via Jay Lake

[barbarienne]

...from one of many link salads.

Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics.

(Spelling is British because it's in the UK's Guardian.)

I need a copy of this article pasted to a bat so I can club people with it.

The reason I perpetually refuse a GPS system is because my internal navigation system kicks ass, and my map

Comments

[barbarienne]

The "science" (notice the scare quotes) on this subject historically has been awful. The trend as we've gotten better at understanding the brain has indicated that mental skills, at least, are not what common (so-called) wisdom indicates.

I mean, it's only the last few years that it's been discovered that neuroplasticity does not have to diminish with age; the previous determinations were through inference, not science.

Even allowing for some general trends, the range of human behavior and skills has been drastically understated across a gender divide. This is true in the physical arena as well.

Take, for example, elite marathon runners. While the top men are still faster than the top women, the women have been closing the gap for the past thirty years. The men's world record (set in '08) stands at 2:03:59, and the women's record (set in '03) is now 2:15:25. (The men's record in '03 was 2:04:55. Source also has a graph showing the slow convergence of the curves.)

Who is to say that men are inherently faster, rather than that women have historically been discouraged from elite sports, so fewer have trained as elite marathoners? Are women as able to get the sponsorship necessary to devote themselves full time to marathon training?

But more than that, the fact is the the elite female runners blow away all the men who aren't among the elite group. That is, there are a good number of female runners who finish ahead of 99.9% of the male marathoners in any given race.

Saying "men are generally better at A and women at B when it comes to physical abilities" is NOT the same as saying "Men are A and women are B." But our culture takes the generalities and uses them as baseline assumptions, and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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The physical differences between men and women are certainly there, but how much they affect things other than reproduction and core body strength are completely undetermined, and increasing evidence suggests that they have little to do with it, particularly in the mental arena.

[jaylake]

Thanks. This isn't a hot button issue for me (and I do have a daughter who breaks a lot of stereotypes), but it does poke my curiosity, like I said. I take the argument that the variation across the human range far exceeds the gender variability. Again, thanks.