Looking for evidence - Male/female differences

[athelas]

A disproportionate number of men being represented at the top levels of mathematics can't be attributed solely to the larger male variance in IQ, since social factors are likely playing a part in it as well.

I notice a discrepancy there.

[EnderSword]

discrepancy in fact, or a little nitpicking of wording?

[apoklips]

A disproportionate number of men being represented at the top levels of mathematics can't be attributed solely to the larger male variance in IQ, since social factors are likely playing a part in it as well.

I notice a discrepancy there.

I certainly could have worded that in a more efficient manner, and I apologize. I'm pretty sure you know what I was getting at, though.

[Vaniver]

I'm trying to show a group of people that statements like "you throw like a girl" are insulting, even if statistically, men are stronger on average. Also, when I try and say we should have gender equality, they say "men and women are different".

The problem is that, by the numbers in the linked pdf, if throwing distance had a normal distribution 98% of boys* would tie or beat the throwing distance of the average girl,* and that the numbers are more extreme for throwing velocity. So, I mean, maybe it needs to be "throw like an average girl"?

*Their data was for the age range 3-20.

[TheGrammarBolshevik]

Why not just "throw like average"? The problem is that so many people express insults by also insulting "the weaker sex."

[setzer777]

Why not just "throw like average"? The problem is that so many people express insults by also insulting "the weaker sex."

Well, "throw like average" doesn't sound very insulting. I agree that sex-based insults should be replaced, but they need to be replaced with phrases that still sound sufficiently insulting to the target.

[TheGrammarBolshevik]

I was thinking of terms like "mediocre." In practice, I play a lot of ultimate, and while we diss each other a lot it seems like most of the jokes I here stay away from "lol ur like a WOMAN" And, no, we don't say things like "You, sir, are at best a mediocre disc-tosser."

[EnderSword]

What do you say?
Seems hard to make a comparison that doesn't set someone up as the metric by which crappy frisbee players are judged.

I actually heard two weeks ago at a lacrosse game 'Put some speed on it (a pass), we're not playing fucking ultimate frisbee'
Almost by necessity you gotta insult or compare to someone.

[TheGrammarBolshevik]

Oh sure, we do that (one player's name is synonymous with shitty hucks), but we don't have to incorporate sexism in order to do it.

Spoiler:

So, I've never invoked the "¡This cheese is burning me!" wordfilter before, and now I do it in SB. Ouch.

[Jessica]

"God, stop sucking, you're bringing the team down".

"What the fuck is wrong with you, did you eat shit for breakfast?"

"Stop fucking up, so we can win this."

"You throw terribly! What's wrong, got wankers cramp?"

[EnderSword]

Some of those insults also sound like something you'd see in mistranslated anime.

"hey you! your skills at throwing are unworthy of your ancestry!"

(They also include several things that could be offensive to some group, thus kind of defeating the point anyway)

[Jessica]

Other than wankers cramp, I can't see anything wrong with it. And other than people who are offended by masturbating, really there is no group of people who is being denigrated by those.

And I'm sure you can think of better ones. I have a hard time thinking that you can't think of a different insult then sissy, or fag.

[EnderSword]

You mention God in vain, sucking, and eating shit as derogatory as well.

I think you can definitely come up with better stuff than just saying throws like a girl, but a lot of insults rely on comparisons. So something like 'You throw like a frisbee player' might be a decent insult to a Lacrosse player. it's a comparison to a group, but not an innate born group.

What type of argument or debate are you looking to have with this information. You winning it I think depends a lot of how you frame it as I mentioned before.

[The Mighty Thesaurus]

Yeah, well you throw like a cow.

[EnderSword]

You could say that, though they'd be able to insult you back if they played the original Monkey Island.

[Zamfir]

Yeah, well you throw like a cow.

Onthe other hand, you throw like a Bull is hardly an insult.

[Outchanter]

Yeah, well you throw like a cow.

