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Originally Posted by Jon Stratis
I have to strongly question any study along those lines - With our current culture, it has to be practically impossible to control for upbringing differences between males and females. How can you test two people for spatial reasoning skills on equal footing, when one grew up building things with Legos and another grew up with dolls and toy ovens? We give our boys toys that encourage development of spatial reasoning skills, and girls toys that encourage domestic tasks (cooking, child rearing), it only makes sense that, later in life, those same children would exhibit different abilities. Equalize the training kids receive from toys at a young age, and you'd probably see some very different results by the time they got into high school.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680714/ supports that "the sexual dimorphism in the structure of the parietal lobe is a neurobiological substrate for the sex difference in performance on the Mental Rotations Test." In other words, neurobiological differences in the brain are likely causing the performance discrepancies.
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Originally Posted by Chris is me
But I mean, you've created a brand new Chief Delphi account to argue about gender, snipped a single line of a post made two weeks ago out of context, and then dropped a link to a Wikipedia article as some kind of justification for institutional sexism
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My point is that the disproportionate gender gap in itself isn't enough to show that institutional sexism exists. There are certainly
cases of sexism in FRC, and the community should work together to address those cases and avoid future ones. I just don't think an all girls event, where the only male focused item on the agenda is a lecture on "Unintentional Bias" is going to help boys or girls.