Back at the old blog we used to occasionally chat about the notorious speech by Harvard President Larry Summers, in which he suggested that intrinsic aptitude was a more important factor than discrimination or bias in explaining the dearth of women scientists. Examples here, here, here, here, here, and here. There was a lot of posturing and name-calling and oversimplification on either side of the debate, of course, which tended to obscure the basic fact that Summers was, as far the data goes, wildly wrong. Two favorite goalpost-moving maneuvers from his supporters were first to pretend that the argument was over the existence of innate differences, rather than whether they were more important than biases in explaining the present situation, and then to claim that Summers’ critics’ real motive was to prevent anyone from even talking about such differences, rather than simply trying to ensure that what was being said about them was correct rather than incorrect.
It was a touchstone moment, which will doubtless be returned to again and again to illustrate points about completely different issues. Here’s an example (thanks to Abby Vigneron for the pointer) from Andrew Sullivan:
DAILY KOS AND LARRY SUMMERS: It’s a small point but it helps illuminate some of the dumbness of the activist left. “Armando” of mega-blog/community board, Daily Kos, takes a dig at Larry Summers, and links to a new study on gender difference. I’m not getting into the new study here, but I will address Armando’s description of Larry Summers’ position. In a bid to be fair, Armando writes:
NOTE: Yeah I know Summers didn’t say men were smarter than women, he just said they had greater aptitude in math and the sciences than women. Huge difference.
This is one of those memes that, although demonstrably untrue, still survives. Read the transcript of Summers’ now infamous remarks. His point was not that men are better at math and the sciences than women, as Armando would have it. His point was that there is a difference not in the mean but in the standard deviation:
Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I’m sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper – looked at the book, rather – looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those – they’re all over the map, depends on which test, whether it’s math, or science, and so forth – but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation – and I have no reason to think that it couldn’t be refined in a hundred ways – you get five to one, at the high end. (My italics.)
Summers was addressing the discrete issue of why at the very high end of Ivy League math departments, there were too few women. His point, as the Harvard Crimson summarized it was that, in math and the sciences, “there are more men who are at the top and more men who are utter failures.” Armando is wrong; and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of leftist blog credibility. Will he correct? I’ll keep you posted.
Ah yes, the good old standard-deviation argument. It’s the absolute favorite of those in the intrinsic-differences camp, since (1) it sounds kind of mathematical and impressive, and (2) they get to insist that it’s only the width of the distribution, not the mean, that is different between men and women, so really the argument doesn’t privilege men at all, while it manages to explain why they have made all the important contributions in human history. In a debate with Elizabeth Spelke at Edge, Steven Pinker rehearses the argument somewhat pedantically.
But let’s look at what the argument actually says, both explicitly and implicitly.
- Standardized tests scores reflect innate ability.
- Boys’ scores on certain tests have a larger standard deviation than girls’ scores, leading to a larger fraction of boys at the high end.
- The dearth of women scientists is explained by their smaller numbers on the high end of these tests.
Now, everyone who is familiar with the data knows that point 1 is somewhere between highly dubious and completely ridiculous; Summers himself admits as much, but it would ruin his story to dwell on it, so he soldiers on. But point 3 is interesting, and deserves to be looked at. It’s a nice part of the argument, because it’s testable. Is this difference in test scores really what explains the relative numbers of men and women in science?
Summers’ data comes from the book Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes by Yu Xie and Kimberlee Shauman. Interviewed shortly after his remarks, both Xie and Shauman were quick to criticize them, using words like “uninformed” and “simplistic.” We were fortunate enough to have Kim Shauman herself as a speaker at our Women in Science Symposium back in May. She pointed out that the studies Summers refers to can indeed be found in her book, right there in Chapter Two. But if you wanted to know whether the standard-deviation differences were actually what accounted for the dearth of women in science, you would have to read all the way to Chapter Three.
Here’s the point. By the time students are in twelfth grade, there is a substantial gap in the fraction of boys vs. girls who plan to study science in college. So it’s easy enough to ask: how much of that gap is explained by differing scores on standardized tests? Answer: none of it. Girls are much less likely than boys to plan on going into science, and Xie and Shauman find that the difference is independent of their scores on the standardized tests. In other words, even if we limit ourselves to only those students who have absolutely top-notch scores on these math/science tests, girls are much less likely than boys to be contemplating science as a career. Something is dissuading high-school girls from choosing to become scientists, and scores on standardized tests have nothing to do with it.
Now, looking at Sullivan’s post above, there’s nothing he says that is strictly incorrect. He is simply characterizing (accurately) what Summers said, not actually endorsing it. Still, he is certainly giving the wrong impression to his readers, by repeating a well-known allegation without mentioning that it is demonstrably false. It’s a small point, but it helps illustrate some of the disingenuity of the activist right. Sullivan is misleading, and he needs to correct the item. In fact, this is a good test of quasi-right-wing blog credibility. Will he correct? We’ll keep you posted.
