Storm over gender gap moves into a gray area
By Natalie Angier and Kenneth Chang
The New York Times Tuesday, January 25, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/24/news/gender.html
Disparities in science not easily explained
When Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this month that one factor in women's lagging progress in science and mathematics might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And although his comments elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many were left to wonder: Did he have a point?
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Has science found compelling evidence of inherent gender disparities in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers in particular?
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Researchers who have explored the subject of gender differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that, yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women: in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains.
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Yet despite the public's desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean that a difference in function or output inevitably follows.
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"We can't get anywhere denying that there are neurological and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly are," said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women." "The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance."
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For example, neuroscientists have shown that women's brains are about 10 percent smaller than men's, on average, even after accounting for women's comparatively smaller body size.
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But through history, people have cited anatomical distinctions in support of overarching hypotheses that turn out merely to reflect the societal and cultural prejudices of the time.
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A century ago, the French scientist Gustav Le Bon pointed to the smaller brains of women - closer in size to those of gorillas, he said - and said that explained the "fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason in women."
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Overall size aside, some evidence suggests that female brains are relatively more endowed with gray matter - the prized neurons thought to do the bulk of the brain's thinking - while men's brains are packed with more white matter, the tissue between neurons.
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To further complicate the portrait of cerebral diversity, new brain imaging studies from the University of California, Riverside, suggest that men and women with equal IQ scores use different proportions of their gray and white matter when solving problems like those on intelligence tests.
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Men, they said, appear to devote 6.5 times as much of their gray matter to intelligence-related tasks as do women, while women rely far more heavily on white matter.
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What such discrepancies may or may not mean is anyone's conjecture.
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"It is cognition that counts, not the physical matter that does the cognition," argued Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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When researchers do study sheer cognitive prowess, many have been impressed with how similarly young boys and girls master new tasks.
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"We adults may think very different things about boys and girls, and treat them accordingly, but when we measure their capacities, they're remarkably alike," said Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. She and her colleagues study basic spatial, quantitative and numerical abilities in children ranging in age from 5 months through 7 years.
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"In that age span, you see a considerable number of the pieces of our mature capacities for spatial and numerical reasoning coming together," Spelke said. "But while we always test for gender differences in our studies, we never find them."
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In adolescence, though, some differences in aptitude begin to emerge. But the modest size and regional variability of the gender differences in math scores, as well as an attitudinal handicap that girls apparently pack into their pencil case, convince many researchers that neither sex has a monopoly on basic math ability and that culture rather than chromosomes explains findings like the gap in math SAT scores.
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Yet Summers and others have observed that while average math skillfulness may be remarkably analogous between the sexes, men tend to display comparatively greater range in aptitude. Males are much likelier than females to be found on the tail ends of the bell curve, among the superhigh scorers and the very bottom performers.
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But few researchers who have analyzed the data believe that the greater representation of men among the high-end scores can explain more than a small fraction of the sex disparities in career success among scientists. .
it may not explain all but i believe it would explain much more than "a small fraction.
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