This is all true, and what's more it's clear as day to anyone with half a brain.Originally Posted by Vota
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro...ex_differences
This is all true, and what's more it's clear as day to anyone with half a brain.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro...ex_differences
Not true. Let's look at a few jobs which can be described as "physical labor" and you can decide whether you think men are more adept at them:
1) Housecleaning.
2) Knitting.
3) Repetitious tasks on an assembly line that don't demand heavy lifting.
4) Waiting tables at a restaurant.
These jobs are often done by women. Other manual labor jobs for which men have few (if any) innate physical advantages, but which are generally performed by men include:
1) Auto mechanic
2) plumber.
3) carpenter
etc., etc. ad infinitum
Jobs that men are probably innately better than women at performing:
1) Mixed martial artist (and many other less idiotic sports).
2) A few other jobs in which strength or size is very important.
By the way, "People like Ecurb" -- a silly and insulting phrase -- do acknowledge the obvious. What I don't acknowledge is that sexist stereotypes are "obviously" the result of innate physical differences. As I said before, they might be, but they might not be. It is often extremely difficult to determine.
I'll grant, Clopin, that since it all appears "clear as day" to you, you also appear to have "half a brain". Is that the left side, or the right side?
Give me a break, who refers to knitting or waiting tables as 'physical labour'? And is knitting really a 'job' for very many people? I actually never said that women are physically hindered from becoming plumbers or auto mechanics, I agree they are not.
Carpentry requires heavy lifting, which men are better suited for. And suggesting that a strength imbalance between men and women is a 'sexist stereotype' is absurd.
Last edited by Clopin; 12-10-2014 at 07:24 PM.
I think he was pulling your leg Clopin. I hope he was!
In "Twelve Years a Slave" the champion cotton picker was a woman. Does picking cotton constitute "physical labor"? Of course if by "physical labor" you mean only "labor requiring physical strength" then men have the advantage. How are housecleaning and cotton picking not "physical labor", though?
They are, and you're right, physical tasks which require endurance and not strength do not favour men particularly (though there is a clear cultural bias towards physical prowess in males so I suspect your average male can, in fact, pick more cotton than your average female) so I misspoke. Considering the entire realm of physical labour though, men clearly hold a large advantage in the jobs which do require strength, I'll list a few since you seem to doubt their existence.
Pipefitter
Stocker
Construction Worker
Mover
Landscaper
Firefighter
Sheet Metal Worker
Bricklayer
Women also have weaker grip and I'm not a plumber, but maybe if you can't open a jar you'll struggle plumbing as well?
Last edited by Clopin; 12-10-2014 at 07:48 PM.
It has already been stated that there is an obvious physical difference between men and women. I think you are labouring the point, (haha), as is Clopin. You just need to compare athletes.
It is stretching a point to suggest jobs with more skill cannot be done by women and nowadays construction work has lots of assistive tech like those conveyor belts for roof tiles, portable lifts etc. (You might want to mention it to your boss and yes I've worked on construction too).
I think the cultural standards we have probably have more influence than you might think. With a labouring job it's not merely down to how much you can lift but whether you can stick with the job. If you consider other countries that don't consider sex to be a barrier to this kind of work then you do find women labouring there in India and other Asian countries. Women were conscripted to dig tank traps and defences in WW2 in Russia. An example in extremis you might say, but they also had front line units made of women. Necessity and a different attitude to what women were expected to is the key. In cases like heavy physical work, it's not about barriers but the expectations of both sexes that this is not their kind of work. You may be a good worker, but in your line of work it's about being able to carry on all day everyday, not about how much you can lift at one time.
This is separate from Clopin's argument that women just do not produce as much excellent literature as men despite his acknowledgement that women intellectually outperform men academically. He also cites more physicists chess players and mathematicians as support for his idea that our reproductive system inherently produces more male geniuses with the counter that this also results in more violence and psychopathic men.
I do not agree with this assessment because it makes a number of assumptions about maths physics and chess and whether any of the qualities needed to become good in this field have any relation to literary excellence.
If we question whether women have equal opportunities in maths chess and physics, we'd have to say yes, but are the expectations that these are the pursuits of men rather than women already there? On the Big Bang Theory comedy - excellent though it is - we get a double message. Science is ok for both sexes, but physics is nerdy and in Sheldon's case for the weird. The women scientists are into biological sciences, which on the one hand shows successful women scientists, but on the other reinforces the idea that physics and engineering is for those nerdy boys. Good though it is, it still contains cultural assumptions, and it is difficult to say whether those cultural assumptions are not influencing the choices made by the sexes regarding career paths in science. In fact the lead physicist on the British satellite that landed on a comet recently was a woman, but we don't usually see women in those roles. Except I've just remembered a black woman astrophysicist who is on the telly. Maybe things are slowly changing.
For these reasons I just don't think you can make bland statements about men being more productive than women. The barriers to women still exist in society and culturally. It is changing though so you'd better keep up.
Another thought - I wonder if you being Canadian is significant in your views. I remember Juniperwolf - a Canadian who used to post - going on about the masculine culture she lived in. Just wondering.
Nobody has made the argument in this thread that there are jobs which women can not perform, even assuming the job is something like ditch digging, women can do it of course just not as well.