I agree with those who have in essence pointed out that the predisposition to be attracted to science and mathematics could be an innate feminine characteristic, even if ability in these subjects is not.
Contrary to Sean’s belief, such an innate characteristic could explain female under representation in science as well as external dissuasion.
Good job with this post, Sean. Did you catch the Policy forum article in Science about Women in Science?
August 19, 2005 issue; access needed at this link:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5738/1190
I thought it was useful because it included concrete suggestions for eliminating barriers.
And in case people haven’t seen this before, go to
http://www.implicit.harvard.edu
if you insist there is no social bias against women in science.
Kea, your insinuation that I am unfamiliar with women in science is way off the mark. I have known a number in my time, and I married one of them. I have shared her frustrations as she has coped with the vicissitudes that every woman faces in a male-dominated world. I certainly do not deny the existence of problems arising from social prejudice against women in technical fields; my thinking is that we must recognize all three factors at work here. My own impression, as I wrote earlier, is that the self-deselection is the most important factor, and therefore the one we must concentrate most of our efforts on. I have mentored a small number of young women students, and my primary efforts are directed at building up their self-confidence.
Here’s the apocryphal scenario that seems to characterize the problem: we’re in a meeting of technical people and the boss says that he needs a solution to a problem involving technology XYZ. John and Jane, two kids fresh out of college are sitting next to each other. Neither of them really knows much about technology XYZ. Jane, being a reasonable and mature person, prudently keeps her mouth shut. John’s hand shoots into the air. “I’ll handle it, boss!” The boss eyes him suspiciously. “You sure you know enough about technology XYZ to handle this, John?” “Sure thing, boss! No problem!” So John gets the task, and he’s dug himself into a deep hole. He goes home and researches technology XYZ like a maniac. He calls up an old friend who knows something about it. The odds are that John will manage to pull off a passable performance. The boss is impressed, and when a promotion opportunity comes up, John gets it, not Jane. And it has nothing to do with ability. Jane could have done exactly the same thing, but she was too mature to risk company assets.
Almost every professional woman in a technical field will tell you that there was a moment, right after they got some big promotion or a new job, when they were sure that somebody would tap them on the shoulder and say, “We’ve found out about you; you’re not really a scientist or engineer — you can go home now.” Men NEVER report that feeling. Our primary task is to convince women that they really do belong.
Arun, I don’t understand your main point, but I can respond to your question “Finally, how did evolution make this sexual drive appear that manifests itself in a rather asexual way?”
In just about every species, females control reproduction. Males seek female permission to reproduce. To obtain this permission, they must prove their overall worthiness, usually by demonstrating the quality of their genetic makeup (“Get a load of this magnificent tail, baby! If I had the slightest genetic weakness, it wouldn’t be so perfect, would it?”) In hominids, this is complicated by the additional elements of paternal investment in the children (as in, “will you still love me in the morning?”) and the impossibility of determining the paternity of any given child (as in, “but is it really mine?”) So hominid males had to demonstrate two things to gain access to reproduction: their genetic quality AND their paternal commitment. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for a male in a hunter-gatherer society to demonstrate his ability to deliver paternal investment (as in bringing home the bacon) before he has established a track record. So males resort to all manner of indirect methods of showing off.
There are a lot of good books on sexual selection; as far as it applies to humans, The Mating Mind is probably the best single volume. And if you’re open-minded enough to read a truly in-your-face diatribe, “Why Men Rule” is a load of fun. You don’t have to agree with everything he says — if you did, you’re probably crazy. But he makes a lot of good points. Reminds me of Petr Beckman from the 70s and his newsletter “Access to Energy”.
Chris
Your closeness to women in science, which sounds commendable, makes your willingness to sprout your unscientific opinions all the more disgraceful, as Arun has tried to point out. On the one hand you mention your wife, and on the other, a scientist of the calibre of Newton. Which are we discussing here? Don’t bother answering: the question is rhetorical.
Kea, which “unscientific opinions” do you refer to? Let’s tackle those, rather than quibble about my personal worthiness.
Arguing that the self-deselection is the most important factor is kind of a chicken and the egg argument, really. What CAUSES the self-deselection? Might it be, perhaps, the quite extreme levels of presure and prejudice that women feel in the physics world? That, after hearing their advisor declare “You can be a physicist, OR you can be a mother” for the 200th time, decide to say “fuck this, I’m going into Math or Biology or Chemeistry or Engineering, or anything.”
To cite another example, (as what is subtle to some, is oppressive to others) the endless “joke” talk regarding violence toward women that I have heard in my tenure in graduate school makes me red with rage. And then, any woman who DARES object to such behavior is considered a humorless bitch. Yeah, I don’t see how it could be that women would voluntarily self-deselect from such a system.
