> I am a libertarian so ultimately I believe that everyone should be free to make their own decisions even if there are gender preferences at play. Not saying there aren't issues, but simply saying, "X is anti-women, because only Y% are female," is academically dishonest.
It's not academically dishonest, it's the application of a reasonable epistomological presumption: we presume that observations are not caused by biological differences without concrete evidence of those differences. The corollary to that is that disparities in outcome are prima facie evidence of disparities in opportunity.
It's not that people are unwilling to acknowledge biological differences between genders. Nobody argues that women have as much upper body strength as men. Rather, people are aware of the longstanding practice of chaulking things up to biological differences, and adopt a presumption against such explanations. You can see that clearly in this thread, where people are arguing that women might be biologically predisposed to being primary caregivers without any concrete evidence backing that up.
> "we presume that observations are not caused by biological differences without concrete evidence of those differences. The corollary to that is that disparities in outcome are prima facie evidence of disparities in opportunity."
Ummm...the first part is fine, the corollary reasoning is what is academically dishonest. Prima facie is not academically acceptable when determining causal relationships in statistics. The illustration of this is why the power of Hypothesis testing is centered around rejecting the Null hypothesis. Failure to reject the null hypothesis doesn't confirm/prove the null hypothesis as true.
The corollary follows from the first part because of the nature/nurture dichotomy. It's either biological, or sociological. If you presume it's not the former, unless we have evidence thereof, we must presume it's the latter. What else could it be?
Also, what is acceptable for proving a causal relationship in a statistical sense is not coextensive with what's academically honest. In the real world people have to make decisions and set policies based on imperfect information. Requiring premises underlying those policies to be proven with scientific certainty before condoning political action just establishes a default policy of preserving the status quo.
>>The corollary follows from the first part because of the nature/nurture dichotomy. It's either biological, or sociological.
Nature/nurture argument is not a dichotomy. It isn't either/or. It can be both to varying degrees, i.e. biological dispositions can be nurtured/reinforced by environment and upbringing.
> If you presume it's not the former, unless we have evidence thereof, we must presume it's the latter.
Your presumption seems to favour the sociological explanation. Why do you not say, "If you presume it's not the latter, unless we have evidence thereof, we must presume it's the former"?
It's not really reasonable to take as a strong prior (or null hypothesis if you are that sort) that two distributions are equal. Why would they be?
Further, lets think of all the distributions where we can easily measure - upper body strength and height are two examples. The male/female distributions are, in fact, not equal. Same for the distributions of mathematical ability.
It seems like you want to simply assume your pet hypothesis to be true - with no real evidence for it - while demanding a high level of rigor from those you disagree with.
We know that there are sex specific physical characteristics that differ between men and women. Nobody is arguing that's not true. Extending these to mental differences however is a stretch and not easily observed.
The people with the pet hypothesis here are those who assume without causal evidence that there is a difference in cognition between men and women. Neuroscience is converging on the fact that sex specific differences in the brain are minimal. [0] Differences in the brain have been observed between taxi drivers and the general population. We clearly wouldn't assume that they were born to be taxi drivers, we would place the causation on neuroplasticity. Even then, neuroscience is a very immature field. Neurobollocks is an entertaining read.
I agree it's not easily observed. What I'm disagreeing about is the idea that if two numbers are not easily observed, they must be assumed to be equal.
Similarly, it's unreasonable to assume that the number of dollars in my wallet is equal to the number of dollars in your wallet unless someone can come up with p<0.001 proof otherwise.
Also, on this topic, I don't trust any pop-science writing (such as Scientific American) or journalism about science papers. I don't even trust the abstracts of science papers. Take a look at my citations about mathematical ability - unless you look at the data tables, you won't actually realize that those citations provide strong evidence of significant differences in math ability between men and women.
For example, consider the article with the title "Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance", while the first data table shows a variance ratio of 1.11-1.21 and the second table shows the result of this in the right tail.
Unfortunately scientists need to tread very carefully and obscure the "wrong" results - loudly proclaiming these results is a career limiting move.
> We know that there are sex specific physical characteristics that differ between men and women. Nobody is arguing that's not true. Extending these to mental differences however is a stretch and not easily observed.
Yes, it is easily observed and has been extensively studied. Wikipedia has several articles about "Sex differences in ..." on different topics. For example, see "Sex differences in intelligence" [1] or "Sex differences in human psychology". Lots of studies are linked. One that I recall is "Sex differences in human neonatal social perception" [2]:
> Sexual dimorphism in sociability has been documented in humans. [...] 102 human neonates, who by definition have not yet been influenced by social and cultural factors, were tested to see if there was a difference in looking time at a face (social object) and a mobile (physical-mechanical object). Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin.
Another example is "Sex differences in parking are affected by biological and social factors" [3], which found that men are better at parking cars:
> The stereotype of women’s limited parking
skills is deeply anchored in modern culture. Although laboratory tests prove men’s average superiority in visuospatial tasks and parking requires complex, spatial skills, underlying mechanisms remain unexplored. Here, we investigated performance of beginners (nine women, eight men) and more experienced drivers (21 women, 27 men) at different parking manoeuvres. Furthermore, subjects conducted the mental rotation test and self-assessed their parking skills. We show that men park more accurately and especially faster than women.
