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Originally Posted by Chris is me
I think the implied conclusions you are drawing from this study are a bit broader than the actual result shows. The implicit assumption is that the differences in neurobiology are the result purely, or predominantly, of biological sex's effect on brain development. But we already know that brain development is heavily influenced by a wide variety of outside factors, and it is impossible to isolate differently sexed people from social and environmental factors influenced by others' perception of their genders.
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Good point. It's fair to say that further research is needed in order to conclude that this spatial ability disparity is nature and not nurture.
There are other performance differences between sexes that I feel would be more difficult to attribute solely to nurture. It's pretty known that the variance of male IQ is greater than the variance of female IQ.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc...=rep1&type=pdf found that amongst the top 2% of IQ scores, there were almost twice as many males as females. Given that FRC is such an intellectual challenge, it wouldn't surprise me if the majority of students who choose to participate are pretty high on the IQ spectrum, which could perhaps explain why there are more male students than female students in the program.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
Even so, this point is kind of tangential - you can't use generalized trends to justify treating specific people differently
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Exactly. I've thought about this more, and now
the all-girl event in itself doesn't really bother me (although I disagree with the implications that all males need to be educated on unintentional bias). I just feel that sometimes males are actually at a steep disadvantage due to this "movement" to do whatever we can to get more females involved. There are less scholarships for males, and additionally, I've actually witnessed discrimination against males for Dean's list. Also, at one point when I was on a small team that happened to be all-male, judges had consistently asked "what have you done to try to recruit women," and even "why don't you have any women on your team?" Our team had limited member spots, so in recruiting members, our priority was to find people who would be capable (or willing to spend time learning), dedicated, and have plenty of time. After repeatedly receiving such comments, we talked about going out of our way to find females (who weren't interested in the first place) over more otherwise-deserving males (who were asking to be on the team) to avoid subjecting ourselves to such criticism in the future.
I guess my point is that we should just treat everyone equally, and that going out of our way to try to compensate is neither fair nor productive. If there is in fact an unequal nurturing epidemic (and at least some of the gender gap in FRC could be attributed to environmental factors), perhaps it would be best to address this at a younger age. I don't think treating women specially is good for anyone.