Are Men More Rational than Women?

[Kul69]

Seeing as maths is the language of logic, if one gender were more suited to mathematics then you could provide a proof for the original premise.

So are guys better at maths?

why don't women take up maths courses and maths based degrees (engineering) at college level.......societal influence or simply going for other strengths?

No, they're not. See the post above where I quote one of your sources that has evidence of this.

Women don't do math/science as often because they're told they won't be good at it, discourged from participating, deal with sexism constantly, there are a TON of environmental reasons why women don't go into these fields.

My girlfriend is a physics major with a near 4.0. Her sister is a computer science major who now works at Microsoft and has gotten high up in management there.

Both of them attend/went to women only colleges where they don't have to deal with the stigmas/sexism present in science fields at cooed institutions.

I even read a post on bluelight recently from a female in a science field who was complaining about constant sexism in school and favoritism extending to males in those fields.

 

[neverstop]

I'm a very calculating logical person and I have found that I get along with men far better than I get along with women. All the girls I have ever had flings or relationships with have been those "oh she's just one of the guys" type girls. Now I am just one person sharing my experience and so are all the people who agree/disagree with me so I think it's impossible to make a generalization in either direction.

 

[Rated E]

Having gone in my life from a very conservative area where all of my male friends were extremely macho types and there was "the gay kid" at my high school that everyone made fun of to living in extremely open minded communities where there's "the straight kid" everyone makes fun of I can assure you the amount of logical women and emotional men has gone way up in the latter.

Do you think the open minded nature of the environment was something that attracted these people to it?

Honestly when I think about it I know more emotional men than women now and more logical women than men. I'm not joking at all.

Honestly when I think about it, I know more people that live in my city than people that don't. I'm not joking at all.

(Maybe more people live in my city than anywhere else...)

 

[Rated E]

Women don't do math/science as often because they're told they won't be good at it, discourged from participating, deal with sexism constantly, there are a TON of environmental reasons why women don't go into these fields.

My girlfriend is a physics major with a near 4.0. Her sister is a computer science major who now works at Microsoft and has gotten high up in management there.

Both of them attend/went to women only colleges where they don't have to deal with the stigmas/sexism present in science fields at cooed institutions.

I even read a post on bluelight recently from a female in a science field who was complaining about constant sexism in school and favoritism extending to males in those fields.

Anecdotes.

 

[qwe]

research DOES (especially social psychology, a very interesting field, i recommend taking a class in one) indicate that:

females have superior ability to communicate
females make better romantic companions and friends
females respond better to emotions and can read emotions better

basically, females are more emotional, and have better emotional (& social) intelligence

this is most likely due to cultural influences in early childhood. who gets the tank truck, and who gets the dollhouse?

so women are more socially oriented, and do better there. does that mean that they are more "rational"?

well if rational means making decisions which benefit you, and changing your beliefs when confronted with appropriate evidence, i would say women: women aren't the ones getting into fights, and women tend to be more liberal than men. (these could of course be due to cultural factors as well. there is some biology to it, though. i have read studies comparing both brain physiology and philosophical worldviews and they point toward women)

and as i brought up in the first part of my post, emotional intelligence is a very important factor. they may be more intelligent, over-all, because of it, since emotions and cognition are so intimately tied

evolutionarily, i suppose, men would have had to adapt to certain practical intelligences (while hunting) while women would have had to adapt to certain social intelligences (stuck at home with a baby inside of their giant belly). this is assuming that there were differences between the genders in terms of roles (gender roles) before society evolved; there may well have not been any difference

but if there was, the basic message is (and research definitely confirms this!):

men are better at some things,
and women are better at other things.
This goes back to the tank&dollhouse idea

of course, in this particular case (rationality or intelligence), comparing a 50% group of humans to another entire 50% doesn't make much sense to begin with in the first place. Everyone has met boyish girls and girlish boys. The differences between the sexes may be about the same or less than the differences within a certain gender, i dont know what the research says about this

 

[Kul69]

Anecdotes.

Just responding to the same from the person who I was responding to.

