I came across a story on NPR today about why women read more than men. They quote from Louann Brizendine who wrote the book The Female Brain. The issue of gender differences and the brain always starts fights. Men have larger brains and more gray matter, which handles information processing. Women have more white matter and thus more interconnectivity between parts of the brain. The prefrontal lobe in women is more densely packed with neurons, and that is the area responsible for judgment, planning and language. Here is a quote from the article:
“Girls have an easier time with reading or written work, and it’s not a stretch to extrapolate [that] to adult life,” Brizendine says. Indeed, adult women talk more in social settings and use more words than men, she says.
Woah nelly! Brizendine hasn’t been doing her reading, because tons of contrary evidence to this crap has been out for a while. And trying to find that link, I discovered that Language Log has already done a pretty extensive commentary on this article. When it comes to matters of language, it’s hard to scoop them. The long and the short of the Language Log commentary is that the so-called gap in fiction sales could be accounted for entirely by sales of romance books.
So why is it ok for Brizendine to say that women read more because of biological differences but it’s not ok for Larry Summers to say that perhaps there are biological differences that account for the lack of women in engineering? Does it not amount to about the same thing? A very informal study (that is, just what I’ve noticed) gives me the intuition that there are fewer men pursuing English degrees than their used to be. Looking solely at enrollment data for California State University Sacramento, the ratio of males to females pursuing English degrees (English, Creative Writing, Teach English as a Foreign Language) is about 1:2 and is trending slightly downward since 2002 [source].
Compare that to the ratio of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 and men outnumber women 3:1. But in English departments, it appears there is a biological explanation, as Brizendine tries to show. If we believe that, is it really such an unthinkable leap to say that biological differences account for the lack of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields?
Honestly, I don’t know. I know many females in my program who are way better at math than I am. Going through high school I couldn’t say the same thing. That seems to be anecdotal (and therefore unreliable) evidence that this is a cultural thing, because the females in my program are almost all from China or India, whereas the females I encountered in high school were predominantly American. However, the population I am exposed to now was selected from a much, much different distribution than in high school. Presumably math background is a heavy factor in acceptance (though they do accept a few of us who leaned more towards linguistics).
This question is so muddled with emotion and propaganda, political correctness, heresy and hypocrisy that I think the real answer will be very difficult to come by. People lose their jobs if they try to claim that there is a biological reason for women appearing less in STEM fields. A 2006 report from the National Academies made the case that the reason is social, but the make-up of the panel was so stacked against the biological position that the outcome was obvious [source]. I’ll conclude with a quote from this Reason magazine article:
The report [by the National Academies] endorses the view that the predominance of men in scientific fields is due not to biological differences and personal priorities, as [Larry] Summers suggested, but to gender bias and unconscious institutional sexism. But is this an effort to find out the truth, or to stamp out heresy?
The makeup of the panel that produced the report is revealing. Chaired by University of Miami President Donna E. Shalala, who is known for her commitment to feminist causes, the panel included a number of strong proponents of the belief that women in science are held back primarily by sexism and that aggressive remedies to these biases are needed.
Noticeably absent were proponents of other viewpoints—including such female scientists as Vanderbilt University psychologist Camilla Persson Benbow or Canadian neuroscientist Doreen Kimura, who argue that biological sex differences influence cognitive skills in some areas.
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21 September 2007 at 12:26:46
Melinda Weathers
Interesting post. Personally, I have always been very good at math. I think I had the top grades or at least a tie for the top grades in high school math, I was 10th in the state math competition and wound up on the state team, I did old AP Calc exams for fun (I think I did maybe 10 years worth of them), I graduated with highest honors in Mechanical Engineering. So math was by far my favorite subject in high school, and it probably tied with programming in college. And it always came easy for me.
So if someone were to say to me, “you’re a woman, so your brain doesn’t handle math well, maybe you should be an English major,” I would be pretty mad. But maybe if they convinced me of that when I was young enough, I would never have signed up for advanced math when I was young, and then I would have lost interest in it before I was even considering where to go to college. So it would have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. I definitely think that this is happening to a lot of women now — they are not supposed to understand math, because women “aren’t good at it”, and math is “nerdy” so they convince themselves that they in fact don’t understand it. And then they don’t do well.
And not only that, but if it that viewpoint were supported by “legitimate” scientific research, would women be discouraged from going into engineering fields (like they used to be and probably still are somewhat) because of it? Would women be looked over on job offers and promotions because of it? I mean, we are just starting to admit that women can do these things, but I think having actual scientific backing that they aren’t as good would set us way back.
And anyways, this is all based on averages, so who really cares if this is true on average? What if it’s true for 60% of women? Jeez, that leaves a lot of women that might want to pursue engineering that will be discouraged because of the “facts”. And that 60% never would have wound up in engineering anyways, so my theory is that maybe those who are interested in math and engineering do not necessarily have a biological disadvantage. Of course, I haven’t seen the research. I would just think that maybe, say, the average of men has a higher math potential than the average of women. But if that is the case, that in no way means that any given man will have higher math potential than any given woman.
You can make numbers tell you anything you want, really, so personally I don’t think there is a “real answer” to this question that is meaningful. So I am all for it if the scientists do not come down on the side that is harmful to us engineer gals.
21 September 2007 at 12:46:44
Jason Adams
Yes, many excellent points. The whole debate is probably a dangerous and stupid one to be having. Whenever we look at men do this better or women do this better, all it serves to do is discourage someone from trying. What bothers me in things like this NPR article is that it’s hypocritical to say “women are better at this biologically” whereas the “men are better at this biologically” argument is taboo. Likewise, we are so caught up in the science (myself included) that we ignore the very important social benefit we gain from not knowing: people are free to discover for themselves what they are interested in and good at. And the National Academies report is even worse because by stacking the deck so heavily in favor of one side, it casts serious doubt on its conclusions. Maybe the science behind it was good, but it seems like an ethical line was crossed.
21 September 2007 at 13:41:04
Donna Adams
Anything you can do, I can do better. ‘Nuff said.