Reddit mentions of Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities

After coming across this interesting article in Skeptic summarizing the evidence surrounding sex differences in cognitive ability I decided to pick up a book on the same subject by the author (Diane Halpern), Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, which I haven't read through yet but I noticed it did have the following discussion of Baron-Cohen's hypothesis:

>Numerous researchers have offered stern criticisms of the idea that female and male brains are "essentially different," especially in ways that Baron-Cohen has suggested (e.g., Eliot, 2009; Spelke & Grace, 2007). According to Baron-Cohen, it is high levels of prenatal testosterone that make the male brain good at systemizing. But males who are exposed to very high levels of testosterone while still in the womb (i.e., CAH males) are not more masculine or better at male-typical tasks than males who are exposed to normal levels of prenatal testosterone. In fact, the idea that high levels of prenatal testosterone cause autism, which might be expected from this theory, has not been supported. In addition, one prediction from this hypothesis is that autistic boys would be "hypermasculine," which is not supported with any research (Eliot, 2009). The experiment with newborns that Baron-Cohen frequently cites as evidence that girls are born with an interest in faces and boys are born with an interest in objects has been criticized on methodological grounds, including experimenter bias, small sample size, and failures to replicate (Spelke, 2005). ... In addition, numerous studies have found no sex differences in aptitude for science or mathematics in young children (Fine, 2010).

> The virulence of this debate may seem surprising because clearly the hypotheses put forward by each side are not inconsistent with each other.

In my view the more interesting incarnations of this are people like Alice Eagly (who shows up as the most-cited woman on gender in intro psych texts). That said, she's pretty hard to pigeonhole into one camp or the other which is one reason why I don't think that she's been cited as frequently as she might otherwise be in recent discussions. (She's also previously spoken out about activists mispresenting the state of research on diversity).

Another person along these lines is Diane Halpern, whose words I've recently seen semi-regularly quoted from this article to the effect that 'a former APA pres agrees that sex differences exist'. My impression is that a lot of the people citing her don't seem to realize that her most cited work according to Google Scholar (3197 citations) is the book Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. i.e. she's not just a former APA president but this is also her area of expertise (and she was a few years back awarded the APA's lifetime achievement award).

|The cognitive differences between men and women|
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|...over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.|
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|In 1991, ..., Diane Halpern, PhD, past president of the American Psychological Association, began writing the first edition of her acclaimed academic text, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. She found that the animal-​research literature had been steadily accreting reports of sex-associated neuroanatomical and behavioral differences, but those studies were mainly gathering dust in university libraries. Social psychologists and sociologists pooh-poohed the notion of any fundamental cognitive differences between male and female humans, notes Halpern, a professor emerita of psychology at Claremont McKenna College.|
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|In her preface to the first edition, Halpern wrote: “At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. ... After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles … I changed my mind.”|
|Bruce Goldman, "Two minds: The cognitive differences between men and women", Stanford Medicine, Stanford University, Spring 2017 - Archive Copy|

>instinctual drives that are more a set of goals than they are behaviors. We instinctively enjoy sex and want to survive, but the behaviors we engage in to fulfill those goals vary in every which way

That's an apt description. But the behaviors we engage in to fulfill those goals don't vary randomly. Some of them consistently vary with regard to sex. Again you reference "hard coded" behaviors, which is a biological determinist position. No scientists are talking about 'hard coded,' and innate doesn't mean 'hard coded.' You're oversimplifying the issues yourself, and accusing an entire branch of science of not getting it. But the science is aware of the complexities. It's possible for innate proclivities to be enormously complex and still innate; take language, as an obvious example.

As for parental investment theory, you still haven't provided any examples of the many counterexamples that scientists ignore. I'm unaware of them, and I don't think you'll find any. Likewise for certain tendencies that exist across cultures. The countless tribes certainly didn't share all of our social structure, but some social institutions are as far as we know ubiquitous. Some of the behavioral differences between the genders span age groups and cultures.

As far as what the proper arguments are, and how these studies can be attempted... it's really complicated. I can leave a few papers that if you're interested in, will do a much better job of explaining it. I hope it doesn't seem like I'm just dumping an 'educate yourself' link on you, but I think these papers are representative, and I honestly think that if you read through them without discounting the possibility that biology has these affects, you'll find that the field is not as insane as it can be portrayed.

[This is a good starting point for an accurate summary of an evopsych theory we discussed](
http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165805.pdf)

The book Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities is a very neutral and comprehensive source on what we know about the differences between men and women

More specifically, on the intersection of feminism and science:

This is an excellent paper, and while it likely represents your position much more than mine, I think it presents a good argument that mirrors some of what we discussed


The book Who's Afraid of Charles Darwin and a critique called "more misuses of evolutionary psychology" unfortunately behind a paywall.

