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The Brains of Men and Women Are 'Wired Differently'
Rambo Tribble writes "Research out of the University of Philadelphia concludes there are major differences in the neural pathways in the brains of men and women. Men, they say, are wired more front-to-back, women more side-to-side. 'The results establish that male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication. The developmental trajectories of males and females separate at a young age, demonstrating wide differences during adolescence and adulthood. The observations suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.' They propose this may explain why women have been found to be better multitaskers. Of course, this may also have ramifications for what skill and career proclivities each sex exhibits."
And the poisonous ideologies invented to justify it, and the pervasive violence employed to enforce it. For women's liberation through socialist revolution! Abolish the family!
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Don't tell me! Men and women might be different!?!?!?!?!?
female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes
Ah, this must explain why most programmers are women.
..is still dwarfed by the differences between individuals of a gender. None of these articles about statistical differences will ever justify the prejudices and social roles some people want to enforce on others to make things simpler.
As the article notes, the pathways being studied can change throughout life.
Presumably they change to fit the tasks the person spends most time on.
So... it seems plausible that the pathways reflect gender stereotypes because gender stereotypes created them in the first place.
So a study noted some interesting neurological structural differences, which is cool.
What is likely to be not cool are the coming comments about how this is just more evidence that divides in fields like STEM, management, finance, etc, are somehow the result of natural drives/talents and that women really do just want to be relegated to the low paid, low respect fields which have minimal chances for advancement, and that they are paid less because they are simply less capable.
" is a huge leap to extrapolate from anatomical differences to try to explain behavioural variation between the sexes. Also, brain connections are not set and can change throughout life."
So... basically this could be 100% enculturation and there could be zero genetic differences. This is essentially the equivalent of pointing out that people who do a lot of running have strikingly different looking cells in their leg muscles than people who sit on the couch all day. Jumping to the runners being born with different leg muscles might not be the correct answer.
There has actually been some rather cool work with brainscans of transgendered people, and often they will show neurological structures indicative of the sex they feel rather then the one their primary and secondary sex characteristics indicate.
Gay and lesbian generally just show up as whatever cis body they are.
"It is what it is" only because we're still getting out of the dark ages where women were being held back. I'm not saying that it will gravitate towards 50 percent and then stay there, but it will certainly change.
These studies are only trying to explain why there are differences between the sexes. This is news for nerds, stuff that matters. Personally I've always wondered exactly why I've found I could handle multiple projects much more easily than my male co-workers. Just getting a "you're a girl, duh" response is pointless. Back that up with some research and now you're cooking!
Also, this could also show why a corpus callosotomy can be more problematic for females than males.
The problem when discussing gender differences is that there is no stereotypical male or stereotypical female.
The difference in genetic makeup between the average male and the average female is LESS than the difference between one individual and another individual.
Trying to create more "gender ghettos" is the wrong response. Here at the UW there are many women engineers and scientists, and not in the fields old fogies think they "should" be in.
We are all individuals. How we use what we have differs, but that doesn't make it "better".
It's like a study on Mergers and Aquisitions reported today saying boards with only one female member were less likely to do a merger than boards with all male members - the problem is that mergers are usually a bad idea for shareholder value in the first place.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No! Men and women are EQUAL, dammit! I'm not listening, lalalalalala...!
One of the great myths of our time is that "equality" is the same as "identicality."
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Citation....desired. I really don't mean to be a dick, I am really curious to read more about this. I actually have a few tranny friends and find this pretty interesting. One of the people in their circle of friends actually found out, at somewhere around 40 years old, that desipite being outwardly born male, she actually had ovaries!
I always find this interesting because I tend to be a bit gender blind. I never really had this strong notion of basic mental differences and ability differences between men and women. As it turns out women I get along with well, including my own wife, tend to identify themselves as tomboys, but, I never really notice or think of them that way.
so it starts coming down to.... what causes these differences? The brain changes all the time based on what we do. You can find differences in brain connectivity just based on people's activities and lifestyles. So.... is it hormonal? (maybe not if the transgender thing translates to these connections), is it social? (women and men socialize in different groups that tend to do different things, and so, grow different types of connections?)
another interesting question is when and how this happens. If a transexual is more like their claimed sex than their outwardly visible one.... is that innate? or does that come from years of practice at trying to be the opposite sex?
One observation I have made is that.... well... I don't like young trannies, they annoy me. What annoys me, and this goes for both MTF and FTM is that (and I am generalizing) they tend to take on a characture of the gender they want to emulate. Some younger, less experienced FTMs tend towards being loud, overtly macho. Likewise MTFs tend towards well... acting like they learned to be a woman from watching Zsa Zsa Gabore (get off my lawn). You kinda get the idea they are overacting, faking it a bit. Its a vibe I don't get at all from older trannies who are more experienced.
This makes me think.... maybe its in fact acting out our expected social roles that changes the brain in these ways? Or maybe its a feedback loop, a bit of the chicken, a bit of the egg.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Eh? I always thought when people use the term "equality" it is about equality of opportunity regardless of gender, race, physical deficiencies, etc. not that people are actually equal as an individual, that would be an oxymoron...
The fight over "begging the question" was lost decades ago. The modern usage makes more sense anyway: the logical fallacy would be better off renamed "assuming the premise", which both serves as a more descriptive name and is a better translation of the Latin petitio principii.
