Wonderings about brains and being good at things.

[Ozziegirly]

Following on from the very interesting thread on fewer girls doing A Level Physics than boys, it made me wonder, are there some actual proper built in differences between boys' and girls' brains which make more boys interested in maths/science etc and girls more interested in languages/english etc?

Or does it come down purely to social conditioning from an early age?

Because there seems to be a received wisdom that "girls talk earlier and better, and boys do the physical stuff earlier and better", suggesting that their brains are different, or at least learn differently. I know we can all point to individuals where this doesn't apply, in the same way that we can point to women who are scientists or computer programmers, and men who are midwives and carers, but I'm more talking about the majority, rather than the minority.

So, what do you think? Nature or nurture or a a combination of both?

And if so, I suspect my next question would be; if there are these differences, does it matter if fewer girls are doing physics - so long as the ones who are able and interested are able to do so. If the statistic was turned around and showed that "1/2 of state schools have no boys studying French", would we express the same concern?

Lotta - the toilet comment was from a primary school teacher (though not in school, at a playgroup). She regularly makes comments like that. I die a little inside each time.

I am known as a bit of a feminist nutter though. In my professional environment, it was considered perfectly ok to use the phrases 'man up' and 'cry like a girl'.

Baron-Cohen is extremely selective in his account of what constitutes male or systemising characteristics. he dismisses skill at legal reasoning and analysis as a systemising type skill, for example - well he'd have to, given the numbers of females excelling at law, these days. but in reality the analysis and application of rules is the systemising-type skill par excellence (where both ds and I excel).

It's probably a mixture a nature and nurture whether they are presented in equal measure I don't know and will differ from person to person although although boys or girls would be more likely to lean towards a certain direction and we are speaking in generalities here. There are structural differences between the sexes brains and an array of chemicals and hormones which affect the brain in different ways and they also vary in concentration between the sexes.

Structural differences in brains are caused by environmental factors. Nature/nurture is a transaction, they are too entwined to Seperate and therefore it's virtually impossible to tell whether there are any sex differences in cognition.
But one true factoid is that there are more differences between individuals than between the sexes.

Is there a sex bias in standard IQ tests? Is there a cultural bias?

Studies carried out many years ago (I can't remember where I read it but a long time ago(brain failure) suggested that there was both a cultural and sex bias. Men usually score higher but on average only a couple of points. The same tests were carried out on different people around the world and found that their scores were very low.

It has been found that some isolated tribes in south america do not have words for certain colours or even basics like left and right. So does this make these people less intelligent? I think it simply proves that our range of abilities and to what degree these are developed are primarily determined by environmental factors and social conditioning.

Whatever the difference in the average male/female brain is, it's minimal and is nothing compared to the barrage of social factors at work.

Personally I think that one of the biggest factors in socialisation is that people tend to follow in the footsteps of people like them. If a girl sees that a particular hobby or subject is full of boys then she will be less likely to choose it and vice versa. It is a confidence problem too as girls are told in a myriad of subtle ways that they do not have the brain for technical things and so when they find it hard they give up, whereas a boy might continue because he knows that boys are capable, having an abundance of role models and a lack of messages, ranging from the obvious to the subliminal, that he isn't able.

I don't know why people focus on extremes like autism because that is not where the difference lays, rather it lays in the different experiences of the average boy and the average girl.

Has to be a combination of both, imo. I can't see how physiological differences don't impact on the brain although I also agree that nuture has a huge part to play.

That said, I agree with whoever said that the differences only matter at the extremes of the bell curves. For the vast majority of people the brain differences between a man and a woman can't be picked apart from the nuture influences and I do agree with Uppercut that the absence of evidence doesn't prove anything, it just shows that you haven't designed an experiment that gets to the core of the problem probably because nature and nuture are so intertwined.

For what it is worth, I haven't read Cordelia Fine's book but I did read the exchange of views between her and Baron Cohen in the Psychologist a couple of years ago which did go on for several issues and I have to say he was more convincing than she was but I think that is probably because she took a social psychological approach and Baron Cohen's approach was more scientific. I don't like the' ASD is extreme maleness' argument idea either but the rejection of that idea doesn't necessarily mean the rejection of his findings on gender differences in prenatal and neonatal brains. He also makes the very valid point from a feminist point of view that if we blame social determinisim for the all the differences in gender we are effectively putting some of the blame onto the parents (along with society in general of course) for whatever gender specific weakness like ASDs their children may have which I would have thought is not something we want to be getting into surely?

