Men and women can have an identical mean across a large number of traits but if the standard deviation is not the same then we can expect large differences at the extremes. This is in fact what we see. Boys' and girls' mathematics scores are pretty much identical at the mean but boys have a slightly higher standard deviation. Boys are thus overrepresented in the 1st and 99th percentiles of mathematical ability.
I think the other problem is that we as society only want to look up, never down. Many feminists demand that we equalize the representation of the sexes in all of the high-paying, intellectual fields (engineering, management, finance) but never in the dirtiest, most dangerous, outdoor fields (mining, logging, fishing, trash collecting) where men are similarly overrepresented.
Regardless of the accuracy - and I definitely have questions about some of the thinking that comes out of that that space - I think it's important to address the arguments people are actually making, rather than others characterizations of those arguments.
It does not necessarily disprove the hypothesis of systematic sexism, but it is an observation which requires explanation.
Update: fixed wording.
For completeness, I would add the "welfare trap" to SkyBelows list, which then pulls in a lot of women. The "bottom" here is not a very comfortable place to look, and involves a sad stories from many different directions. I think one of the ways it reflects in a gendered way is that for men at the lower margins we (i.e. "society") are more likely to say 'you are on your own, deal with it yourself' and for women more likely to say 'we know better, here is what you are going to do'.
I recognize that you are in some sense just the messenger here, but I will just point out that this response appears to use a form of equivocation. Saying that society merely treats people (of both sexes) unequally in gendered ways is not the same as saying that society favors men over women.
This kind of equivocation is what is called a Motte and Bailey[0].
> Perhaps unsatisfying, but they also tend to view it as not their principal priority to fix; which I guess is fair.
Aside from the logical error, I don't mind that they their priority isn't helping disenfranchised men. Indeed, an important requirement to effectively helping people is to keep your scope narrow.
> For completeness, I would add the "welfare trap" to SkyBelows list, which then pulls in a lot of women.
Totally fair.
> The "bottom" here is not a very comfortable place to look, and involves a sad stories from many different directions.
True.
The original statement is perhaps even more in danger of falling into this and similar logical fallacy - the existence of a subset of disenfranchised men is not evidence against society favoring men generally, while it is evidence against that being universal.
I could also be reading into your words more than is there as a result of my own prior experience.
> It can after all be perfectly consistent to hold both views (i.e. that society treats people in various gendered ways and favors men over women on average) - you just have to be careful about what you are taking as evidence for what claims.
It is possible to both perspectives at the same time, but it seems a bit like addition of epicycles to Ptolemaic cosmology: an post-hoc modification to the general theory without much deeper examination into the inconsistency.
Of course all scientific models are off in some regard, it doesn't prevent them from being useful. But it is good to be aware of the edge cases in our model, in case it turns out we need to update it.
> the existence of a subset of disenfranchised men is not evidence against society favoring men generally, while it is evidence against that being universal.
Let me pose it this way: The question isn't just why are there men who are disenfranchised. If society is systematically biased against women, then why are they disproportionately absent from the lowest tiers?
> an post-hoc modification to the general theory without much deeper examination into the inconsistency.
Allowing for this (indeed proposing it) doesn't require any mental gymnastics at all, merely an allowance for complexity. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying it doesn't even run afoul of Occam.
> if society is systematically biased against women, then why are they disproportionately absent from the lowest tiers?
It's much less clear to me that this is a good definition of "lowest tier" though, clearly some prison populations and most/all homeless are in there, but it inclusive enough? What about other populations? Sex-trade workers are disproportionately women, and most of them are very low-status, but relatively few are counted as homeless. Etc. etc. I would have to know a hell of a lot more of the poverty literature before I would be comfortable that I understood where to draw this line.
Anyway we have probably reached the depth of viable conversation in this medium, or close to it. And that on a subject that is difficult to get honest engagement with. Thank you for being reasonable the whole way through, it's rare and I appreciate it.
They are making a trade in exchange for resources. No matter how horrible one thinks that trade is, it would rank as slightly better than the people who don't even have that option.
Of course those in actual enslavement situations are in even a worse position, but you then get into the movement of slaves based on where they can be most exploited and thus gender ratio of slave.
Specifically to his point that:
> the rationale was there aren’t any differences between males and females, so you avoid the unnecessarily complicated feature of the female hormonal cycle and study the male.
In other words...the "settled" science actually excludes the explicit study of, and furtherance of our understanding of, the female brain. Which in turn leads to a lessened ability to treat and address all sorts of conditions.
So by all means decry bias...but be aware that bias can be introduced by scientists wanting to cut corners and make research faster and easier so they can publish more just as much as they can be introduced by gender superiority zealots.
That said, I have to observe that if the matter was settled the way Cahill claims it is, Nature wouldn't be publishing dithyrambs for Ripon's book, and Cahill wouldn't be publishing his own article on Quillete. It would rather be the other way. It's Quillette that's know to court controversy and Nature that's know to be as controversial as a pot of instant noodles.
