Reddit reviews Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences

Pretty much all historical civilizations were sexist, since women were denied fundamental rights in them based on gender. Even if one were to agree with everything else you've written, your final conclusion/suggestion does not follow. I can't think of any significant, historical civilization that might be called non-sexist.

Biology is a fact of nature; you cannot "fight biology". That would be like fighting physics. No matter what you did, the laws of physics would still apply. What you are talking about, such as "scholarships for women only, to get them into areas of technology, engineering", and "specialized programs for boys only to help them in reading & writing" do not in any way fight biology, they leave biology just as it is. However, they do change society. Scholarships are societal creations designed to redistribute access to education, which is another societal creation. Education doesn't grow on trees; human beings artificially created the system of education. Hence, the educational system is an aspect of society, not biology.

The fact that there are some gender differences in the brain, statistically speaking, should be no big surprise. But many popularized studies tend to exaggerate or misinterpret these differences. I would suggest you read Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine, or Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences for a deeper look at these topics. Broadly, a study that shows no differences in how men and womens' brains, on average, perceive a topic won't make a good headline or blog post, so it will be unlikely to be reported compared to one that finds a difference.

Secondly, it's not clear what these differences have to do with social roles. For example, what does the fact that men have more spatial reasoning, on average, mean for social roles exactly? Since there are many intelligent and successful women in programming and engineering fields, and many men who suck in these areas, it does not follow that there is a casual relation between gender and STEM fields. On the other hand, engineering is clearly coded as a masculine profession in society, and girls may be turned away from studying engineering for fear of being seen as unfeminine. Scholarships that seek to counteract that would then be playing a positive role.

Finally, I see an assumption through your post that what is "nature" is automatically good and must be accepted by society. However, the whole point of civilization and society is go beyond nature itself to build something for ourselves, as humans. Is medicine natural? We are programmed to die from birth, yet we still use the medical system to prolong life. Since men are physically stronger than women, should men then dominate women and impose our wishes on them? No, we created a system of laws where all citizens are equal before it because we recognize the equal moral worth of each person. Freedom is the fundamental issue. Humanity as a whole, and individual people for their own lives, must have the freedom to define its own path and create its own society without being told that a certain path is required due to unnecessary extrapolations from natural facts.

Oh I believe in evolution. I just can't stand crap evo psych and half-understood pop biology, particularly because it is so often employed in regressive politics.

To be clear, the sexes did not "diverge". We are the same species. In large mammals like us I see no reason to suppose there would be serious adaptive pressure to have much sexual dimorphic behaviour. Until I see damn good evidence that such selective pressure existed, I'm sticking with the null hypothesis.

Plus, like, some evidence that our brains are fundamentally different would help.

Edit: If you care about this issue I'd recommend you read Brain Storm.

This is not what you are asking for, but you might take interest in it anyways- Brainstorm is a book that basically calls bullshit on a lot of studies that have been done about how hormones and the difference between males and females. Talks about intersexuality as well.

The science around sexual orientation isn't very clear cut and looking at brain scans of adults tells us little about their origins. The evidence that male and female brains differ due to innate biological differences is weak enough that extrapolating from that to talk about sexual orientation is even harder. Have you picked up Edward Stein's book "The Mismeasure of Desire"? It's a bit old now but the studies he discusses have much in common with more current research. I'm not saying there's no evidence that sexual orientation is innate, just that it's far from conclusive and tends to oversimplify the complexities of human sexuality.

John's point, however, stands regardless of the science and he is qualified to speak on the philosophical/ethical implications of BTW arguments. His point is that questions of innateness are ethically irrelevant. The science simply shouldn't matter. It might be politically useful to use BTW arguments but these arguments are problematic in other ways.

I'm glad I posted this after all. I had hoped it would spark good conversation and it seems to be doing just that.

"There have been many studies..."

Here is the thing tho. A lot of the studies in gender differences have absolutely junk methodology. And a lot of the valid studies show only minor differences where the two Bell Curves overlap 90 percent. From that aspect the science shows clearly that individual differences in something like math skill completely override any tiny difference in gender. Here is a book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Storm-Flaws-Science-Differences/dp/0674063511

I don't expect I can change your view, but if you are really interested in the subject and open-minded I'm sure that book can.

The data did show that boys did better than girls at math. But there's some other interesting studies that showed that if girls were told that they were being tested in math against the boys, they did worse than if the girls were simply given a math test. So there's that to think about.

What I meant by the foundation being sexist is similar to how most of biological science has been built on sexist foundations. Such as the IQ test being tweaked until the boys outscored the girls. In studies with baby psychology, researchers tend to assume that they are going about their methods wrong if baby boys and girls don't act the way they expect them to based on their genders.

On the one hand, of course it's always good to question your methods if you're not getting the results you expect--you could be doing something wrong. On the other hand, you should stop and think "why do I expect these results in the first place?" In my experience, many researchers don't ask themselves that.

Again, I'm not saying that it's totally impossible for innate differences to exist. On the one hand, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective why men and women might have these differences with regard to hunter-gatherer societies. On the other hand, I find evolutionary psychology dangerously reductionist as a whole, and it is often used to justify sexism, racism, and ableism anyway. To me the field strikes me as the science of writing the perfect "just so" story.

Bottom line, I'm sure there are some innate differences. I'm just not sold that those innate differences are as hard-wired or lead to the hugely dissimilar cognitive and behavioral phenotype as the current literature suggests.

Check out this book for more information. (Of course, the author there is biased too! But there's still a lot of interesting stuff there worth considering.)