On the other hand, you throw like a Bull is hardly an insult.

Unless male bovines have suddenly evolved opposable thumbs, how can they throw anything?

[mosc]

I have no links but I think what you should look at is the strong connection between testosterone and strength. Also the connection between gender and testosterone differences. I know too that the hormone balance (estrogen, etc) also changes how effective testosterone is. Anyway, I think fundamentally what you're looking for is an explanation of hormone differences between men and women as well as the function of those hormones.

[Cup of Dirt]

Speaking of women in the military, the NY Times had an article a few days ago: link.

From the article:

Their success, widely known in the military, remains largely hidden from public view. In part, this is because their most challenging work is often the result of a quiet circumvention of military policy.

Women are barred from joining combat branches like the infantry, armor, Special Forces and most field artillery units and from doing support jobs while living with those smaller units. Women can lead some male troops into combat as officers, but they cannot serve with them in battle.

Yet, over and over, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army commanders have resorted to bureaucratic trickery when they needed more soldiers for crucial jobs, like bomb disposal and intelligence. On paper, for instance, women have been “attached” to a combat unit rather than “assigned.”

This quiet change has not come seamlessly — and it has altered military culture on the battlefield in ways large and small. Women need separate bunks and bathrooms. They face sexual discrimination and rape, and counselors and rape kits are now common in war zones. Commanders also confront a new reality: that soldiers have sex, and some will be evacuated because they are pregnant.

Nonetheless, as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women have done nearly as much in battle as their male counterparts: patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, disposed of explosives, and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads. They have proved indispensable in their ability to interact with and search Iraqi and Afghan women for weapons, a job men cannot do for cultural reasons. The Marine Corps has created revolving units — “lionesses” — dedicated to just this task.

A small number of women have even conducted raids, engaging the enemy directly in total disregard of existing policies.

Often, the arguments against social progress in the military go something like, "Sure, us enlightened civilians are totally on board with equality and everything, but military units need a certain amount of bigotry to do what they do (God bless 'em)." But according to the article, the military is out in front of civilian politics -- units on the ground are semi-openly bending the rules to get woman service members closer to combat. Not out of charity, but out of simple pragmatism. So, Jessica, not exactly what you're looking for, but it is a refutation of some common wisdom about what women aren't good at.

[Woegjiub]

I don't know that you'll be able to find empirical evidence of the differences between the two, but through casual observations, one can conclude that:

Excluding a very small percentage of women, men have far higher testosterone levels.
Testosterone leads to muscle growth, increased sexual drive, increased aggression, etc etc...
For this reason, a male and a female who do the same activities will get significantly varying results, meaning females have to be more dedicated to attain the same results as their male counterparts.
(This is why I refer to male weightlifting as "easy mode" - Natural steroids :p)
Sure, I know a few females who are stronger than me, but after only a year of weightlifting as a male, and being considered intermediate at best, my lifts would be considered "elite" for a female.
http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifti ... dards.html
Somebody above asked about female bodybuilders.
For a female to get to bodybuilder size, they *have* to take steroids. Certainly, the same is true of most males, but looking up "natural bodybuilders", you can see that males are able to become far larger than females, due to the natural advantage of testosterone.
Similarly, it's very easy to obtain a sixpack as a male (trust me). For a female to get a sixpack, her bodyfat percentage has to be lowered to a dangerously low level, meaning it's very rare.

Society also plays a large role, as was mentioned above - it's "wrong" for a female child to wrestle, but if they're male, it's just "playing".
Conversely, males are highly discouraged from embarking upon "female endeavors" such as playing with dolls, using make-up, etc.
Someone mentioned that there's still sexism against females because they aren't allowed combat roles in the army.
There's also sexism against males. Females are allowed to wear any form of clothing, and it is socially acceptable. However, if a male wants to wear a dress, they are persecuted for being "gay".
If a female is raped, it is a heinous crime (which is true), but if it's a male? He "probably wanted it", or was "too weak, needs to shrug it off".

