gender
purepedantry | August 7, 2006I was at a wedding this weekend, and I was getting in one of those conversations that drunk people get into at weddings: what are the gender differences in cognition?
OK, so maybe you don't get into conversations like this with people you don't know well, but I do.
Anyway, it got me thinking that I should post a summary of what is known. Much has been argued about the relevance of differences in cognition. Larry Summers lost his job over it. Ben Barres wrote a lovely editorial about it -- that we all talked about at length (my stuff is here, here, and here). The Economist has an…
purepedantry | July 27, 2006Apparently I will be spending today documenting differing opinions on the Ben Barres Nature editorial. Here is the man himself doing Q&A for the NYTimes:
Q. What about the idea that men and women differ in ways that give men an advantage in science?
A. People are still arguing over whether there are cognitive differences between men and women. If they exist, it's not clear they are innate, and if they are innate, it's not clear they are relevant. They are subtle, and they may even benefit women.
But when you tell people about the studies documenting bias, if they are prejudiced, they…
purepedantry | July 26, 2006Eugene Volokh from The Volokh Conspiracy has weighed in on the recent Nature editorial by Ben Barres that I commented about before. The editorial is about whether it was right for Larry Summers, former President of Harvard, to discuss the possibility of innate gender differences in the gender disparity in science. He agrees with Dr. Barres's evidence but is concerned about the standard we set when we prohibit discussion of scientific topics. Money quote:
Now I understand part of people's concern about discussion of innate gender differences: If certain students get alienated or dispirited…