This last one is a very on topic; it is a response to social constructionist critiques of EP and a summary of recent debates.
http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/196924.pdf

First, you would have to be totally ignorant of the psychology of people to think there are no differences. Or subscribing to an ideology (which I suspect is the issue with the left at the moment). You can see the group differences in personality in literally every single thing we do, every day. Men are more interested in "things" rather than people. Men are more sexually charged. Women are more emotionally charged. Men are more competitive. Women are more social. Etc, etc. This is evident now, and throughout all of history and is clearly backed up by evolutionary psychology. This is not an extreme claim. Anyone who thinks so has been influenced by propaganda and ideology.

Scientific studies that found significant gender differences after 4 minutes of googling:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Differences-Cognitive-Abilities-4th/dp/1848729413

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/


http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=6390

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jnr.23862

https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/28/8/2959/4996558

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0099099#

https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v74y2012i11p1738-1744.html

https://books.google.com/books?id=2qsKNaqIsuUC&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q&f=false

I mean, to think that genders differ in personality is an extreme claim, is itself an extreme claim. I think it's even more ridiculous to suggest that there are no differences.

>> Which is not evidence that there's a problem.

> Of course it is. For some reason, girls aren't filling jobs that are highly lucrative.

The fact that they aren't filling some highly lucrative jobs is not evidence that there's a problem. It's reasonable to go "hm, maybe there might be a problem here, lets see why this is so", and I'm completely on board with that, but the mere fact that there isn't equal representation at every level in every field is not by itself a problem in my eyes.

>> That's an argument from ignorance; "it's not A, so it must be B" - no, there's C and D and E.

> How so? What else is there? If we know that they are smart enough (just by looking at high school graduation stats), why are they not going into those fields if not for social reason?

> Again, what other reason can there be?

> We don't know. That's the whole point.

That's exactly an argument from ignorance: "well it's not these explanations, so what else could it be than the explanation I offer?" This is not how rational people draw conclusions based on evidence. By that kind of calculus, you would have to consider it a good argument for someone to go "Well how could lightning happen if Zeus doesn't make it? So it's gotta be him!"

The way to draw conclusions is to find evidence for your hypothesis. "I can't think of any other mechanisms that could be relevant here" is not evidence, what you have to do is show that there is unfair treatment of girls/boys, that that unfair treatment leads to inequalities, and quantify in how far it does that. It's no use to go to

> I have anecdotal evidence of girls believing that "coding suits boys better", but nothing more.

you actually have to figure out ok, how much of these misrepresentations are due to malevolent causes? Because if only, say, 5% of the misrepresentation in different fields is due to malevolent causes, and the other 95% are the result of a fair system where different people of different preferences and different capabilities choose to do what they want freely, then we're in a pretty decent place. The 5% still should be counteracted with proportionate means, but that's not the sort of measured approach that you seem to be going for here.

Many entirely benign reasons do account for a large fraction of the different levels of representation in different fields, so that is something that needs to be acknowledged and accepted. You even quoted sources that show that if you account for some purely benign reasons, then the wage gap already shrinks to like a fifth (or something like that) of the size we get by a naive "group them all together simply based on gender".

> If there is indeed a social stigma on girls becoming coders then that is unfair treatment, since boys don't have the stigma.

Sure, if there is, and if it actually discourages girls to a quantifiably non-negligible degree from going into programming, then that's not acceptable. You haven't demonstrated any of that.


>> There are important cognitive and personality differences between men and women that result in significantly different preferences and life choices without any unfair treatment of anyone being involved, for example.

> Citation needed.

I'm happy to give you a couple sources, but reflect on this before you go to the sources: if you haven't even looked into this point before now, how can your argument be anything but an argument from ignorance?

Here's some very light fare, The Gender Equality Paradox; it's a 40 minute documentary where some reporter/comedian goes and asks experts in cognitive and social development about possible innate gender differences. Don't be discouraged by the fact that he's a journalist/comedian, he talks to leading experts in the relevant fields, so you can ignore him and listen to what they have to say.

Then here's two posts by heterodoxacademy.org (a kind of crowdsourcing site that's run and written by academics to comment on issues from a scientific perspective) about the Google Memo thing from last summer, maybe you saw/remember that controversy: 1) The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences? and 2) The Greater Male Variability Hypothesis – An Addendum to our post on the Google Memo. Having read through some of the sources, I think there's more red in that article than there should be (they highlighted sources that they thought disagreed with the claims about gender differences made in that memo in red), but it's definitely a valuable collection of research.

Here's a two hour debate about cognitive sex differences, with the speakers being Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke.

And a book that I found to be fantastic on these issues: Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities by Diane Halpern, former president of the American Psychological Association.

These sources are a lot of stuff to go through, and if you follow the citations to the research that they bring together you may as well spend the next decade reading, but the relevant point here is: there are significant personality, cognitive, and preference differences between men and women that go a long way in explaining why they are represented differently in different fields.