It's a frequent complaint that in our politically correct climate, talking about behavioral, psychological, and intellectual differences between men and women has become a taboo, at least in enlightened academic circles (as Larry Summers found out the hard way). I am certainly not even favor of any such taboos. But the truth is that on the popular level -- and also among the anti-PC set -- talk about sex differences often tends to lapse into unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping.

Unmistakably, 100% true. And as Young points out, lapsing into "unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping" cuts both ways, demonstrated by Lauren's casual "bs" call, Amanda Marcotte's typically charming take on evolutionary psychology ...

... your average evo psych theory as to why women are destined to be inferior to men is a "make up your own bullshit" effort, because no matter how stupid it is, people will eat it up.

... and Echnide's head-scratching "if-then's" posited in the course of her takedown of a column by the NYT's David Brooks:

Let's give a little more attention to one of David's wholesale conclusions, this one:

One of the findings of this research is that men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people.

If this is true, shouldn't women be running all political systems in the whole world? And how would you divide fields such as medicine?¹ After all, people have things inside them. People also do things. So confusing, isn't it? Much easier to argue that women are more interested in people and that means that women are better suited to rearing children and men for everything else.

The subtext and/or text of the latter three defensive condemnations of behavioral/bio/psychological/evolutionary gender differences is that such differences are effectively non-existent and/or practically irrelevant, abused as a tool of the patriarchy to subjugate and ghettoize women into certain "natural" roles. This analysis is situationally ironic in that two of the three feminists approvingly link Cathy Young's piece decrying "unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping," while effectively engaging in their own, opposite "unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping" motivated by their given ideology. (To be specific and fair, David Brooks is indeed engaging in loose (though not baseless) gender characterizations in Echnide's critique)

The truth (or something that I'd argue is closer to objective "truth") regarding gender differences is somewhere in between. Narrowing down the above links to illustrate my point, take the fact that Young's otherwise reasonable criticism of both studies largely hinges around an apparently insignificant percentage gap in male-female behavior. Her judgement regarding the internet study:

Other Internet behavior differences found in the study:

-seeking health information: women 74%, men 58%
-getting support for health problems: women 66% men 50%
-pursuing religious interests: women 34% men 25%
-checking the weather: women 75% men 82%
-reading the news: women 69% men 75%
-getting DIY information: women 50% men 60%
-checking sports scores: women 27% men 59%
-investigating products: women 75% men 82%
-downloading music: women 20% men 30%

Yes, a lot more men check sports scores. Surprise, surprise. The other gender gaps strike me as ... well, not exactly of Grand Canyon magnitude. Or Mars/Venus magnitude.

Her conclusion is dependent on a subjective interpretation of what constitutes "Mars/Venus magnitude." But in statistical terms, especially over a large population (say, 300 million Americans), the mean 12.5% difference in Young's sample behaviors is pretty darn significant.

Let's narrow it down even further and look at two related measures from the Pew study that Young excerpts, from a statistical, related research and practical perspective - male vs. female propensity to "seek health information" and "get support for health problems" online.

Statistical Perspective

Both questions show a 16 point divide between the online behavior of women and men regarding propensity to do medical research online (74 vs. 58% and 66% vs. 50%, respectively). Statistically assessing the first measure (74 vs. 58%) - noting Pew's proper random sampling and test design, and assuming a 51 to 49 gender split among the 6,403 interviewees in 2005 - reveals an extremely high "z-score" of 13.69.

Translated, this z-score means that the possibility that this 16 point difference based on gender is due to chance is essentially zero, or about 1 in Infinity. Further translation: for purposes of establishing the statistical significance of differences between two groups, the difference in response to this question based on gender is statistically significant and reproducible. And to elaborate with some subjective, contextual stats analysis, I'd personally classify a z-score of 13.69 as "super-dee-dooper-ooper statistically significant," also known as "yowzas, that's a Hell of a statistically valid difference!" when comparing two groups. And given the proper test design and execution, including a large sample size and parity between genders of test subjects, this 16 point difference is reproducible (within a margin of error of only about +/-2%) in subsequent tests, and can be extrapolated to draw accurate conclusions about the behaviors of men vs. women in the larger population.

So we've established that it's a reproducible, statistically significant difference. What does that mean? We'll get to that in a second. First ...

Related Research Perspective

... are the gender-disparate results to these questions about online medical research logically unconventional? In a word, no.

A casual google turns up related references:

Item:

Almost a third of men under 40 do nothing about bad health in the hope that illness will "go away", according to a survey from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB).

Item:

The data bear that out: One recent Commonwealth Fund study found men to be much less likely than their wives or girlfriends to see a doctor, especially in their younger years.

"The majority of men surveyed also stated that even if they were sick they would delay seeing a doctor as long as possible," says Dr. Jean Bonhomme, an Atlanta-based consultant to the MHN and president of the National Black Men's Health Network.