Hey, do you actually have anything to add to the discussion?

Anyway, you're as bad as that other guy who said "he loves it when people say unscientific things like the brain is fluid." I say something in a general sense sometimes because I think other people already know certain things.

I'll educate you though. Next time please focus on the first sentence in my post though where I state things not related to personal experience and ignore the rest if you'd like. Do your own research. This is boring reviewing the same stuff I already know. Show me something I don't know. At least the guy who posted those other sources taught me a couple things by providing me with some reading material. Thanks.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/09/000913083409.htm

Specifically, women tested in single-sex groups scored a 70-percent accuracy rate on math exams; women tested in groups in which they were outnumbered by men scored a 58-percent accuracy rate, said lead author Michael Inzlicht, whose study appeared in the September issue of the American Psychological Society’s journal, Psychological Science.

http://www.psychologymatters.org/thinkagain.html

The evidence has piled up for years. In 1990, Hyde and her colleagues published a groundbreaking meta-analysis of 100 studies of math performance. Synthesizing data collected on more than three million participants between 1967 and 1987, researchers found no large, overall differences between boys and girls in math performance. Girls were slightly better at computation in elementary and middle school; in high school only, boys showed a slight edge in problem solving, perhaps because they took more science, which stresses problem solving. Boys and girls understood math concepts equally well and any gender differences narrowed over the years, belying the notion of a fixed or biological differentiating factor.

As for verbal ability, in 1988, Hyde and two colleagues reported that data from 165 studies revealed a female superiority so slight as to be meaningless, despite previous assertions that “girls are better verbally.” What's more, the authors found no evidence of substantial gender differences in any component of verbal processing. There were even no changes with age.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...t-add-gender-inequality-and-the-math-gap.html

The study, which appeared in last week's edition of Science, relied on a test from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). A total of over 275,000 students in 40 countries took the PISA exam as 15-year-olds. On average, girls scored about 2 percent lower than boys on math, but nearly 7 percent higher on reading, consistent with previous test results.

The researchers, noted, however, that the math gap wasn't consistent between countries. For example, it was nearly twice as large as the average in Turkey, while Icelandic girls outscored males by roughly 2 percent. The general pattern of these differences suggested to the authors that the performance differences correlated with the status of women. The authors of the study built a composite score that reflected the gender equality of the countries based on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, data extracted from the World Values Surveys, measures of female political participation, and measures of the economic significance of females.

Grooming people to see themselves a certain way has a major effect on the brain. Those rich kid college prep schools are specifically designed to teach everyone there that they're better than everyone else and destined to be someone really important.

Don't underestimate the effect role models have on the developing mind even while you're developing in the fetus. I think you all need to study the brain a little bit because you don't seem to appreciate it's awesome fucking power to become anything you will it to be.

Eh.. whatever.

 

[Rated E]

Just responding to the same from the person who I was responding to.

Hey, do you actually have anything to add to the discussion?

I made no claims about the abilities of females compared to males. I asked:
"Do you think the open minded nature of the environment was something that attracted these people to it?"

Anyway, you're as bad as that other guy who said "he loves it when people say unscientific things like the brain is fluid."

I am? What do we have in common?

I say something in a general sense sometimes because I think other people already know certain things.

I'll educate you though. Next time please focus on the first sentence in my post though where I state things not related to personal experience and ignore the rest if you'd like.

I didn't realise you made posts this way.

Do your own research.

I'm already doing quite a bit of research... on the effects that word frequency and phonological neighbourhood size have on recall and recognition of verbal information, and the links between short term memory and long term memory that this exposes.

This is boring reviewing the same stuff I already know. Show me something I don't know. At least the guy who posted those other sources taught me a couple things by providing me with some reading material. Thanks.

Well like I said, I didn't ask you to do any boring work.

 

[ebola?]

This reminds me of the feminism debate.
I'll hold back my whole schpiel, but I should note that the causes of anatomical differences in the brain, between the sexes are unclear. We haven't teased apart biology and culture, not that we could. These differences are also just average tendencies.

