Wednesday, January 26, 2005

MALE-FEMALE ABILITY DIFFERENCES

On Jan. 14, Lawrence H. Summers, who is (at least for now) the president of Harvard University... attempted to explain why there are so very few women holding senior academic positions in math, physics, engineering and technology. He began by observing that women with children may be less willing to put in the long hours required to achieve top positions in those fields. But he went on to question whether, perhaps, women just aren't cut out for the hardest of hard sciences, that maybe there are "innate differences" between male and female brains that render most women incapable of doing really tough math.

"Intellectual tsunami" is one description for what's happened in the days since Summers' remarks became public. The left protested vociferously. The right defended him, citing tidbits of research. Thus conservative columnist Linda Chavez placed great weight on a Johns Hopkins study that showed that among gifted pre-adolescent children, boys outperformed girls in math 13 to 1. In an effort to stem the waves of anger, Summers apologized in person to a group of women professors Thursday.

In fact, the evidence does not support the idea that innate differences are at fault.... The most important breakthrough has been the discovery that the various regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in girls. Researchers at Virginia Tech used sophisticated electrophysiologic imaging to examine brain development in 508 normal children — 224 girls and 284 boys — ranging from 2 months to 16 years. These researchers found that while the areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls, the areas involved in math and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys.

The real problem is not with the different mental capacities of boys and girls but with the way they are taught. Most girls attend coed schools in which girls and boys study the same subjects in the same sequence. Too often, the result of that kind of gender-blind education is that by age 12 the girls think they're no good at math and never will be. The irony is that many of those girls might be math prodigies, if only they were taught in schools whose curriculum was tailored to the individual.

All-girls schools hold great promise for eliminating the gender imbalance in math and science. A study of graduates of girls' high schools in the United States found that 13% went on to major in hard sciences and math, compared with only 2% of girls who attended coed schools. In other words, girls who attend all-girls schools are more than six times as likely to earn degrees in the very subjects about which Summers professes concern.

This guy has certainly got part of the story -- a part that will NOT suit feminists who claim that men and women are born the same -- but he omits to mention that the same male/female differences in ability have long been known in adults too. In fact, slower maturation of an ability is a good sign of lesser final potential in that area. Intelligence was in fact originally measured in terms of "mental age" -- indicating that abilities progressed in a similar way with everyone but that some people progressed much more slowly or quickly than others. The slower progressing ones of course always ended up with lower scores as adults

More here



MORE NAUGHTY MALE/FEMALE DIFFERENCES

"Men frequently despair at women's map-reading skills - or rather their lack of them. Now scientists believe they have pinpointed the reason for this conflict between the sexes.Researchers say it is all down to differences in the reliance of the sexes on either grey matter or white matter in their brains to solve problems.

They found that in intelligence tests men use 6.5 times as much grey matter as women, but women use nine times as much white matter. Grey matter is brain tissue crucial to processing information and plays a vital role in aiding skills such as mathematics, map-reading and intellectual thought. White matter connects the brain's processing centres and is central to emotional thinking, use of language and the ability to do more than one thing at once.

Professor Rex Jung, a co-author of the study at the University of New Mexico, said: "This may help explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing, like mathematics and map-reading, while women tend to excel at integrating information from various brain regions, such as is required for language skills. "These two very different pathways and activity centres, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."

Previous studies have shown that women have weaker spatial awareness than men, making it harder for them to read maps. Research has also found that in childhood, girls' vocabulary develops more quickly and that in later life women can speak 20,000 to 25,000 words a day compared to a man's 7000 to 10,000.

For the study, published in the online edition of the journal NeuroImage, researchers performed a series of brain scans on 26 female and 22 male volunteers using magnetic resonance imaging equipment. All the volunteers were in good health, had no history of brain injury and the average IQ scores of the two sexes were similar. Their brains were scanned while they carried out tests designed to assess their general intelligence. Researchers then created a map of a brain showing the varying levels of activity in the brains of men and women. About 40 per cent of the human brain is grey matter and 60 per cent white matter."

Source



Feminist fog: "Common sense, in its admittedly rough and ready form, has always revealed that men and women are different in certain crucial enough respects. The question is, 'In just what respects and why so?' It is no good saying, 'Society made them different,' because then that needs to be explained. And answering that 'Men have managed to conspire to keep women different -- say, in steering them away from the sciences, politics, business and so forth' -- doesn't work either because that, too, begs the question: 'How did men manage such a feat unless there is something inherently different between the sexes, even if that is that men are meaner, women are kinder?'"

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