Save your time and effort for the "literally" folks. It's wasted here.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
See the book "Unlocking the Clubhouse" for how high-achieving girls fascinated by computers suffer a death by a thousand cuts and switch fields despite their preference.
I was also interested and did a quick Google search and found a few different results:
Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus
White matter microstructure in female to male transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A diffusion tensor imaging study.
It seems as though there are some differences in the brain for transgendered individuals in that areas of their brain are more similar to the gender that they think they are rather than the brain of the gender that typically corresponds with their biological sex. It also appears (at least from these studies) that hormone therapy is not responsible for those changes. There isn't anything to suggest what causes this to occur, so it could be biological or social, but I doubt it would be largely due to social causes as that would seem to imply that people could become far more intelligent simply by acting like a genius. At the same time, I don't think it's genetic (or entirely so) either as it intuitively seems as though being transgendered probably produces a less fit individual as I can't imagine having to cope with your brain telling you that you're in the wrong body for your whole life making life easier, especially if everyone else treats you as though you're insane.
Simon LeVay also published some similar research about 20 years ago that examined differences in the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men, so some of that research might also provide some insight into what might cause the observed differences.
By and large, men are physically more powerful -- by a very large margin. Over the vast majority of history, that physical power has been both a key factor in survival, making the male indispensable to the household, and consequently a means to dominate the family unit that could not be excised -- at the same time, it isn't something that depends upon superior cognitive function.
It is only (very) recently that females have become broadly able to support a household without benefit of a male presence. If women are to dominate due to any particular cognitive advantage, they've only just entered the race and it'll most likely be some time yet before we see the results, both due to cultural inertia and learning curves.
There's no telling what women may be capable of as yet in terms of exceeding male performance; they've barely had a few decades to try things on, and they're still being held back by religion, chauvinism, and the divisive backwards ride that sexual-role focused feminism took them on.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Then women are the one advantaged. They get more pardon, reduced sentencing and easier parole. I don't even start on domestic issues and divorce where they are more than likely to be seen as the victim, get alimony and child care...
No one who is married needs to be told that men and women are wired differently.
For example, my wife seems to have a problem with my spending all my free-time playing Battlefield 4 and Need for Speed Rivals. She thinks family dinners and holiday celebrations and our anniversary should take precedence over a week of double-XP.
Clearly, her priorities are way out of whack. Yet, somehow it seems to work. Or at least it did until I stopped showering last Tuesday and she started insisting I sleep in the basement. But the joke's on her because that's where my gaming rig is set up.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Exactly. It's perfectly acceptable and scientific to posit differences, as long as you can find the goods and bads to all cancel out somehow.
Anything else can be dismissed without further thought, of course.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
eq?, eqv?, or equal? ?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
You have been watching too much Bill O'Reilly. I say this, because he uses the same *exact* mis-representative definition of "social justice".
Social justice is not in any way shape or form about equality of outcome, it's about acknowledging that the system isn't fair (that's OK, it can't be fair in a free society), but more importantly taking measures that reflect that the system isn't fair.
Let's come up with an illustrative example:
Let's say that Bill Gates has a child and so do I. The children are the same age. One day, they both independently have two different "million dollar ideas." Bill Gates' child obviously has a clear advantage. He essentially has infinite funding and support to make it happen.
My child other hand will have to work is ASS OFF. He will have to apply for loans, appeal to investors, possibly have to make counter productive deals to make any headway. Even something as simple as filing a patent costs a small fortune (I know, I've done it). All things being equal, this is simply not fair. And that's OK. It doesn't have to be fair.
Here's where "social justice" comes in. The concept is simply saying "Hey, here's a kid whose working hard, has a good idea, let's try to find to give him a hand".
No guaranteed outcomes, not even equality of opportunity. In this example, my kid could still fail. And if he does, there is no one to blame but himself. I can live with that. No one asked for equality of opportunity, just help for those willing to work hard and earn it. This generally benefits society because my kids "million dollar idea" might be something that completely revolutionizes society. And that something may not ever see the light of day without a little support.
Th perfect *real world* example of this type of thing is JK Rowling. She lived in poverty when she was younger, needed support from the system to keep her on her feet. Now because of that support, she was able to creates works which have created more wealth than she could have dreamed. She alone is worth over 1 billion dollars. She creates new jobs and millions of dollars for thousands of people all around the world. She got kids to read *thick, non-picture books* with wonderful stories. And all of this was possible because of a small amount of "social justice" to help her out in her time of need.
Helping the less fortunate stay on there feet is not communism, it's an investment in a person and their ability to rise above their current circumstances.
There will certainly be abuses. There will be people who take and don't give back. And this should be prevented. That should be an argument for means testing, not an argument against helping those who truly need it.
I feel sorry that you are so misinformed.
Then women are the ones who have the privilege, not men. This is true both in the letter of the law, and the precedent set by its enforcement.
1. women get lighter sentences for crime.
2. women are assumed to be victims in 'abuse' cases whether they are or not..
3. if men call 911 because their wives are throwing knives at them, he is arrested and brought to jail. look up 'mandatory arrest.'
4. women pay less into social security yet retire sooner.
5. women don't have to sign up for the selective service in order to vote.
6. women are given access to public money (scholarships) for education just because they are women.
7. Title IX. Enough said.
8. VAWA. Enough said.