Biology of Gender

All I’m saying is that this “current” against them shouldn’t be enough of a deterrence away from choosing a course. If one is put of and swaps courses from Engineering as their Professor says they don’t belong there then they lack willpower to stay and prove them wrong. It comes down to a question of resolve. Obviously the comments shouldn’t be made in the first place.

1 Like

This nails it. Sure, there are some young people who learn early to tune out naysayers and push toward their goal. But that is a fractional minority compared to young people who have plenty of talent and capability but who are impressionable and are influenced by parents, authority figures, and peers. Lots of young people can get talked out of pursuing a path by someone they trust and listen to.

1 Like

I think you missed everything Aragorn said but I’ll put it to you like this.
When I was a kid my mom told myself and my siblings she can’t dance, and none of her kids can dance. If we ever tried to do some sort of dance she would say “now you know none of my kids can dance.” Being a Black child that “can’t dance,”
When everyone around you appears that they can is about a self stigmatizing and defeating as they come.
So I just accepted I couldn’t dance…I didn’t even try. If I did, I felt goofy and stopped as soon as I started.

When I got to college and away from my Mom’s voice in the back of my head…people began to reinforce to me that I indeed could dance…I was elated. I told my mom she lied to me my entire life.

If a young lady is in a class where the professor (her authority figure, possible mentor) says to the class “Women can’t do this” and she’s like 18, still forming her identity, still listening to authority figures as she has been taught her entire life…she may believe this authority figure like I believed my mom and internalize it.

You can say “we should all be motivated to prove people wrong.” I do agree we should try our best to say “fuck you!” to all our naysayers. But, if you have low self esteem, or a weak self image, or low self-confidence that’s not going to happen.

3 Likes

Appears you beat me to it.

1 Like

I have no problem with this, because the prof isn’t presuming that women (or men, or blacks, or Southerners, etc) are incapable of mastering the material. The recommendation was performance-based.

I had a prof who, when handing back tests, would staple a ‘drop slip’ to the ones with a low grade.

Yes, it would be great if everyone was of such steely resolve and unflappable comportment that no amount of personal attacks–of being told by experts in their chosen field that ‘You’re not good enough, you don’t have what it takes’-- would dissuade them from what they believe to be their life’s path. But as @Aragorn, @thunderbolt23 and @MoreMuscle have noted, not everyone is made of such stern stuff.

1 Like

I’m actually pretty alright with an approach like that. Thinning the heard because you know it’ll be too hard for them if they can’t accomplish their current studies might seem rough, but imo it’s better than waiting an extra 2 years (and probably thousands in student loans) to figure it out yourself.

Now if we repeated your example except only the women were told to go, that’s where I would see a problem.

1 Like

I had a stats teacher just like this. She turned out to be a really good teacher, actually, but was such a bitch up front. Weeding out the weak I suppose.

You always tell beautiful stories. Thank you for sharing.

3 Likes

Thats the thing that went unspoken, but became obvious. It was virtually all women that got cut. There was one that was in the same classes all the way through with me and another guy, and honestly she was exceptional.

I can’t parse out whether it was a function of their brains or a product of conditioning, but I also tutored a few women, and they didn’t relate to numbers the same way as guys. On a word problem like " John has any number of apples for every 3.5 oranges that Jane has. If Jane has 14 oranges, how many apples does John have? Write the equation and show work.", the women would invariably ask “what kind of oranges?”.

I’ve noticed something similar with my daughter (~6 yrs old). My wife doesn’t have a lot of patience when it comes to teaching so when she needs help with schoolwork I’m usually the one helping. It took me probably a couple months to really figure out how she learns, and that it’s not very similar to my own way.

Once I figured out how to best explain things to her, she caught on hella quick. Tbh much quicker than I expected, as inherently I felt like her way of learning wasn’t very efficient.

I did this with a couple of my nieces too. They are strikingly different though. My one niece is definitely high test. She carries some muscle and is very aggressive. I told her to do what she could and I’d help her with the ones she need it on. She excelled at maths and wen on to quickly become a regional manager of a restaurant chain, which is pretty math intensive (scheduling, performance stats, etc.)

