Now, naughty kids get 'diagnosed' and given a cool label, get a 'teachers assistant' assigned to them - effectively praised for being naughty.

I agree with your point about women excelling at empathy and communication, but I'd say the movement away from male teachers has also been due to the removal of discipline in schools, and a movement toward empathising with bad behavior rather than correcting it.

I think naturally, when faced with bad behavior women will try to empathize and reason, whereas men will tend to punish/kick into line.

If you empathise with someone, it is harder to cause them discomfort because it causes you discomfort also. Thus, someone with lesser empathy would be better at discipling children.

"I disagree that men are better at disciplining children than women are."

You can't have it both ways, Sarkozy. Which is it?

Any man with the skills needed to perform well in childcare(especially) and teaching jobs are discouraged from taking those jobs, as any woman would 'naturally' be better in such roles (not to mention the significant 'pedo scare' barrier). This is the sort of latent discrimination that forces people away from the jobs they are best suited to.

The sexes have obvious physical differences, as well as obvious mental differences. To deny either of them is stupid.

I'm saying women are better managers because they are less prone to the types of socially tone-deaf interpersonal problems you see lampooned in Dilbert.

In other words, if I had to choose between a male manager who could create a succesful company versus a female manager who knew how to foster a harmonious working environment, I would choose the harmonious working environment over monetary "success" every time.

In the end, what does it matter to me if the company I work for is financially successful or not? On the other hand, if my manager is able to help create an environment that is more pleasant for every involved, that's something I'm interested in and that's where I think women in general are more naturally capable than men.

But to bring it back to the subject, my son's kindergarten was 1/2 staffed by males (we're in Norway). He loved every minute of it.

Unpopular opinions will not be tolerated!

Oh, HN, you never fail to disappoint.

Okay, that's a cheap shot. I know you don't have any such study. Tell you what, I'll settle for any study demonstrating that the divergence between the mean of all women and the mean of all men is greater than the divergence between individuals of either gender.

In any metric.

Now, why is it that you are entitled to an opinion and he is not?

I have no problem with other people having opinions. I likewise have no problem with publicly disapproving of opinions which I think are socially harmful.

I don't have any illusions about changing a bigot's mind, but I can hope that others will see my disapproval and think that bigotry is just that much less cool.

For example, what would you do if your own opinion (that is, your honest best assessment of what the truth actually was) was an opinion you judged to be socially harmful? Would you continue to hold the opinion, but try to avoid mentioning it? Would you publicly lie about your opinion? Would you express the opinion and expect public disapproval? Would you intentionally try to change your own opinion somehow?

I mean, looking at it logically, thinking that all women want to have children wouldn't be prejudiced if all women actually did want to have children. Would it still be wrong to say so? I can't see how.

I guess if my assessment of the facts were greatly opposed to my values it'd probably imply some more significant cognitive dissonance.

I was merely trying to elucidate the broader point that shaming can be appropriate in the case of "differences of opinion"— after all, bigotry is just the extremity of the belief that one's personal prejudice is well-grounded in fact.

Of course I appreciate that you're willing to discuss this civilly, and I hope you'll forgive the hyperbole.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/abs/nature04...

Come on. There are countless studies that show the biological differences between the sexes and the way their brains work. It's not rocket science.

If you believe in evolution, surely you believe that over time, the female and male brains have developed for different functions. I've never understood why people disbelieve this and try to pretend that the sexes are identical.

I really can't understand how anyone who accepts evolution (Surely most people), but doesn't accept the idea that perhaps the female and male minds have evolved and optimized to different things.

Given that we have obvious and numerous physical differences, it seems terribly unlikely that we have no mental differences. Especially given that physically and internally the sexes brains differ quite a lot (size, weight, number of neurons etc).

For example:

  Number of neocortical neurons (females) = 19.3 billion
  (Pakkenberg, B., Pelvig, D., Marner,L., Bundgaard, M.J.,
  Gundersen, H.J.G., Nyengaard, J.R. and Regeur, L. Aging
  and the human neocortex. Exp. Gerontology, 38:95-99, 2003
  and Pakkenberg, B. and Gundersen, H.J.G. Neocortical
  neuron number in humans: effect of sex and age. J. Comp.
  Neurology, 384:312-320, 1997.)

  Number of neocortical neurons (males) = 22.8 billion
  (Pakkenberg et al., 1997; 2003)

I think that if you disagree with the above, there's no point continuing. It'd be like trying to argue with someone who denies evolution.