The real problem here isn't the science, is the pseudo-science and the journalism. It's pretty common for people to take single studies out of context and act as if their cherry picked study is the final word. Science journalists are supposed to bridge the gap between experts and laymen, but there seems to be very few good science journalists, and there seems to be lots of hacks and conmen.
That is not my comment. My comment claims that cultural bias can influence the result of scientific studies and we must be vigilant not to let this happen.
Do you disagree?
>> Should the opposite result also be viewed this way?
Does the opposite result coincide with a commonly held preconception?
My comment says what I meant to say. What it doesn't say, I didn't mean to say on the subject. Responses to what I didn't say are none of my business and I won't bother with them any more.
The only reasonable answer is "It doesn't matter." As long as the result is reproducible, coinciding with commonly held preconceptions or not is of no relevance whatsoever. All results need to be equally validated for reproducibility.
Perhaps you didn't realize that going against cultural bias (your term in another comment) make many people uncomfortable.
Why should the result that goes against the commonly held preconception be under greater scrutiny? If any difference would exist in scrutiny, it should obviously ask more from a result that goes against the general preconception.
What you might be missing is that the current leftist consensus dominating western universities is a strong form of cultural bias.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
If the burden of proof is set at the level in which a statement can be made such that there is evidence that cannot be explained by other phenomena then both of you can be correct.
(TBH I don't agree that one level of skepticism should be warranted for all things. If someone claimed P=NP my expectations are significantly higher than if someone claimed that HN commentors primarily comment in English.)
IMO the problem is that it's not 'simply' because the results are inconvenient in one way or another. That seems like a rather handwavy or dismissing cognitive understanding of what the person is saying. In their perception it is because a given conclusion has a known and studied bias- this isn't particularly simple, nor is it about inconvenience. It is that the evidence provided may have caveats that have also been studied that would skew the evidence to be explained by other factors.
This is similar to the claim about the convtroversies behind global warming or antivax, except the amount of evidence is overwhelming such that the scientific consensus of possible skew is extremely low. I don't know (and have not heavily researched) if brain architecture and gender identity and human behavior (as a trifecta) have the same amount of evidence (I was under the impression that the technology to study the brain architecture is new enough that the research hasn't been wholly settled- if this is incorrect let me know).
I wasn't using "simply" to say that explains all objections, I was saying of the objections we should be wary of ones that might be because of confirmation bias, and how that can sometimes lead to apparent lack of consensus where there is one.
That is, if you take the calls for additional scrutiny and filter them to account for confirmation bias, we should consider that outcome as well as how thorough the study was when deciding how much additional confirming reports are required to start considering the results worth mentioning. Surely, if it goes against the common knowledge of a large percentage of the population, that's reason enough to follow up in detail, but we should not shy away from the truth because it is inconvenient, whatever it may be. At to be perfectly clear, this isn't some veiled statement about topics here, it's a general statement about the utility of science and how we can use it effectively to better ourselves.
I'm not always neurotypical in my understanding so please clarify if I'm misunderstanding you: Is your position not that you believe the poster is creating an unfair framework of skepticism on how convenient evidence is?
I didn't describe "the" position, or any single position. That seems to be the crux of misinterpreting my comment.
I should have included it in the reply, but I was responding specifically to the idea, in semi-isolation, of "TBH I don't agree that one level of skepticism should be warranted for all things." and how we should be careful that we don't allow it to go to the other extreme, as (it has for some subset of people) in the example I gave.
> Is your position not that you believe the poster is creating an unfair framework of skepticism on how convenient evidence is?
My point, as it often is, since I find some themes cause me to comment over and over, is that both the extremes of a spectrum are often unappealing but in different ways, and a middle ground is often best. While applying the exact same level of scrutiny to all things isn't useful or efficient, neither is allowing political, economic and cultural narratives to the degree that we never accept results that are "inconvenient" in that they run counter to those narratives. The example given was one where it is inconvenient politically and economically to accept the results of man made climate change. Culturally, that could be results on the effects of marriage, or religion, or lack of religion.
My statement should have been interpreted as a refinement on a specific point, not necessarily supporting or refuting anything absolutely.
I chose the word inconvenient on purpose, to encompass results that are against someone's economic interest as well as those against their specific views on a topic.
It's meant as a general statement about the idea of requiring more or less evidence for specific results, and where I think we should be wary of this going awry.
You may note that I clearly steered my example away from the topic at hand to avoid getting it tied up in a topic that I think is contentious because it affects people's personal interpretation of themselves. I did so by steering it to another charged topic, but one a little less tied to an individual and one that has numerous examples of very thorough science. I'm not sure why I chose inconvenient specifically, other than it encapsulated colloquially what I was trying to express. It's been used for the same purpose previously, and famously so, in "An inconvenient truth", so perhaps that affected my choice.
