Letters to the Editor
-
Regarding statistics
I do sympathize with Anonymous, having been in similar straits in a philosophy department (which is mostly reasoning about words. Go figure). The problem isn't that the statistics don't reflect anything real; it's that they are GENERALIZATIONS. It is incredibly frustrating to have your reasoning ability or your communicative ability judged in terms of statistics about your gender.
The fact that 50%, 60%, or 70% of women score lower than the average man on some test does not mean that I or Ms. Anonymous must assuredly be one of them (I beat the average male score on the spatial test by two items, BTW, and I'm convinced it's because I SEW). Knowing nothing about me but my gender, one could only say that there is a 50%, 60%, or 70% chance that I would score lower than the average man. No one is going to know squat about what I actually do unless they pay attention to me as an individual, which my department chair was in an excellent position to do, but mostly didn't (I actually overheard him say that he thought women and minorities should be in the department because "tolerance is an important virtue". Asshole).
I hate these studies because they feed into people's lazy tendencies to want to treat each other as "man" or "woman" first, and as individuals with widely varying interests and abilities second. That doesn't help anyone: not me, not Ms. Anonymous, nor any of the men I know who face very real obstacles in the female-dominated areas they participate in.