Women also tend to have the ability to ask others for help and/or directions -- thereby balancing out the matter! LOL

Anyone who has raised kids of both gender cannot possibly be surprised to find out that there are bio-chemical differences. If you gave my son a box when he was 2, he would have flipped it over, pushed it along the floor and made car sounds. Both my girls would have made some kind of art project with it. They are all teens now, and still interact with the world differently.

Larry Summers original comments were of this same type, an observation. What he didn't say was that one was 'better' than the other - just different.

We are different. Thank God!

Hooray for evolution.

The funny thing is, this isn't exactly revolutionary science. It's been known for at least 50 years that men are physiologically more oriented toward spatial and mathematical analysis, while women are more attuned to social and emotional analysis.

Not better, just different.

They also found in the 1980s (I think) that taxicab drivers tend to have enlarged hippocampi, an area of the brain used to remember locational data.

I remember these studies from the 1980s. Look at the percentages. You still got millions of men and women who don't fit into the categories. We are all a lot more variable than these studies suggest. (Actually, the studies themselves are usually rigorous, but the popular science reporting isn't - remember, this is the same MSM who reports on the war in Iraq and the 2004 election. Scientists are not happy when their findings are generalized out of all recognition.)

I love reading maps and using them to get around, either on foot or by car.

As long as schools and employers look at each individual's real abilities, the studies can be useful adjuncts for particular purposes. but as we can see by this latest blog kerfluffle, people love any excuse to make sweeping generalizations, because it saves mental processing time. (That also has evolutionary value at times.)

Bill,
I just wanted you to know that, as a woman, I have no intention of boycotting you whatsoever (g).

Well yehudit, the "latest blog kerfuffle" and the topic of Summers' controversial comments are all about "making generalizations" in the context of "look(ing) at each individual's real abilities."

The operative, meritorious generalizations here are that men as a whole tend to be more naturally adept at mathematics, thus there are far more men that are 4 standard deviations above the mean in test scores for mathematics and hard sciences, thus at least partially explaining the gender gap in academia, thus supporting the conclusion that the hysteria over Summers' remarks about gender are ridiculous.

I heard they started putting women on the Space Shuttle so somebody would stop and ask for directions if it got lost.

There is now a place in the world that can be called a "politically correct feminist nirvana" where you don't have to worry about studies like this.

I like smart girls.

Since we're on the subject of men vs. women, does anyone have any pictures of Ann Coulter in daisy dukes and high heels? Now that is one hot woman.

Bill:

Just wanted to let you know that I too, as a woman (despite my handle) will not be boycotting your blog either.

However, if you don't see me around here that often in the future, it's probably just because I got lost on my way here.

(i kid, i kid)

Wow! A discussion of elemental differences between the sexes. Mens and wimmens am different, and we is supposed to be, otherwise androgyne would reign and there would be MUCH less fun in the world. Just look at the modern DNC for a chilly example.

To bsp in an earlier post:

Ann Coulter in Daisy Dukes and heels. Oooouuh yeaaaas. That'll enlarge the old hippocampus.

Dan Patterson

This whole "controversy" and the diminutive self-abasement that poor Mr. Summers has been force to affect is just such sweet comedy. OF COURSE men perform better than women on tasks such as mathematics, map-reading, understanding logical relations, and 3D object rotation...whereas women perform much better at intersubjective communication, reading facial expressions, and language usage. This has been scientifically established for the better part of thirty years and makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective.

The problem is, this and other scientifically established gender differences rely on biology, something that current American feminism has never come to terms with, as it is still lost in the dreamy po-mo world of Foucault and the "socially-constructed everything". Quite ironic considering Foucault's own misogyny is well documented as well as the fact that his three volume "History of Sexuality" spares not a single reference to the feminine. Oh well, that's what you get from spending all your free time in San Francisco S&M parlors.

bsp:

Man, I sure hope so.

I was so upset when I read your post that I felt physically ill. I almost fainted.

For those of you - including you, Bill - saying "Of course these differences are well-known for 50 years": No. They aren't.

From the link:
Japanese girls outperform boys from most other nations on math tests.
Girls in iceland outperform boys in Iceland on math tests.
The number of women working in math and physics more than quadrupled in 30 years in this country.
Cognitive testing of children from 5 mos. to 7 yrs. shows NO gender difference.

None of those stats are explained by "Of course!" (condescending pat on the head to shrill feminist me) "we all KNOW men are better at spatial blah blah blah."

