Discussion on All-Girl events

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by anfrcguy

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.

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.

An oversimplified example: Say a boy and a girl go to the same preschool, which assigns the boys blocks to play with and the girls doll houses. These kind of external factors impact which parts of the brains are exercised during play and thus what part would foster growth. We can't isolate the variables enough to say what portion of the development is caused by something inherent to the human's sex and what portion is caused by differing life experiences based on being treated as a member of that sex's associated gender.

Even so, this point is kind of tangential - you can't use generalized trends to justify treating specific people differently. There are many women with better spatial reasoning with many men, but if sexist attitudes in society work from the generalization that women are weaker in that area than men, those women may not even get the chance to try and exercise the skills they have due to this perception. Social factors are everywhere. Events like all-girls events just try to eliminate those social factors for one day and let young women try whatever they want to try on a robotics team. For one day.