[Vaniver]

But according to the article, the military is out in front of civilian politics

This is mostly old news. Which came first, desegregation of the Army or of schools?

[mister k]

Edited to make me look like less of a patronising arse.

One thing that might be useful would be feminism 101, a useful blog to point people who don't understand feminism or the concepts of privelege:

http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com ... q-roundup/

and in particular

http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com ... t-obvious/

is on this very subject. There's a lot of good stuff out there. Sorry if you've seen this.

[Lucrece]

I don't know that you'll be able to find empirical evidence of the differences between the two, but through casual observations, one can conclude that:

Excluding a very small percentage of women, men have far higher testosterone levels.
Testosterone leads to muscle growth, increased sexual drive, increased aggression, etc etc...
For this reason, a male and a female who do the same activities will get significantly varying results, meaning females have to be more dedicated to attain the same results as their male counterparts.
(This is why I refer to male weightlifting as "easy mode" - Natural steroids :p)
Sure, I know a few females who are stronger than me, but after only a year of weightlifting as a male, and being considered intermediate at best, my lifts would be considered "elite" for a female.
http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifti ... dards.html
Somebody above asked about female bodybuilders.
For a female to get to bodybuilder size, they *have* to take steroids. Certainly, the same is true of most males, but looking up "natural bodybuilders", you can see that males are able to become far larger than females, due to the natural advantage of testosterone.
Similarly, it's very easy to obtain a sixpack as a male (trust me). For a female to get a sixpack, her bodyfat percentage has to be lowered to a dangerously low level, meaning it's very rare.

Society also plays a large role, as was mentioned above - it's "wrong" for a female child to wrestle, but if they're male, it's just "playing".
Conversely, males are highly discouraged from embarking upon "female endeavors" such as playing with dolls, using make-up, etc.
Someone mentioned that there's still sexism against females because they aren't allowed combat roles in the army.
There's also sexism against males. Females are allowed to wear any form of clothing, and it is socially acceptable. However, if a male wants to wear a dress, they are persecuted for being "gay".
If a female is raped, it is a heinous crime (which is true), but if it's a male? He "probably wanted it", or was "too weak, needs to shrug it off".

I wonder, do guys get the same privilege as females to keep the small ponytail hair-length? All I see in makes are shaved heads, which strikes me as a double-standard. In combat roles or positions where you have to keep your head shaved to avoid lice due to limited hygiene, I can understand. But in places where hygiene is readily available, why do females get to keep their hair while males cannot?

Just wondering, though; I don't want this to turn into a silly "well, men are oppressed too, so your womanly problems are not unique nyah nyah!"

[EnderSword]

That part is more about conformity than anthing else, its more psychological shaving off your old identity etc...
I assume there was some pressure from female groups resisting the shaving of the head and they just decided they wouldn't press the issue and make them.

[sound19k]

I think I can shed some light on the topic of women in the military, specifically in combat. Here we go:

We have women serving in what the media likes to claim as 'combat' for a couple reasons. The first, and most important is that the conflict on the ground is isometric, i.e. there are no front lines. Insurgents strike at targets of opportunity, which could very well be a supply and logistics convoy from one major FOB to another, or in the case of the 507th Maintenance Company and Jessica Lynch (remember her, anyone?) a bunch of ill-trained National Guardsmen lost in Baghdad. The Army officially sanctions women in support roles - small arms repairers, administrative specialists, chemical technicians, cook, mechanic...ect and these female soldiers must get from point A to point B somehow. If that 'somehow' is a ground convoy and it becomes a target for an insurgent strike, then those women in the convoy are now in 'combat'.