Why would you assume that a social psychological approach was not as accurate as a scientific one? Especially when you consider that science isn't entirely objective in practice.

Besides, even if you accept Baron Cohen's idea that the extremes of ability and disability belong to men, that still doesn't explain the imbalance that exists in the STEM industries, because the size of that imbalance is much larger than the supposed difference in ability between the average man and average woman.

Maybe, just maybe, part of the difference can be down to the fact that we are still having this conversation after hundreds of years. I don't see anyone endlessly discussing whether or not men have the innate ability to cut it in the physics world. Maybe if they did, we would find boys confidence slipping.

messyisthenewtidy
"Besides, even if you accept Baron Cohen's idea that the extremes of ability and disability belong to men, that still doesn't explain the imbalance that exists in the STEM industries, because the size of that imbalance is much larger than the supposed difference in ability between the average man and average woman. "

On the contrary, I would expect the STEM industries to recruit the cream-of-the-crop from the population. Hence a small gender disparity in the extreme end the IQ spectrum, could reasonably be expected to lead to a non-proportional representation of that 'genius'-rich gender in STEM industries.

messyisthenewtidy
"I don't see anyone endlessly discussing whether or not men have the innate ability to cut it in the physics world. Maybe if they did, we would find boys confidence slipping."

I don't approve of idle speculation regarding 'gender' abilities; someone can either perform or they can't. But as for the reason no questions male abilities in physics? Sir Isaac Newton. Before this descends into a tit-for-tat name game, my point is that whilst there are many brilliant female scientists in this world, the historical backlog of 'genius', particularly in physics, is overwhelmingly male.

"in this world, the historical backlog of 'genius', particularly in physics, is overwhelmingly male."

FFS, do you actually know anything about women's history?! No, of course you don't, why would you? Unless of course you care to seek it out, which if you did you'd end up asking yourself how any woman managed to become a famous scientist at all. Hard to become a famous scientist when you're not allowed an education, or when you've been taught that too much learning will damage your ovaries or that no man will touch you with a barge pole and when you're actually barred from graduating or practising, or conducting your research.

Women weren't supposed to occupy the public domain, it was considered unseemly. All very well for girls to go down the mines to pull the coal but when a middle class woman wanted to go down the mines to analyse the coal for her research, that was unladylike and not allowed.

You see, that's the problem, all that should be in the past but it's not because no one teaches that truth, so girls go on looking back in history and thinking they couldn't do it when in reality it was because they weren't allowed to do it.

I don't understand what 'historical backlog of "genius"' means?

Does she not mean that there's a history of people identify male scientists as 'geniuses' and defining the term based on them?

If so, that's not a million miles off.

It's true there are women scientists who did research now recognized as very good, but who aren't well-known. But it's also true there must have been lots of women who never got past the first hurdle of being told that history was against them and scientific geniuses were men.

And as for your cream of the crop theory, purlease! I work in STEM, and believe me it has less to do with genius and more to do with confidence, personal interest and a love of spurting out confusing acronyms! !

Well mathematical brains are supposed to be good at music and also sewing. Yet maths is seen as a "boy" thing and sewing as a "girl" thing. Not sure about music!

Allpast, quite. I know a Maths whizz who loves nothing more than reading a good knitting pattern.

Surely sewing is only a girl thing because all of these frustrated geniuses had to fill their time somehow, plus someone had to fix up the shirts and make clothes.

I read somewhere that the first women to be accepted into Oxford were not permitted to pass out. So they could study to the same level but they could not be rewarded for it, they were locked away from the men. I wonder why? maybe all that education might have corrupted them!

I think the differences largely lie in nature. The fundamental problem lies in the way the differences are valued. Why is there never an outcry at the lack of men in the arts, the care industry, or number of boys studying beauty therapy? Where is the initiative to get boys interested haidressing?

kim147
"Do you know your history about women in science?"

messyisthenewtidy
"FFS, do you actually know anything about women's history?!"

Please, stop foaming at the mouth, take some sedatives if necessary, and accept the simple fact that there are many more famous historical male role models in science than there are female. Telling a class of boys that boys are shit at physics isn't going to wash when the subject is dominanted by men, past and present. That is all I was suggesting. I'm well aware of the social factors that contributed to this situation, but I'm not going to prefix every valid statement with a grovelling apology for the social conditions of centuries past.

