Yet another "hard-wired" argument - from UK chess expert

[grimbletart]

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/chess/11548840/Nigel-Short-Girls-just-dont-have-the-brains-to-play-chess.html

Nigel Short, one of the UK's greatest chess players claims women are hard-wired not to play the game well.

Love this little gem (not). "I don't have the slightest problem (he says) in acknowledging that my wife possesses a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do. Likewise, she doesn't feel embarrassed in asking me to manoeuvre the car out of our narrow garage."

Wrong Nigel love. You don't have emotional intelligence, not because you are a man, but because you spend half your life hunched over a board game instead of of interacting with the rest of the human race. Your wife is bad at getting the car out of the garage not because she is a woman but because she is a fucking awful driver.

From the same abstract that BuffyNeverBreaks was quoting:

Males have only a marginal advantage in mean levels of g (less than 7% of a standard deviation) from the ASVAB and AFQT, but substantially greater variance. Among the top 2% AFQT scores, there were almost twice as many males as females. These differences could provide a partial basis for sex differences in intellectual eminence.

(I think this was from the same paper that I tried to link to earlier, though my link does not seem to work now)

Messy's post: "To me that is so bloody in-your-face obvious and logical and that it surprises me that Nigel the fantastic chess player can't see it."

Quite. Just goes to show that being able to play chess says bugger all about your ability to think about anything else.

What is it with people and their hard-wired brains theories? They think if they on on about it long enough women would throw up their hands and admit that they are stupider than men.

Tiresome to the extreme.

buffy quoted and commented on the whole of the abstract

Sorry, Buffy, I was replying to your previous post, only I was doing it really slowly so I missed your latest

That's absolutely bloody shocking, Buffy.

I have dipped in and out of this thread, and I see that the old "tails are longer, more male genius and dunces" line has been trotted out. I offer you:
Emmy Noether

Now, think of the privileged background she had - father was a mathematician, all her male colleagues (Hilbert and Einstein among them) thought she was a genius and fought her corner, and Hilbert still couldn't get the University of Erlangen to give her a paid post. Now ask yourself how many women there may have been out there without her privileges who never made it past the first hurdle? Social structures matter - genius doesn't automatically float to the top simply by being genius. (Another example - Mary Somerville's parents were so scared of female education, they used to remove the candles from her bedroom so she couldn't work on maths - it wasn't until she married a mercifully understanding and forward thinking man that she was able to pursue her research).

The long tails argument always makes me think of one of my favourite Jackie Fleming cartoons - a woman in Renaissance dress, heavily pregnant, toddler tugging at her skirts, cooking pot on her head like a hat, standing at an easel. And the caption reads "Why have there been no great women artists? Great questions by great men series #293".

another bit of anecdata - i didn't think i was good enough to do maths at university. i got an A at a-level despite missing a lot of my upper sixth year due to illness. but i was surrounded by boys in my class who had been told how talented they were at maths (and i'm sure they were) from a young age and i felt stupid in comparison

sorry - no shocking about your much earlier post re. the two researchers who got a peer review saying their work needed a male co-author. (Got pulled away by the day job!) But very sad about your daughter and her school being happy to let everyone, particularly girls, chug along in the middle, and sad about her lack of confidence (stereotype threat again? - Hapshawl obviously suffers from this too, plus from overt sexism from teachers praising the boys and not the girls!)

Lurcio that is so true. They always say "behind every great man is a great woman" but I think it's more likely to be the other way round because when you look at the women in history who have broken the mould they have often had a father, brother or husband who has given them access to that male dominated field and that man's validation has given them self belief.

Great men on the other hand haven't needed their wives or mothers to tell them "hey you can do it" because they already have the endorsement of society.

I think the problem is men don't realise how important that endorsement is. How we can't help but try to fit the roles that society has laid out for us. And the legal right to do something means very little when you have millenia of memes and stereotypes and all kinds of subtle psychological shit influencing you in ways that even you can't identify.

I'm just going to pick up one phrase from that abstract: "pairs of opposite-sex siblings". Now as I understand it (full disclosure, am physical scientist, not social/biomedical scientist), sibling pairs are used to correct for social class variation and other confounding factors (e.g. nutrition - one assumes both of the pair will have had similar diets in childhood). But surely the assumption that this methodology will remove confounding factors is massively flawed in this particular instance because there's a wealth of research to show that a lot of parents do in fact have very different educational and intellectual expectations for opposite sex children and therefore treat them differently from early childhood.

As a statistical aside: the top 2% of 1296 pairs... this is a sample size of approx 26 pairs. Not huge. Do they do a student t-test on the significance of their sample? (Extreme value analysis is very hard to do - what seems like an enormous sample when you look at all the events suddenly becomes a very small sample indeed when you're interested in the extremes).

Just out of interest, why is there this such a passionate desire to reject evidence that Male vs Female brain are different.

I don't have a problem with the notion that males may be better than females at certain sorts of tasks, and vice versa.

As a member of a maths dept., we are constantly encouraging our female student to move out of their 'comfort zones' and engage in some really demanding mathematics. We have to do this all year round.

But still the majority of the Higher Level Maths classes are male.

(I'm not trying to offer this anecdote as any form of evidence)

why are you so keen not to critically examine the evidence you find that back up your own assumptions, despite your own comments about confirmation bias further upthread?

of course you don't have a problem with accepting that women are innately better than men at certain things and men are innately better than women at other things - because conveniently for you those things that men are supposedly naturally better at are also those things that our society holds up as valuable and worthy of money, power, recognition, respect, status etc. which then justifies men having more money, power, recognition, respect, status etc without having to examine how they may have been advantaged in society

also partialderivative, if you are a secondary school teacher, it's likely already too late in terms of socialisation

are you the maths teacher who thought it was acceptable to make sexist comments in class? apologies if i am misattributing that thread

What Buffy said.

What do the "hard-wired brain" community want? What is the "ideal outcome"? Women saying "oh dear I'm so sorry I've taken up so much space and asked for so much privilege I don't deserve, like the right to vote and the right to equal pay, because the evidence show that I'm not as good as men"? Is that what they want? If not what?

If so they can FOTHFSOFAWTGTFOSM.

Oops. I mean FOTTFSOFAWTGTFOSM

I can't think of any other reason.