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The cognitive differences between men and women

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Re: The cognitive differences between men and women

#12
post #9
post #5

I'd like to think society can truely embrace diversity instead of uniformity. Sadly, racial and sex discrimination still exist leaving society stuck with imperfect solutions to deep rooted problems.

^ this ^ so much. It makes me very sad to see male masculinity being shamed and female empathy mocked as a weakness. The important differences should be celebrated, not viewed as a superiority contest.

How are you going to do that in a way that isn't shitty to "feminine" men or "masculine" women?

Re: The cognitive differences between men and women

#15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ this ^ so much. It makes me very sad to see male masculinity being shamed and female empathy mocked as a weakness. The important differences should be celebrated, not viewed as a superiority contest.

How are you going to do that in a way that isn't shitty to "feminine" men or "masculine" women?

How about not shaming anyone, male or female, for any traits that aren't harmful to other people?

Re: The cognitive differences between men and women

#16
post #9
post #5

I'd like to think society can truely embrace diversity instead of uniformity. Sadly, racial and sex discrimination still exist leaving society stuck with imperfect solutions to deep rooted problems.

^ this ^ so much. It makes me very sad to see male masculinity being shamed and female empathy mocked as a weakness. The important differences should be celebrated, not viewed as a superiority contest.

Denial of sexual dimorphism is an odd shibboleth, but amazingly persistent. It always makes me laugh when any ideology claims to be pro-science, as the left has done recently. They deny natural selection when it encumbers on their domain just as quickly as the religious right does. Reality has no ideology. Natural selection is a search process that is literally powered by death and suffering; why should we expect it, that vast indifferent thing, to distribute desirable characteristics in the manner prescribed by our flimsy ideologies?

Re: The cognitive differences between men and women

#18
1) There are sex-differentiated characteristics of the brain.

2) Those sex-differentiated characteristics tend to be a mosaic in the brain [1].

3) Despite being a mosaic, statistics can still differentiate sex based on individual brain characteristics [2].

4) Therefore the current social structures that differentiate the roles men and women play in society are biologically derived /s /s /s /s

A long time ago, it was decided that women and men had their place because god ordained it. When that fell out of fashion (still fashionable in many places), shallow thinkers used sed to make it seem more respectable.

Putting this into the context of the recent discussion about the role of sex/gender in the tech industry, let's suppose that biological differences influence a person' career choice. Let's also acknowledge that until the last 60 or so years women were basically barred from pursuing technical work in great numbers by social obstacles. The question is, when did those social obstacles become so negligible that only biological factors are left as plausible reasons for gender disparities in, say, programming?

Very few people disagree with the idea that society should treat people equally irrespective of their gender. There's just a contingent of people who say that such social parity has already been achieved (or maybe we've gone too far), and another contingent who say that parity has not been achieved. If we're already in an egalitarian society, then clearly the only reason for significant differences in the division of labor and social participation between different genders must be of biological origin.

In other words, the contentious issue of biological differences between men and women isn't contentious because of the biology, but because of the assumptions that need to be made in order to correlate those differences with the structure of society.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468

[2] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/14/E1968.short

Re: The cognitive differences between men and women

#19
post #9
post #5

I'd like to think society can truely embrace diversity instead of uniformity. Sadly, racial and sex discrimination still exist leaving society stuck with imperfect solutions to deep rooted problems.

^ this ^ so much. It makes me very sad to see male masculinity being shamed and female empathy mocked as a weakness. The important differences should be celebrated, not viewed as a superiority contest.

>male masculinity being shamed

citation needed... When is the last time you saw an action hero movie with a man who was shamed for being too masculine? Western Culture as a whole views male masculinity as a good thing. Being non-masculine is viewed as weakness.

On the other hand, if a woman is masculine, she's assumed to be a lesbian, and otherwise shamed. As a result, women are stuck between trying to be what society claims to like (masculinity) and what they are supposedly good at, but society doesn't value highly (femininity).

CEOs and other officials are congratulated for making tough calls, being aggressive, taking risks, outsmarting and defeating their competitors. It's generally discussed in terms of battles, and the tone is almost always in rewarding the "masculine" approach. This is why startup culture is often in the news as very unwelcoming.

Re: The cognitive differences between men and women

#20
post #2

From the article. "Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills: They’re better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two- or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, at correctly determining angles from the horizontal, at tracking moving objects and at aiming projectiles." From this article: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-…

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