I think the cleanest experiments here would be those having to do with stereotype threat. For example, women asked to write down their gender (even just with a checkbox) before a math test at the GRE level score significantly worse. Asian women asked to also write down their race are inoculated against this effect. These women are "primed" with their stereotypes and it dramatically influences performance. Even asking people to think about being a professor increases their performance!
I don't know if there are any related experiments with priming subjects with the concepts of "mother" or "feminine" or what-have-you, but it's a good place to start.
Maybe priming women with a reading comprehension test involving a passage with Marie Curie? Or Lynn Margulis? Or Sophie Germaine...
...shows a strong pull toward shorter hours/working from home for women over men, and it gets stronger as women age from 25 to 35.
I think this indicates some of the pressures of motherhood.
To this end, I think it might be a good idea to have mixed age Montessori schools at places of business. Since it's an exploratory learning model, and the place is set up to be a cool place to learn and play and be anyway, and one of the biggest recruiting draws and factors in the choice of workplace is often the school district, and a single teacher can handle the mixed-age children of a small-mid sized company because they largely teach themselves/each other, and because that's less expensive than private school and the parents could participate more in their kids lives if they were physically close to work, I think it could be a huge benefit to forward thinking companies. Don't know, but it could help both men and women.
It plots surveyed personal importance for various issues, like "Developing my intellectual interests" to "Part time career for a limited time". You'll notice that the male and female responses almost entirely match, with the few exceptions, and there it doesn't deviate by much!
It seems that if stereotype threat is real, and applies to more circumstances than just an examination, then this is truly compelling evidence that women really are inferior to men (in aggregate, individuals may vary of course).
After all, a man and a woman of equal intrinsic ability may perform just as well under ideal circumstances, but the woman's performance is fragile. If the woman is reminded of her gender at lunch, she might return from lunch and perform "significantly worse".
(This does of course assume equal statistical distributions of intrinsic ability between men and women.)
That is a horrible and illogical assumption to make. Stereotype threat is shown to exist for white males. There is a stereotype that white people are less athletic than black people. If you prime white males by reminding them of the stereotype that they cannot perform well athletically, they will do worse.
Source: pages 8-11, Whistling Vivaldi, by Stanford professor and stereotype threat researcher Claude Steele.
Stereotype threat has been shown to affect any group subjected to a negative stereotype. Steele's book is rife with examples. Stereotype threat can also be dispelled with enough encouragement and the right kind of mentorship. You can, for example, decrease the performance of Asian female math students by first reminding them of their gender, but then you can improve their performance, too, by reminding them of them being Asian.
I am appalled that you made the leap from "women experience stereotype threat" to "they are inferior and have universally inferior psyches" without considering "hmm, do other groups experience stereotype threat too?"
There is a stereotype that white people are less athletic than black people.
All else held equal, this would indeed make white men inferior athletes to black men, as I acknowledge in my response to danifong.
I didn't declare women as having "universally inferior psyches", I declared women as being potentially inferior in job-related tasks on the assumption that stereotype threat applies to those tasks in addition to GRE exams.
According to you, the simple non-discriminatory act of putting "Select one: Male [ ] Female [ ]" on a math test is sufficient to reduce female performance.
The value judgments ("something wrong with them") are something you fabricated, not something from my post.
That doesn't follow at all; and is phrased in a completely insensitive way. If you want to have a civilized conversation, stop that.
Boys/Men are also susceptible to stereotype threat. The priming with race is well known. They are also especially susceptible if they are primed with an "immutable talent" over "hard work = success" lesson, and then undertake a very difficult task. Boys struggle with this, and perform much worse in the next test, just as girls do.
Cultural factors are absolutely the dominant factors in which stereotypes are threatened. Both genders respond negatively to threats. That's no justification for claiming women are inferior!
An even more vivid example: Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes test:
"Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom on that day, asking why "that King" (referring to Martin Luther King Jr.) was murdered the day before. After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them what the children knew about blacks. The children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and common labels to those of Native Americans or Blacks[citation needed]. She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be treated the way a colored person is treated in America, mentioning that it would be interesting if there was segregation based on eye color instead of skin color. The children enthusiastically agreed to try the exercise.[1]
On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess.[citation needed] The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment's rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students' reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes.
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King and write compositions about the experience.[1]"
That doesn't follow at all; and is phrased in a completely insensitive way. If you want to have a civilized conversation, stop that.
Demanding that certain ideas be phrased in a politically correct way only serves the purpose of making it more difficult to express those ideas. If your goal is to suppress dissent that is valuable, but not if your goal is to find the truth. What is your goal?
If men are prone to stereotype threat in some area, then they too are inferior in that area. For example, if a "white men can't jump" stereotype prevents men from performing well in basketball, then men are indeed likely to be inferior basketball players. Similarly, in the non-scientific experiment you described, the brown-eyed children did appear to perform more poorly.
