Gender studies are nonsense with zero scientific, rational or logic basis to them - The Gender Equality Paradox - Documentary NRK - 2011

Here’s one Korean study (not to generalize):

http://paa2011.princeton.edu/papers/111625

There has been long-standing interest in the possible positive effects of all-girls schools for improving girls’ education in general and in STEM specializations in general. But the positive associations presented in the previous literature do not permit identifying the effects ofselection into all-girls schools versus the effects of those schools. Using the unique Korean experience of random assignment in most, but not all areas, we find the all-girls schools do not significantly affect a range of indicators related to STEM education and careers. However, based on the areas in which the policy has not been applied, we do find evidence of selection effects of
the sort that also may be present in previous studies that attempt to make causal inferences on the basis of associations in observational data – consistent with the possibility that it is selection, not the effects of all-girl schools per se, that underlies their results.
Recently there has been increasing interest in educational issues concerning adolescent boys and, relatedly, whether single-sex schools might improve their education. In contrast to girls, we find that single-sex schools enhance boys’ interest in, confidence about, and expected and actual enrollments in STEM majors in college. Thus, strikingly, we do not find evidence of causal effects of all-girls schools on girls STEM concentrations – but do find significant evidence for boys, to whom the previous literature has paid very little attention until recently.

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No. There are studies and statistics on this, and there’s a pattern, nothing to do with me. Again, watch the video.

Oh man… it’s just 30 minutes. And to see the gender studies failing to try to say something different from nonsense is priceless

Were those Gain’s words? If not, to use such emotive terms comes across as disingenuous.

@Gain and @dhg please share your thoughts, in the simplest and shortest of the ways you can, about the following assertion:

“Generally speaking women are naturally different from men in terms of emotions/feelings, tastes and intellectual interests, motivations and capacities”

Thanks.

I’ll read the paper properly when I have time, but I’m already a bit irritated by it (the abstract doesn’t include a summary of conclusions, and all the tables are missing).

“Despite the voluminous literature on singlesex schools, there is far from a consensus on the effects of single-sex schools on educational outcomes including STEM career choices.”

Normally when this happens, you can be confident that the effect you’re observing is either an artifact or of no practical significance. Real differences are often so blatant that you don’t need sophisticated statistics or multiple studies to tease them out. Those tools are used more properly (as per Feynman’s favourite maxim) “so that we don’t fool ourselves”, rather than in the manner of a microscope.

The paper does mention about 20% of female students on average choosing STEM subjects, and my feeling is that that’s a lot. It would still be a lot if it were men. I don’t get the obsession with STEM. Although it’s a good thing for people to have a good understanding of science, we simply don’t need that many technologists.

Maybe it’s also a factor to consider the fact that a single-sex school will produce more lesbians and due to their hormonal changes some of them will lean towards more male-related jobs like STEM jobs, truck driving and owning bars.

Hermaphroditism and sex changes often happens when there aren’t enough membersof the opposite sex in a group. Like when you grow marihuana, you know.

Now we know where most of Jesus’ understanding of sex and gender comes from. :sunglasses:

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From jail :frowning:

I didn’t. It’s 40 minutes long. I figured it was something like The Gay Agenda.

The TL;DR version is:

A bunch of people liked the idea that men and female are basically the same and can be interchangeable like Lego blocks.
A bunch of new studies (and a few million years of evolution) has proven that there are clear biological differences that go well beyond the shape of genitals and boob-size, with clearly distinct and innate behaviors and character traits that are more likely to be attributed to one of the two groups.
The bunch of people who see men and women as interchangeable don’t like such studies and tag them as biased, patriarchy-generated, bigoted etc etc.

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Of course anything that doesn’t backup the current super progressive and radical feminism and other deliriums must be some conspìrancy or bullshit :smiley:

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You forgot to mention that the “researchers” found funny the “obsession” of scientists with finding a biological basis to sexual/gender differences but then when asked about this possibility (and well, told that there were proofs pointing in that direction) they said that they just didn´t work with those thesis xD

“THERE ARE NO BIOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GENDERS”
“Actually there are a fuckton, here’s a list…”
“…THAT LIST IS BIASED! CHECKMATE! WHERE ARE YOUR CENTURIES OF BIOLOGY NOW???”

