Letters to the Editor
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the reason all acknowledgement of gender difference must be vigorously suppressed
is that once you open that door it may be possible for someone somewhere to argue that a male might think a thought different from a female for some reason other than that he is trying to oppress her or that there is something wrong with him. Obviously this won't do.
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I resemble that study
I spent the last weekend getting hopelessly and repeatedly lost while driving around Boise Idaho for the first time. I asked for instructions plenty of times, but it was as though I could not hear or process them. Luckily my twelve year old son, who has a great sense of direction, helped me navigate.
I don't think I had ever experienced anything like that before. I have driven in strange cities with relative ease in the past. I am not sure what has changed (and I hope it's only temporary) but I sure was in the grips of some sort of road cluelessness.
I don't know there is any gender thing here. I think Carol's point about mom being the co-pilot (which I usually am) is probably a valid one. I think that some moms I know tend to be a bit more involved in the activities inside the car and a little less involved with things outside of the car, but that might apply to some dads too. And as for me, I am not so good at orienting to north and south when I am driving, but I don't think that's a girl thing.....
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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.
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test results, if anyone's interested :)
Well, that was interesting.
I feel blechy right now (lupus headache) so I figured I would score badly across the board.
Instead I maxed out the angles test and the rotation test (which I thought I was doing poorly on, since it felt hard to me while I was doing it), and scored in the top range of the spot the differences test.
No surprises on the empathizing/sympathizing thing, since this is essentially the same measurement as Myers/Briggs Feeling/Thinking, and I score a solid X on that test. Identical scores on the two halves in this test, too, both somewhat higher than average.
On the other hand, I have girly fingers, a preference for extremely masculine faces, and good scores in the reading emotions and verbal fluency tests. (The verbal fluency test as a measure of masculine/feminine strikes me as very fucked up, since it's going to be extremely influenced by education.)
Now, I probably score highly on a lot of these tests because they directly measure things I do everyday - building 3d models of faces out of lines and shapes, for example, and writing dialogue for games. I'm not sure it's fair to test someone on something they practice regularly and compare it to the score of someone who never does this sort of task.
I'm gonna make my husband take it - he's far better at rotating things in real life than I am (since I ask him for help when I have problems with a model, I know this) and he has extremely masculine finger length. On the other hand, he's generally known as an extremely empathetic and not very male-oriented guy - the guy who prefers hanging around with the "Bitches Guild" to hanging out with other guys.
In response to the discussion about statistics: Yep, the danger with any statistic is that people try to misuse it. An average is not predictive of the characteristics of an individual, period. If you give people a concrete example, this becomes obvious. Let's say that men, on average, are taller than women. Bob is a man and Mary is a woman. Bob is therefore taller than Mary, right? Except Bob is 5'6" and Mary is 5'9"! No one with sense would use average height as a predictor of the height of a specific person, but for some reason, smart, educated people will use a 10% variation in average skill based on sex to make sweeping statements like "Men are not empathetic" or "Women are bad at spacial visualization."
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and, for my husband
Two oddities:
First, he scored very low on the "empathizer" questions, but maxed out the test on which eyes showed which emotions, which is also supposed to be a measure of empathy. So... is he empathetic or not? He certainly appears to be empathetic to those who live with him.
Second, he maxed out the 3d rotational test (no surprise) but did very poorly on the angles test. I note that although he visualizes things in 3d for a living, he can't navigate worth a crap. Maybe the angles test is more indicative of navigational ability (it's a sense of direction he lacks, his map reading skills are fine) than the rotational one.