So we have to ask, how is our particular conception of reason constructed, how does it function, and how are men ascribed rationality while women are ascribed as oft irrational?

ebola

 

[The_Idler]

according to my observations:

men TEND to be more masculine
women TEND to be more feminine.

masculinity TENDS to produce more structured/rational cognitive processes.
femininity TENDS to produce more spontaneous/emotional impulsive "reasoning".


So, there I can see a situation that could precipitate some kind of correlation.

 

[ebola?]

However, as I've seen, men tend to deal with emotions, especially anger, without complex reason. Women seem to better reason through emotional things.

 

[The_Idler]

true dat

 

[qwe]

how about this, guys:

men are rational, except emotions like anger (outward-directed emotions) can break that rationality

females are rational, except emotions like anxiety (inward-directed emotions) can break that rationality

 

[ebola?]

I don't think that these are quite the right tendencies.
I would say that (contemporary 'Western') women tend to navigate many people's anxieties using sophisticated reasoning, not what their 'gut' says.

It could be that men tend to justify behavior in terms of 'objective' reasons, eg, what's fair, while women perhaps tend to justify actions in terms of emotional states. Intense (adrenal) duress, be it anger or fear, undercuts reasoning for everyone, but men are more likely to express anger, women fear.

Again, these are central tendencies of groups in a particular culture, not capabilities of individuals.

ebola

 

[Psychedelic Gleam]

personality tests show differences between men's and women's roles

diference between male and female brains

This accounts for the common knowledge that most women are better at multitasking than men.

There sure is some interesting research going in this area and it seems to be growing.

Within group variation is greater than between group variation. There are rational women and emotional men and visa versa. If you did a graph of this distribution the amount of overlap would far exceed the number of traits that are exclusively male or female. You seem to argue from the "nature" perspective asserting that biological differences have direction correlates in behavior. Frankly with the immense complexity of human consciousness asserting that basic knowledge of brain differences has absolutely different consequences is ignorant and absurd. We have a long way to go before we know what these differences truly mean. Gender performance is extremely and dramatically varied between cultures (with emotional men, warrior women, hunting women, men who dress as women and behave as women their whole lives, men who give their elders blowjobs until they come of age at which point they take a wife, and so on and so forth), with men and women taking roles which are oftentimes contradictory to our picture of gender roles, their biological differences are similar if not identical but gender expression is greatly varied. Thus one must realize that difference is culturally emergent more than anything.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

^ Good post, PG. Much agreed.

A lot of gender roles, I believe, are based on divisions of labor that helped *A* specific cultural group survive in *THEIR SPECIFIC* geographic zone, at *A* specific technological era.

Peoples making a go of it in a very different part of the world, with much different resources at their fingertips, will likely find it advantageous to encourage the genders to assume markedly different roles.

I think you can assert two base biological facts about the genders:
1. Female humans tend to be optimized for the care of children
2. Male humans tend to be optimized for taking care of painful and difficult tasks that are necessary to society, but contraindicated by the long term, vigilant raising of children. Every culture has the concept of a 'real man', and pretty much all define it as a man who is capable of handling pain and hardship.

But beyond this, all bets are off. One could frame most tasks or roles as either 'feminine' (related to the direct rearing of children), or 'masculine' (necessary, but hazardous to the rearing of children), depending on what the culture's proximate needs are.

For example, if a culture sees itself as needing every able-bodied man involved in hard physical labor, and every able-bodied women involved with the raising of as many children as possible, then chances are they will reject a man who, despite his ability to endure hardship, prefers non-physical pursuits.

 

[Khadijah]

hence research shows they make better friends, in terms of being supportive and understanding and self disclosure among other things

Yea, better friends that stab them in the back and talk shit about them as soon as they leave the room....8)

I believe that men , in general are more rational than the average woman. Im talkin about the women that magazines like Cosmopolitan (14 better sex tricks to keep him in your bed! The must have shoes for fall! What is he REALLY thinking when he says that? Sexiest flirting moves!) are aimed at. the women who watch sex in the city and all that type of shit. For example I was watchin this show the other night called Speeders and it had someone doing 88mph in a 65. It turned out it was a girl and her younger sister and she was speeding becuz they were a few minutes late to the younger girls high school prom, so she (literally) said it was a emergency and thats why they were speeding. watever, i understand that they wanna get there on time but that shit is just silly.