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I think merely existing is a burden. It comes with some suffering and we don’t live in a utopian and egalitarian society. And any attempts to do that have resulted in pretty much the opposite of the that. Are some of the burdens of existence biological ? Yes certainly so, and I think it’s fair to look it objectively and see if we as a society can improve for everyone. But it seems like some people are just resentful for their own biological limitations, and in terms blaming and even seeking almost revenge like solutions and hatred now.

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Okay, it turns out the interesting stuff starts about 22 minutes in: Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, Sacha’s cousin) describes a study on infants at the age of 1 day, which is obviously more credible than the earlier study on infants at the age of 9 months.

(I say it’s obviously more credible because I’m reminded of the old experiment, centuries ago, to discover the One True Language by avoiding all speech in the presence of a child until the child speaks its first word – you need to be strict to avoid accidentally influencing the result. The result they got iirc was the word for bread in the dialect of one of the servants in the house. which suggests there was a slip-up. You can’t really perform an experiment like that on infants with the kind of strict standard that would be necessary to make it truly objective, unless you subject them to what might be called cruelty.)

Then Anne Campbell explains the evolutionary psychology angle: hormone differences cause men and women to behave in ways that overall promote the survival of the species, e.g. more estrogen makes women avoid dangerous situations ergo they and their babies are more likely to survive.

When she extrapolates that estrogen vs. testosterone is also the reason for women who are about to be tortured to choose to spend the pre-torture waiting period with other people, whereas men choose to spend the pre-torture waiting period alone, obviously the water is murkier (i.e. it’s no challenge to find a list of socially constructed reasons for a result like that). It sounds like they did the study merely by gender and not by actual hormone levels, which don’t always match the standard levels expected for a particular gender – a phenomenon that was noted in the infant studies (the result there being that it’s the hormone levels themselves that appear to cause the behavioral differences, not the “dangly bits” as Finley would say).

Then she says (direct quotation)

I just find it hard to believe that a very, very subtle difference in the tone of voice you use or how long you make eye contact or something like that could really have such a profound effect on the interests and activities and preferences that children show.

Earlier in the program they mention studies showing that the differences in how boys and girls are treated is definitely not subtle, even in Norway. And even subtle communication strategies can have profound effects, as anyone who’s seen a proper demonstration of NLP knows.

Then there’s the gender gap in computer interest.
computer gender gap by country

They don’t show the whole chart, but presumably blue = male employment in “computer jobs” (whatever those are), and red = female employment. The conclusion is supposed to be women in less developed countries choose computer jobs because they’re more desperate for money, but in developed countries people are free to take the jobs they really, truly want, deep down inside! :rainbow:

That doesn’t quite square with Finley’s comments in the other thread about coal miners, but that’s not the main issue. Economies develop in different ways, as the differences between countries of comparable development levels show.

What gets Jesus and Ibby so excited, it turns out, is (33 minutes in) Ms. Egeland accusing Mr. Dieseth (the guy who studied infants at 9 months) of being biased by his own expectations. Then she says biology has no effect on behavior and that there’s “no room for biology” in her theory because she’s a sociologist.

Next (35 minutes), Mr. Lorentzen asks why some people have such a “frenetic concern” with the biological origin of gender and posits that the studies in question don’t actually prove a genetic origin for gender differences beyond reproductive organs (and the miscellanea he mentioned earlier like height and weight), because there’s a “missing link” in the theoretical chain of cause and effect.

Host: You assume there are no [genetic] differences [between the genders in terms of feelings and interests] until the opposite is proven?

Lorentzen: Yes.

Then the host makes a good point: the other scientists don’t seem frenetic (unlike some of us :smile:), and they don’t say the differences are 100% biological, but the Norwegians do say the differences are 0% biological.

