From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 08/29/02-09:42:36 AM Z
Kris Erickson wrote:
>
>
> Over the last several years I have come to believe just the opposite: how
> incredibly similar men and women (i.e. males and females, boys and girls, ad
> nauseum) ARE to each other.
>
Which makes sense, because the data show that there are very few
differences, and what differences there are, are very small.
The only absolute difference, of course, is in reproductive function. By
absolute difference, I mean that on this variable, for all intents and
purposes, all men are different from all women. All other differences
are relative, meaning that there's a difference between the average of
the two distributions, but the overlap is much greater than the
difference.
The one important relative difference is in size and strength. Men on
average are taller, heavier and stronger than women. But not all men are
bigger than all women. My daughter, at just under 6 gorgeous feet tall,
is taller than almost all women, but she's also taller than the majority
of men, I would guess.
As for cognitive differences, there are almost none. The small
difference seen in verbal skills 20 years ago has evaporated since; a
recent study comparing the test scores of millions of students showed no
difference between males and females on verbal scores.
Math is slightly more complicated; if you include the very small group
of math prodigies that are clear out at the end of the curve away from
everyone else, then males are slightly better at math skills than
females. But if you drop these outliers and reanalyze the data, then in
the normal (non-genius) population, females are better at math than
males. But even if you leave the geniuses in, the difference is not
worth worrying about; in other words a woman at the 99th percentile of
the female distribution will be superior in math skills to 95-96% of the
men as well.
It's widely believed that there are basic differences in communication
styles between men and women, but the work most often cited as proving
this is faulty, and attempts to replicate it using sound methodology
have found no differences between men and women. Christine is
absolutely right; that business about Men are from Mars, Women are from
Venus is from the birds.
There is sometimes a deal made about difference in brain size, but when
you adjust for body size, there's no difference in brain size or weight.
And the research that purports to show that men's brains are more
lateralized to the right side than women's brains was done on rat
brains, and male rat brains at that, so shouldn't be given the time of
day.
Gotta go,
kt
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