LRDtheFeministDragon
"I don't understand what 'historical backlog of "genius"' means?"

A scientist who at least made an exceptional contribution to their field, or, more appropriately perhaps, created or fundmentally changed their field of science. Einstein, Dirac, Newton, Pauling, Hodgkin, Curie, Watson, Crick and so on. Whether or not you'd class them as genius is a personal matter, hence my use of inverted commas.

messyisthenewtidy
"And as for your cream of the crop theory, purlease! I work in STEM, and believe me it has less to do with genius and more to do with confidence, personal interest and a love of spurting out confusing acronyms! !"

Yes, I'm sure the average IQ of CERN physicists is no higher than that of the team of career Johhny and Jane no-stars at my local McDonalds.

Did you ever work in a McDonald's?

"Why would you assume that a social psychological approach was not as accurate as a scientific one? Especially when you consider that science isn't entirely objective in practice".

No of course, none of the life sciences and particularly psychology are objective in practice. We aren't talking about studies on rocks but on living things which aren't all identical and particularly when you are studying people there are difficulties in controlling all the variables. That doesn't of course mean that you can't try - it depends on what you are trying to look at.

I say social psychology isn't as accurate because it isn't meant to be as accurate! Social psychologists aren't as interested in the the 'how' and 'what' but the 'why'. They don't attempt to control all the variables because there are too many of them to control so they work with the qualitatitve not the quantitative. That is entirely fine - it has it's uses but that is working along side the scientifc not instead of it. You don't do what Fine did and rubbish a more scientific approach and replace it with a political view on gender differences. That doesn't prove anything. She tried to rubbish B-C's studies on the basis of methodology, and yet didn't apply the same standards to her own work.

Quite apart from anything else, I don't trust anybody on the extremes who decides that only nuture or only nature are relevant and that appears to be where Fine is coming from. It smacks of having an agenda and weakens her argument. The same would be true if a scientist, especially a male one, came and said that sex differences were all down to nature. Of the two of the B-C was more than happy to acknowledge both nature and nuture are relevant but not Fine.

Yes, I think you're right, then, upper. Male physicists are well known; women are not. Didn't someone on here say the other day that their DD's class was shown a picture of Curie in her lab, asked what they thought she was doing, and they thought she was cooking?

I agree that it's likely reasonably educated teenagers/adults won't buy 'men are innately bad at physics' in the way a woman might, if they're convinced by examples from history.

But then, what about small children? How early does it all set in? I think another set of assumptions are at play already when children are very little.

Best reason I can think of for separate education.

I suspect both boys and girls would do better educated apart.
I wonder if the uptake and performance in science is better in all-girl schools?

[It is, I gather]

I am really torn about single sex education.

Single sex schools I am fine with.

But single sex lessons for just some subjects.... Well I worry that any positive impact is outweighed by the message of "oooh, girls are a bit poor at X, so we need to put you in a special class". Definitely as a teenage girl I would have seen it as a negative message about girls if I was told I had to be in the girls maths/physics/chemistry lesson. Does anyone know of any studies on that?

BBB - "I say social psychology isn't as accurate because it isn't meant to be as accurate! Social psychologists aren't as interested in the the 'how' and 'what' but the 'why'. They don't attempt to control all the variables because there are too many of them to control so they work with the qualitatitve not the quantitative."

I'm guessing you're not too familiar with experimental social psychology?! For what it's worth I would actually critique social psychology in the past (and sometimes in the present) as being too phenomenological, too focused on the 'what' and not on the 'why'. But most Social Psych these days uses the experimental method and can control for extraneous unknowns just as well as biological approaches (and in biology there's also myriad complexities and unknowns and that's why we all use randomisation and control samples in experiments).

Which is not to say the qual people don't exist, but that's not who Fine was citing.

OneMoreChap/YoullLaugh

The data on schools is that single sex schools are better than mixed for girls' achievement but worse for boys.

But there are social consequences to single sex schools for those who don't get regular interaction with the opposite sex outside school (case in point, my DH, who treated girls as another species until well into his 20s! But I've known plenty more like him, male and female.)

The separate classes for some lessons, if the school is big enough, is supposed to help I think, but it's about a decade since I read anything about it. Only problem is that at my school, unless there were two small classes, I'd have been even more bored and frustrated in a girls-only but more mixed class, and ditto for the boys who were best at maths and science.