Host: But most importantly, can you, as a scientist, understand the world if you don’t consider every possibility?

Baron-Cohen: It’s a very moderate proposal to say it’s a mixture of biology and culture. I’m not saying it’s all biology. I’m simply saying don’t forget about biology.

This is in harmony with what I said earlier, but I approached it from the other side: whereas Finley would almost have us believe babies are born fully clothed, with pants and skirts formed in the womb, and “skirts” for boys (sarongs, longyis, kilts, etc.) are just genetic abnormalities, I would like people not to give the womb more credit (nor less) than it deserves. Exactly how much credit it deserves is a question we’ll probably never know with absolute certainty, especially if we can’t agree on whether or not the triple helix theory is valid.

I would love to know how Finley’s oh-so-irrefutable sexology of the 1950’s and 60’s shows this all to be naÏve nonsense. :slight_smile:

You do seem to enjoy re-writing my arguments in strawman form, but the TL;DR version of my posts is basically this:

Baron-Cohen: It’s a very moderate proposal to say it’s a mixture of biology and culture. I’m not saying it’s all biology. I’m simply saying don’t forget about biology.

… as is the general scientific consensus. The people who believe that the biology is irrelevant, and the people who believe that biology is everything, are actually very few. They just happen to be the noisiest. Also, it’s kind of boring to point out that people - individuals - are a product of their environment acting upon their biology. It’s just not very profound, or, like, provocative and stuff. So when people make documentaries about this, it’s the wingnuts who get the airtime.

A human being cannot possibly be a ‘blank slate’. A blank slate would be a cabbage. We are all born with certain things preconfigured, and certain differences between individuals. The only debate here is whether men and women (as statistical populations) have meaningfully different hardware settings. You could separate people into, say, people with blond hair and brown hair and find some statistically-significant difference between them, so given that male and female biology is radically different (not just in the matter of estrogen vs. testosterone) it would be absolutely astounding to find that this reality is not reflected in our behaviour and abilities. And so it turns out. Just because some people don’t like it doesn’t make it any less true.

Feynman explaining how science works, for the benefit of people with sociology degrees:

Read the books. There’s a reason those guys wrote thousands of pages on the subject.

As for why it’s a matter of frenetic concern: surely that’s obvious. Politicians are obsessed with it, and a lot of social policies are targeted towards making us all “equal” (whatever that means). Most countries are run by chinless wonders with no scientific education, so somewhere along the line the scientists do need to point out when the politicians are full of it. Checks and balances, and all that.

An interesting Tucker interview with the white guy who identifies as a Filipina. Turns out he’s not really an SJW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgA9wErGlGk

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Because it’s an idiotic statement that proves a complete lack of knowledge of the arguments she’s talking about. The study of the big five traits of personality has shown that:

a) Some non-biological characteristics (behaviour, personality etc etc) are heavily influenced by gender
b) Heritability AND environment have an effect on the same characteristics

Trying to separate biology and behaviour development is nonsense, it’s not too far off from claiming that earth is flat. “Well, if you ignore all the proof that demonstrate that earth is roundh(ish), then when I look in front of me the horizon seems flat”. It’s the same logic.

From a biological point of view there are two genders, and each gender develops in a different view both in terms of physiology and psychology. The fact that some people wasted money in order to make an ideological statement that:“We’re all the same” doesn’t change the facts, as it has been proven many times.

People who fall “inbetween” genders (which I put between quotation marks because it’s not really a correct way to describe them) usually suffer from 48XXYY syndrome or gender dysphoria. The former can have extremely severe effects on a person’s life if not properly diagnosed and treated in time, while the latter is a psychological disorder.

Which “some uf us” stated that behaviour is 100% based on biology? Or did someone post a study about it? Or was it Mr Strawman?

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HURRR! POSTING IN ALL CAPS AND MAKING WEIRD NOISES HURRR! THAT’S NOT FRENETIC MAN! HURRR EVERYBODY DOES IT HURRR HURRR HURRR!!! :rant: