Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

Whomever wants a critical look at this kind of "psychology result", I really recommend checking out Cordelia Fine (Oxford, Cambridge, UCL educated) and "Delusions of Gender". She is a fun listen/read and explains really well the flaws in the science/reporting/interpretation of "gender science", from the statistical to the neurological.

http://blip.tv/slowtv/delusions-of-gender-p1-cordelia-fine-4...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_Gender

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8031168-delusions-of-gen...

Additionally, readers who are not very acquainted should know that PsychologyToday is not a respectable publication in psychology, and is regularly embroiled in issues with propping up "we are telling the truth that nobody wants to hear about white supremacy". If you do not know who Satoshi Kanazawa is, you should look him up, or you can ask the psychology subreddits what their assessment is of that website.

This post veers close to ad hominem, but the way people are processing the OP is very much fallacious as well: a combination of taking a dubious authority on its word, not following up on the stats, and relishing in it confirming everything they want to believe (sexism is over-discussed, we really are different, and it explains most differences we observe). I cannot possibly offer a counter-argument in such meager visual real-estate and with so little captured attention-span, but if anyone is interested in hearing the best counter-arguments (not of the "artsies who believe in the blank-slate" variety), I offer a place to start.

Cordelia Fine is known for ignoring all finding that contradict her worldview. You make it sound like her position represents the consensus... it does not.

http://www.uvm.edu/~tribeta/Articles/Sex%20stereotypes%20Hal...

"Cleverly written with engaging prose, Delusions of Gender and Brain Storm contain enough citations and end notes to signal that they are also serious academic books. Fine and Jordan-Young ferret out exaggerated, unreplicated claims and other silliness regarding research on sex differences. The books are strongest in exposing research conclusions that are closer to fiction than science. They are weakest in failing to also point out differences that are supported by a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research."

Fine can play the audience well but she does not do well in academic reviews outside of feminist circles.

I'm not sure if you read the review you're linking but it's not a "bad review". It points out, as you quoted, where the books are "strongest" and "weakest", and is generally complimentary to the works reviewed. And as the author of the review points out to explain Fine's omissions:

"…whereas sex differences are reliably found in several areas of research, none of the differences support essentialist claims that girls and boys need separate educations based on their brain types, that one sex is better suited to become engineers, or that one sex is inherently more intelligent—to name just a few of the ideas being promoted under the guise of 'science'."

Halpern is being overly courteous. Fine denies the very existence of evolved human sexually dimorphic psychological adaptations, significant (physical) brain differences between men and women etc.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108906/

"Nothing short of stopping research on the topic would seem to satisfy her."

This is so ridiculous, I chuckled. This is from her conclusion on the aforementioned book:

"But also, to those interested in gender equality there is nothing at all frightening about good science. It is only carelessly done science, or poorly interpreted science, or the neurosexism it feeds, that creates cause for concern."

And her work is all about that. It's funny to me that she's done a very large review of tons of experiments, down to methodological aspects such as the way babies are held in supposedly controlled settings, and people try to slander her as some kind of anti-science advocate.

No doubt there are scientific flaws in Fine's work, but even as this article states:

"…popular books are written to appeal to a broader audience, and in that respect both Jordan-Young and Fine have succeeded. Prompting laypeople to adopt a more critical view of overly simplistic views of complex data sets is a goal any scientist can support, and for that we applaud their efforts."

The "overly-simplistic views" referenced by the reviewers are exactly the ones approvingly quoted in this article by Psychology Today, and to which Fine is, appropriately, being offered as a counterpoint.

I don't see how these links are a relevant counterpoint; they all seem to focus on claims about averages, that the OP deliberately did not talk about.

Her work is critical of various pillars of gender science, and most definitely does not refrain from tackling the "Greater Male Variability" hypothesis that gets so much mileage these days. One such excerpt:

> In a Science study of over 7 million United States schoolchildren, Janet Hyde and her team found that across grade levels and states, boys were modestly more variable than girls. Yet when they looked at the data from Minnesota state assessments of eleventh graders to see how many boys and girls scored above the 95th and 99th percentile (that is, scored better than 95 percent, or 99 percent, of their peers) an interesting pattern emerged. Among white children there were, respectively, about one-and-a-half and two boys for every girl. But among Asian American kids, the pattern was different. At the 95th percentile boys’ advantage was less, and at the 99th percentile there were more girls than boys.[15] Start to look in other countries and you find further evidence that sex differences in variability are, well, variable. Luigi Guiso’s cross-cultural Science study also found that, like the gender gap in mean scores, the ratio of males to females at the high end of performance is something that changes from country to country. While in the majority of the forty countries studied there were indeed more boys than girls at the 95th and 99th percentiles, in “in some countries females are equally or more variable, or are as likely as boys to make it into the 95th percentile.“

> (Penner 2008; Machin & Pekkarinen 2008). These latter authors stress the strong pattern of greater male variability, but the boy/girl ratio (shown in parentheses) at the top 5 percent of maths ability was more-or-less equal in Indonesia (0.91), Thailand (0.92), Iceland (1.04) and the UK (1.08). Penner found greater female variability in the Netherlands, Germany and Lithuania. For useful discussion of these data, see (Hyde & Mertz, 2009)."

This analysis ignores both the (1) base rate, and (2) practice effect. The problem with using gender-neutral percentiles is that the proportion of males and females may not be 1:1. So, even if the percentage of women in the 99th percentile is higher than that of men, men could actually be more likely to be in the 99th percentile than women.

That is, they found p(women | 99th) / p(men | 99th) whereas they're claiming they found p(99th | women) / p(99th | men).

Regarding the second, it could be that the women were studying more, and thus not represent a genetic trait. In order to settle whether differences are genetic, you would have to compare performance from the same amount of effort.

I'm interested to see how the research continues in the future. It seems there is a lot of taboo around the subject, and I hope that doesn't dissuade scientific debate.

> Regarding the second, it could be that the women were studying more, and thus not represent a genetic trait. In order to settle whether differences are genetic, you would have to compare performance from the same amount of effort.

I think this is an important objection, but you stop far shy of its true implication. If just studying more would skew the results, then you cannot reasonably say that the method used has any significant power to detect the influence genetic traits.

What is tested in a standardised test is arguably the combined effect of societal environment and genes, and considering that the field of the interaction between gene expression and the host environment (Epigenetics) is only just starting, even the genetic component might not be some static contribution.

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