Clues About the Gender Gap

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• More good points. Science does a great job in answering questions, but humans would do well to use philosophy to help the scientists decide which questions are worth asking.

• Oops... We need to clarify:

  Biology = Bio (Gr. Life) + Logos (Gr. study)

  I got a little tripped up with the language. But we can change our composition and the processes of life. Neurobiological medicines change the processes that people commonly refer to as biology. Some people are born with the inability to process seratonin (aka: depression). SSRI's work because they change the processes that prevent seratonin from being effectively used. Science was created by man; therefore, we did do it ourselves, I firmly believe. The tool is inseparable from the person because the tool was given birth by the person.

  Yes, if "biology" were the sum of all processes. But biology, even in the common sense is plural (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=biology).

  Don't get me wrong, science can have value, but without philosophy to give the answers such as meaning, etc, it is only a patch for each leak. It doesn't fix the entire pipe system. I don't -think- you disagree (after all, you are in the humanities and not physics.) I guess our disagreement is approach.

  The total union of philosophy and science will be the most powerful force. Right now, that reality is far from reached. Science continues to progress at exponential rates without evaluating its common assumptions (Funny, but there is actually a TV show that I enjoyed. It was called "Numbers." It has an underlying theme about the pathology of trying to find meaning with numbers. Highly recommend).

  Which in turn, causes philosophy to run faster to catch up (For example, postmodernism and science. Philosophy is trying to do a mass suicide) without evaluating its assumptions. There is, or has been, somewhat of a culture war between science and philosophy. I'm always annoyed at the sense of "pull" each of my disciplines seem to impose. I don't want to be one or the other... I want both.

  Thank you for confiding in me about science. I knew that I could trust in your open mind about science in the humanities. The academic community is ruthless. Thankfully, I have yet to run across a student or faculty member at Seton Hill who holds a rigid, elitist attitude about the value of their discipline. God bless the Liberal Arts! Keeps me sane...

• I'm not sure that the examples you give really make a fundamental change in biology. Yes, we can manage certain parts of our biology with hormones and surgery, but "we" can't do it ourselves -- not without science, that is.

  I agree that we can't right the wrongs of society by saying "biology made me do it" and stopping there.

• "we can't change our biology."

  Not necessarily. Gender reconstruction therapy. Medicine. Surgery. Electroshock therapy.

  All of these are biological changes that have a huge impact on our behavior. The general concensus in the psychological community is that the nature vs. nurture debate is dead. Both work in relation to each other. They are a complex system.

  Changing biology is a temporary fix -- just like most scientific developments -- for the problems of society. People often suggest the ridiculous solution of "conversion therapy" for gays and lesbians. That works with the assumption that there is inherently something defective or otherwise wrong with the individuals.

  Homosexuality exists in other species without social opposition. The defect is not the person. The defect is society. The trick is always knowing which is which.

  The model of science only tells us how things are... not how they should be. I think Larry Summers made the mistake of being inflexible. And as you can see, it made him look like a fascist, not a scholar.

  Biology explains a lot about behavior, but it can't answer the issue Summers was to address. Even if biology and inherent aptitude were the reasons that women weren't getting as many tenured positions in science, that still begs the question: "so what do we do about it?"

  Even failing to hire for lack of aptitude shows the social values are skewed more toward aptitude and less toward interest, passion, comprehension.

  Biology is not a useless endeavor. But if you try to change the world with mere biology, you will run into brick walls. Proving that sexuality is a purely biological phenomenon will not keep policymakers from exploiting the rights of gays and lesbians, for example. What does biology, in this case have to do with the social issue? Incest is a biological phenomenon. Who's to say that because it is inherent, that it is not pathological?

  The GLBT community is losing the battle because they have the APA saying... "oh, it's okay to be gay and science can prove it."

  The community trusts anyone who will entertain their selfish interests. And that is what perpetuates homophobia. The gay culture. We don't fear the idea; we fear the culture that comes with it. So, the APA has been the main front of advocacy for GLBT issues. However, having some degree of social science background, I can assure everyone that, even though the body of research in the APA finds many good things for GLBT people, they are useless factoids in proving their assertion of advocacy.

  Right now, the way the APA defines a psychological pathology allows anyone who wants to justify different given sexualities as pathological, can arguably do so. The frame of reference for an individual problem, according to the APA, is always the culture and society. That works under the assumption that the society is a perfect reference point.

  I like the fact that people are still lingering in the optimism of positivism, but it's time to come back to reality. Science is more of a recreational club. It has much to offer, but too many people are driven to science to solve the worlds problems. There is no shortcut escape from the human condition. We have to start facing our fears rather than patch them up with scientific development. Numbing ourselves to the pains of human drama will not make it go away.

  Men -are- the weaker sex because more men are retreating to hide from the pain of life. Video games, sports, science. These are the drugs that masculinity depends upon to hide in fear.

  I firmly believe that we have to use the right tools for the job. Biology just won't cut it to fix our social cises.

• Good points, Evan. And sorry about the URL issue... I have to make some compromises or I'd be overrun with hundreds of junk comments for every legitimate one.

  Regarding my thought that men "might not respond well," of course I don't mean to exclude statistical variation... neither the survey nor I claimed it was biology that caused the variation in gender responses, and my comment about boys being turned off by the kinds of books that their female elementary school teachers deem to be valuable could just as easily apply to biology as to socialization. So I think we're on the same page, there.