Two factors contribute to self-deselection: nature and nurture. We are familiar with the nurture elements, although I would caution bittergradstudent that the most important nurture elements do their mischief long before grad school. The cultural factors that drive girls aways from science begin in infancy and are reinforced throughout primary and secondary school.
The nature elements arise from evolutionary selection in favor of females with stronger social reasoning skills. Hominid females lacked the physical strength to defend themselves and their children, and so had to rely on a social network. For example, among chimpanzees this is accomplished by frequent mating with every male; this insures that any male could be the father of her children, which in turn provides an incentive for all the males to protect her children. Among hominids, this strategy can’t work because the mother also needs paternal investment in the form of protein. Therefore the mother must build a strong social support network. This has the additional benefit of adding to the enforcement of paternal commitment.
Males have much less dependence on social support and so faced little selection pressure in favor of social reasoning skills. The result of all this is that modern human females have much stronger social reasoning skills than modern human males. This differential explains the well-established dominance of females in careers requiring such skills.
The cultural pressures that direct women toward such careers are not arbitrary; they reflect an appreciation of the differentiation. Some of the cultural pressures reflect differentiating factors that are no longer relevant. For example, upper body strength is a major differentiating factor between males and females, and was accordingly a selecting factor in many economic tasks because so many social functions in the past relied on human strength. Nowadays, very few tasks rely on upper body strength, yet there remains a prejudice against women in such careers. Fortunately, that prejudice is fading in first-world cultures, but it’s not gone yet.
Chris Crawford, I believe I am rather confused by your post. So here’s my reaction, based what I think you meant, and you can correct me where it’s necessarily.
“The nature elements arise from evolutionary selection in favor of females with stronger social reasoning skills. Hominid females lacked the physical strength to defend themselves and their children, and so had to rely on a social network.”
I am a physical anthropologist, so I know a thing or two about early hominine (that’s the correct word, by the way, it got changed about 2 years ago) females. Since you did not specify as to what species you were referring to, allow me to assume you meant our Homo ancestors and Homo sapiens pre-dating agriculture. If you were referring to Austrolopithicines, then this is an entirely different conversation. Anyway, all we have of early Homo species are their remains, and occasionally, a few pieces of evidence of their culture. The only way of hypothosizing their way of life is to compare them with hunter/gatherer societies that exist today (which I’m sure you’re aware of, but I’m simply explaining for those people who might not have a strong background in hominine history). Obviously there could be several flaws in this system, but seeing as time travel has not been invented yet, it’s the best we can do for the moment.
Hominines of both genders were a force to be reckoned with. If you examine early tools, especially those used for hunting, it’s quite amazing to realize that these people defended themselves against the wildlife around them. Notice how hunters of today use guns instead of sharp rocks tied to sticks, and they usually stick to herbivores! Anyway, due to comparison to current hunter/gatherer societies, most archeologists assume that hominines of the past probably hunted in groups, killed large prey very rarely, and mostly came home empty handed. Archeologists estimate 90% of our ancestors diet came from gathering. You are correct to assume that males mostly did the hunting. Not because of stronger upper body strength per se, but because they didn’t want their women to be mauled by an animal. Unfortunately, males are expendable. You only need a few males in a population to keep it sustainable. But females are not expendable. All the males in the universe are useless if you only have 1 female. As a species (and all Homo species were roughly the same) we’re only granted 1 child per 10-12 month period. That’s it. So, 10 females= 10 babies as long as there is at least 1 male. 10 males= depends on how many females.
Defense of children was not as important as you make it out to be. Early hominines set up their “camp”, if you will, away from the regular patterns of dangerous animals. As excellent trackers and reasoners, early humans could easily predict an area where dangerous animals were less likely to venture. So what else did the mother have to defend her children against? … …. ……
“For example, among chimpanzees this is accomplished by frequent mating with every male; this insures that any male could be the father of her children, which in turn provides an incentive for all the males to protect her children.”
If you actually read a book about chimpanzees, there’s little evidence of this. The female does not seek out frequent mating with males, it’s the other way around. I recommend any of Jane Gooddall’s books for they all thorough research about chimpanzee mating. Males do not protect children. Females rarely know nor care who the father of their child is. It is solely the responsibility of the female to protect her child. But chimps are a lot like us, and they do have a certain amount of say, “moral responsibility” ingrained in them. Basically this means that if a male and female chimpanzee are siblings born less than 8 years apart with a good strong mother, then as adults they will be allies. The brother will come to the sister’s rescue and often protect his niece/nephew. This phenomenon can occur outisde a sibling relationship, but it does not lead to mating between the two chimps enough to constitute a theory. Again I repeat, fathers rarely, if ever, care or protect their children. They typically do not know who their children are.
