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How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

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Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#31

Post by blfr »

ectoplasm wrote: post #20
ars wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is generally accepted. But people don't like it. For example it explains why there are more men in high-status positions, which again, people don't like, and try to rail against ("We need more women in XYZ!"). For an even more "untouchable" subject try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

There's a 60/40 male/female split in that graph for people with IQ's of 140. First, you don't need an IQ of 140 to have a high-status position. Second, the male/female ratio for high-status positions is much higher than 60/40.

If OP's explanation of this difference is correct then you would expect (at least some) other mental traits to also have a higher variance in men. It wouldn't be just IQ.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#32

Post by dagw »

sanxiyn wrote: post #21
ectoplasm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a 60/40 male/female split in that graph for people with IQ's of 140. First, you don't need an IQ of 140 to have a high-status position. Second, the male/female ratio for high-status positions is much higher than 60/40.

Yes, it is a partial explanation.

Only if you can show a strong causation (or even just correlation) between very high intelligence and holding a high status position

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#33

Post by MichaelCrawford »

tfinniga wrote: post #29

It's interesting to realize that if two groups have the same mean but different variability, the higher-variability group will have more outliers, on both the high end and the low end. The danger is a kind of genetic fatalism, assuming that what we should do is just to be determined by our genes and how our bodies work. For example, it's possible for a man to produce many children by impregnating lots of women concur…

I once found a "casual encounters" ad on craigslist, in which a woman sought men to attend a certain type of party, which type I do not remember.

I looked it up at Urban Dictionary, the objective of that kind of party is to impregnate as many women as possible.

I contemplated attending but then concluded that I want to know who my children are, and that they would want to know who their father is. Even under the best of circumstances it is painful not to know one's father - look at Steve Jobs.

I was once invited to have unprotected sex with a complete stranger. She was quite lovely, definitely someone I would want to be with but we just happened to stumble across each other at Burning Man. I expected I would never see her again so I declined.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#34

Post by MichaelCrawford »

tfinniga wrote: post #29

It's interesting to realize that if two groups have the same mean but different variability, the higher-variability group will have more outliers, on both the high end and the low end. The danger is a kind of genetic fatalism, assuming that what we should do is just to be determined by our genes and how our bodies work. For example, it's possible for a man to produce many children by impregnating lots of women concur…

My Russian instructor at Caltech was the victim of Bride Abduction while vacationing in Soviet Georgia when she was fifteen years old. Her, uh, "fiance's" mother failed to understand why Valentina was unhappy about it.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#35

Post by xyzzyz »

philh wrote: post #24
hiq wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you tell it is not published? It seemed to me that it had been published in the American psychologist according to [1]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16366817

My bad. It looks like the link was to a pre-publication draft, but it has indeed since been published.

Just FYI: many papers available onlines are actually preprints/drafts, because the researchers are much freer to distribute them, than the actual published papers bearing journal branding.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#36

Post by golemotron »

I'm surprised to see this ranking so high on HN. Sex-based difference is the biggest taboo of our time.

The current educational and political system is organized toward exclusively presenting the view that gender is a cultural construct and there are no differences between men and women other than plumbing.

Men and women, on average, differ significantly on career choice, likes, dislikes, and motivation. And, it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers. The differences are there as early as one day after birth [ http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf ]. Primate studies show the same differences with our relatives.

Everyone should be able to pursue any career they want to, but there should be no surprise when you see gender disparities across different occupations.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#37

Post by lmm »

kirsebaer wrote: post #27
lmm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite easy to ignore even very clear evidence when it goes against one's politics. And that kind of result is massively politicised for obvious reasons (e.g. there are clear differences on standardized test scores - but some argue this reflects biases in the tests themselves).

One bias is so-called "stereotype threat". > negative stereotypes raise inhibiting doubts and high-pressure anxieties in a test-taker's mind... even passing reminders that someone belongs to one group or another, such as a group stereotyped as inferior in academics, can wreak havoc with test performance. http://www.apa.org/research/action/stereotype.aspx http://www.npr.org/2012/07/12/156664337/stereotype-threat-wh...…

Of course as with everything in this area, there is no consensus; studies have contradictory results and some dispute whether stereotype threat even exists.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#39

Post by duckingtest »

summerdown2 wrote: post #12
qmalxp wrote: post #9

Is it generally accepted in the relevant scientific communities that male IQ's exhibit more variance than female IQ's? I imagine this type of thing would be easy to verify via e.g. standardized test scores.

It seems to be a meme without a lot of evidence attached. However, the one paper I did find appears to refute it: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.long I think that some ideas gain traction because they fit well into people's narrative, even when the evidence is not yet strong enough for real trust in them.

>strong correlation exists between a country's measures of gender inequity and the size of the math gender gap both at the mean and the right tail of the distribution

1. How does that correlation disprove it? It's entirely consistent with one common cause for all inequalities.

2. "Mean gender gap" is for people who did school-related tests, mainly PISA, not the general population. If the greater variability is true there will be much more severely mentally retarded males unable to even read. Depending on the size of the effect, the different mean could in fact confirm the hypothesis (that the mean is the same but std is greater).

3. No analysis whether the distribution of countries' result is consistent with greater variability for the whole human population. Especially jarring when they mention Iceland, a country so small that there are many individual schools elsewhere with more students than they have.

>These findings challenge the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, which, if valid, should hold for all representative populations, regardless of ethnicity or nationality.

4. That's an entirely unwarranted assumption (in addition to 3). Are Asian-Americans in particular really representative of a general Asian population (with an American culture)? What about brain drain? The more recent the immigration, the harder it's to get in; simplifying for the sake of an example, if you only allow those with a X234 mutation in a B5 DNA location, don't be surprised when there's zero variability in a B5 location.

Even without a filter, why should the standard deviation in math skills be identical between genetically different populations? The identical variability should be true for the X-chromosome in general, not math-skills in particular.

Re: How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?

#40

Post by ectoplasm »

blfr wrote: post #31
ectoplasm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a 60/40 male/female split in that graph for people with IQ's of 140. First, you don't need an IQ of 140 to have a high-status position. Second, the male/female ratio for high-status positions is much higher than 60/40.

If OP's explanation of this difference is correct then you would expect (at least some) other mental traits to also have a higher variance in men. It wouldn't be just IQ.

Just guessing of course, but I'd say testosterone is probably responsible for a good number of men filling high-status positions, see the sources on this page for effects on behavior:

https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/5740/are-there-re...

That said, I think we haven't quite reached the point where we can rule out hegemony when it comes to imbalance in general.

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