No. We don't.
No. They aren't.

Just. Deal. With. It.

Yehudit

Men and women are different and we process information differently. We are not far from our prehistoric ancestors who needed those differences to survive and thrive.

Deal. With. It.

Oh come on, Judith, you just can't drop a few "facts" from the NY Times (not a scientific journal) and consider the case closed (BTW, I as a member of the VRWC find GREAT fault in the NYT science reports, but it's not just reserved for the NYT, most reporters aren't knowledgable enough in the subjects they write about to be credible)

Point by point of the four facts you state:

1) Could be, but irrelevent as Herrnstein & Murray have already noted a difference between races in testing. Comparing Japanese girls to other nations is apples and oranges. (Note that the article cherry picks the data to say that Japanese males and females were equal in testing)

2) This is the most interesting portion of the study and needs much more study. But everything I know about Iceland makes it an outlier in a statistical sense based on its homogeneity and its social norms

3) Great! but a meaningless stat.

4) Now we get to the crux of the matter. The problem is this is a very generic statement. What does the quoted person mean by "cognitive". Does the age range mean that these testings show no statistical difference at every single age tested? The statement taken the way the author intended contradicts many other studies, giving me the impression that the reporter purposely choose this quote to gloss over some of the real differences between sexes.

All of this though, is worthless when we're talking about such as small sample size of human beings when it comes to Ivy League professors. This has nothing to do with cognitive ability and nothing to do with sexual discrimination. I believe that ON AVERAGE, women are less geeky than men and have no desire to work those long hours for the HOPE of big money... (Ducking quickly, hoping that I'm not the next Dean Esmay on Yehudit's sh*t list)

Yehudit -

As per usual, you are arrogant (and not entirely correct) in your comments.

But you are partially right - scientific arguments (as evidenced by my post and your cultural examples) are far too complex to be encapsulated in simple, overly general narratives.

But that would sort of invalidate all blogging on science because of the nature of the medium, wouldn't it?

That being said, it IS reasonable to make the generalization that Larry Summers arguments were perfectly fine, as they suggested a gender component as part of a comprehensive treatment of the gender disparity in the hard sciences.

So on their face, your links aren't compelling. And if you're getting nitpicky, what were the study designs? Their samples? The context within environmental factors?

And while notable and interesting, this, for example, is laughable as a smoking gun to prove your point:

next. Japanese girls, for example, were on par with Japanese boys on every math section save that of "uncertainty," which measures probabilistic skills, and Japanese girls scored higher over all than did the boys of many other nations, including the United States.

Assuming statistical validity, this is probably significant, yet merely states, on its face, that Japanese girls outperform boys of many other nations in math, yet still score "on par" yet lower on probabilty with japanese boys.

Could be irrelevant, at best partially relevant, or even reinforce the concept of innate differences in gender biology that affect mental predispositions. Why?

1. Because no one is suggesting that women (of whatever culture) don't have the capacity - on average - to outperform men. If environmental influences, for example, subject women to a rigorous math regimen, it's entirely likely that the given population will trump men that reside outside of these environmental influences. Human potential, regardless of gender, often outperforms any innate predisposition.

2. Japanese men still outperform women in an aspect of mathematics, and I'd be curious to see the statistical definition of "on par." It may be that averages shake out in very similar ways, but whether or not women are actually "on par" with the EXTREMES - ie, 4 standard deviations from the mean, would determine whether or not Japanese men are far more likely to be represented in the top echelons of academia.

Which is the argument at hand.

Not merely that all men are better than women at anything, which is the projection that seems to get your goat.

And much more compelling examples - that lie outside of culture - can be found in the studies of autism, a state of being that affects men at rates 3 to 4 more times than women, and is a condition that's considered the extreme model of mathematical genius.

As merely one reference:

Low-empathizing, high-systemizing: That, in a nutshell, is Baron-Cohen’s theory of what characterizes autism. Those traits span the autism spectrum, from people who are mute and unable to function to people who find a niche in society. Moreover, Baron-Cohen’s theory embeds this autism spectrum firmly in a much larger two-dimensional continuum—one that includes all of us. The essential difference between men and women, according to Baron-Cohen, is that women are better at empathizing and men at systemizing—on average, he stresses. There are plenty of male brains in female bodies, and vice versa. There are even female autistics, but there are many more male ones: In Baron-Cohen’s theory, autism is a case of the “extreme male brain.”

So.

