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

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?

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Thanks Morphene .

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.

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

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.

Anyway to return to the point of the thread: the concepts of 'brilliance' 'talent' and 'ability' are all entirely abstract social constructs. So girls don't have an innate different idea of what constitutes achievement or ability.

What they have is a year of being praised as hard working, while their male counterparts are praised as being clever/smart/talented.

This doesn't do either gender any favours.

Our entire society has a poor concept of achievement that is heavily biased in favour of 'brilliance' and speed of getting to an outcome, over quality of the final outcome.

Better to be fast and wrong than slow, methodical and correct!

Why else do we prevent children from retaking a year of school or even university? Why should it matter if someone has been studying material for longer before they master it?

In many other countries this imbalance doesn't occur and the emphasis is on what level you have achieved, not how fast you got there. These places have better rates of women in STEM.

I see male physics students day in day out, who think they have 'reached the limit of their ability' and are despairing. There is no 'limit', you just keep putting in the time and you steadily improve! But they have never been taught to view learning that way and hence drop out with their hopes shattered.

Yet another reason male suicide in young adulthood is a problem.

Not testosterone then, but androgens, which kick in around the age of 6.

Citation, please, Caking.

The thing is, that there is both a nature and a nurture aspect, but we can only influence one of those.

So why even bother discussing the nature aspect?

Primary school teachers have been shown to underestimate girls ability in maths wrt boys and overestimate their reading ability WHEN BOTH GROUPS HAVE THE SAME ACTUAL ABILITY.

So how about we fix that first and then see what residual bias is left over?

similarly there are far fewer women in physics than men and there are any number of reasons why.

But it is a fact that when viewing identical CV's with either a female name on top or a male name on top, the female CV is rated 10-20% less well qualified for the job.

So lets fix that issue first, and then see if there is still a residual bias in numbers, and then we can whinge about innate differences in male and female brains.

The Atlantic article that Caking posted was quite interesting in that it was illustrative of the adage that women have to work twice as hard as men to be thought of as half as good.

But I digress.

You can google androgens yourself M0stlyhet if you like!

Here are a couple of links:

www.researchgate.net/publication/8106972_Physiological_changes_of_adrenal_androgens_in_childhood

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00028.x

I'm just saying that hormonal stuff happens in boys and girls that might explain some of the differences in their temperaments. None of this is fully understood obviously.

Xenophile what makes you think I'm male?

jms

Did xeno call you male? I thought she said your perspective was. Which it is.

Datun- What tosh!
If she's saying I'm giving the 'male perspective ' but admitting I'm not necessarily male, then that implies all men have that perspective! Very patronising and grossly unfair to men and women.!
All of whom may have different perspectives entirely unrelated to gender!

I don't think she admitted to anything. And it's sex not gender.

Datun. What are you on?
You can't have it both ways!
She's either implying I'm male or just that I'm giving a male perspective! Either way she has no right to say so!
She no more knows what a "male perspective" is than anyone knows what a female perspective is!