Women producers!! Where are you!

[S0lo]

The problem is not at the university level. Research shows that roughly between the age of 12-18, girls are systematically discouraged from pursuing their interests in math and science. For example, studies found that male high school math teachers would consistently call on male students to answer questions while ignoring the female students.

May be it's just because females were actually smarter at it and usually knew the answer. So the teachers were trying to catch those lazy boys and provoke them to do some thing.

[AnX]

Were

[S0lo]

Were

Corrected.

[Hink]

Were

Corrected.

and some friendly mod fixed your quote goof pdq

[S0lo]

Were

Corrected.

and some friendly mod fixed your quote goof pdq

hehe , thanks.

[deastman]

In the US?
I even remember my high school days (which is a miracle ) and I think I we would have all noticed if that had been going on in our class. I don't remember such preference. Actually, I was happy when my math teacher ignored me

As would I! I sucked at math then and I still suck at math now. Nevertheless, these anecdotes are not statistically significant.

[whyterabbyt]

Why draw a line between culture and nature? Culture has not begun two hundred years ago, but tens of thousands of years ago. Roles have been the same up until recently

Draw a line between culture and nature where the 'role' is less than ten thousand years old? You ask why?
Oh dear.

And you're really going to plea 'nature' for a disparity between males and female success in your own examples of professional chefs, Nobel-winning scientists etc?

Makes sense; clearly men evolved to be better at arranging asparagus on a bed of bechamel. That makes so much sense compared to thinking there's a basis for it in the cultural and social barriers that existed for women right up to and including the point when the roles of 'chef' and 'scientist' came into being a couple of hundred years ago.

I mean, just because they weren't allowed to vote, or own property, or graduate from Nobel-breeding universities like Oxford, that doesn't mean they were being denied some sort of fair opportunity, does it? No, must be nature what done it, way back when the 'scientist' was the one mumbling to the sun god and the 'chef' was the one who didnt always eat food raw.

[fluffy_little_something]

Of course human nature - both male and female - still plays a role even in our modern world. It doesn't go away just because we use fancy gadgets and yell equality...

[whyterabbyt]

Of course human nature - both male and female - still plays a role even in our modern world.

Oh, so its 'human nature' now, not just 'nature'. Okay. Would you like to be precise as to what you consider that to be?

Given that there are more than a couple of behaviours which could be encompassed in that description, many of which really dont have a role in our modern world, its a bit much to just handwave that 'human nature' intrinsically proves your point in any way.

It doesn't go away just because we use fancy gadgets and yell equality...

Oh, most certainly many aspects of legacy human nature havent gone away. But unfortunately for your theory, there's far less evidence that human nature entails something like 'women aren't intrinsically as good at being chefs' than there is 'males tend to actively try and prevent females from succeeding in non-subservient roles especially those with power, prestige, wealth etc'.
After all, the latter can easily be observed in the exact social and cultural barriers I was talking about.

[Jace-BeOS]

...one can even see on a brain scan whether a brain is male or female, different structure, different brain activity.

Wait, what? "Brain scan" being what exactly?? Your terminology is sci-fi, not medical. If you're talking about imaging, what kind? What is structurally different in the brain between men and women?

Secondly, brain function (and structure) is greatly dependent on nurture and experience. Claiming a specific structural or activation difference as being caused by gender might be entirely backwards. It might be that the life experience is responsible for the features you've decided are "different".

There's a vast difference in how men and women are nurtured (and generally treated) in most societies. The only way to judge whether a brain difference is caused by (or causes!) a difference in behavior, skill, or aptitude is to do a study that eliminates the cultural variables. Since we cannot do this, any aptitude/skill differences noted between men and women cannot be judged as caused by, or effected by, gender.

We cannot compare the brains of a man and a woman who are otherwise the same, developmentally, because they're not raised the same way. We can't even compare children. Gender stereotypes are presented to humans at day one. The moment a person is born, someone does something to them based on gender beliefs that may or may not have any meaning at all to the human species. In the USA, baby boys are almost immediately mutilated with an unnecessary procedure called circumcision. Then there's how children are dressed and treated by the adults that surround them.

There's no way to judge male vs female aptitude differences when we never have any male and female humans raised purely equally to study.

Training people to develop specialized skills also changes brain activity and likely brain structure. These structural changes aren't visible to existing imaging techniques, to the best of my knowledge (anyone with sources to cite that prove otherwise, by all means present them). These structural differences are the kind we can only only see in dissection, and this STILL tells us almost NOTHING about intelligence; it definitely tells us zero about skills and aptitude (barring evidence of overt damage).

If you had magical sci-fi "brain scan" technology, you'd STILL have to consider nurture (culture) BEFORE considering gender. However, we don't have magical/sci-fi brain scan tech. Star Trek is fantasy.