I get the feeling you really want me to apply the word inconvenient towards the topic at hand and your statement in some way. Honestly, since your comment is mostly about making sure we take it carefully and really understand it, I'm not sure I have a useful way to apply it without being ham-fisted and forcing it, which I would prefer not to do. If I had to apply it towards the topic of cognitive differences between the sexes (or even the races), I would say it applies only inasmuch as if the science disagrees with (or as you state, conveniently agrees with) the popular narratives, we should still look at them closely and follow the science, but we should be careful not to let our preconceptions steer us from changing our view little by little and more evidence comes in. I seriously doubt any neurological differences amount to much in comparison to natural variation and environmental factors, but I also don't think it's fair of me to prevent future people from having a better understanding of how, in general, their neurological processes might differ from other people in positive and negative ways in multiple different aspects, and how to take advantage of or mitigate them as needed.
As an example of this, my oldest daughter has ADHD. In her junior year of high school, she's finally learning techniques to mitigate the problems this causes for her (as well as the benefits), Having an explanation and template for her behavior and how we should interpret it was invaluable to us. It's not perfect (what template could be when applied to an individual?), but it did help us all channel our frustrations into useful life strategies, as parents and for her as a child. If an area of research that yields better understanding of our minds overall hampered because of our inability as a society to accept where it conflicts with our ideas of equality (as weirdly disjointed and unevenly applied as those are), then I think we are all worse off for it.
I somewhat agree with this statement. But judging by the ink spilled over sex differences in places like the New York Times, and by the views on the subject that one is allowed to hold in the polite company of higher education and industry, and by the intensity of the backlash when one publicly deviates from those views: I suspect the "deeply entrenched biases" most significant for present-day researchers lean quite opposite from what you assume.
what burden of proof was required to come to this conclusion and why is that burden so much lower than the one required to conclude there are gender differences in human brains? Liberal universities are some of the most politically-correct, left-leaning bastions in the world. Members are imediately called to resign if they dare state anything against the progressive groupthink [1]. Yet you state as if it were well-established fact that "bias is a problem". this is not even counting the programs, scholarships, and active recruiting for more women in science.
I see 2 problems with accusations of "bias". For one, they're never levelled at an individual so the problem can be addressd at the source. It's always something nebulous, like "bias exists in science". So it's kind of like accusing all scientists of being sexist (or implicitly, male scientists, unless you want to clarify that women, too, are part of the problem), while at the same time accusing none of them. It's a tool that conditions its accused members to atone for something they didn't necessarily do, or if they did at one time, they're never forgiven. It makes everyone in the group feel guilty, regardless of whether they actually did something they should feel bad for.
The second problem with bias is that there's no bar for it "being a problem" ? In otherwords, if "it" exists in even one person somewhere in academia, one time, is it a problem ? If so, how long of a period does there have to be without bias for it to no longer be a problem ? If, say, a CMU professor makes a sexist tweet, how long is there a "sexism problem" at CMU? Forever? Until he is fired? Until he apologizes? None of these terms is defined, because I suspect it's not a problem intended to be solved. It's a social manipulation tool.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/us/yale-lecturer-resigns-...
That seems like a very odd, unscientific position to take. We know that men and women have different physical characteristics and hormonal affects (as an obvious example, women have a menstrual cycle while men do not). Ergo, the hypothalamus and pituitary gland (two areas of the brain which play pivotal roles in the human endocrine system) are structurally different between the sexes; this is obvious and self-evident.
Also, differences between males and females in animals are completely irrelevant for humans, because humans have nothing in common with animals.
Thus spoke the latest science (of 17th century, but who cares, science is still science).
The categorical denial of neurological sex differences of the sort that was published by Nature does not encourage careful study. In fact, it does rather the opposite by turning the subject into a political football. This distracts from the more important issue that arguably women have been under-served by the medical community precisely due to the denial of such differences.
They are different enough that investigators can distinguish the differences in skeletal remains, so I'm not sure that holds.
That careful study has been done. The science is settled, and there to learn for anyone with an open mind.
Stopping people from doing science just because of political ideology, is a very dangerous proposition.
Bias is a terrible default as it require the other camp to prove a negative.
Because the differences between male and female "bodies", meaning anatomical differences like sex characteristics, are obvious and self-evident, while differences in brain structure are not and therefore require careful study.
Further, because there are well-known and deeply entrenched cultural biases that risk derailing this careful study and therefore any initial assumptions that coincide with these cultural biases must be eliminated before serious work can begin.
Finally, because any result that just so happens, completely by chance, and despite the scientists' best effort, to agree with preconceived notions about "how things are" should be considered extremely suspicious and scrutinised again, and again, and again, and again, and noone who really wants to understand the relevant subjects should feel comfortable accepting such results as settled, much less defend them as "scientific orthodoxy".
In other words, because "bias" is as much a problem in science as it is in society, and because in the science of sex differences it is doubly so.