The second reason is because of the MP Corps, which is not a combat arms MOS (Military Occupational Specialty), but whose role is predominantly convoy escort of civilian contractor supply trucks. These convoys are targets, and so the women of the MP Corps end up seeing quite a bit of action. As for EOD - Explosive Ordinance Disposal, Google Sgt. Stumpy and read all about this 22 year old woman who now lives without either of her arms. Was that combat? Depends on how you classify combat. The Army classifies it as 'direct or indirect fire from the enemy'. The vagueness comes into play when you ask what is direct or indirect fire? Who is the enemy?

The only times I've ever seen women surreptitiously attached into a combat role is when a female interpreter is needed, or when a female soldier is needed to search local national women. And even then, the 'combat role' is oppressively over-hyped. I've seen one female MP conduct a 'raid' on a few houses, but she was a bomb-sniffing dog handler, and hung out around the trucks while we kicked doors in. I mean, I don't want to take anything away from female soldiers, but I cringe when I think that the civilian public is getting inaccurate data thrown at them from name brand news. As far as the haircut, gender identity, conformity... it is against regulation for a female to shave her head. Sure is. I have no idea why. I'm a fan of the idea.

Anyway, I guess Jessica, when some asshole says: "You throw like a girl" you should aim for their face. I doubt the type of people who say 'you throw like [inset weaker organism here] are really going to be moved by your complex physiological data. I think they're going to say 'you research shit like a girl'. Then laugh.

[Zamfir]

The first, and most important is that the conflict on the ground is isometric, i.e. there are no front lines.

Do you have any idea, by the way, how the word isometric came to be used in that meaning?

[sound19k]

Hm. It would appear I meant asymmetric. Blame the sleep deprivation.

[General_Norris]

We really don't need this to become a debate about feminism. -Az

[cathrl]

Something I read asserted that some of the differences existent in the average male and female have to do with upbringing. Boys typically engage in rigorous athletics from an early age, especially in their developmental periods. So while a girl has had to invest quite some time in learning how to perfect her hair, how to dress, put on make-up; a boy will have spent a large part of his years working his physique.

This really doesn't hold up, though, when you consider sports and activities which girls do preferentially, and in which all the social pressure is on boys not to do them.

Take ice (figure) skating. Highly desireable female activity; far fewer boys take it up than girls, and the common image of a boy who does it is that they are sissy and/or gay. You'd think that the demographic would be for lots of sporty girls at the top end of the bell curve, and for the boys to be average or even below - why do a sport for which you are ridiculed when you can do one for which you will be feted? It's also a sport which requires vast amounts of training time to get to the top regardless of gender - it's not like the boys are getting fit outside their skating while the girls are slobbing in front of the TV.

But the hardest jumps in the sport are done only by men. Almost no women have a triple axel - only a couple have ever landed one. All the top men have one, and most have at least one quadruple jump as well.

[Cup of Dirt]

The only times I've ever seen women surreptitiously attached into a combat role is when a female interpreter is needed, or when a female soldier is needed to search local national women. And even then, the 'combat role' is oppressively over-hyped. I've seen one female MP conduct a 'raid' on a few houses, but she was a bomb-sniffing dog handler, and hung out around the trucks while we kicked doors in. I mean, I don't want to take anything away from female soldiers, but I cringe when I think that the civilian public is getting inaccurate data thrown at them from name brand news. As far as the haircut, gender identity, conformity... it is against regulation for a female to shave her head. Sure is. I have no idea why. I'm a fan of the idea.

Thanks for the excellent post. I guess I shouldn't assume I know something about gender in the military because I read a newspaper article.

[Lucrece]

I see the ban on head shaving for women as having a double purpose:

- Perpetrate appearance stereotypes to which people are accustomed to; they don't want to offend anyone with unorthodox female appearance. Or with some bastardly army chaplains and old brass, "look lesbian".

-Avoid passing off as male while being female. She can bind her chest shave her head, and some women might actually be able to pass off as a guy without close scrutiny. This might go against keeping the sexes segregated.