If you happen to be referencing fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), fMRI works by theoretically showing regions of activity, based on evidence of increased blood flow (the iron in the blood is what we are seeing in an fMRI). It's not known if this is absolutely correct (that blood flow equates to peak activity), we don't know what that activity is, and we don't have any way to define the differences between "active" and "less active" brain regions in any subtle manner... but it's all we have at the moment.

FMRI does not demonstrate qualitative differences between brains in a way that is useful for judging skills and aptitudes. FMRI can help identify brain injury / damage, but it doesn't provide remotely enough meaningful data to judge whether, for example, a [healthy and uninjured] man or woman is better at any task than another [healthy and uninjured] man or woman.

The resolution of the imaging for showing activity is fairly low and the actual function of the brain is still not understood to any serious degree. We only have a grasp of which large regions are related to certain categories of functions (visual, aural, touch, motor function, etc). When it comes to fine detail of brain processing, we have no information and no way to know what is happening with any current brain imaging.

We can observe order of operations to some degree (regions of activation in sequence for tasks given to a test subject) but we cannot use this information to determine whether one person is "better" than another at any task (again, excepting for injured brains, which we can more easily judge as incapacitated).

People who don't know the reality of existing imaging techniques tend to believe in exaggerated notions of the meaningfulness of imaging provided in research studies. Bad scientists have always used irrelevant data to draw ideological conclusions, and fMRI is not immune to such abuses. Beware any literature that claims a "brain scan" proved one person was "better" than another, even if they were trying to qualify their claim by saying "at certain tasks". There's almost no way that they correctly excluded nurture/development from the variables, and ignoring those variables is bad science.

At the very best, any such brain studies are showing that we can observe how sexism successfully cripples one gender against certain skills and behaviors foolishly associated with only the other gender (women blocked from brain development that would result if allowed an interest in, or pursuit of, the sciences; men emotionally stunted by toxic masculinity... for two very broad and imprecise examples among many).

Then there's the whole issue of non-binary gender that's being completely ignored in this discussion!! It further demonstrates that aptitudes are greatly impacted by nurture and that claims of one gender/sex being inherently better or worse at anything is utter bollocks.

[...]

There is nothing wrong about one sex being more interested in and better at this, and the other sex being more interested in and better at that.

Nothing wrong... except there's no evidence that this actually happens at all. What you see is culture. You're mistaking it for nature. We've had this discussion before. You're still seemingly unwilling to accept that you may have been acculturated to accept something that is not factual. I highly recommend opening yourself to being wrong. It lets you learn and grow.

I agree with every reply made by the people here who are challenging you. Your claims are inaccurate, your citations of fact are non-existent, and your language is suspect. Blowing off sexism and citing "political correctness" as a manufacturer of sexism is a huge red flag for actual sexist ideologies.

You may not be aware of your cultural sexism, and that's understandable. I'm NOT saying you're a bad person. You likely have zero malignant intent. However your ignorance of sexism is still a thing of worry because it means that you unknowingly contribute to the maintenance of sexism. Please seriously consider the challenges being made to your beliefs here.

[Jace-BeOS]

"Women producers!! Where are you!"

Where are they? Here's an idea: They're probably avoiding male-dominated forums where they'd have to witness "well-meaning" men telling them why they're fundamentally inferior to men "at certain tasks".

This thread has been cleaned up before, and yet it has gone the same damn direction again. We are literally witnessing the thing that keeps women out of certain areas of interest: sexism.

[BMoore]

Not saying, in any way, anything about ability, but funny how so many bashes someone for pointing out that women's neural structures are anatomically different from men.

Even brain size, and components of the brain are different, thus working differently.

[fluffy_little_something]

Since the sex-based brain differences are most of all due to hormones and genes doing their thing during puberty, those differences are obviously only partly due to different treatment by society, if at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscie ... ifferences

Well, everyone believes what they want, obviously.
So, let's agree to disagree as neither side will convince the other

[BMoore]

Why not ask the questions "Where are the male dental hygienists" or "Where are the male kindergarten teachers".

[whyterabbyt]

Not saying, in any way, anything about ability, but funny how so many bashes someone for pointing out that women's neural structures are anatomically different from men.

Well, no, no-one has been bashed for that here that I can see, though it is actually untrue.

I think its fair to say that making claims made about what such structural differences actually mean have been subject to rebuttal. And of course, that's because the claims being made have zero evidence to support them, its just random nonsense about 'brain scans' and 'structure' and 'different components.'

What is true is that the range of structures of female brains is different from the range of structures of male brains. That doesnt mean that you can actually point to a specific brain and say that its male or female, or that female brains are specifically different from male brains; there's actually significant overlap within those ranges.

Have some facts from one of the most recent studies.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/ ... -and-women

Despite the study’s consistent sex-linked patterns, the researchers also found considerable overlap between men and women in brain volume and cortical thickness, just as you might find in height. In other words, just by looking at the brain scan, or height, of someone plucked at random from the study, researchers would be hard pressed to say whether it came from a man or woman. That suggests both sexes’ brains are far more similar than they are different.