A better example would be baboons, who go to great lengths to impress females during mating season. This includes playing with her children (even if they are not related to the child) and protecting her against other baboons or dangerous animals. Once mating season is over, however, the male baboon rarely “hangs out” with the female and the female is fine with this.
“Among hominids, this strategy can’t work because the mother also needs paternal investment in the form of protein.”
I’m not really sure what you meant by this, but I assume you mean because the male usually hunts, the female needs the meat, so therefore she wants to include him in her social network. Again, archeologists compare hominines towards modern hunter/gatherer societies, who are not only required to share the meat, but rely on the gathering the women have done for food when there is no meat. There is no hunter/gatherer society today where a group of males go out and hunt, succeed, then bring back the food only to say to the females, “you weren’t nice to me yesterday so no meat for you”. This would be highly deterimental to the male’s social status among both genders and it just doesn’t happen. The female does not need to suck up to the male for meat; the male needs to suck up to the female for sex.
“Males have much less dependence on social support and so faced little selection pressure in favor of social reasoning skills.”
Regardless of what society you’re referring to, you’r wrong. Males and females in all societies have equal desire/need for social support. Just think about your own life for a zillion examples.
“The result of all this is that modern human females have much stronger social reasoning skills than modern human males. This differential explains the well-established dominance of females in careers requiring such skills.”
Honestly, sexual differences in social skills is a field of sociology that has not even begin to be explained. You’re on the right track to say the answer lies in the nature/nuture debate. But where exactly? You’re also using examples of primates and Homo ancestors to explain modern humans, which although is not off-base or wrong in any way, is severely flawed. Our cultures are so much more complex than anything chimpanzees or hominines ever dealt with. Besides, we don’t hunt the way our ancestors/cousins do, we don’t mate in the same way either. I mean, not to be personal, but have you ever scored a date with a woman after going up to her with a large piece of elephant meat and saying, “babe i killed this just for you, let’s go make some babies”? If you have, you should write a book about it.
I personally think that males are pressured to be less socially conscious. I don’t mean in terms of what’s going on in the world, but just what’s going on with their relationships. Just the other day a male friend of mine called me, and in the background I could hear his friends teasing him about our friendship. Why? They probably couldn’t give me a decent answer, but I suspect that it dates back to their childhood. Males so desperately want to please each other that they’ll be the idiot who risks the company’s future just to prove himself. But again, WHY? I don’t know.
“The cultural pressures that direct women toward such careers are not arbitrary; they reflect an appreciation of the differentiation. Some of the cultural pressures reflect differentiating factors that are no longer relevant. For example, upper body strength is a major differentiating factor between males and females, and was accordingly a selecting factor in many economic tasks because so many social functions in the past relied on human strength. Nowadays, very few tasks rely on upper body strength, yet there remains a prejudice against women in such careers. Fortunately, that prejudice is fading in first-world cultures, but it’s not gone yet.”
You have no evidence of this whatsoever, and I’m sorry, but you never will. As a man, you’ll never know what it’s really like for a woman in a male-dominated career, no matter what it is. bittergradstudent is a male who is sympathetic towards feminine problems, but he’ll never know what it’s like either. It’s an intangable force that begins before we realize it, that we must choose to fight or deal with on a daily basis. And it’s not just in the workforce, I assure you.
I believe you misunderstand my point about protecting children. There wasn’t not much need to protect them from predators, as they remained close to camp. The primary issue here is protecting children from males. Infanticide by unrelated males is a common phenonemon in many species, and continues to be a problem in modern society. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy wrote “The dawning realization that infanticide may have been a chronic threat during hominid evolution provides another possible reason why strangers would be a useful addition to a little hominid’s repertoire of fears.” And modern studies have shown that a goodly portion of assaults on infants and children are committed by unrelated male acquaintances of the mother.
You seem to be suggesting that there were no gender differences in physical strength. Surely you will agree that there are such gender differences now, and they had to come from somewhere. Are you suggesting that this change in the human genome is so recent that there has been no time for its consequences to appear in the human genome?
You argue that there is little evidence for the effect of widespread chimpanzee mating on male infanticide. My original statement was a conclusion, not a statement of fact. The fact on which it is based is the already-agreed statement that female chimpanzees mate with many males. The female chimpanzee doesn’t consciously decide to mate with lots of males in order to protect her children; it simply happens as a logical consequence of her behavior. Male chimps who kill infants who might be their own progeny remove their genes from the gene pool.
