Letters to the Editor
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Ever hear of scientific method?
Um, did you folks read the paper (not the press release)?
Hey, progressives can't dismiss scientific findings they don't like -- and then take the right to task for doing just that.
I just scanned the paper, and I think this was a very well conducted study. It involved thousands of people, and found age as well as gender and sexual orientation had significant effects on people's skills -- *on average*. The paper is very honest about admitting that they didn't (couldn't, really) study *why*. It's limited in scope, but perfectly valid as far as it goes.
In my household we have two excellent navigators (me and my daughter), a decent but easily disoriented one (my generally brilliant wife) and someone who gets lost going around the corner (my son). So what? That's just our family, and that has nothing to do with the population at large -- and vice versa.
Applying scientific method (testing a hypothesis against a large sample) can sometimes tell us stuff that goes counter to our worldview. But we shouldn't dismiss it or start ad hominem attacks against the scientists in response. Unless we want to be as bad as the Bushies and the religious right.
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I guess I must be a man in disguise
Where is my penis? I don't seem to have one. What could have happened to it? And what about these funny squishy lumps on my chest? The ones men love to stare at even AFTER my breast reduction.
In spite of these odd physical problems, I spent my childhood hunched over math books teaching myself algebra and calculus, I taught myself special and general relativity in college, and I am pretty fracking good at finding places on maps.
So according to this research, there's no way in hell I could possibly be a woman.
Wait until I tell my husband he's been sleeping with a man for 21 years. Is he ever going to freak!!!!
I'll probably have to roast him a nice sustainably farmed chicken to calm him down.
Oh yeah I do that pretty well too.
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something i noticed with the test
I realize that this could be just another case of one exception against the statistics... but I scored higher than either the male or female average on every single part of this test except for 'systemizing,' which is apparently a male trait. I am, according to the criteria of this test, more male than male and more female than female... or maybe I'm slightly more intelligent than average. Anyway, considering that this skew makes me score higher on both typically male and typically female aptitudes, I would have assumed that the test would place me right in the middle- an androgynous brain. Instead it determined I had a 'male' brain! Not to nitpick too much, but doesn't this equate 'smart' with 'masculine'?
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wutang, ever hear of stereotype pressure?
There are a lot of science nerds in science schools who do not care about statistical averages and the greater population blah blah blah when they take these studies and use them to exert sterotype pressure on the highly skilled women trying to study science along them.
I myself was subjected to stereotyped crap over this study by a professor of solid state physics who ought to have known better, being a scientist himself.
Hurtful crap that almost made me walk about of a dinner party quite rudely.
A certain population of gender-obsessed males use this kind of study to apply stereotype pressure to exceptional math-talented women in their professional environment, to try to hurt those women emotionally and cram those women back into their hallowed fucking math-incapable norms.
I've had this kind of shit used on me so many times I really want to puke just thinking about it.
I am great at math, I have wonderful spatial skills, I never get lost when I drive except for one occasion, when Mapquest told me to exit from a freeway exit that had been closed for repair.
I am so goddamned sick of "men of science" who take studies like this and try to use them to intimidate me out of being MYSELF!
It happens. You wouldn't believe how many men who really should know better end up using these kinds of studies in completely unscientific ways, to intimidate the math-skilled women around them.
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To: "man in disguise"
In spite of these odd physical problems, I spent my childhood hunched over math books teaching myself algebra and calculus, I taught myself special and general relativity in college, and I am pretty fracking good at finding places on maps.
So according to this research, there's no way in hell I could possibly be a woman.
So according to your post, you failed statistics? Or just applied math? For example, in this logically consistent world of yours, does the fact that the average height of a woman is less than that of a man negate the existence of the WNBA?
Just wondering.
(Can we have some honest discussion about this paper yet?)
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Maybe the trolls were taking the test and skewing the results...
Well, I did actually take a look at the paper and there does seem to be several problems
1. This is not a controlled study. Responses were collected over the internet. I am not convinced that makes it a valid study
2. While the paper discusses differences in mean scores between genders and ages and sexual orientation, I did not see anything on differences within each category. So men as a group outperformed women as a group in some areas and vice vesa. But what does the distribution look if you consider just the men or just the women? Are there overlaps between the groups? If the distributions are sharp bell curves then there might be something to look at in terms of gender differences. But studies like these usually tend to have flat wide bell curves - and if that is the case here then sexual differences alone cannot explain the results.
Having said that, I find myself in a position agreeing with many of the "trolls" - these results have nothing to do with how Ms. Lloyd or any of the individual letter writes would perform on the test. Isn't this what feminists have been arguing for a long time when it came to studies on cognitive differences?
And BTW, I did not have the patience to complete the test - so can someone explain to me what the "clasp your hands to see which thumb is over the other" test was doing in there? In our all girls's school, our biology teacher made us go through that experiment to explain dominant/recessive genes. Most of us had our left thumb on top - as that is supposedly the dominant gene. What does this have to do with left/right brain??