BoysToys

Maybe evo-bollocks upsets someone else but not me personally. I think the person who said it was discussing how it is used to justify patriarchal constructs. I don't think they were criticising science but pseudo science that explains gender difference. I'm correct in saying that a difference in male/female brains has never been conclusively found? Or at least not to the extent that explains the gender divisions we have in our society.

Please quote specifics.

No, I'm busy. Please read back your posts and evaluate your posting style.

I would say that the data and observations were correct - but that classifying a pot as feminine isn't, and that the conclusions they draw are a flight of fancy and bias, and nothing to do with the data they found.

But that's just me.

Slow - a poster gave a good example just upthread - that there just wasn't a chess club at her all girls school, but there was at the boys school.

How can a girl even know that she's good at chess if she doesn't even get a chance to play? Let alone play against high quality opponents or learn from better players so she could compete?

If you don't get the opportunity to try or improve, how is that not an indirect ban?

How is it not a ban to have the 'real' tournament and the 'womens' tournament? Only very tenacious women would think to go to the non-women's

Perhaps SlowFJH might prefer another example of men not standing in the way of women.

Women's football was highly popular during World War I, drawing crowds of many thousands - 53,000 on one occasion.

In 1921 the FA banned women's football, calling on clubs to refuse the use of their grounds to women.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30329606

But hey, the FA was obviously full of enlightened men being very helpful because in 1971, they lifted the ban. So we must all be jolly grateful for their enlightened attitude.

Op, your posts feel really dismissive and rude. I know earlier you said you weren't intending them to be as such so I just wanted you to know how they're being received by me. Maybe other posters agree.

SlowFJH wrote - "In 1868, when the first FIDA chess tournament was held, do you think a group of chess players got together and said "I know we've only got two women interested out of every 100 entrants... but for God's sake that's two too many!! What can we do?""

In the 19th century, many chess groups deliberately chose to hold their group meetings and tournaments at men-only venues that banned women. So, women were deliberately, though indirectly, excluded from chess tournaments.

Not that I agree with the paper at all.

Especially classifying a pot as feminine. That's just bizarre - every single kid in the world, when put in a bath, wants pots to pour water between, every single person in the world (pretty much) uses pots to eat from and put things in - there is nothing inherently feminine about a plastic pot (frying pan, whatever it actually was)

And there's plenty more holes to shoot in it come to that - that perhaps the male monkeys were bigger so got first pick, that since as Lweji pointed out we didn't descend from these monkeys but both descended together, how can things that a monkey do reliably relate to humans etc.

That is why it's evo-bollocks.

Agree with GTJ.

Yeah, I know, we've all been on the planet evolving - the common ancestor we both branched off from :)

it's gone a bit weird, but I think that keeping things strictly correct is the expected with this one - I don't think little mistakes can be allowed to slide so good catch!

that because the monkeys, who branched off the tree before us exhibit this behaviour, that explains how we, who branched off later

We branched off from each other. Monkeys are literally just as evolved as we are.
Just saying.
What you mean is branched off the human line of ascent. And anthroponotic view.
Is it relevant? The thread is already bonkers anyway...

Are we reading the same abstract that I quoted?

It says that their results, that female monkeys preferred the frying pan suggest that preference for these things evolved before humanity did - ie, it's been baked in before humans were humans, and in the same way, the male monkeys preferred the ball.

That's what evolution is - that because the monkeys, who branched off the tree before us exhibit this behaviour, that explains how we, who branched off later also exhibit that behaviour - ie. women like frying pans, and look our precursor female monkeys like frying pans - it's innate!

Honestly, I just don't think you're understanding the point that opportunity is just as important as rules.

Also if you think a woman doesn't know exactly how it'll go if she walks into a club full of men desperate for female company, then you're wilfully blind to how the world works

"It is a scientific study. If you feel the researchers have falsified their result.."

I NEVER said anything like that! Honestly, try thinking a bit before you post! I was criticising the DESIGN of the experiment and the interpretation, not claiming anyone falsified anything.

And if you knew anything about science, you'd know that implying that someone has FALSIFIED anything, or even stating that someone else was accusing someone else of falsifying their results, is about as serious as it gets. You DO NOT bandy words like 'falsifying the results' about in scientific circles unless you are really, REALLY sure.

