21–30 of 57 posts
So if prenatal testosterone has such a deleterious effect on females, what effect does it have on males? How do all those metrics they measured for the girl half of the twin pairs compare to their sibling?
Those two numbers seems connected, ie that individuals that have higher risk of high school drop out have also a higher risk of not graduating. The study do not cross compare this with male students which also have higher drop out rate and lower graduation rate compared to female students, but some relation seems implied.
The study also notes a lower probability of ever having been married by age 32, and lower probability of employment. The article does not explore if the effect could be exclusively a result of lower education.
As a final thought, the sample size is relatively small and the effect relatively minor in absolute numbers. The paper does not give out any P values or confidence intervals for their primary findings. The relative effect is large, but I interpret that more like a warning flag. In absolute terms we are talking about 136 additional students born between 1967 and 1978 that dropped out compared to a null hypothesis. The same number for college drop out was 49 students that did not graduate. With so few individuals having that large effect on the conclusion I personally will wait a bit for replication studies.
My girlfriend has a twin brother. Since they were born in Haiti and we live in the US I'm not sure how relevant this study would be towards her, meaning the socioeconomic changes between living in those two countries is pretty wide. How does prenatal test affect someone after they've gone through puberty? I just don't see how that can be attributed towards college graduation or marriage rates. Is that not a far reach…
The test doesn't affect them. Hormone levels during development are the primary way the body controls development, so even small alterations in hormone levels in utero would be expected to have large physiological consequences.
> Is that not a far reaching statement to associate the two
Luckily, the field of statistics gives us ways to reason about whether or not to believe an observed effect.
In this case[1], the researchers used data on 100% of Norwegian births from 1967-1978 (n=728,842) including 13,800 twins. From these large n's the researchers are able to get the statistical power to measure these effects at the level of precision they did. The p-values for all the reported effects are presented in the appendix [2] and ranged from It's worth noting that many of these differences had already been observed in multiple previous studies. The difference in marriage rates, for example, already appeared in a study analyzing records of 18th and 19th century (1734–1888) Finns [3].
So, in summary, while these statements are interesting, they're in no way an overreach, given the amount of data analyzed.
1: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/14/1812786116
2: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2019/03/14/181278611...
3: https://www.pnas.org/content/104/26/10915?ijkey=2c55ba770f14...
Toxic masculinity, literally
Technically a somewhat clever pun, but currently that’s such an emotionally charged issue that no one wants it brought up unless it’s relevant. Either that or it may sound like you’re insulting all males.
Why is “marriage rate” a factor in determining “life success”?
That a behavioral difference (marriage rate) seems to be influenced, in females, by in-utero exposure to testosterone (independent of any effect on fertility rate, at that) is certainly a scientifically relevant finding. Links between psychology and biology are still infrequent.
With smaller data sets I find the summary to be less valuable than the actual paper. In this case we are talking about 4,533 twin pairs where one is a male and the other female. The female twin had a 2.8-percentage point higher probability of dropping out of high school compared to other female students, and a similar 1.9-percentage point lower probability of graduating from college. Those two numbers seems connected…
Incorrect. The p-values -- all 85 of them -- are presented in the appendix[1], linked to in the first paragraph under the 'Results' heading, along with means, standard deviations, and number of observations. The article text[2] repeatedly references these tables when making each claim.
> The paper do not give out any [...] confidence intervals for their primary findings.
Incorrect. Confidence intervals are presented in 100% of the figures.
> The article does not explore if the effect [on marriage or employment] could be exclusively a result of lower education.
Incorrect. They explicitly consider the effect of educational attainment on future economic earnings.
"Behavioral changes downstream of prenatal testosterone exposure, such as any effect of disruptive behavior on schooling or educational attainment, are likely candidate pathways linking male co-twin exposure to later earnings. Consistent with this interpretation, conditioning on educational attainment in the earnings equation reduced the coefficient on opposite-sex from −0.086 (SE, 0.021) to −0.042 (SE, 0.014), suggesting that roughly 50% of intensive margin labor market effects could be explained by educational outcomes that are upstream of earnings.
> Those two numbers [H.s. dropout rate / college graduation rate] seems connected ... some relation seems implied.
These measures are already known to be strongly correlated, along with the correlations to the probability of inclusion within the labor force and lifetime earning potential. The paper makes no claims that these four measures are independent from one another.
The paper does explicitly make clear when findings of independence are relevant, particularly in usually-correlated variables. In this case I'm referring to their findings of a fertility rate effect independent from marriage rate.
1: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2019/03/14/181278611...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically a somewhat clever pun, but currently that’s such an emotionally charged issue that no one wants it brought up unless it’s relevant. Either that or it may sound like you’re insulting all males.
It's very American reaction. As an Eastern European I find it's just funny.
Why is “marriage rate” a factor in determining “life success”?
The researchers never once use the term 'life success'. [1] That a behavioral difference (marriage rate) seems to be influenced, in females, by in-utero exposure to testosterone (independent of any effect on fertility rate, at that) is certainly a scientifically relevant finding. Links between psychology and biology are still infrequent. 1: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/14/1812786116