Another known result is that male IQ is higher on average has higher variance than female IQ. The intelligence study "Sex differences on the progressive matrices: a meta-analysis" [4] concluded:
> Results showed that there is no difference among
children aged 6–14 years, but that males obtain higher [mean IQ] from the age of 15 through to old age. Among adults, the male advantage is 0.33d equivalent to 5 IQ points. These results disconfirm the frequent assertion than there are no sex differences on the progressive matrices and support a developmental theory that a male advantage appears from the age of 15 years.
"Brother–sister differences in the g factor in intelligence" [5] claims that male IQ is not higher on average, but has "substantially greater variance". If male IQ had greater variance, this means we would expect that there are more men than women with very high IQs (as well as more men with very low IQs). The section about current research in [1] has more.
These are just a small sample of peer-reviewed research articles examining mental differences between men and women. There may not be consensus on all topics, but there is on some, such as the higher variance of male IQs, and it's being actively studied.
The mobile/face study has not been reproduced. Researchers who tried again, making the study gender-blind (i.e. dressing the babies in gender neutral outfits and not looking at the names) found that there was no significant differences. [4]
[3] is thoroughly conditioned into women [5]. Not only do people say that males are more visually intelligent, boys take part in more activities that develop spatial reasoning and coordination, namely sports and video games. This difference starts at a young age, with boys receiving more functional toys that develop logic and hand eye coordination, while girls receive more dolls, dollhouses, stoves, strollers, etc.
> Gender differences were found [] due to an increase in girls' gaze behavior. Girls also made more eye contact in female–female dyads and in the second interaction over the first. Boys' behavior remained unchanged over time. The data provide evidence for gender differences in mutual gaze in a younger sample and wider context than previously demonstrated.
This seems to reinforce the claim that there are gender differences, doesn't it? (I don't have access to the full paper and can't see the result you're referring to)
> This difference starts at a young age, with boys receiving more functional toys that develop logic and hand eye coordination, while girls receive more dolls, dollhouses, stoves, strollers, etc.
Did you know that a monkey research study examined toy and play preferences of male and female monkeys? Like humans, male adolescent monkeys prefer to play with wheeled vehicles, while the females prefer dolls. "Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children" [7]:
> Sex differences in juvenile activities, such as rough and tumble play, peer preferences, and infant interest, share similarities in humans and monkeys. Thus if activity preferences shape toy preferences, male and female monkeys may show toy preferences similar to those seen in boys and girls. We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females.
The abstract is phrased in the way that it's most sensationalist to the neuroscience community, unfortunately. The authors said that they found effects in a follow up study, but in the initial study that replicated [2] they found no significant results. Leeb and Rejskind's analysis suggests that the expectations of the experimenters influenced the study in the previous example.
The thing is, talk to girls -- they don't actually like to play with dolls. Many of them envied the lego sets and toy cars of their male peers.
I'm losing steam. I might flesh this out tomorrow. I've been arguing with people far less reasonable than you all day.
Spatial reasoning does seem to have strong male/female correlation. Give a hundred men and a hundred woman a map and an address to reach, and guess which cohort gets there more easily? Or give the same groups a Lego set and the instruction booklet (especially the tediously piece-by-piece modern ones), and see which population completes the set more quickly and more accurately.
Do you have a source, or is this a thought experiment?
> Or give the same groups a Lego set and the instruction booklet (especially the tediously piece-by-piece modern ones), and see which population completes the set more quickly and more accurately.
fwiw, Lego are overwhelmingly marketed to, and given to, boys. I'm not sure it's safe to draw a conclusion from this.
> we presume that observations are not caused by biological differences without concrete evidence of those differences. The corollary to that is that disparities in outcome are prima facie evidence of disparities in opportunity.
Wouldn't it be better to cite studies comparing women who do and do not care for children as proof that there is some other cause, instead of asking everyone to accept that assumption?
we presume that observations are not caused by biological differences without concrete evidence of those differences. The corollary to that is that disparities in outcome are prima facie evidence of disparities in opportunity.
Is it? I think it just means you need evidence of biological differences (or lack thereof) from things other than disparities in outcome - from outside the circle.
If I say "Women aren't as fast at sprinting as men, and it's biological, as evidenced by the fact women aren't as fast as sprinting as men" I agree that's a circular argument.
But if I say "Women aren't as fast at sprinting as men, and it's biological, as evidenced by these studies of testosterone levels and their effects" that's a non-circular argument.
I agree with the last part. But here OP said "we presume X is not a factor", and then goes on to conclude X is not a factor.
OP requires evidence for biological differences, but requires no such thing for the discrimination theory.
Throwing around "epistomological presumption", "corollary"' and "prima facie" does not make this a scientific argument.
In reality there is plenty of evidence for biological gender differences (and for discrimination). Pinker's "Blank Slate" is a good start if you have time to read 600 pages.
It's not academically dishonest, it's the application of a reasonable epistomological presumption: we presume that observations are not caused by biological differences without concrete evidence of those differences. The corollary to that is that disparities in outcome are prima facie evidence of disparities in opportunity.
It's not that people are unwilling to acknowledge biological differences between genders. Nobody argues that women have as much upper body strength as men. Rather, people are aware of the longstanding practice of chaulking things up to biological differences, and adopt a presumption against such explanations. You can see that clearly in this thread, where people are arguing that women might be biologically predisposed to being primary caregivers without any concrete evidence backing that up.