mob mentality."
If you are not familiar with that earlier body of research establishing behavioral differences, these studies might be a place to start, and then of course you can walk the bibliographies to find more.
http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/c_c/rsrcs/rdgs/e...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571891304...
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9219513/
http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~dcampb/Campbell.InfantMetaALSex...
Published just a few years ago, it criticizes much of the research on sex differences, and from the reviews it makes a very exhaustive and compelling case. I'm curious if these are some of the studies it criticizes.
(I don't have an opinion on this either way as I have not been able to examine the evidence. But I'm very interested to see that there is so much controversy, even among scientists, on this issue).
http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/2042-6410-2-4.pdf
It has been argued that these authors have picked evidence they find disagreeable but fail to mention more solid studies.
It's a little boring, but systematic.
And exactly what 'nurture' are in-utero babies - the subject of the testosterone / interest tests - subjected to anyway?
You've read the book. Sum it up for us.
That said, the structure of schooling isn't arbitrary. It's a reflection of the needs of a modern knowledge economy. It's something that doesn't just affect boys versus girls, but certain kinds of boys versus other kinds of boys. Compare your stereotypical programmer to the stereotypical kid who bullied him in 5th grade. More likely than not, the bully had less patience and a lower attention span, more physical strength and greater size, and a well-developed ability to get others to follow him through a mixture of coercion and manipulation. A thousand years ago, at least in Europe, these skills would have been a ticket to higher social status through violence and war. The programmer stereotype, if he was lucky, might have found reprieve in a monastery or something. Of course the shoe is quite on the other foot today, isn't it? The ability to do tedious, boring work for long hours is now valuable, and is basically what modern K-12 education prepares you to do.
Is our modern economy unfair to the bully?
All of which is unimportant. Even if there are innate biological differences between the sexes, they are at most trends, not hard barriers. There is almost complete overlap. I've personally seen every kind of behaviour from every possible gender identity. So it doesn't make any sense to prejudge people by their gender, or force gender roles on children.
The issue of whether or not ADHD/ADD are real diseases, and whether children are being over-medicated is completely different to the issue of gender essentialism. I suspect you're lumping them in together because they are two things that are new that you don't like.
I grew up with ADD, and did not obtain medication, by choice, until I reached adulthood. I perceive the medication to be supporting what I'd generally call "masculine values" - it's good for deadening the emotions and producing things. I'll skip it if I know the day is going to be mostly social, or even if I know that I will have a meeting where my ability to schmooze is more important than my ability to focus and complete a task. I describe being medicated as being "two drinks more sober" - Focus is easier, yes. It's easier to get things done, sure. But social stuff, unless there is a clear and directed goal, becomes rather less interesting and rather more awkward in a way that could be described imprecisely and offensively as "a little bit autistic."
>Boys are failing at every step in public institutions, with higher drop out rates at all levels of schooling.
I have a different theory on why that is.
I think that the causation of the correlation between formal education and money sometimes runs opposite the traditionally assumed direction; if you have the prerequisites to make a lot of money (either your parents are upper middle-class or are obviously really smart and very hardworking and know when to conform and when to rebel) you are far more likely to go to school. I mean, it works the regular way, too; some people do come out of school with skills that have a high market value, I'm just saying, a lot of those people would be valuable either way.
That fits into my theory on why boys are dropping out more than girls. I would suggest that boys are raised to be results oriented. If you can get the ball through the hoop, or the oblong object between the poles, people will like you. As you get older, that's the nice car and house. We are taught that people value us for what we can produce, what we can accomplish, not who we are. Sure, confidence is important, but that's mostly because you need [to at least be able to fake] confidence to accomplish anything that involves other people.
[as an aside, my experience as a man is that the reality is that people value you for your money, yes, but it's dramatically less important than I was led to believe as a boy. Now, I still believe that I'm largely judged by my accomplishments, my prestige, but it's way more complex than just money; in fact, a degree would have been a useful minimum social proof of accomplishment, and would have helped me in that arena far more than I thought it would have when I made the decision.
Still, that perception that how much money I made was the primary thing others would value me on was very strong when I was younger, as I think it is in most young men, and it had a large effect on my life decisions when I was making the work/college decision, as I think it does for most young men.]
My perception is that girls and women are primarily valued for their characteristics; who they are (or, at least, how they look and how they act towards others.) over what they can produce. This... is a very different set of incentives. Of course, I didn't grow up as a girl, and haven't experienced life as a woman. I have no idea how much my perception is shared by people who have.