So, I think it was a poorly-designed study, I think there were too many variables that were not separated out, but I also think that the experiments are probably a bit constrained by the fact that they have to(?) use actual kids toys. Later experiments, which go for a plush/movable split, but frankly, couldn't you do plush/hard, movable versus non-movable (and make a furry police car, in both pink and blue), and so on, rather than mixing it all up with a hard, blue, police car being compared to a pink, fluffy toy bunny........

Or would the monkey enclosure then be so full of toys that they couldn't find anything :-)

"I am assuming it is peer reviewed in order to be a reputable one. But I am not sure." Rather an ODD comment, given that despite the fact that their website seems rather slow, it only took me a few clicks to find the 'Guide for Authors' (It didn't, my browser hung!) -- Wikipedia says it is peer-reviewed, so it MUST be true!

Actually, I'm rather more perturbed by their statement that they encourage submissions from scholars in the humanities! Sorry, but proper boundaries MUST be maintained between scientists and lesser mortals. Can't have these damn people who don't even know how to performs student's t-test infecting the pages of our august journals.................. :-)

As regards chess, apparently checkers/draughts still has a separate womens world championship. If this is just for encouragement, or because evolutionary biology means females are less able when it comes to manipulating objects meaningfully on a black/white board, I don't know (maybe a red/pink board would produce better results.........)

They didn't always need to explicitly ban women to keep us out, and the 'very few' argument doesn't always work either. Although some explicit bans were amazingly long-lived. I just think of dear Philippa Fawcett, from Newnham College, who scored THIRTEEN percent higher than the next best in the lists in the Maths Tripos, yet was still not given the title of Senior Wrangler (males only), or awarded a degree (took until 1948, a month before her death).

From the paper:
"The six toys were a ball, a police car, a soft doll, a cooking pot, a picture book and a stuffed dog. These toys were categorized as “masculine” toys, “feminine” toys, or “neutral” toys on the basis of evidence that boys are more interested than girls in balls and cars (the “masculine” toy set), girls are more interested than boys in dolls and pots (the “feminine” toy set), and boys and girls are approximately equally interested in books and stuffed animals (the “neutral” toy set) "

So this seems okay in that the cooking pot is tagged as 'feminine' because kids say it is (As a result, we would assume, of their socialisation?), but I'm still confused as to why the female vervets prefered it? After all, they don't know it is a cooking implement! Perhaps, since female vervets apparently have a greater liking for reddish-pink, then perhaps the issue is that the pan was red? But what about the police car? Did the male vervets prefer it because it could be used in active play, or because they may prefer blue/green to reddish pink? Would a reddish-pink police car have been as attractive to female vervets as the red pan?

I could totally understand the 'females prefer cooking cos evolution' line that I often heard as a result of this paper. But there seem to be too many variables here, they didn't know if males preferred cars cos movement, or males preferred cars cos blue, or females preferred the cooking pan because it was a better choice for whalloping an annoying male over the head with it..............

Chess teacher although he obviously plays as well.

Does anyone remember that study that concluded that women naturally prefer pink, because they would be ones collecting berries (conveniently forgetting the fact that most wild berries in this country are blackberries).

My dad is a chess player and his younger female pupils are as interested as boys in the game. They tend to lose interest as pre-teens, when peer pressure kicks in. I think it is far more socially acceptable for boys to continue with special interests into adulthood

I said earlier that I was a member of a chess club at my all-girls school. The group was made up only of girls in my math's class in year 9. I believe the teacher put a stop to it in Year 10 when we sat our GCSE. Not many of us knew how to play before, it wasn't something we'd ever been taught at home or school. We were the only people in our school to be involved with chess club. I imagine not many other girls at my school played chess outside of our class and year group.

I know at the corresponding boy's school there was a chess team open to all. I don't doubt that girl's enjoy chess when the chance to play is given to them. I saw that for myself. It would be surprising if us girls outperformed the boy's school in question seeing as they could have been playing chess at school from year 7 onwards.

I don't think I'd seen a game of chess before that time in school, except for maybe in cartoons. If I was good enough to play at a top level, this would put me off:

Most male chess players I know would think they'd died and gone to heaven if they had an influx of female players.

I'd want to play the game. Not be stared at or hit on.