[Nadja]

Just wondering... hypothetically, would your ideal experiment be to compare populations of males vs. females who were raised identically (i.e. without societal gender cues)?

Are you looking for physical differences in particular (you mentioned strength), as behavioral measures as well?

[mosc]

Doesn't the subject here have nothing to do with the current state of the gender gap in the job world and more to do with the actual difference in biology and capability?

I mean, today's military has very high damage weapons that require very little strength to use (guns). Now if we're talking broadswords, I'm going to have to say gender plays a role. Firing a rifle though, not so much. Isn't that more the subject and not what the US military does or doesn't do atm?

[Enuja]

I think that elite sports and weight lifting are two very special cases that are inappropriately seen as representative of gender difference. In elite sports, only the very best men and women participate. In sports that depend on physical strength, the best men will be stronger than the best women, which currently makes our whole society think that "men" are better than "women" in these sports. But, for most of of us, who don't even play our very favorite sports more than 3 or 4 hours a week and certainly don't train our bodies to be better for our chosen sport, the individual differences in skill level, dedication, time spent with the sport, and the like are much more important than the average biological differences between men and women. For weight lifting, high testosterone levels make training effects (getting stronger due to training) much more powerful. But this is also irrelevant to most of real life, because excelling at sports and carrying chairs and tables and the like are mostly improved by knowing what you're doing and being smart about it, not by being strong.

This was probably emphasized to be by learning AiKoDo with large and unskilled people and some small and very skilled people. You switch partners all of the time, and you learn how much individual difference is much, much more important than any sort of group identity.

For person to person interaction, the question is not "Are men different than women?" but "Who is better at/more interested in this particular task from the set of people in front of me?" It doesn't matter how much testosterone is floating in his very much stronger muscles, between my spouse and I, I'm a much better choice to kill something or to do any kind of mechanical task. Finding and presenting research about gender differences is quite irrelevant when dealing with people who want to stereotype you, especially as it emphasizes group identity.

If people like to stereotype, unfortunately, there isn't a way to stop them. You can tell them to treat you as you instead of as a "women" or a member of some other category, but if they think that stereotyping is useful and important (a surprisingly large number of people do), there is nothing you can do to stop them.



Edited to add:
The point of my post is that all of these detailed thought experiments and comparison to elite sport and strength training does nothing but encourage the categorization of people by gender or sex. While I am happy to discuss both physiology and culture where appropriate, it does not make sense to me to use thought experiments about the differences between men and women in this thread. So I will simply restate that it is a much more effective approach learn about the individual characteristics of people in front of you, instead of categorizing them and comparing the categories. (In other words, I'm not taking the bait, EnderSword and athelas.)

[EnderSword]

But, for most of of us, who don't even play our very favorite sports more than 3 or 4 hours a week and certainly don't train our bodies to be better for our chosen sport, the individual differences in skill level, dedication, time spent with the sport, and the like are much more important than the average biological differences between men and women

If you tested that though, wouldn't you expect to see a difference?
If you took 100 males at random and 100 females at random and they all played some sport 4 hours a week each, and we then tested their performance in those sports, wouldn't the men on average outperform the women?

Some women would be better than some men, but at a given level of training, the men would outperform significantly on average.
Something like weightlifting you'd likely have 80% of the men better than the top 10% of women.
At a fixed training level, you'd still see men outperform as a group.

[athelas]

This is true; if you have two groups that are normally distributed in some variable, such as strength, and there is a relatively small difference in the means, if you go up several standard deviations you'll find a much more skewed ratio. So there will be many more very strong men than very strong women, but there will be only a few more moderately strong men than moderately strong women, etc.

Doesn't mean the differences aren't there, however. And usually where these differences matter - in job placement, for example - you are looking at the best of the best along some criterion. So keep that in mind.