You assert that males show no preferences in sharing their kills. This is certainly the case with large kills, where the task is to eat up all the meat before it spoils. But with smaller amounts of meat, your hypothesis of total egalitarianism in meat sharing flies in the face of evolutionary logic. In a social environment of total meat-sharing, it takes just one cheater who slips his kids additional portions of meat to gain an advantage in the gene pool. The male who idealistically maintains egalitarian behavior sees his own kids falling behind in vigor and succumbing to disease more readily. His genes get pushed out of the gene pool.
There’s no question that parents nowadays show a great deal of favoritism towards their own children. This makes plenty of sense in evolutionary terms; are you suggesting that this unviersal human trait is some kind of cultural choice that only arose recently and is not part of the human genetic heritage?
You assert “Males and females in all societies have equal desire/need for social support” without any substantiation. Let me point out that males in modern societies demonstrate less need of social support systems than females. When you think of the term “loner”, do you visualize a male or a female? How about when I use the terms “wanderer”, “pilgrim”, or “hermit”. In the USA, more men than women live alone (when you correct for the greater life expectancy of women). I realize that this is a question for which no definitive answer can be obtained, but I’d like to hear your arguments in support of your assertion here.
When you write “Our cultures are so much more complex than anything chimpanzees or hominines ever dealt with”, I am concerned by two issues. The first is that you seem to be denying any substance to the field of evolutionary psychology. Is this your belief?
My second concern is that I am uncomfortable with the implication that hominines lived in a substantially simpler mental universe than we do. There is certainly some truth in your assertion, as there can be no doubt that we rely more nowadays on mental skills than physical ones. However, I am reluctant to dismiss the hunter-gatherer as something like “stupid”. After all, the brains that we use so proudly now are exactly the same brains that they needed to survive — they wouldn’t have saddled themselves with so much metabolically expensive tissue if they didn’t need it as much as we do.
Your final paragraph presents two major issues. The first is your apparent claim that there has been no progress in bringing women into the economy, and your claim that this is not provable. This is easily refuted by the employment statistics demonstrating women penetrating a great many careers once exlusively male: politicians, doctors, lawyers, construction workers, police officers, veterinarians… the list is huge. Yes, there remains much work to be done, but much progress has been made.
My second concern lies with your “men can never understand” argument. This kind of argument is anti-rational. Yes, men can never fully appreciate the emotional impact of sexism. But then, women can never fully appreciate the emotional impact of sexual rejection. By your logic, neither men nor women would ever be justified in discussing gender differences. But so long as we all remain outside the realm of emotionalism, and work hard on the rational side of these considerations, I think we can teach each other a great deal.
Regardless of whether circumstances before grad school may or may not be more important, the situation in grad school (and at the Universities in general) is by far the most easily fixed. Grad school involves only a very small subset of society, which is, by and large, far more educated and well-organized than society at large. If we cannot fix the situation at grad school, than chaging anything at the society-wide level is impossible.
If my institution is esentially a hostile workplace (I speak for no other instituion, but I have heard almost nothing from elsewhere that things are any different), then it will be virtually impossible to produce female Ph.D.’s there. Only the very most determined and brilliant will be able to survive the atmosphere. This has almost nothing to do with any biological differences. It has to do with open hostility that is often directed toward women in physics. And the reason why people are so offended by talk regarding these biolgical differences is that it causes people to diminsh the importance of real, serious, problem that demonstrably exist. And until we get rid of these real, institutional, blocks that women face, I really could care less what types of biological differences exist, as they are essentially unmeasurable.
Chris
So you want to argue with the nice anthropologist? I’m not an anthropologist, so I put some trust in what she says. By the way, men are only stronger than women if their muscles are larger. It has been shown that women’s muscles are actually more efficient. There is no task that a man can do that a woman cannot. Next time I climb a 1000m ice face I’m not taking you with me.
women warriors
Chris, I still am extremely confused by your opinions. It seems you like to make random statements that make no sense. Here I will try once again to understand, maybe for the last time.
1. Infanticide- Hrdy wrote about langurs of India and her research is currently being scruntinzed. She is the “pioneer” sorta speak of the infanticide idea as it is presented in primates. As I said before, we only have hominine remains to study, and there is no way to know that males purposely killed children that were not their own. Of course I haven’t studied every fossil found. But from what I have studied, the cause of death is guessable in only a few specimens, say less than 10%. I’d say its a hypothesis at best that our ancestors practiced infanctide.
There are some current societies today that I know of that may practice infanticide in certain situations. However, most of these infanticides do not center around the father of the child, but the sex of the child. This is an acceptable practice in the society so the mother does not try to “protect” her daughter against the practice. Or, she may wish to, but does not.
As with chimpanzees, infanticide is practiced more by females than by males. They are of course not killing their own offspring, but that of less-dominant females. This is an issue of the social hierachy, not of the parentage of the child. As I said before, chimpanzees neither know nor care who the father of their children are. It is not typical male behavior to random kill infant chimpanzees. I have known of a few cases but none of them have been able to be linked to a specific reason.