Aside from that I have no problem with your post. You don't think evolutionary psychology is as important as cultural or societal pressures and you could be right. I expect to live at least another fifty or so years, so if by then a full 50% of inventions, scientific breakthroughs, mathematics jobs, physics jobs, chess grandmasters, political positions and engineering positions, are made or held by women while 50% of childcare, education, healthcare or social assistance positions are held by men I will certainly admit that my ideas on the subject were dead wrong.
I see it as sort of a chicken and the egg argument, what came first a natural predisposition to certain roles and functions in society which caused a widening gap and inequality over time, or an artificial social hierarchy that culturally pressures people into this or that role and severely underpowers women.
I think it's mostly 1 with a heavy dose of 2, though 2 is becoming less and less prevalent every year and I can't notice any disadvantage women face in entering the hard sciences today. Most of the disadvantage people observe are based on result I.E "women occupy only 10% of jobs in petroleum engineering (no idea if that is true btw) so they must be at a severe disadvantage in entering this field", which, while certainly a possibility is not evidence in itself of any serious lack of opportunity. Like I said, women outperform men in school so do we have to now suggest that this is entirely due to inequality faced by males? I don't think so.
Also I don't think Canada is an overly masculine environment... maybe compared to somewhere like Sweden it is.
Last edited by Clopin; 12-11-2014 at 07:22 AM.
Vota made the physical argument strongly, but I think he overstated it beyond the athletic situation.
I think your post is on the whole fair, but whereas there may be more overt advantages for women to take up jobs in petrochemicals - to use your example - the actuality of the situation may be that it is women's mindset that mean they do not take a career route that leads there. Due to current cultural expectations and conditioning, they may make choices which steer them away from such work. That is speculation of course, but I think there's something in it. Who in the Reagan era would have thought that a black president would be possible within 30 years until black presidents began to appear in films like Independance Day. It is very difficult to quantify, but you can see positive movements in things like gay rights and disability laws.
I was just wondering about Canada. Orphan Pip, another Canadian poster, was much more cosmopolitan so I just wondered.
Here in the UK a large local council - Birmingham - was recently ordered to compensate women employees for underpaying for equivalent work done by men. I was surprised at this as the council had a sheen of the progressive. It does show that there's a way to go in employment terms.
Cultural factors that lead to differences in achievement between the sexes can be subtle. Based on my experience, I think it's correct to say that men are more competitive (about sports OR career achievement) than women, on average. But we need not assume that the difference is innate; it could just as easily be based on differences in child-rearing, or differences in how boys and girls are treated.
It's well known, for example, that eldest children are considerably more likely to achieve success (based on a wide variety of measurements) than younger children. Perhaps we can all agree that the difference here is unlikely to be genetic, or even based on the prejudices of society. Logically, it must be psycho-cultural. It's reasonable to think that differences in achievement between the sexes may result from similar psycho-cultural factors. Of course it might also be that such differences can be explained by evolutionary-psychology.
The problem with evolutionary psychology is that it tends to reason in circles. Men are more competitive than women because being more competitive helped them have more children (in the days of polygamy, possibly). However, such generalities tend to be unpersuasive and banal. Even if they are correct (as might well be the case), how do they help us understand and cope with male or female psychology? How do they help us explain cultural differences around the world? In addition, we have no way of knowing if the assumptions ARE correct. Didn't some hyper-competitive men join the priesthood? What about homosexuality -- doesn't that cast doubt on evolutionary psychology? Like many reductionist explanations for complex behaviors, evolutionary psychology lacks both sophisticated predictive capacity and falsifiability. It sounds good, but doesn't really get us anywhere.
Just to clarify my last point, the logical error I often see in Evolutionary Psychology is assuming the antecedent. The error involves the following mistaken logic:
postulate: If A, then B.
Observation -- B exists.
Erroneous conclusion: A must have existed.
Evolutionary thought often falls into this error. Even just considering physical traits (as opposed to more complicated psychological or culturally constituted mores and behaviors), we cannot assume that because a trait exists, it must have promoted descendent-leaving success.
It is true that if a genetic trait increases descendent-leaving success it will tend to spread. That's the fundamental principle of Darwinism. However, assuming that because a trait has spread, it must have increased descendent-leaving success involves the logical error I point out above.
Women actually are not paid less for the same work, the studies which have shown that women make 77 cents on every dollar a man earns only took into consideration total earnings by gender and did not control for relevant variables like field of employment or even hours worked.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christ...b_2073804.html
Ecurb you realise that the exact same reasoning is applied to the following example
"If women are underrepresented in many fields there must be a bias against women inherent in those fields"
"Women are underrepresented in many fields"
"Therefore the reason for this must be that women are being kept out of these fields due to bias"
I don't feel like debating the nature vs nurture thing anymore though, you obviously think nature plays a very small role while I think the evidence suggests it plays a very large role and since neither of us are going to 'prove' the other wrong I'm fine with agreeing to disagree.
I'll just close with saying that I don't even think it comes down to one or the other, nature or nurture, I think both play a role and both are important.
I agree that it's futile to argue nature vs. nurture. There's no way of determining the answer (although my example of eldest children out-performing their siblings proves that it's POSSIBLE that the differences in achievement between men and women are based on nurture alone).
Also, I never argued that (direct) bias is the primary factor for differences in achievement between the sexes. It probably once was -- women didn't go to University, etc. But that's no longer the case, and, as you point out, it would be a logical error to assume the antecedent. However, some sort of "bias", or, at least, differential treatment from the parents MUST be the reason for eldest children's success. What else could it be?
Eldest children have a statistically higher I.Q score, I'm not sure I.Q can be raised through nurture.
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