Item:

A new report which surveyed more than 44,000 GP visits has found that one-quarter of Australian men have not seen a doctor in the past year, compared with just over 10 per cent of women. Men aged between 18 and 24 were least likely to have made an appointment and most likely to smoke and drink heavily - classic risk factors for cancer, heart disease or stroke.
...
Previous research has found that men are much less likely than women to engage in preventative health screens, such as checking for testicular cancer or requesting cholesterol or blood pressure tests. Men's diets are also poorer than women's and they're less likely to use sunscreen or receive vaccines and flu shots.

Item:

Why are men so bad at going to the doctor? Men are four times less likely to consult a doctor when they experience medical problems, even though a man's average life expectancy is six years less than a woman's, and men are much more likely to be admitted to hospital as an emergency with something serious or life threatening!

Thus, tabling the complexities of motivation, cultural influences, etc., related research tells us that the Pew results about online behavior related to medical research make sense. There is an apparent, widely recognized pattern regarding how likely men and women are to seek health advice and engage in preventative care. While not definitively tied to the specific variation of online research behavior, a strong, reasonable inference can be made between the general trend in the items noted above and our chosen sample section of the Pew results.

So we've established a vaunted level of statistical significance for the specific gender difference, as well as noted related practical research that inferentially validates our slice of the Pew results - again, what does it mean?

Practical Perspective: The Search for Meaning in Stats

As Young is driving at, it does not mean the following ...

Women go online for health information/support, whereas men don't.

or

Women go online for health information, whereas, in contrast, men like to "investigate products."

... which are the typical simplistic binary implications seen in media write-ups of all forms of research. More specifically stated, our Pew results related to gender differences in medical research mean ...

Women are 27.59% ('more than a quarter') more likely to go online to look for health information or support than men, though a majority of both sexes (6/10 men and 3/4 of women) use the internet to acquire health information.

Thus, as with correct interpretation of many statistics associated with politically or culturally charged topics, there is a significant difference, though the difference resists binary classification and is not individually deterministic.

The study is neither "bullshit" nor is it an oracle of individual male and female behavior online. But for the purposes of allocating resources based on advertising gender-specific products or tailoring online information portals based on gender (for two specific practical examples), the numbers can be situationally very relevant, and a mean difference in behavior by gender does exist. A significant difference.

Another example of situational meaning of statistics can be found while sorting through the can of worms opened after Larry Summers' discussion of gender differences in mathematics-based academia. Overall, from the perspective of averages, the conclusion that "boys are good at math, girls aren't" is totally false, as the male advantage in mean math scores is relatively small over a large population (though boys hold a slight advantage), and girls get better grades in math. The differences become situationally significant at the extremes:

Through high school, girls earn better grades in math than boys, but boys usually do better on standardized tests. The difference in means is modest, but the male advantage increases as the focus shifts from means to extremes. In a large sample of mathematically gifted youths, for example, seven times as many males as females scored in the top percentile of the SAT mathematics test. We do not have good test data on the male-female ratio at the top one-hundredth or top one-thousandth of a percentile, where first-rate mathematicians are most likely to be found, but collateral evidence suggests that the male advantage there continues to increase, perhaps exponentially.

Tabling the issues over innate biological differences² vs. culture as root cause, a statistical difference exists, and depending on its situational application, this difference can spur both meaningless, imprecise, or incorrectly loaded conclusions ("males are better than females at math") or quite significant conclusions ("a much greater proportion of the tiny number of people that are extremely good at standardized math tests are male, and this could at least partially account for gender disparities in employment at world-class positions in academia, rather than hiring bias"). But for those interested in trashing Summers without analyzing the statistics, the chosen methodology is to work backwards from a chosen political premise, numbers be damned.

Again, selective stats interpretation is both twisted by interested parties, as well as used to erect easily vanquished strawmen as representative of opposing positions. Whether it's the Larry Summers flap or something as mundane and light as the Pew Internet research study, Young hits the nail on the head by maligning "unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping," a consequence of the natural human impulse to engage in simplistic binary classification.

It's easy to engage the binary impulse in an effort to counter a simplistic binary conclusion, casually dismissing the more complex, relevant interpretations of statistics while fighting their overly broad interpretations in service of a disparate ideology. Yes, efforts like the Pew Study are simplified and distorted by media outlets and popular understanding in an attempt to quickly assign meaning to the results. No, these results are not deterministic. But is a Mars-Venus divide buttressed by the study results?

Let's adjust the perception of the given difference and call it a Venus-Pluto-Mercury-Earth vs. Mars-Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune divide, while acknowledging it as a statistically significant, consistent and situationally relevant divide nonetheless.

More on the larger implications of like divides in Part Two.

Bonus Section!