The other was a girly girl, and no matter how hard she tried was not going to excel at math. She did, however, have some good skills and interest in arts- sculpting, drawing, painting. She took off as a welder within a couple of hours of training, and whizzes through a lot of difficult weld configurations like someone using a sharpie that deposits metal.

2 Likes

Thank you. I hesitated to jump into this thread since I’m the only active female poster in this forum. Kind of like you trying to keep the Race thread from going off the rails! Haha. Pressure! Gotta represent. Sample size of one.

A lot of us have anecdotes, right? And we do see some broad differences in things like “Men can pack the car trunk faster and more efficiently.” This was on a Brain Games episode.

It’s fun, and interesting, and we do know there are some broad differences, but culture is always there. For example, Irish military recruits in the WWI era scored lower on aptitude tests than the men from Britain. Britain was more industrialized, so they had more opportunity with spatial/ mechanical problem solving. I think we’re still figuring out how much that kind of thing is at work in these kinds of differences.

1 Like

Yeah. There are so many confounding factors that influence learning, what is learned, how it is learned, etc. From intra-uterine androgen levels to the influence of friends and what they think is cool, I don’t know that it can ever be neatly pinned down.

Then there’s the untraceable surprise factors- Like “Holy crap! I can’t believe the kid just (did, said, accomplished, solved) that!”. Even if a lot of these things are or can be figured out, I wouldn’t mind not knowing. Sometimes surprises are nice too.

2 Likes

On the topic of women in STEM :

  1. men makeup more of the extremes in IQ, while women usually are in the middle. That means the extremely intelligent and very low intelligent are mostly men. STEM fields attract people in the upper tier in intelligence usually.

  2. women prefer careers that have a social aspect. Careers that require sitting in front of a computer quietly coding will never appeal to women en masse.

  3. men in STEM aren’t usually the most sexually desirable (nerds). A lot of women do not want to associate with these types of men and will avoid careers where nerds congregate

While I agree with most of what you posted above (even the part I quoted), the part I quoted is ACTIVELY changing in our current landscape. Fields like programming/finance/engineering are now becoming “cool” for lack of a better word. As society evolves and we’re exposed to tech younger and younger, the general stereotype of STEM fields is fairly quickly going the way of the dinosaur.

Except economics. That’s still for nerds.

Yea Raj! Hey you know, one time a guy came up to me and he said “You know why Doctors turn babies upside down and smack them on the butt when they’re born?” and I said “No! Why dey do dat?” and he told me “To knock the dicks off of the dumb ones!” and we fukin laughed!

So thats what I think now.

It must have not worked with you though. I think when you came out the doctor smacked your mom.

1 Like

[quote=“EyeDentist, post:82, topic:228430, full:true”]

For the majority of the time football has been played, coaches–including those who had experience with thousands of athletes–believed black athletes were ‘not well suited’ to play quarterback. As we now know full well, that was self-fulfilling racist nonsense. I would put the attitudes of these professors in a similar (albeit misogynist) camp.

According to Puff’s article above nearly 50% more women than men are getting Bachelor degrees these days and that is a trend that started years back and is projected to increase going forward.
According to ASME article, 20% of engineering students and 14% of employed engineers are female.

So a tenured Professor is less objectively qualified to determine who will likely succeed in a specific career path compared to young man who had a class under the professor? Surely his expertise combined with the statements above are far weightier than your ‘Blacks can quarterback too’ subjectivity.

Not trying be combative, but I have noticed in these biology threads you like to throw out an exception to prove the ‘rule’ can’t be true, since there is an exception. That sounds like philosophical mumbo-jumbo rather than biology to me.

1 Like

Women don’t like nerd, pfffff

1 Like

I remember reading an article about a woman in Seattle discussing how Amazon Has ruined the dating scene there. I also read that prostitution has exploded there (lol).

I can’t find the first one but here is the 2nd.

…or in the past men that women would find desirable weren’t in STEM fields. That is changing as we type.

1 Like