College is... well, my perception is that it's not about increasing what you produce, primarily, It's about changing who you are. Making you a better (or some would say, more culturally middle-class) person. From a raw "what can I produce?" standpoint, if your parents aren't rich enough to pay for it, you are quite likely better off getting that construction job, or that front-line tech support or computer repair position than you would be working on an art history degree. But if you are trying to learn how to deal with other people, how to be charming and interesting? art history, or maybe literature isn't a bad bet.
Of course, I'm not advancing this viewpoint as an absolute "this is the way it is" - I don't know that it is. These are just my perceptions as a person who perhaps put more thought into gender roles than most people did while growing up.
My son has ADD too, and so far we have been able to get by without pharmaceuticals. He does drink coffee most mornings and that really helps him. But we'd avoid medications if possible.
Here in Indonesia such things are still very stigmatized but there's a positive side to that too, in that the definition of "normal" is much more expansive. To a remarkable extent by destigmatizing these things we've paved the way in the US to allow the elision of "normal" from descriptions of actual, living, breathing people.
There are clearly differences between the physiology of the average man and the average woman, but those differences appear to be more of a spectrum than a binary split. Given that, I don't understand how people with an axe to grind against the "gender is cultural" idea would like society to look. Why argue against the idea that individual differences are vast, and that the best approach is not to create groups that are defined at birth? What's the alternative being suggested?
Anyone with an extreme emotional investment in the "gender respresentation" issue isn't even going to read the article before proselytizing HN with their beliefs.
This is an article about gene expressions and their correlation to the development of various neurological disorders.
However it mentions differences between males and females... so it's going to trigger a completely off-topic flame war.
>There are racial differences in gene expression (though much smaller), too, but I doubt anyone would upvote it or start a similar conversation about race if an article about it were posted here.
You've been here long enough to know that isn't true. Plenty of people on this site have a passionate belief in the simultaneous superiority of and tyranny of the inferior masses over white males within the civilization that they built with their own hands.
But it's alright to just accept we're all products of socialization as a valid conclusion?
>What's the alternative being suggested?
A nuanced conversation on the interplay of biology and environment. Which there is very little of.
Except when you compare the average male and female.
That's not the wheel I'm interested in rolling. I'm rather interested in critiquing the current humanist-sociological status quo mantra that biological differences are irrelevant or can be abstracted away. A rather large difference between the two goals.
"People cite title of article to support existing opinions while admitting TL;DR."
> We show that sex differences in gene expression and splicing are widespread in adult human brain, being detectable in all major brain regions and involving 2.5% of all expressed genes.
While I don't have a similar number, inter-racial differences of gene expression will be quite similar, if not even higher. This is the reason why RNAseq experiments these days in some cases can even find opposing evidence, given the genetic background of the subjects, such as in the recent bladder cancer publications regarding the role of STAG2 [1].
Please do not claim (or, rather, proselytize...) the "evidence" for sex differences based on a Nature article most people taking positions in that respect probably do not even quite comprehend.
[1] http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v13/n12/full/nrc3631.html
There's all kinds of good science done that doesn't use the null hypothesis - it's a myth that if one isn't presented, then it's "not science".
They are saying that in hard science it is often useful to start with a null hypothesis, and report anything that diverges from that as potentially significant (assuming statistical significance of the divergence).
anyway I agree with you, one doesn't need a null hypothesis to measure things
on the other hand to advance theories, in other words to test and reject (or fail to reject) hypotheses, one does need ... hypotheses[1]
It should also be noted that the average age at death was around 60 years old, which means that most women were post-menopause. The effect of estrogen on gene expression is thus underestimated.
I'm just looking at all these comments saying "there is a spectrum of individual variation" and it is infuriating that the paper offers no way to confirm or deny this assertion, despite its importance to the conclusions.
There might be reasons this isn't the case, but it is apparently true that maternal behavior influences which parent you express genes from in mice (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20616232). I'm not sure (and not qualified to answer) whether similar mechanisms are at play here, but it does suggest that evolution has found a way to use early experience to modulate genetic expression. That might be the case here, too.
I think that's a useful study, since male and female organism react differently to some illnesses (check out sex differences in heart attack symptoms; here ignorance can literally be lethal).
What I do find funny is how quite some people here didn't bother to read the article and, upon seeing the title, so happily shout "FINALLY! DIE FEMINISM, DIE!" Sorry guys, wrong cue.
It's evolution of sex, stupid.
PS. My previous comment on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041221
The same argument can be levied at racism. If you go back to the year 1000AD, it's obvious that Europeans are of vastly inferior stock. The Chinese and the Arabs were doing optics and stuff while the Europeans were basically playing in the dirt.