¹ Reviewing Echnide's quote regarding David Brooks:

Let's give a little more attention to one of David's wholesale conclusions, this one:

One of the findings of this research is that men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people.

If this is true, shouldn't women be running all political systems in the whole world? And how would you divide fields such as medicine?¹ After all, people have things inside them. People also do things. So confusing, isn't it? Much easier to argue that women are more interested in people and that means that women are better suited to rearing children and men for everything else.

To answer her specific counter regarding the medical field, one only needs to look at specialty breakdown by gender to find some backing for Brooks' (admittedly imprecise) "things" vs. "people" comparison:

At present, it is not clear whether or not the choices of specialty areas by male and female medical students are converging. Historically, women have selected specialty areas with high patient contact. In the study reported here, the authors address whether or not there are differences in perceived specialty choice among the newest entrants into medicine. A total of 180 freshman medical students at one medical school (120 males and 60 females) participated. It was found that 70.4 percent of the women stated that they expected to select a specialty in primary care compared with only 44.4 percent of the men. On the other hand, 30.8 percent of the men expected to enter a surgical specialty area compared with only 11.1 percent of the women. A higher proportion of women than of men indicated that patient contact and family life were instrumental in the selection of a medical specialty. Seventy percent of the men expected an annual income of more than +75,000 (in 1984 dollars) compared with 43.3 percent of the women, who generally expected a smaller income. The authors in this study found that the traditional identifications of both male and female specialty choices are not changing.

While my cited study is rather dated and doesn't have an awe-inspiring sample size, it's illustrative of a "people" vs. "things" gender dichotomy in the field of medicine. (And if you still don't believe it, please call your local trauma center and ask for a breakdown of the surgery staff by gender) Again - this does not mean that "women" don't want to be surgeons, nor that "men" aren't or don't want to be internists. It just means, for reasons probably related to both culture and biology, statistically significant differences in behavior by gender can play out with measurably differential results over large populations. In this case, by chosen medical specialty.

² I lied about tabling innate biological differences. The key to why men may have an advantage at the extremes of achievement in mathematics may lie here:

The difference between the sexes may boil down to this: dividing the tasks of processing experience. Male and female minds are innately drawn to different aspects of the world around them. And there's new evidence that testosterone may be calling some surprising shots.

Women's perceptual skills are oriented to quick -- call it intuitive -- people reading. Females are gifted at detecting the feelings and thoughts of others, inferring intentions, absorbing contextual clues and responding in emotionally appropriate ways. They empathize. Tuned to others, they more readily see alternate sides of an argument. Such empathy fosters communication and primes females for attachment.

Women, in other words, seem to be hard-wired for a top-down, big-picture take. Men might be programmed to look at things from the bottom up (no surprise there).

Men focus first on minute detail, and operate most easily with a certain detachment. They construct rules-based analyses of the natural world, inanimate objects and events. In the coinage of Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, Ph.D., they systemize.
The superiority of males at spatial cognition and females' talent for language probably subserve the more basic difference of systemizing versus empathizing. The two mental styles manifest in the toys kids prefer (humanlike dolls versus mechanical trucks); verbal impatience in males (ordering rather than negotiating); and navigation (women personalize space by finding landmarks; men see a geometric system, taking directional cues in the layout of routes).

Almost everyone has some mix of both types of skills, although males and females differ in the degree to which one set predominates, contends Baron-Cohen. In his work as director of Cambridge's Autism Research Centre, he finds that children and adults with autism, and its less severe variant Asperger syndrome, are unusual in both dimensions of perception. Its victims are "mindblind," unable to recognize people's feelings. They also have a peculiar talent for systemizing, obsessively focusing on, say, light switches or sink faucets.

Autism overwhelmingly strikes males; the ratio is ten to one for Asperger. In his new book, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain, Baron-Cohen argues that autism is a magnifying mirror of maleness.

Similar to how creative genius knocks on the door of insanity, it's also intuitive that mathematical genius would correlate with a systemizing affliction like autism.

Anecdotally, while I tend to systemize political arguments into geometric diagrams in my head ("male"), I can't read a map to save my life ("female"), and math was always my weak suit ("female"). I also have decent verbal and empathic ability ("female"), don't watch football ("female") and like to softly cry myself to sleep after watching Beaches ("pathetic"). Lauren at Feministe is more like a guy than many guys I know. Don't even get me started on Marcotte, who could probably easily give me an atomic-wedgie until I shouted "I love Gloria Steinhem" and then casually beat me comatose. Go figure.

The lesson from these exceptions is that many people have personal traits that directly defy broad gender patterns, and that there is more variation within genders than between genders - BUT - it's relevant not to view mean-defying personal traits as a falsification of the differences that play out over the larger population.

³ I say that I'm going to write a "Part Two," but am I? Who knows, man? Who knows?