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

[Italiangreyhound]

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

Just that?

What's the cause?

www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jan/26/girls-believe-brilliance-is-a-male-trait-research-into-gender-stereotypes-shows

I believe studies show that at 1 year old most girls will pick out a doll from a group of toys and boys will pick out toys with wheels. Ans this is independent of the clothes they were dressed in and the toys their parents give them to play with.
Boys and girls are different, they are innately different as they are genetically different .

But I very much doubt that the difference in girls' perception of how able they are has much to do with the toys and clothes divide. I would say one of the major influencing factors is the fact that in most families the mother doesn't work or has reduced hours whereas the father does the serious important job.

And just out of interest, in the country I come from girls are considered better at Maths and Maths degrees at the best universities have a much higher proportion of girls than boys. So this concept is not only but potentially specific to only some cultures / countries.

I have boy/girl twins.They have both grown up doing ballet/modern dance,piano lessons,athletics,football/rugby.They're both very good at sport,musical,love cooking ( DD makes cakes whereas DS is big breakfasts and soup)and popular.The main difference I can see is that my DS is dyslexic and academics can be a struggle but his sister finds work easy.Also DD tends to 'wound' with words whereas DS physically will often try and thump his brother ( very occasionally his sister).
DS has had to suffer endless comments about his ballet and music though over the years from both pupils and parents.Dd has always been utterly convinced she's superior to her brother in every way.The increasing feminisation of Primary education has reinforced this.However at Secondary School level my 17 year old DDs friends ( co-ed) have all given up on Maths and Science subjects whereas dd1 (girls school) is heading for an A/A* in Maths and Sciences.

And here's a link for the difference in the toys girls/boys prefer: [http://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks.htm]

www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks.html

La

I really can't understand that study. Trucks are an invention from less than a hundred years ago. How can an interest in them be 'innate'?

According to Alexander, one possibility is that girls have evolved to perceive social stimuli, such as people, as very important, while the perceived worth of social stimuli (and thus, dolls that look like people) is weaker in boys

There is no doubt that there are physical differences in men and women. Even our eyes see things differently.

Guys' eyes are more sensitive to small details and moving objects, while women are more perceptive to color changes, according to a new vision study that suggests men and women actually do see things differently.

That's not an innate preference for gendered objects though.

Zero citations, so can't give it much credence.

This link talks about the different components in male and female eyes, but again it puts it all down to testosterone.

www.google.co.uk/amp/amp.livescience.com/22894-men-and-women-see-things-differently.html

xenophile and datun yy I wondered if I was missing the definitive statements and research about sex and toys, but it seems not.

To come back to your original question, italian I wonder if it's related to maturity. Studies have shown girls mature earlier than boys and this impacts on how they process their environment.* If they're maturing into a patriarchal society, it follows that their perception of both their abilities and their achievements will gradually wane. It would be interesting to see if the results were replicated in matriarchal societies.

• Newcastle University study

Some references here

My apologies, I thought we were discussing humans, it appears you're actually discussing various species of monkey.

Xenophile: animal models especially primates are incredibly useful for studying human behaviour. In this case even more so as we're eliminating all the human influences that we claim affect children's behaviour.

La

I still didn't get it. As a monkey doesn't even know was a truck is, how can he decide it's for boy monkeys?

Give the monkeys a truck designed to look like a baby and a baby designed to look like a truck! See who goes for what. Simple!

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.

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.

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?

Guys' eyes are more sensitive to small details

Unless this includes the grot on the toilet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!