Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak
Provide the required evidence, not another argument as to why you must be right or how things don't really mean what they mean, but actual evidence that women *prefer* not to work in math related fields as you claimed or admit you have no clue what you are talking about.
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Again, you're failing to understand what I'm saying, which is that woman make the choice not to work in these fields. That may be influenced by culture, biology or a host of other issues, but the fact of the matter is they are given the choice not to. If woman are making the choice, then they are preferring not to do so. I'm saying their
choice is their preference. It's really as simple as that.
But while we're on the subject, are woman biologically predisposed to being worse at math and spatial reasoning? The simple answer is, yes. The only question is how much. Part of the difference is that men tend to statistically be extremely poor at math and extremely good. The thing is in nearly all fields men tend to be more highly concentrated at opposite ends of the bell curve, where as woman tend to gravitate towards the middle. There are more men who can't do math at all and math geniuses, where as woman tend to all be about the same on average. [
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http://www.livescience.com/20011-bra...fferences.html
""We do socialize our boys and girls differently, but the contribution of biology is not zero," said Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California, who has been studying cognitive gender differences for 25 years. Halpern was a keynote speaker at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference here last Thursday (April 19). "
http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/...or/sexdif1.htm
"Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes and reproductive function but also in many other characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual problems. ... On average, men perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that require the subject to imagine rotating an object or manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is, in guiding or intercepting projectiles.
Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of words and on tests that challenge the person to find words that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly identifying matching items and performing certain precision manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a board."
http://www.science20.com/news_articl...es_math-106756
“Educational systems could be improved by acknowledging that, in general, boys and girls are different,” said University of Missouri biologist David Geary in their statement. “For example, in trying to close the sex gap in math scores, the reading gap was left behind. Now, our study has found that the difference between girls’ and boys’ reading scores was three times larger than the sex difference in math scores. Girls’ higher scores in reading could lead to advantages in admissions to certain university programs, such as marketing, journalism or literature, and subsequently careers in those fields. Boys lower reading scores could correlate to problems in any career, since reading is essential in most jobs.”
http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2008/...ial-skill.html
"Men consistently outperform women on spatial tasks, including mental rotation, which is the ability to identify how a 3-D object would appear if rotated in space. Now, a University of Iowa study shows a connection between this sex-linked ability and the structure of the parietal lobe, the brain region that controls this type of skill.
The parietal lobe was already known to differ between men and women, with women's parietal lobes having proportionally thicker cortexes or "grey matter." But this difference was never linked back to actual performance differences on the mental rotation test."
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/2/823
"Sex differences are of high scientific and societal interest because of their prominence in behavior of humans and nonhuman species. This work is highly significant because it studies a very large population of 949 youths (8–22 y, 428 males and 521 females) using the diffusion-based structural connectome of the brain, identifying novel sex differences. The results establish that male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication. The developmental trajectories of males and females separate at a young age, demonstrating wide differences during adolescence and adulthood. The observations suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes."
http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/NV.JEP.pdf