I completely get that we should not discriminate UNFAIRLY based on any attribute of anyone. But to deny obvious differences that clearly exist is just silly.

"The following specific differences in behavior are attributable to biological differences between male and female: _____" is a rather different claim from "There exist biological differences between male and female." I believe the former claim is the one being challenged. Disproof of the latter claim, while sufficient to disprove the former, is not strictly necessary.

And if you're serious, you have to respond to all my other points. For example:

  Do you believe that evolution exists
  Do you accept that women are physically different to men
  Do you accept that womens brains are different to mens

Is it racist to say most basketball players are black due to them being on average taller? Or maybe you think their extra height is caused by their environment :/

Since you mentioned spatial awareness, you'll probably like this one. Having both groups play Medal of Honor for only 10 hours total narrowed the spatial gender gap into nonsignificance, with women benefitting much more than men. The benefits were still visible months later, without any instruction to continue playing.

Considering the wildly different toys and games we encourage boys and girls to play from infancy through adolescence, to say that this calls the idea that the spatial gender gap is genetic into question is quite an understatement.

So, uh... got any evidence that it is?

I think we're getting nowhere here. You clearly have an agenda to follow rather than a desire to find out the 'truth'.

I'm also guessing from your comment about toys that you don't have kids yet.

It's totally wild.

It shows that women can 'learn' to get better at spacial awareness. Just like men can 'learn' to get better at communication.

It doesn't "directly contradict" anything.

The general point here is that there is much, much more overlap between the sexes than there is difference between them. That's why although you certainly can make interesting statistical inferences about populations, applying the same statistics on an individual level (this person is a woman, she's probably [whatever]) is very likely to be false and is equivalent to blind prejudice.

Look at page 11. 19 year old women in the 90th percentile are still shorter than 19 year old men in the 50th percentile. Now, while I was never very good at statistics, I'm pretty sure if we had a running bet over who was taller in any random male/female pairing, I would drain your bank account dry.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/abs/nature04...

It's studying adults, so it can't and of course doesn't make any claims about genetics like you're trying to.

I can only find one place with any information about individuals (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/fig_tab/natu...), but according to that one graph the difference among all men is more than twice the difference between the average of all men and the average of all women. Even the cultural implication isn't valuable for making statements about individuals.

Doesn't really look like it answers either of my points.

The second page has a graph of individuals by "empathic concern" (ignoring the brain activity axis, which is what the study is actually demonstrating...)

Note that although women, on average, have higher scores than men (a mean difference of 2 on a scale of 1-20), almost half of the men have scores higher than the female average, and a quarter of the women have scores lower than the male average.

In more intuitive terms, out of this sample of 16 men and 16 women, the 7 most empathic men were more empathic than the 8 least empathic women. If you were trying to guess how empathic someone you meet is based on their sex, you would do slightly better than just flipping a coin. From this you're getting that "women are more empathic"?

Or are you using a slight statistical association to rationalize your cultural prejudice?

http://www.springerlink.com/content/r2k31831780w417w/

On the "Empathy Quotient" test, the average female score is 47 while for males it is 42.

So, no, I'm not using "a slight statistical association to rationalize" either (a) "a cultural prejudice" or (b) "bigotry" (which you unfairly accused me of in an earlier comment). I could just as easily accuse you of denying the weight of the scientific evidence because of misogyny but that would be silly. The fact is, there is room here for reasonable debate and your attempt to paint this issue in black and white is unjustified.

If that study were a hiring situation and you figured that, since "women are more empathic than men", you should only consider the female applicants, you would be tossing out nearly as many qualified applicants as you'd be keeping. It's just not a useful thing to say based on that data.

When you add in the fact that saying "women are more empathic than men" contributes to the broader social condition that empathy is encouraged in women and discouraged in men, and that mean women get a free pass because they're women and caring men can't get a job teaching children because they're men, it becomes a positively damaging thing to say.

And what do you get out of it?

If you have a man and a woman in a room together, it's going to be more or less a toss-up which of them happens to be more suited for a particular task, since what the body of research mostly shows is that, in general, men and women are pretty much the same.

Considering that, it strikes me as disingenuous to say something like "men are better at [x] than women" — which is vague by the most generous reading, outright false by the most literal — when what you really mean is "the mean for [x] among all men is 5% higher than the mean among all women."

I think the reason people don't say that instead is because it's obviously a very weak statement.