Obviously the inferiority only holds in a cultural context and in certain areas - mine referred to the modern American context, where apparently even marking [X] Female lowers women's performance on scientific topics. I probably should have expressed this more clearly in my original comment.
An interesting fact to realize is that the stereotype-threat based inferiority might be unavoidable. Suppose hypothetically that white men are shorter or worse jumpers (on average) than black men. In this case, the "white men can't jump" stereotype is true - but then knowledge of this true fact might cause them to also perform worse than their height would otherwise suggest due to stereotype threat. Human psychology might actually amplify innate differences in abilities.
If your goal were to find truth your arguments would be more well reasoned. I can't ascribe your phrasing to anything other than sloppiness or a desire to incite controversy.
To my knowledge we haven't found a single demographic group immune to stereotype threat. I suppose one could argue under your tortured semantics that they are all inferior to one another under different forms of discrimination, but what is the point?
...we haven't found a single demographic group immune to stereotype threat.
This is a straw man. I never claimed any group was immune to stereotype threat.
You claimed stereotype threat affects some groups more than others in some areas. Your specific example was women are affected by it in math. I pointed out that if this generalizes beyond the GRE, and if men and women's abilities are equal absent stereotype threat, the result is that women would be inferior to men in math-related jobs.
You can claim my arguments poorly reasoned all you want, but you still haven't pointed out any flaws in them. All you did was demand I not be "insensitive" and attack straw men.
To be as explicit as possible: poor functioning as a result of discriminatory stereotypes is no evidence of innate inferiority, be it in women or men or whomever. It is evidence of discriminatory stereotypes, that is all.
For everyone's sake, allow me to try to rephrase yummyfajitas's argument.
Consider several groups of equal ability and equal vulnerability to stereotype threat. On average, the groups that have more negative stereotypes directed toward them will perform worse. Given two people of equal ability, a purely rational actor trying to choose a member of their team will choose the one to which fewer negative stereotypes apply.
Yes, and as a special case of this, if what DaniFong says is true and generalizes beyond the math GRE", non-Asian women will exhibit inferior math performance in the contemporary US*. Similarly, if zasz's claims about athletic performance stereotypes are true, then non-black men will be inferior athletes.
Both of these predictions seem to concur with reality, so I'd suggest maybe Danifong's theory has something going for it.
A purely rational actor who is ignoring externalities. A purely rational actor taking a different set of factors into account may make a different decision. We generally call the first "a dick" and the second "a worthwhile human being".
That doesn't follow at all; and is phrased in a completely insensitive way. If you want to have a civilized conversation, stop that.
Boys/Men are also susceptible to stereotype threat. The priming with race is well known. They are also especially susceptible if they are primed with an "immutable talent" over "hard work = success" lesson, and then undertake a very difficult task. Boys struggle with this, and perform much worse in the next test, just as girls do.
Or an even more vivid example: Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes test:
"Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom on that day, asking why "that King" (referring to Martin Luther King Jr.) was murdered the day before. After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them what the children knew about blacks. The children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and common labels to those of Native Americans or Blacks. She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be treated the way a colored person is treated in America, mentioning that it would be interesting if there was segregation based on eye color instead of skin color. The children enthusiastically agreed to try the exercise.[1]
On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess.[citation needed] The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment's rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students' reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes.
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King and write compositions about the experience.[1]"
After reading through your other comments, I think I have an idea of what you're trying to say, and I think that you're correct. However, you've chosen an inartful way to phrase your argument that you know others will find abrasive. Tailoring your words to your audience isn't political correctness; it is communicating effectively, and it's something you should attempt to do if you care about getting your points across.
I don't know if there are any related experiments with priming subjects with the concepts of "mother" or "feminine" or what-have-you, but it's a good place to start.
Maybe priming women with a reading comprehension test involving a passage with Marie Curie? Or Lynn Margulis? Or Sophie Germaine...
Also, this is indirect, but the study of highly talented women and men here: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/Ferriman2009.pdf
...shows a strong pull toward shorter hours/working from home for women over men, and it gets stronger as women age from 25 to 35.
I think this indicates some of the pressures of motherhood.
To this end, I think it might be a good idea to have mixed age Montessori schools at places of business. Since it's an exploratory learning model, and the place is set up to be a cool place to learn and play and be anyway, and one of the biggest recruiting draws and factors in the choice of workplace is often the school district, and a single teacher can handle the mixed-age children of a small-mid sized company because they largely teach themselves/each other, and because that's less expensive than private school and the parents could participate more in their kids lives if they were physically close to work, I think it could be a huge benefit to forward thinking companies. Don't know, but it could help both men and women.
Bonus:
Check out the graph on page 477 here:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/SexDiffs.pdf
It plots surveyed personal importance for various issues, like "Developing my intellectual interests" to "Part time career for a limited time". You'll notice that the male and female responses almost entirely match, with the few exceptions, and there it doesn't deviate by much!