I can act alot based on my feelings of things sometimes but in general I dont really like to be around people who act like that all the time as their average normal way of being. i dont get along too well with alot of average females so maybe i am biased or sumthin. i dont kno. I do kno tho that I do believe that many women are less rational and logical than men.

and to the people sayin, well is it mentally/genetically (naturally there) or is it becuz of how society raises them, well who really knows the answer to that question, but the topic here is, are men more logical than women, not, are women raised/conditioned by society to be less logical than men or are they born that way.

Thas jus how i see it , seems pretty straight forward to me.

 

[Psychedelic Gleam]

How does this optimisation take place?

Culture and biology (evolution) to varying degrees depending on who/when/where etc.

I think one caveat that should be added to that statement is that men and women can fill each others roles with relative ease 99 percent of the time including child care/work at home or hunting/war/etc, that is if the culture has the openness to allow this.

I think the real question to ask of the original poster is, are you referring to men and women in terms of sex or gender? as these are two totally different though interconnected beasts.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

Can you elaborate on what you think the difference is? Because personally I think it's a lot of fluff and poetic licence. Once again though I am open to new evidence so I am all ears.........or eyes in this case.

Sex is whether your sex chromosome is an X or a Y.
Gender is where your preferences and personality lie, relative to traditional gender roles and expectations.

There you are. No fluff.

 

[Psychedelic Gleam]

What you identify yourself as, has little bearing on the reality of your chromosomes and DNA. It amounts to wishful thinking.

I mean I'd like to be a dolphin, but it doesn't make it so.

Now I am a firm believer that people can do whatever they want in soceity as long as it doesn't harm anybody else, but let's call crazy......well loco. To deny our sexes their obvious identity, i.e. male=masculine, female=feminine takes away meaning from our existence. It makes what you were born a meaningless occurence.

Gender is expressed and acted out. You don't know the "sex" of anyone you meet. They could be a herm/merm/ferm: herm- true hermaphrodite/merm male sex organs with female gonads/ ferm female sex organs with male gonads, or any variation in between, they could be transgendered, and so on. Your whole idea of a world where sex is an absolute binary with an absolute binary of expression is fundamentally flawed and ignores a broad spectrum of people who don't have the binary chromosomal configurations. The comparison of gender queers (people whose expressed identity runs in conflict to the traditional conception of gender) to dolphins is grossly over simplistic and flawed (though a humorous south park reference I assume). Dolphin-ness is not a socially expressed identity but reliant on biological functions. Gender is, in every case beyond reproduction, a social performance, thus this is an unfair comparison.

The only identity you know is the expressed gender. What I mean to say is that for 99.999 percent of individuals you meet in your lifetime the only access to their gender is through their gender performance. Thus the "male" and "female" identities you face in every day interactions are a performance not an innate genetic fact that is immutable due to DNA/genetics. These individuals "sex" has nothing to do with the gender you assign them with.

The assertion that the disassociation of male=masculine and female= feminine "takes away meaning to our existence" is absurd from my point of view. Breaking free from this binary would allow fluid and free expression of gender for individuals. They would find their own identity not one assigned by culture. The disintegration of this binary would be liberating. Perhaps you would lose this assigned meaning but you would access true freedom of expression and experience.

And "to deny our obvious identity", if you read any contemporary gender theoreticians (especially in the sociological realm) you would realize that identity is never "obvious" once it is examined.

Oh and that picture you have of a crossdresser, most drag queens/cross dressers are heterosexual male identified genetic men, most crossdressers do not identify as women on a daily basis but ACT as women sometimes as a political statement to show how gender is performance (though obviously some performances are more convincing than others.

 

[kytnism]

the answer to this question is dependant on what situation of rationale you are faced with.

men tend to have more logical thinking methods.
and women, emotional.

...kytnism...