By the year 1000 AD the Europeans had already built the most grandiose of structures that rival today’s standards, had the most extensive networks and cities, filled entire libraries with books on all manners of philosophy and science, explored all corners of the world, and so on and on.
And it wasn't until about the 1900s (about 1920-1960), when the Western World (that primarily consisted of those same groups of people) exported its knowledge and technology (via a combination of globalism/capitalism + sharing + altruism) - that started to change the subsistence living conditions for everyone else to at least something higher.
If something was not invented by the Europeans, it sure as hell was revised and improved to such a degree that you can't equate the two in any meaningful way.
Hell, at that point, even the Eastern Roman Empire was struggling.
And eventually the doom and gloom that came afterwards was overcome fully with new civilizations, countries, etc... And by the 1800s the Western world and the European countries were so far ahead of anyone else that it's silly to even compare them to the rest of the world at that point in history in regards to reason, law, economy flow, technology, science/math, music, theater, culture, ideas, etc.
By your logic I could point out that China before the mid-point of last century was a 99% peasant-class country full of hardship and misery, and make the argument that you are using - wiping out all their previous culture and accomplishments.
We have to look at this from the totality point-of-view.
It kind of sounds like you might be using a very geographically restricted classification.
Sexual roles (the evolution of sexuality) is a completely different game. Ever thought why peacock has a tail but not peahen?
In the U.S. whites score about one standard deviation above blacks on IQ tests such as WISC and Stanford-Binet, and in adoption studies that try to control for environment, this difference does not go away. Race is more than skin deep.
EDIT: Sorry, wrong paper. Looking for the right one.
Even the fact that you point out "in the US" should be an indicator of the racism. I've never heard any other modern countries seriously complain about the allegedly inferior intellects of their black populace. Are American blacks different?...
These differences are mirrored by PISA and IQ scores between nations, SAT scores within nations, and etc. It's not hard to find corroborating evidence, but most people don't want to.
http://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/#Race-IQ
It's hard to imagine that racism accounts for the entire explanation of such a global, consistent, and persistent phenomenon.
For 104 of the 185 nations, no studies were available. In those cases, the authors have used an estimated value by taking averages of the IQs of neighboring or comparable nations. For example, the authors arrived at a figure of 84 for El Salvador by averaging their calculations of 79 for Guatemala and 88 for Colombia. Including those estimated IQs, the correlation of IQ and GDP is 0.62.
It's not hard to find corroborating evidence, you can just make it up!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations#Na...
I guess what they intended was "African Americans have low IQ and so do Africans, ergo IQ is race-related". Yet African Americans have higher IQ than Africans, because they live in a more prosperous region, with less disease, more opportunities etc. so what does that tell us about IQ and race, and racial differences within countries? That maybe it's not all about race (and generally be on the lookout for stats that don't correct for factors like age/wealth/education/sex etc. I regularly see the "headline" figure being given uncorrected.)
African Americans are closer to European IQ levels than Africans, probably for several environmental and genetic reasons (better nutrition and schooling, ~25% European ancestry, etc)
From the paper:
"The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socio-economic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential."
Of course humans were not a subject to strictly controlled selective breading like dogs, which means we have much fewer and less diverse races. Still, this is not something that should be completely ignored when trying to understand human behavior, both social and genetic traits matter.
The unknowns are how mental differences (expression of genes) are caused by environment or effect the environment.
This means we don't know whether a 50/50 split in some field is natural or a result of society railroading people into the field. It seems to me that the best way to handle policy is not to base it on unknowns, so that's why I favor policy that ensures opportunity to work in specific fields but doesn't try to balance them.
All your wishful thinking will never make women and men the same.
There's no question that things like hormone levels are likely to have some sort of effect but your response begs huge questions such as how low-level differences affect incredibly complex higher-level processes like cognition, how much a skill like programming depends on such specific cognitive abilities, and even how important a single area of expertise like programming is to overall success in such a wide field which requires a range of different individual skills as well as complex social behaviour on multiple levels.
There is still plenty of Nobel-level groundbreaking research yet to be done for each of those questions but instead you simply chose to ignore all of that hard thinking and simply assert that simple biological determinism explains the gender distribution across an entire profession.
And when in evolution, we say "they", we don't mean any individual members, we mean proportions. So women in general don't do some things that interest men.
Now, if you guys want society to spend effort and probably money to push women in some roles that don't interest them (or vice versa for men), so be it. My opinion is that doing this will not make women/men any happier or even will not be good for society...