In modern society, the threat to children stretches further than a random acquainted male. I’m sure this is obvious to anyone so I will not comment further.
“You seem to be suggesting that there were no gender differences in physical strength.”
No, I wasn’t suggesting that at all. In modern societies, specifically ours, I’d say there’s a pretty good gap between the physical strength of a male and a female. There’s a biological preference for strength towards males, but females can build up their strength easily. What I was saying is that in hominine sexes, both were strong. I’d say the gap was smaller, in other words. That’s all I was saying.
“The fact on which it is based is the already-agreed statement that female chimpanzees mate with many males. The female chimpanzee doesn’t consciously decide to mate with lots of males in order to protect her children; it simply happens as a logical consequence of her behavior. Male chimps who kill infants who might be their own progeny remove their genes from the gene pool.”
I already commented on this. If you read my previous post, you’d see that I said males mate with several females, not the other way around. This leads to several females ended up mating with several males, but that’s the side effect. The male wishes to spread his genes, the female is not looking for protection for her children. As I said before, males do not care about their offspring.
The paragraph about eating meat still stands. When only 10% of your diet comes from meat, it simply doesn’t matter who’s getting it. Sure, so the dad slips his son/daughter more meat. Who cares? Its an act that would happen so infrequently it’s incosequential.
“There’s no question that parents nowadays show a great deal of favoritism towards their own children. This makes plenty of sense in evolutionary terms; are you suggesting that this unviersal human trait is some kind of cultural choice that only arose recently and is not part of the human genetic heritage?”
I never said anything about parents showing favoritism towards children. This is coming out of nowhere.
“You assert “Males and females in all societies have equal desire/need for social support” without any substantiation.”
Because I assumed you had loved ones in your life, maybe I shouldn’t have. There are people who live solitary lives sure, but they account for less than 1% of the population I’m sure. Do you really think you could live your life without your family, friends, and colleagues? If so, that’s just sad and I feel sorry for you.
“When you write “Our cultures are so much more complex than anything chimpanzees or hominines ever dealt with”, I am concerned by two issues. The first is that you seem to be denying any substance to the field of evolutionary psychology. Is this your belief?”
I’m not sure what you’re asking here, but chimpanzees’ brains are a third the size of ours, and other Homo species are only slightly bigger. Yes our culture is more complex. We managed to manipulate our environment to our needs, instead of having to “adapt” to our environment. That is why Homo sapiens survived and all others died. I’m assuming you live in a house that you did not build, drive a car you did not build, eat food you did not hunt, watch TV that you did not create, etc. Our ancestors had none of these luxuries.
I do not meant to say the hunter/gatherer is stupid. This is their life: they get up, and say, hmm.. I need to eat today, drink water, breathe, and reproduce/take care of my children. They did not have fire, or agriculture, and they had very simple tools. So by the time they took care of all their needs for the day, it left them with very little free time. They were by no means stupid. They just had a little more to worry about.
“Your final paragraph presents two major issues. The first is your apparent claim that there has been no progress in bringing women into the economy, and your claim that this is not provable. This is easily refuted by the employment statistics demonstrating women penetrating a great many careers once exlusively male: politicians, doctors, lawyers, construction workers, police officers, veterinarians… the list is huge. Yes, there remains much work to be done, but much progress has been made.”
The problem is how these women are treated in these professions, not if they are entering them. We could have 100 female doctors in a hospital, but if they’re raped once a day, how is that progress? I’m using an extreme example obviously, but the threat of sexual violence/harassment is immeasurable.
“My second concern lies with your “men can never understand” argument. This kind of argument is anti-rational.”
I had a feeling you’d say that, and there’s really no way to convince you or even show you otherwise. So think that if you wish, but don’t you think sexual violcen is also anti-rational? Yet it still exists.
“Yes, men can never fully appreciate the emotional impact of sexism. But then, women can never fully appreciate the emotional impact of sexual rejection.”
I actually think that we are equal only in our oppression. Have a child with your wife and then see who gets custody when you divorce. Come out of the closet and see who accepts your sexuality. Watch a nature film over football and see how many men join you. In these aspects, I could never understand what it must feel like for a man, or a young boy. It’s the same both ways.
“By your logic, neither men nor women would ever be justified in discussing gender differences.”
Maybe we can’t. Everytime I try, men get pissed off at me *shrugs*
“But so long as we all remain outside the realm of emotionalism, and work hard on the rational side of these considerations, I think we can teach each other a great deal.”
