More on the Student Gender Gap
Just to show that the difference in the numbers of men and women studying different college degrees is not some artifact of the US, something to do with the way the society is organized, have a look at this from The Times (London version). The major part of the article is about how different college degrees are harder or easier to get top marks (and thus a good job) in but that’s not I think the point that interests us here.
It’s the gender divide between the numbers doing different types of degrees: women make up 83% of those on psychology courses and 76% of those doing an English degree. Men 84% of engineering students and 65% of those taking physics. As always, we could take this to show that our society is biased, that the process of socialisation pushes people into one or another subject seen as “more appropriate” to their sex. It’s certainly true that this used to happen and it might still be going on.
However, one thing we can take from our EQSQ personality tests is that not everyone is suited to an English program, or a college degree in engineering. In deed, in the former we expect women to predominate, in the latter men, simply given the distribution of the systemizing and empathizing brain types.
This doesn’t of course, show that the socialisation or the discrimination are not going on: but we do need to keep in mind that there can be entirely valid and rational explanations for gender imbalances in college degrees that don’t include them.
March 1st, 2007 at 6:18 am
Women have babies. That’s why. Having babies (or just the ability to have babies) creates empathizing which leads to empathizing careers. And we’ve been children of women who have babies, who are children of women who have babies, children of, children of, children of women like us…
And men are children of women who have babies, our boys - babies who can never have babies, and we women know our boys can never have babies, but they will be needed to provide the sperm, to provide the un-nurturing side of the baby-making, the thing that fertilizes the egg but does not care for it, the thing that buys the home but does not care for it…
March 1st, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Well, sorta, this is very much taking the nurture side of the debate. 100 years ago it was simply common sense, not an expression of intelligence, to state that of course men and women were made differently. In the 1960s and 70s it was entirely fashionable to insist that we were, at birth, all entirely the same, it was simply society that made us act differently, nurture only.
These days the pendulum has swung back a little I think, the intelligence being that there are some things that are entirely genetic (XX and XY for example), some entirely cultural (pink and blue for girls and boys) and most some complex mixture of the two.
March 3rd, 2007 at 3:26 am
Lucy, You bring up a great point concerning the effect of having babies. That surely rings down through the generations as a difference in experience and therefore outlook.
As you both know, we’ve got a new baby around here. And I’m wired to care. Every time she cries, I go all milky. My husband, on the other hand, feels a bit helpless, hopeless, lost. During those rare but still terrible wail outbreaks, I’m by far the lucky parent. I’ve got what they call the post-partum cuddle hormones. (For more info, here’s a link to an article about how hormones effect mothering .
Not only might my brain have been wired a bit on the give-a-damn rather than take-their-dimes side of things, but my body’s generating a potent relate-to-another drug. And then there’s simply the lived experience of being the primary caretaker of a wee cooing human.
March 7th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Tim, in my college days, I entirely believed, and advocated, that male and female were the same at birth. And while I still believe society plays a large role in our development, I’m opening my mind to the biology behind it all. In addition to the fact that women have babies, men have more testosterone. Although, it’s been shown that in childhood, there are only a handful of times the amount is so different that it affects behavior.
As a child, for behavior purposes, I was a rough and wild “boy.†My youngest son is similar. But my oldest son, for behavior purposes, is a “girl.†He is not rough in any way; when he acts out, it is not in a physical sense. Instead, he pouts and cries and runs into the bathroom in tears. When rough-housing boys are nearby, he velcros his body to my leg. My youngest is drawn to wildness. But then again, I can tell the way I’m raising him has tamed this a bit.
My boys are being raised in a household where nothing – neither behavior nor object – is labeled “boy†or “girl.â€
It will be interesting to see what occupations, for instance, they are drawn to in adulthood. And to see if, in our case, nurture can at least keep pace with nature.
March 8th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
I was with an English journalist, Nick Cohen, last weekend and he was banging on about how great a man Simon Baron Cohen was, what with his intelligence about how some things really are determined genetically. I was a little shocked as I’ve always considered it obvious that some things are and some not. However Nick was saying that in left wing circles in England it’s almost anathema to say so.
Lucy, you seem to be describing absolutely male and female brain behavior there amongst the three of you, with two on the other side from the XX and XY diagnosis. Here’s hoping the intelligence in the EQSQ Theory section helps!
Millie, I hear you: one of the lovely games you can try and play with this sort of intelligence is trying to work out how much is culturally imposed and how much is genetic. Roughly where we came in I suppose. Is it that the last few generations of mothers and fathers have imposed this? Or is it a long term thing, that those who had those “cuddle genes” were the ones whose children survived and thus the ones we are descended from?