Can anyone suggest why girls at 6 change their view of girls' ability to be brilliant?

Yes the infamous "testosterone spike" which supposedly happens at round about 7 to 9 years old was a factoid (i.e. not true) made up by Steve Biddulph. When he came on here for a web chat, those of us who are research scientists by trade repeatedly asked him for a citation in the peer-reviewed literature to back up this throwaway comment in his books, and he repeatedly refused to answer.

Boys don't have a testosterone boost at that age, their testosterone stays level until they approach puberty.

Maybe it is nature and not nurture. Maybe boys get a testosterone boost at that age that makes them more confident.

IME (sorry to generalise) boys and men do seem to be more confident in their abilities and more certain about their decisions. This is not always a good thing. There is often a good reason to question your decisions and think twice. For example, I believe it is now understood that you live longer if you have a female GP and outcomes are better for female physicians across the board.

www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/12/female-doctors-superiority/511034/

It's interesting.

I don't think it does boys any favours to think they are marvellous. It's delusional and it can bite them in the bum later on in life.

Thanks Morphene .

I think the question of how someone pops out the womb and ends up socialized and identifying with the opposite gender is fascinating. Unfortunately its very hard to discuss without pissing people off.

ppeatfruit if innate differences are SOOOO powerful how come their are female engineers and male nursery workers?

Bullshit argument I'm afraid. All this only applies to averages in the groups. The tiny innate difference between male and female children is far smaller than the range of difference between individuals. The massive difference between socialization of male and female children is still smaller than the range of difference between individuals.

Hence the innate difference in the proportion of male and female babies drawn to trucks versus dolls is small and it is perfectly easy to find girls who prefer trucks and boys who prefer dolls, and the socialized difference is larger, but it is still perfectly easy though somewhat rarer to find girls who prefer trucks and boys who prefer dolls.

I am 100% female, as I'm a woman. If you mean none of us conform to gender constructs 100% then I agree with you. People have their own personalities which include aspects that will be classified as masculine or feminine depending on the culture that you're in.

Well yes forgive me for being dense , I don't understand ! DS had a friend who had 2 bothers and one of them decided from very early that he wanted to be girl, He wore a jumper as a sort of wig to make his hair seem long and dresses when he could. Of course there is gender but that varies within us all, none of us is 100% male or female I know that.

D values again.

No one denies that humans are sexually dimorphic. The d value for height, for instance, is about 2.

In contrast, for any statistically significant small cognitive difference which has been measured (e.g. age at which a child's vocabulary reaches 50 words, say), the d values are tiny - less than 0.5. In other words the differences between individuals of a given sex absolutely swamps the difference between the means of the two populations. And (see, for instance, references passim in neuroscientist Lise Elliott's book Pink Brain, Blue Brain), given plasticity in neurological development in the first five years, it is impossible to attribute these (tiny) differences to nature or nurture.

ppeatfruit I don't understand what you're getting at? I think you're asking why socialisation doesn't make everyone heterosexual, and why socialisation doesn't prevent people from being transgender?

And you appear to be conflating sex with gender. Which devalues your opinions enormously.

La

Given that you're an expert on primate models of behaviour explaining human behaviour, can you tell me why both of those studies have been heavily criticised?

Jms

Again, welcome to MN. It's so interesting to hear the male perspective on this. Perhaps you might be kind enough to explain why, if what you say is correct all studies bear out MostlyHet's experience that, when tested blind, women's work is suddenly perceived differently? Do you think that the fact that children pick up on is the one you posited? Or the one borne out by extensive research?

Sexual dimorphism is a fact . An undeniable biological fact. Without it the human race would become extinct. It's the reason MOST men want to have sex with women and MOST women want to have sex with men! There are two main genders and gender in the vast majority of people is biologically (not socially) determined!