Teach each other a great deal? Hey, this is what it’s like to have a penis. Cool, this is what it’s like to have a vagina. Neat. That’s all we’ve got to teach each other, because that’s all thats *really* different. But nobody seems to realize that.
bittergradstudent, here are some numbers on gender ratios in higher education, taken from the 2003 Statistical Abstract of the US (I’m always a few years behind the times):
full-time faculty members:
1976: 326,800 male, 107,200 female (3.0 ratio male:female)
1991: 366,200 male, 169,400 female (2.2 ratio male:female)
1999: 371,000 male, 219,900 female (1.7 ratio male:female)
Note also that between 1991 and 1999, only 5,000 males were added to total faculty ranks, but 50,000 — ten times as many — females were added. This certainly suggests that colleges and universities are leaning over backwards to add female faculty members. That doesn’t excuse the current situation, which will only be right when the ratio is 1:1, but it does demonstrate that the institutions are making heroic efforts to correct an unjust situation.
By the way, the changes in these ratios closely follow the changes in the demography of undergraduates, with about a lag of between five and ten years — just what you’d expect assuming that hiring is partially based on availability of suitable candidates.
Things may indeed be horrid at your institution, and for the country as a whole they are still unacceptable, but the evidence clearly shows a major effort to correct the problem.
Kea, I don’t ask you to trust me, nor would I believe anything told me merely because one expert says so. I prefer to rely on reason rather than trust. The claims I make here are not of my own concoction; they are derived from a great deal of material from many experts. If you have objections to the facts I assert or the logic I offer, by all means let’s hear them. Let’s be scientific!
“If you have objections to the facts I assert or the logic I offer…”
And which facts would those be?
Sleeps with butterflies, our discussion is growing extended, so I shall have to break up my responses in order to properly research each one. On the issue of infanticide, you argue:
“As I said before, we only have hominine remains to study, and there is no way to know that males purposely killed children that were not their own.”
The bones aren’t the only evidence. We can draw a great many reasonable inferences from behavior patterns of modern humans and from primates. Here’s something from Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind:
“Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have found that men in every culture are about a hundred times more likely to to beat and kill their step-children than their genetic children. There are clear evolutionary reasons for that. When male lions and langur monkeys mate with a new female, they routinely try to kill off all of her existing offspring. Those offspring do not carry the male’s genes, so by killing them the males free the females to conceive their own offspring, who will carry their genes.”
You noted that I seem to be arguing randomly. I think what’s happening here is that we are relying on two very different logical systems. You are looking at the bones and asking, “what do the bones prove?” By that system of reasoning, my own reasoning seems arbitrary. I am using evolutionary reasoning, asking, “how would a given behavior affect that individual’s reproductive success?” It’s a very different way of thinking, but it has its merits. Rather than rejecting this style of thinking, why not give it a whirl and see what benefits it provides? Sure, it’s got its flaws — so does every logical angle. But it also has its strengths.
Yes, there’s a whole bunch of infanticide going on. Hrdy shows that neonaticide is sometimes to the benefit of the mother, in which case she has no qualms about offing the kid. It all follows a strict evolutionary logic.
On chimpanzee promiscuity, I think your arithmetic is off here. If all males mate with multiple females, then it’s pretty hard to avoid females mating with all males. In fact, here’s what Geoffrey Miller says about it:
“A chimpanzee female might mate with every male in the group every time she becomes fertile. She lets their sperm fight out it in her reproductive tract, and the strongest swimmers with the best endurance will probably fertilize the egg. In response to this sexual selection for good sperm, male chimpanzees have evolved large testicles, copious ejaculates, and high sperm counts.”
You dismiss the male contribution to the child’s diet as only 10% of the total, and therefore insignificant. If male hunting efforts were insignificant to the total diet of hominines, why did they bother? In evolutionary terms, wouldn’t males who devoted their time to the far more productive effort of gathering (as per your assertions) enjoy greater reproductive success than males who engaged in futile hunting?
You write, “I do not meant to say the hunter/gatherer is stupid. This is their life: they get up, and say, hmm.. I need to eat today, drink water, breathe, and reproduce/take care of my children. They did not have fire, or agriculture, and they had very simple tools. So by the time they took care of all their needs for the day, it left them with very little free time. They were by no means stupid. They just had a little more to worry about.”
What are you saying here? I believe you are incorrect about the amount of free time hunter-gatherers have; I recall reading in several places that hunter-gatherers tend to have a good deal of free time. However, if you question the point, I’ll see if I can’t find some documentation for it.
Moreover, the logic of your paragraph escapes me. You say that they were not stupid, and they had more to worry about. Are you offering this as support for your earlier assertion that our societies are so much more complex than anything that hominines ever had to cope with? Are you saying that they had more to worry about, but it was of a simpler nature, so they didn’t have to cope with complexity?
I’ll break here and come back later with some other responses to the latter portion of your posting.
“I am using evolutionary reasoning, asking, “how would a given behavior affect that individual’s reproductive success?” ”
Doesn’t sound very rigorous to me, but then I’m a physicist, so what would I know. OK. Let’s play this game.