Though. I. Hate. Your. Use. Of. Periods. Between. words. As. A. Cliched. Dramatic. Device.

I. Have. To. Say. That. Once. Again. As. is. Your. Tendency. Your. Argument. Is. Arrogant. And. The. Assertion. That. Your. Opponents. Are. Oversimplifying. And. Making. Generalizations.

Is. Hypocritical.

Boy, for a gal that "reads maps" so "well," you aren't very good at multifactorial logic.

Yehudit,

The article you cite offers a handful of anecdotal examples that contradict the assertion made by Summers...big deal. Then you go on to demonstrate that you have some serious emotions and resentment invested in this issue.

In a field as complex and dynamic as human psychology there are bound to be contradictions and cross-cultural inconsistencies. However, there are volumes of evidence, not just statistical and social but cognitive as well, that support the claim made by Mr. Summers. PET scans of people engaged in tasks such a map-reading and 3D object rotation show extreme differences between the sexes.

Human beings have bodies and you cannot escape it. As much as you would like to believe that everything is reducible to socialization, our bodies have been formed by the vicissitudes of 4 billion years of evolution, and from an evolutionary perspective, there is absolutely no reason for men a women to be blank carbon copies of each other.

It's interesting that you find the mere assertion of difference to be chauvinistic condescension and tantamount to misogyny. What ever happened to the celebration of difference that the Left prattles on so much about?

Ooh, Ooh, Bill, I think you’re mixing two different arguments here.

"The operative, meritorious generalizations here are that men as a whole tend to be more naturally adept at mathematics, thus there are far more men that are 4 standard deviations above the mean in test scores for mathematics and hard sciences"

There’s one argument, that men are better at some things, and that women are better at others, on average. Simply obvious in some cases (see roles in making babies for example) less obvious in others (the map reading?) and non existent in a third group (none come to mind right now but I’m sure there are some). But note that it’s on average.

We don’t pay much attention to these average differences because the variation around that average within each group is vastly larger than the variation between the groups (except, again, in such things as baby making).

As an anaology this is why books like the Bell Curve are so deeply uninteresting. What does it matter, what useful information do we gather, from the (asserted) fact that average black IQ is 5 points lower than average white IQ (just to get a nice contentious factoid into this comment...and I don’t state that it is true) when IQ’s within each group vary from 50 to 200? We don’t learn anything at all useful about being able to predict the IQ of an individual do we?

The Summers argument is different, in that he’s saying, as far as I can tell, nothing at all about the average in connection with maths and the hard sciences. He’s talking about the (well known) fact that the variation in men is greater than the variation in women. There are more male maths geeks at 4 SDs from the norm, just as there are more male idiots at 4SDs from the norm. So if you go trawling for those who have this particular talent, more than 4 SDs from the norm, you’ll end up with a population weighted towards men...weighted, not exclusively so.

This can lead one (well, me,) to an interesting speculation. In those areas where we do have an equality of women, or even a preponderance, do we then find that these are areas where women’s variance is greater than men’s, or is it a symptom of us not actually looking for those more than 4 SDs from the average?

I can read maps, but only if they're in a foreign language. No wonder I'm all screwed up.

The Summers argument is different, in that he’s saying, as far as I can tell, nothing at all about the average in connection with maths and the hard sciences. He’s talking about the (well known) fact that the variation in men is greater than the variation in women. There are more male maths geeks at 4 SDs from the norm, just as there are more male idiots at 4SDs from the norm.

I'm not sure why you think that you're contradicting me; the standard deviations on both ends are covered, and this is specifically what I was emphasizing in relation to larry summers, though not as the first point used to shoot down the Japanese example (which makes the Jared Diamond argument).

Here, let's rewind:

It may be that averages shake out in very similar ways, but whether or not women are actually "on par" with the EXTREMES - ie, 4 standard deviations from the mean, would determine whether or not Japanese men are far more likely to be represented in the top echelons of academia.

Which is the argument at hand.

See? Both "EXTREMES." Upper echelons, issue at hand.

As for this:

In those areas where we do have an equality of women, or even a preponderance, do we then find that these are areas where women’s variance is greater than men’s, or is it a symptom of us not actually looking for those more than 4 SDs from the average?

I suspect that in some of the areas where women are more naturally gifted there will be more discrimination holding them back, because the qualities like emotional intelligence, verbal acuity and multi-tasking are applied and interpretated by far more subjective standards than, say, a math regimen.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the finger length indicator of math abilities. Which is thought to be hormone induced.