Several centuries!!! Surely a generation is all you need to pick out differences! Females have outnumbered males in higher education for a while now and that discrepancy continues to increase! Despite that look at the Nobel laureates across all fields - mostly men!
And I certainly am not saying that women cannot be geniuses - in fact I started off by saying exactly the opposite and I will repeat now - There are many examples of female genius (many of them are hero's or heroines of mine) but the fact is the vast majority of geniuses across all fields are male. And this continues to be the case despite the massive social changes over the last 50 years and despite women forming the majority of people in education for the last generation and being at least equal in number for the last 3 or 4 generations.

I still don't understand why , if socialisation is SOOOO powerful, ( from within the womb etc etc.) there are any gay people at all or people who have the urge to be a different sex.

And the flip side is that women serial killers are rare- I did read a study that linked testosterone to "drive"- the desire to get things, which is why men are billionaires and murderers; but I can't remember where it was.

jms's blithe dismissal reminds me of one of the great educational achievements of my undergrad physics tutor (FRS, professor of astrophysics, woman...)

The "received wisdom" in my university had pretty much matched jms's view: women were dull plodders who got 2.1s and 2.2s, while a lot of men fell in this bracket, they were also the group that got the 1sts and the 3rds (brilliant, or lazy). It appeared that the stats did indeed bear this out - more men than women got 1sts.

Then my tutor pushed very hard to get blind marking introduced, so exam markers no longer knew whether the scripts they were marking were from women or men... and, suddenly, the discrepancy disappeared. Women started getting as many 1sts as men (proportionate to the numbers of women on the course).

Funnily enough, this pattern gets repeated all over the place... Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting chapter in one of his books on introducing blind auditions for orchestral places, where players performed behind a screen. Again, suddenly women started getting appointed to roles (principal trumpet, etc.) that they just hadn't got anywhere near in the past.

Jmslvlc990, I think that until you have had several centuries where women have had equal access to education and work etc, it is not possible to state definitively that women just aren't capable of genius.

Of course girls and women can have brilliance but you have to apply a level of reality and admit that most brilliant, exceptional geniuses, either physically or mentally tend to be male. Males provide the best and worst exams of humanity. Look the exceptional scientists, athletes, chess players, mathematicians, chefs, fashion designers ...go on and on ... mostly men. It's a fact and children pick up on that. Women have always tended to cluster around the mean on any ability scale and men to the extremes good and bad.

La

So what was the conclusion regarding his preference for a truck? That the design and colour was something that males instinctively like? (Despite those instincts being honed millennia ago). Or that it had some intrinsic purpose, which despite him being entirely unaware of, he somehow innately just knew?

If a monkey is expressing a preference for a traditionally male toy without knowing what it is or what it does (so it's just an object to him) I fail to see how that can in any way be an indication of gendered preference instead of 'ooh colours! bits that move and make a noise'. i.e. something all babies like.

I'm probably not getting it.

Guys' eyes are more sensitive to small details

Unless this includes the grot on the toilet.

The whole nature versus nurture thing is SO boring and misunderstood.

Of course there will be some innate difference between male and female children ON AVERAGE, and of course watching ENDLESS adverts and TV shows which pump out the gender stereotypes in the megawatt power range has a profound effect.

So it is both nature and nurture....like every bloody other thing.

What is interesting is what our assumptions about the nature versus nurture level of influence tells us about our societies preconceptions.

For example what proportion of religious faith do you think is down to nature? What proportion of homosexuality do you think is down to nature? What proportion of intelligence/academic ability do you think is down to nature?

That's the point! He doesn't know it's for boys and he didn't chose it because it's a boys toy., that would defeat the purpose of the experiment. He just chose it because he preferred it, with zero gender bias.

By way of a curve ball...

Look at the magazine stack in the newsagent, (not the supermarket one as they have a more restricted range)

Most publications aimed at women seem to focus on what you look like. They have a picture of a woman on the cover and articles about what clothes to buy. And of course cleb gossip.

Most publications aimed at men focus on what you can do. Fishing, running, hill climbing, train spotting, sailing, football... Then there is the top shelf!!

Elsewhere it is the same. Consider the much seen image of two beautiful women staring lovingly at each other all over the merchandising,,, Frozen. The focus is appearance not action.

How can a little girl be brilliant when she is being given images focussed on looks? Remember women must buy the womens mags or they would not sell.