For thousands of years, homonines have fought. What behaviours would affect their reproductive success? Well, they would have to survive until a reasonable age, for starters. So the women, as well as the men, would need excellent survival and battle skills.
As for your higher education figures:
1. They are for the US. Not all of us are from the US, and these figures are therefore of no interest whatsoever.
2. This is a physics blog. Many readers are physicists. The physics figures (which is what some of us were originally discussing) are by no stretch of the imagination anything like those that you quote.
Now let’s turn to the issue of social reasoning and male need for social support. You write:
“Because I assumed you had loved ones in your life, maybe I shouldn’t have. There are people who live solitary lives sure, but they account for less than 1% of the population I’m sure. Do you really think you could live your life without your family, friends, and colleagues? If so, that’s just sad and I feel sorry for you.”
First off, let’s avoid the personal remarks, shall we? You have no need to feel sorry for me. Let’s just focus on the facts and the logic, OK?
Second, your assertion that people who live solitary lives account for less than 1% of the population — that’s off by an order of magnitude, if you equate “living alone” with “living a solitary life”. According to the 2003 Statistical Abstract of the United States, there were in 2002 28,775,000 individuals living alone in this country — about 10% of the population.
You seem to suggest that 100 female doctors being raped every day is not a satisfactory situation. I agree. Fortunately, this awful scenario has never been realized. We must instead rely on those events that actually take place. Women are undoubtedly making significant progress in achieving equality in this society — although, as I have said, much remains to be done.
You note with sadness that whenever you talk gender issues with men, they get pissed off at you. Rest assured that I am not pissed off at you, and in fact it is most unlikely that you can provoke me to that point. I’m a pretty easygoing guy.
Lastly, you assert that the only differences between the genders are the primary sexual characteristics. I disagree. During gestation, the presence of testosterone in the embryo causes changes in the way that the brain develops. This is the biochemical basis for many of the behavioral differences that we see between men and women in all cultures.
I have known many parents who tried to break the cultural standards by giving their little boys dolls to play with and denying them guns. Invariably the little boys would bash and break the dolls and use arms and legs as guns. I’ve known quite a few parents who really made the effort to break down those gender differences, and ultimately gave up, recognizing that there are fundamental differences between little boys and little girls that no amount of cultural pressure can change.
“…recognizing that there are fundamental differences between little boys and little girls that no amount of cultural pressure can change…”
Not one of us denied this. Go back to what Sean said, and read it more carefully.
Kea, let me now respond to your postings. First, you ask what facts there are that you should respond to. My answer: any assertion that you find objectionable.
Second, as you note, evolutionary reasoning is not rigorous, but then, nothing about the human mind is. Somebody once observed that the human mind is the most complex phenomenon known to humankind; such a phenonemon should be least accessible to rigorous methods. That doesn’t mean that we can’t be rational about it. We just can’t be rigorous. There’s a difference.
Your assertion that hunter-gatherer women need excellent battle skills is way off the mark. Hominine females do not rely on brute strength to accomplish their goals — they rely primarily on social reasoning skills, which have served them rather well. After all, a physically weaker woman challenging men to physical battle is going to have her genes removed from the gene pool very quickly.
You object to the figures I offer because they are specific to the USA and they are not specific to physics. Very well, let’s have some better figures! I offered mine only because they were the best numbers I could find. But if you’ve got better numbers, let’s see them, by all means!
Kea, you write, “Not one of us denied this. Go back to what Sean said, and read it more carefully.” I believe you misunderstand my statement. I was responding to Sleeps with Butterflies statement:
“Teach each other a great deal? Hey, this is what it’s like to have a penis. Cool, this is what it’s like to have a vagina. Neat. That’s all we’ve got to teach each other, because that’s all thats *really* different. But nobody seems to realize that.”
She’s the one who denied any differences other than primary sexual differences. I suspect she was engaging in a little poetic hyperbole, but I wanted to address the point in case she was serious.
“…little boys would bash and break the dolls and use arms and legs as guns…”
And how did they know what a gun was?
“That doesn’t mean that we can’t be rational about it…”
You don’t sound rational to me.
“Your assertion that hunter-gatherer women need excellent battle skills…”
I didn’t say hunter-gatherer women.
international study of women in physics
Sean’s argument is not correct. Something that discourages girls from physics-like careers more often than boys is called the laws of nature. If you pick some people who happened to fluctuate to a high enough score, even if you choose the same score for boys and girls, it will still be true that the girls have naturally fluctuated there from a slightly lower expected position, and they will inevitably be still biased against the physics jobs statistically.
Hello, Lubos! True to form, I see. Nice picture of you with Klaus on your blog. As to the laws of Nature….well, we’re all aware of your superior familiarity with those.