I don’t think they have done a study on the brain structure of newborns, as fMRI is fairly new and I doubt many mothers want to stick their newborn in a machine. I suspect many men would be willing. Is this hereditary or from being formed by your parents and society? I think it is definitely a mix of the three. Can women do math as well as a man? I fully believe this. I’ve seen the amazing DB2 projects my mom has been in charge of for a Fortune 100 company. Women are very logical thinkers, but men are different in the way we pysiologically think.
These differences in the basic brain physiology give augmentation to certain skills for each of the genders, usually. Some skills will be stronger, others weaker, and traits can go across genders.
I do wonder what the physiology of the brain of a hermaphrodite (they are xxy? xyy? something like that) would be, after you guys all got me thinking about this…
I guess Poe’s Law applies in print too, even where it involves well known publications with established perspectives. No wonder foreigners didn’t get this one:
I’ll harumphingly appologize. I’ve been seeing HK show up in pop culture (from the sidelines) since 1976, and I’ve never seen her mouth, any reference to her talking.
I got in touch with my friend, and she asked a colleague of hers as well. The two answers I got to “What would be your odds of telling whether a person was male or female from an MRI” were “I don’t know” and “ummm… no?” These are two people whose PhDs are in MRI research. Apparently my friend actually did a study while in school trying to replicate a study that showed sex differences and the results didn’t match the earlier study at all. From my best sources in the field, you simply can’t tell sex from MRIs (at least, not reliably enough that you people who work with MRIs all day would want to make risk making themselves look foolish by saying they can).
Which is a lot of time for culture to kick in. It’s also a lot of time for hormones to kick in. Which would, again, leave us wondering what “men” and “women” mean in that case.
This could very well be true, IMO. Hormones probably play a bigger part in gender identity than culture, IMO, but both have an effect.
Edit: Actually I wonder about a man’s brain structure after being castrated as a young boy, like they used to do to get soprano(?) men. (I should know opera better, my brother’s wife is an international opera singer and I have no idea what voice(?) she is)
There is however, the unfortunate case of David Reimer whose penis was burned off after a botched circumcision. He was surgically altered as a baby, given female hormones and raised as a girl.
He claimed he never felt like a girl growing up though, and later in life after learning the truth, attempted to come to terms with it, only to commit suicide a few years later. Truly, truly tragic.
That’s not to say culture doesn’t play a part, but I’d guess it varies wildly with individuals. For some it’s predominantly culture, for others predominantly biological, with every stripe inbetween.
Which is to say that there are no simple explanations.
Sounds very sciencey but with your “science” you get to be promoted in your job and I am not.
Many years ago I got frustrated with computer science courses because my programs were always so different from what other people were designing. Later I worked with a supergenius programmer - the guy had gone to Tufts at age 13, been a vp at a major software company in his 20’s - and he told me that thinking differently about programming wasn’t so terrible. In fact, it could have been a great thing for me.
So, so what if women can multi-task and men can’t or vice versa? How does this affect our ability to work on engineering issues? We would just bring different strengths to the problems.we are solving. IMHO, engineering could use a lot more lady design approach.
I think that if we tease culture and biology apart we find the biology is extremely alien. Science is the uncaring stranger. The things we care about are more about how we get along in the world.
Whether or not your legs work is biological, but whether or not you can get to the second floor is cultural (via technological). Legs are just hunks of meat, but there are things on the second floor we want.
I believe this exactly! We all are different in our own ways. I think what I explain in my paper (see my BB profile) about how to engineer a quantum computer is really a woman’s area of engineering, if I may call what I have done, that. As a strait (what are homosexuals, bent?) man, I came up with it though, which i don’t think is a particularly male gender type of physiological thinking.
Edit:BTW it took a deep schizophrenic break that developed over the six months of creating what I did, and I was firing all 10 of my 8 cylinders at full bore and my mind blew. I also managed to come up with it. If you look at the most complicated part, the grenade throwing part, I smoked two bowls of weed and took a shower for 10 minutes, thought about it during that time, came out of the shower and wrote it like it is.
That’s just it. I don’t really think we can to any significant degree. You’d end up with different results for different subjects.
Which leaves us with, as you say, it’s more about how we get along in the world.
The problem with her argument is that programming ability isn’t dependent on mathematical ability (she even points this out herself), and so her reference of the study with the very similar bell curves relating to mathematical ability isn’t really relevant to the debate.
Not that I’m saying the overall gender disparity is a result of biological differences, we don’t really know for sure, not enough studies have been done.
There have been lots of studies that have shown differences in various cognitive abilities though, and I believe it’s reasonable to assume you could design further studies which would find other cognitive abilities that show similar differences (these aren’t studies that show men are cleverer than women or anything like that, in some of the tests the women were outperforming the men).
The reason for these differences probably has very little to do with genetics, though it may play a small role. It’s likely the differences are largely down to the differing levels of hormones developing foetuses have dependent on sex (the genetic factors involved probably have to do with the degree to which the hormones levels affect development or differences in the levels of the hormones themselves, but it could be a very subtle effect).
This is just an educated guess though, early socialisation and education could also play a key role (especially during the key period of maximal neural plasticity up until around 7-10 years old). The studies don’t really say which effect is more important, or maybe that they are equally important. A lot more work needs to be done, but due to the obvious structural differences that we can see from brain imaging (both in terms of individual cognitive areas, and importantly in the bias towards inter-hemisphere connections in women compared to intra-hemisphere connections in men) there is certainly some degree of fixed biological difference.
Of course even if there are relatively fixed neural differences (either due to pre-natal factors or otherwise) they still wouldn’t explain the degree of difference we see in the workplace. Whether the remaining difference is due to outright sexism, or what you might call ‘ambient prejudice’ (cf. the Parable of the Polygons http://ncase.me/polygons/) is open to debate (mostly the latter I would think, though with enough individual examples of the former to be a worry), and maybe pedagogical failings could play a big role too (maybe we need to design coursework to better take into account differing cognitive abilities for example).
This is the kind of issue that needs to be tackled from a lot of different angles, but ruling things out for ideological reasons isn’t helpful, we need to do the science first and see what the real answers are.
Today’s your lucky day to find out something new. As others have tried to tell you, this makes perfect sense.
Suppose, on average, Italian men are very slightly taller than French men. Then you can say that there is a difference between Italian and French heights. But of course the variation within Italian men is much, much higher than the difference between the average Italian man and the average French man.
So, while Italian vs French heights are different, Italian vs Italian heights are more different (to use your slightly-awkward phrasing above).
If you were told the height of a person, you would have no way of knowing if that person were Italian or French.
Likewise with male and female brains. No, you can’t reliably tell a male brain from a female brain in an fMRI.
