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

psychologytoday.com

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

#81

Post by belorn »

golemotron wrote: post #36

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…

While what you are saying is partial true, the picture of genetics vs nurture is much more complex. I would recommend a excellent lecture series at (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&index=1&list=PL4...) which goes into quite into depth about the subject.

For example, while there are clear differences at birth, nurture can permanent shutdown genes. Additionally a lot of activators for genes are triggered by mental thought process and the environment around individuals.

To make a car analogy, we could assume that faster cars are more often breaking the speed limit than slower cars, and we might very likely find this to be true in practice regardless of the actually speed limit. From there we need to be careful to conclude that its the fault of the car when a driver choses to ignore the law, or that just because the acceleration is faster and it is easier to drive fast in a fast car a person is not conscious in their choice.

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

#82

Post by amyjess »

golemotron wrote: post #36

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…

> gender is a cultural construct

Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct.

In my experience, the nastiest transphobes are the ones who believe gender is a social construct. They're called TERFs. They can't wrap their minds around the fact that we prove their pet theories wrong, so they stalk, harass, and doxx us.

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

#83

Post by totalrobe »

carapat_virulat wrote: post #75
golemotron wrote: post #36

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…

Is the percentage of women in STEM low in all STEM degrees in the US? I'm Spanish and math and chemistry usually have a 50/50 or >50% of women here. Not sure if those are considered STEM at all in the US.

Yes math and chem are STEM. In my experience, women were found in greater percentages in the basic science and maths (required for pre-med) and in the life sciences which were geared more towards medical professions.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by songshu »

amyjess wrote: post #82
golemotron wrote: post #36

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…

> gender is a cultural construct Trans people such as myself are proof that gender is not a social construct. In my experience, the nastiest transphobes are the ones who believe gender is a social construct. They're called TERFs. They can't wrap their minds around the fact that we prove their pet theories wrong, so they stalk, harass, and doxx us.

Stalking, harassing and doxxing is indefensible, but not being able to wrap one's head around gender is understandable I think. Often people want, whether trans or not, to express their gender in terms of constructs like name, language, manner of dress etc which are clearly social (sometimes clearly invented in the last 100 years). We have no easy way of deciding how these seemingly superficial things relate to underlying gender.

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

#86

Post by tzs »

mattmanser wrote: post #77
rndn wrote: post #26

The next article in this series on "Which sex is playing higher stakes reproductive game?" is also worth reading: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-diff... It reminds me of an interesting hypothesis I've read about the other day that the concept marriage plays a significant role in the success of our culture as it counteracts this difference. It allows more men to reach a social status at which…

Warning: Unskippable advert on video.

It's YouTube. Whether you get no ad, an ad skippable after 5 seconds, an un-skippable 15 second ad, or an un-skippable longer ad varies. I'm currently getting a skippable after 5 seconds ad.

This may also depend on what ad blocker you are using. At least one popular ad blocker [1] sometimes fails to block the "skippable after 5 second" ads but DOES block the "skip this ad" overlay. To make that even more annoying, I think that the "skippable after 5 second" ads are often long ads so the result is people without an ad blocker get 5 seconds of the ad, and people with that ad blocker get get the full thing!

[1] I'm not naming it because I was trying out different ad blockers on different machines to see which met my needs best, and I don't recall for sure which one it was.

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

#87

Post by nailer »

geomark wrote: post #44
golemotron wrote: post #36

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…

Having lived through so much of the polictically correct conditioning about equality of everybody I became pretty numb to it. Then having a child and seeing the stark difference between play habits of boys and girls made me think about it again. Anecdotal, of course, although consistent with many other people's anecdotes, which starts to look like data after a while.

Check out the work by Simon Baron Cohen at Cambridge, which includes studies on newborns showing clear differences between genders. http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf

Also check out the work of John Money, who popularised the concept of 'gender as a social construct', and wrecked the life of a young man whose penis had been destroyed by trying to raise him as a girl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer.

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

#88

Post by RodericDay »

Whomever wants a critical look at this kind of "psychology result", I really recommend checking out Cordelia Fine (Oxford, Cambridge, UCL educated) and "Delusions of Gender". She is a fun listen/read and explains really well the flaws in the science/reporting/interpretation of "gender science", from the statistical to the neurological.

http://blip.tv/slowtv/delusions-of-gender-p1-cordelia-fine-4...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_Gender

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8031168-delusions-of-gen...

Additionally, readers who are not very acquainted should know that PsychologyToday is not a respectable publication in psychology, and is regularly embroiled in issues with propping up "we are telling the truth that nobody wants to hear about white supremacy". If you do not know who Satoshi Kanazawa is, you should look him up, or you can ask the psychology subreddits what their assessment is of that website.

This post veers close to ad hominem, but the way people are processing the OP is very much fallacious as well: a combination of taking a dubious authority on its word, not following up on the stats, and relishing in it confirming everything they want to believe (sexism is over-discussed, we really are different, and it explains most differences we observe). I cannot possibly offer a counter-argument in such meager visual real-estate and with so little captured attention-span, but if anyone is interested in hearing the best counter-arguments (not of the "artsies who believe in the blank-slate" variety), I offer a place to start.

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

#89

Post by stefantalpalaru »

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…

> But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that.

I don't think that intelligence is the most important factor for those positions, so let's talk about researchers and university teachers instead. Do you really think that society would be better if less intelligent people would be better represented there?

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

#90

Post by FeepingCreature »

fecklessyouth wrote: post #71

I find it funny that so much scientific research attempts to prove the existence of a biological contrast that's blatantly obvious, but which has been completely deconstructed and obscured by modern literary theory/philosophy.

This is the case with every field of science. There's no such thing as "obvious"; obviously, the earth is flat and in the center of the universe.
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