[mosc]

Sports are not a small facet of human life. I'm trying to dig up some more figure but there must be tens of millions of student athletes in the US alone. The vast majority are in gender divided sports and they are divided due to general aptitude differences. It's hardly a small footnote in the activities of humanity. Sport is also probably our single largest recreational activity, especially if you include just simply watching. How many of us have not watched a sporting event in the past month?

[aneeshm]

A disproportionate number of men being represented at the top levels of mathematics can't be attributed solely to the larger male variance in IQ, since social factors are likely playing a part in it as well.

Funnily enough, it's possible to determine whether or not social factors play a role by doing the maths, and seeing if our expected value for the male:female ratio, given a cut-off of N standard deviations above, matches the actual values in elite university departments. If it turns out that the actual ratio is greater than the predicted ratio, we would have some social analysis to do. If not, then everything is as expected.

[Me321]

Ok sorry for reviving a dead thread, but I am.

First we all have to agree that there are differences between men and women, other than just the obvious, these differences generally have men being stronger and seen as the protector and the bread winner, and women are seen as the housewife and more involved with raising the children, regardless of why you think this happens, it does, so why does it happen?

First let’s assume that to start out the male and female genders were equal in every aspect except for childbirth, now for my example, assume this is true for a group of humans in the Stone Age.

you are the leader of this group of 200 stone age villagers(not counting you for ease of math, and all old enough or young enough to fight and to reproduce, again for ease of math), your tribe has had problems with a nearby tribe, the only way to continue your tribe, and even expand it is to fight (all other options have been exhausted) now you know that to win the fight you need to send 100 of your villagers and you know that 50 will die to save the village, so who do you send?
Now this problem is assuming that all fighting skills are the same and the deaths will be distributed evenly.

Now this is my solution and its impact on the group over time:
(Note birthrate per year is = to # of women, for ease of math 1 child per year,)

Sent into battle..........Survive.....Total population...Birthrate per year............long term effects on the population
50 M 50 W...............25 M 25 W.......75 M 75 W............75..................because the weakest die the population gets stronger
100 men.................50 M...............50 M 100W...........100................strongest men survive reproduce more with attractive women
100 women..............50 W............100 M 50 W...........50..................strongest women survive men compete to mate, outcome?

Now if I were the chief of the tribe I would send all 100 men to fight so that my population can grow at the same rate as before (if the surviving men have 2 wives, to maintain the 100 children per year possibility), the result of this is that the strong men survive, and choose to reproduce with one of the 2 wives they have a few time more based on looks, ability to care for a child, or some other instinctual impulse, the eventual result due to natural selection is the stereotypical gender roles of today.

Does anyone else see the logic in this or am I crazy?

[Enuja]

You've revived a thread looking for evidence in order to add your personal speculation?

Problems with your speculation include: 1) Early human groups probably didn't have chiefs to just make these decisions. 2) Gathering was probably a much better way to get food than hunting was in many hunting/gathering societies. 3) A women not hunting does not equal "being protected" (it equals "not going out to do something stupid and risky," but gathers still have to protect themselves and the children). 4) We know from archeology and anthropology that different hunter/gather societies were structured very differently (our ancestors didn't just make one set of decisions that had one set of evolutionary outcomes). 5) The cultural ideal of women = homemaker and man = breadwinner is a super-recent Western culture invention. In Europe and American before the Industrial Revolution, marriages were economic alliances and the creation of a household economic unit where both members "worked" hard in the home/farm. Women as "homemaker" was part of the devaluation of household work as men left the home and worked in factories and as professionals.

There was a Scientific American article about fallacies of the type of story telling sociobiology you did above (here's a link to a teaser, but the rest of the article is behind a pay wall). Feel free to make as many speculative hypotheses as you'd like, but be aware that they are speculative hypotheses, that the human mind didn't evolve once for a particular hunter/gatherer system, but instead has been, and continues to be, under lots of different evolutionary pressures, and that a psychological tests can't distinguish between cultural constructions, recently evolved biological drives, and older biological drives.