  It's good that you're willing and able to analyze the findings on such a fine level. The study did do some comparison of self-reported readiness and actual academic achievement, and did reveal that men are more likely to overestimate their readiness to succeed academically, and women are more likely to succeed.

  There are far more male chess grand masters than female chess grand masters. Spatial awareness and the ability to calculate risk and assess threats are survival skills associated with hunting and war, which are traditionally male activities.

  There are also probably far more women who are skilled at remembering faces and voices and connections between people. This is not to say that men are biologically incapable of managing social contacts, or that women are biologically incapable of playing chess. I do think it's important to think about how socialization could play into the formation of the gaps that have historically been assigned to biology.

  Autism affects men far more than it affects women, but who knows, may be girls who start developing signs of autism are socialized to get help sooner than boys; so that perhaps girls who might show signs of autism have a better support network, or are socialized early on to find ways of coping with their situation.

  Since we are both biological and social beings, I don't see that it will be possible to ignore either biology or socialization when it comes to understanding human behavior.

  if you're talking about CHANGING human behavior, that's different. We can't change our biology, but if we understand how biology might contribute to our behavior, then it's probably easier to change our society.

• (I think I got a comment blocked. It had three urls).

  The problem we must remember with gender differences is that there are exceptions and exceptions to exceptions. While most men -will- read more distant (by that I mean emotionally distant) literature than women, I think it is a stretch to say that men "might not respond well to the questions that asked whether they have an emotional connection to what they read."

  That works under the assumption that men, even if generally, lack the breadth of emotion that women have. That is not psychologically supported. In fact, men are capable of responding well to questions about their feelings. They just don't. (This is going to greatly tie in to my last comment).

  The reason we see men as dispassioned and rational in academia is due to socialization. The terms "rational" and "emotional," when used in isolation, are but mere social constructions. The reality is that all humans across cultures have both. Our environment, however, tells us which emotions are appropriate to express (that's why you don't see Dr. Jerz rolling outside his office in a tantrum when a colleague asks for a favor).

  This dynamic is constantly used in genderization. Men don't lose emotions (and let me be clear, men express emotion more than women! Anger is also an emotion.) You never lose the ability to throw a tantrum. You just don't do it any more. The compulsion to fit within the parameters of the culture that you are in outweighs the compulsion to act in a way that would be contrary to the culture.

  Now, you could say that the Punk movement is a counterexample to this. Au contraire! Punk itself is a culture with its own parameters of acceptable behavior. If you went to an infoshop praising G.W. Bush and the War, you might just leave with a bloody nose.

  Women don't enter the tenured science teaching positions because they can't... they can. They just don't. After so many centuries of not having the same access to the body of scientific literature as men, the perceived deficiencies are not because of "innate incompetencies" as Larry Summers would have us believe, but because the social climate of science up until after the 20th century was a men's club in which women did not have the ability to participate.

  You can't be expected to up and drive a car if you were never allowed to touch one before. Science is a paradigm and practice that requires practice and participation.

  This article also makes a strong case for this socialized disparity.

  "Even the article admits that although over 90% answer positive to this question, only about 50% of the students will actually graduate. "

  Note the that this is a survey. There will be a disparity between expectation and accomplishment. However, this survey, and any survey, in fact, is agnostic to accomplishment except in relation to expectation. Social scientists don't choose one method over another at random. This study was done in survey format for a reason. If the researchers were only interested in what and how men and women study, they would expiriment or collect data some other way.

  Instead, they wanted to find the expectations of students entering college. You can't measure confidence and expectations with expiriments. You can draw your own conclusions by pairing this subjective study the the more objective statistics of who graduates (and it's important to note gender dimensions. 50% average? 50% male... female?).

  But it is a false assumption to hold that objective data collection of every phenomenon is sufficient to answer every scientific question. Especially in the social sciences. Even the fact that they merely report the data gives clues into this social phenomenon.

• Yes, any time you do a test that involves self-reported answers, typically the men are more confident in their own abilities.

  Note also the questions that ask about "books." Other studies have shown that boys are more likely to read sports articles and stats, how-to instructions, comics, and other kinds of reading matter. My son learns a lot of vocabulary from reading PC Gamer, or the manual for whatever computer game he's interested in. When he was very little, he absolutely loved a Richard Scarry book that featured a diagram of how water gets from rain to your household tap, through a water treatment center, to the ocean, and back to the clouds. He will stare at his Star Wars cross-section books for hours, reading all the technical details.

  My daughter, on the other hand, prefers books with stories. Since elementary school teachers are mostly female, these are the kinds of books young children are more frequently asked to read in school -- not books about sports, machines, or war. So men who may be voracious readers in certain subject areas might not respond well to the questions that asked whether they have an emotional connection to what they read.

  Having said that, it's a fact that more women than men are going to college, and women are more likely than men to finish college. Men are less likely to ask for help, they are less likely to believe they have to study, and therefore they're probably more shocked when they don't do well, and perhaps that leads them to drop out more quickly.

  Our school has added football and wrestling in the past few years, in order to get more men to enroll. But getting them in the door is only part of the problem.

• The title of this article should be revised to read "Woman more likely than men to say they will study and that they like reading more".

  Have you read the questions?
  "I am very strongly dedicated to finishing college - no matter what obstacles get in my way."
  This is like a question I expect from an hr department.

  It seems to me that this survey is more a test of the different genders to answer questions in certain ways. Even the article admits that although over 90% answer positive to this question, only about 50% of the students will actually graduate.