Friday, January 21, 2005

MALE/FEMALE DIFFERENCES INCORRECT

Doing remarkably little to combat the stereotype that women are emotionally frail and constitutionally incapable of dealing with stress, Professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT told the Boston Globe that she had to leave a lecture delivered by Harvard president Larry Summers because if she didn't she would have "either blacked out or thrown up." What caused this damsel Hopkins to hie to her fainting couch? Why, the mere suggestion that there might be inherent differences between men and women when it comes to aptitude to the hard sciences..... Summers raised the possibility that "innate difference" might be a factor as well. According to reports, he didn't necessarily embrace this view so much as throw it out for discussion. Indeed, before he raised this point he apparently said several times, "I'm going to provoke you" — which Hopkins might have noticed had she been able to hear over her ideological agenda. "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Hopkins told the New York Times. "Let's not forget that people used to say that women couldn't drive an automobile."

That's true. "People" also used to say that women aren't as tall as men, that men are more aggressive than women, that women are the ones who make babies, that men are physically stronger than women, and all sorts of other things that happen to be true. The mere fact that "people" used to say some things that weren't true doesn't mean that everything people used to say is untrue — even if some of those comments offend Hopkins's delicate sensibilities.

In fact, the scientific consensus is that there are innate cognitive differences between men and women — as groups. Individual men and women can be geniuses or morons (though the data suggest that men tend to produce more of both than women). Men tend to perform better at spatial tasks — rotating three-dimensional objects in their mind, for example — as well as some mathematical and navigational tests. Women, on the other hand, are better at word games of various kinds, and they beat men at identifying matching items rapidly and putting the right-shaped pegs in the right holes. This is all fairly uncontroversial stuff — you can find a nice summary on the web in a Scientific American article called "Sex Differences in the Brain" from May 13, 2002.

But don't show it to Nancy Hopkins. She may lose her lunch..... In the past, women used to claim that vulgar language would cause them to grow ill or faint. Now feminists like Hopkins use the same tactic to silence ideologically unacceptable ideas and to intimidate the intellectually curious. That's the stereotype Hopkins is reinforcing: that feminists and the Left are pro-science and pro-scholarship as long as they already agree with the conclusions

More here. See Peg Kaplan for some good comments on the sequel to the matter. And Steven Pinker summarizes the scientific issues involved.



MLK DAY REVEALS THE BIAS

Catholic League president William Donohue addressed today the claim that there is a December Dilemma in the schools: “When people say there is a December Dilemma, what they mean is that school officials are in a bind: how can they allow the celebration of Christmas without offending others? The answer? Censor Christmas.

“The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is so worried about Christmas that it issues an annual document, ‘The December Dilemma,’ on how to deal with this problem (in response, the Catholic League offers, ‘The December Celebration’). In a Q&A section, the ADL comments on what is excessive when it comes to Christmas decorations. After admitting that the courts have said Santas and Christmas trees are secular symbols, it warns, ‘Nevertheless, their inordinate usage is inappropriate.’ It does not say what constitutes an inordinate number, nor does it say why secular symbols of any kind should be censored, regardless of their volume. But it does tell us a lot about how the ADL views Christmas...

“In every instance, school officials say they must censor Christmas because the holiday is not inclusive. But if they were advised to censor Martin Luther King Day celebrations—on the grounds that it is not inclusive (it represents only a small minority)—they would respond by saying that white kids who feel left out should respect diversity. Why, then, should not those who are not Christian (a small minority) be told to respect the diversity that Christmas offers? There is a game being played here: in one instance, those who complain are rewarded; in the other, they are denied. Such is the game of multicultural madness.”

Source

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