> In her preface to the first edition, Halpern wrote: “At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. ... After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles … I changed my mind.”
> Why? There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys
> Many of these cognitive differences appear quite early in life. “You see sex differences in spatial-visualization ability in 2- and 3-month-old infants,” Halpern says. Infant girls respond more readily to faces and begin talking earlier. Boys react earlier in infancy to experimentally induced perceptual discrepancies in their visual environment. In adulthood, women remain more oriented to faces, men to things.
https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...
Thank god we have science to confirm that to us!
Sociology and anthropology depts can't handle this because they aren't interested in science.
the fact that you still think of sex as a binary difference between xx and xy shows how far outdated your ideas about the science of sex differences are. even "biological sex" (not even gender) is a spectrum influenced by a variety of different factors
"Light switches are in fact a binary difference, dimmer switches are a small portion of all switches."
"Life is in fact a binary difference, brain death patients are a tiny portion of all patients."
Metastable states[0] are a tiny portion of all logic values. They exist and are inherently unavoidable, but somehow massively complicated systems that fundamentally rely on the assumption that values are either 0 or 1 still work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_in_electronics
This seems analogous; we should design social structures (or allow social structures to emerge) that assume that individuals are male or female, but which handle the exceptional case of non-cisgendered individuals. Just like a software system that doesn't handle exceptions gracefully, a social system that lacks provisions for these is fundamentally flawed and can fail unexpectedly and potentially catastrophically.
Society also lacks "provisions" for violent criminals[0] but it still handles them and is yet to fail catastrophically.
[0] I'm not equating these two categories of people, merely illustrating that your example of comparing software exceptions to people is deeply flawed.
http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2015/02/24/sex-biology-redefin...
Also, a lot of survey data captures demographic characteristics, not just individual beliefs-- think censuses. Surveys are generally considered a robust instrument for measuring things (like income, occupation, gender) that are relatively fixed over time.
> They should have more humility, and be more open to listening to the stories of people instead of just trying to think of things in terms of Numbers.
Throughout my entire career, which now approaches the close of its second decade, I have known exactly one person who might even possibly match this description. Last week, he filed the initial paperwork to declare his candidacy for the House seat in his district, whose longstanding incumbent is probably going for a Senate seat next year. He's running as a Democrat, and his entire platform revolves around improving social welfare by eliminating inefficiencies without cutting benefits rolls - indeed, while expanding them. He's advocating a tax-neutral, net-positive-payout plan for a universal basic income!
He's doomed, of course. Even in Maryland - even in Baltimore, he doesn't stand a chance, because he is a man of unusual personality who does not make friends easily or quickly inspire confidence in strangers. But I love him for trying. And I have no idea in the world what you're talking about with this "numbers over people" culture among people in our field and those adjacent. I don't doubt your observations, although I do find them wildly at odds with my own experience. But my own observations do not in any sense bear out your analysis that is culture arises specifically from "STEM-ness" of people instead of some other quality, and I'm not interested in abandoning my observations for your own, either.
Are you sure that your analysis of this phenomenon's origin is not wildly off base? Because, you know, I think maybe your analysis of this phenomenon's origin might be wildly off base.
I think I'm pretty much done with the Left at this point. I find this rejection of basic scientific inquiry to be really strange and dangerous.
That's funny. I can totally see the same kind of comment in a thread about other topics that are unpopular in the Right.
Perhaps there is a pattern here.
are you human
Are there problems in these fields? Sure, there are problems in every field. But I haven't seen a single reasonable point here or otherwise that provides a good reason for mistrusting the vast consensus among a wide variety of very smart people who have spent their entire lives studying these issues and instead trusting JavaProgrammer37 who stomps his feet and insists women just aren't smart like him, smart enough to write SQL queries.