The Science of Everything Podcast - Episode 55: Sex and Gender Part 2

Episode Date: December 23, 2013

Continuing on from the previous episode, I discuss some of the biological determinants of gender differences, including hormonal effects on interests and behaviour, and structural differences in the brain. I then examine a number of more specific topics pertinent to the issue of gender differences, including occupational segregation, women in science and technology, emotional differences, and differences in conversational form and topics.

listening to The Sides of Everything Podcast, episode 55, Sex and Gender, Part 2. I'm your host, James Fodor. So this episode continues on directly from the previous episode, as you might have guessed, so strongly recommend that you listen to that first. In this second part of the two-part series on sex and gender, we're going to be talking about the hormonal and biological differences between males and females and the extent to which they can explain differences in behavior and attitudes and so on between males and females. And then we will move on to applying some of the different.

the techniques and insights that we have gained from the first and second parts to discuss more specific issues, including occupational segregation, representation of women in math and stem fields, and differences in emotion and conversations, the way in which men and women engage in conversation. So let's jump straight into it and start talking about hormones. So I don't think we've really talked about hormones on this podcast before. Hormones are just regulatory chemicals that are produced and distributed throughout the body that have a wide variety of biological consequences. they're generally involved in regulating things like metabolism and heart rate and growth of tissues and all sorts of things.

There's an enormous variety of functions that hormones perform. The system that most relates to hormones is called the endocrine system, and we'll do a podcast on that. I'll do a podcast on that at some point. But anyway, we just need to understand for this episode that hormones are chemicals that cause various biological phenomena. And in particular, we're interested here in sex hormones. sex hormones are those hormones which are responsible for sexual behaviors and primary and secondary the formation and maintenance of primary and secondary, primary and secondary sexual characteristics

in males and females. Now, contrary to what some people think, males and females both possess basically all the types of hormones. So testosterone is famously associated with males. Male type hormones like testosterone are known as androgens, and estrogen is commonly thought of as a female hormone. And males and females both have testosterone and estrogen and all the other hormones. It's just the relative quantities of the different types of hormones that has the difference,

but it's not the fact that one gender has them, one sex has them and the other doesn't. Anyway, the particular relevance of hormones that we want to focus on is the effect they have on the developing fetus in utero, because there is an interesting body of evidence that suggests that the exposure to androgens, remember that's those masculineizing hormones in utero, has a strong effect on the subsequent behavior. and gender identity, interests and so on of the child. Now, in studying this, in studying the effect of hormones in particular, it's necessary obviously to control for confounding factors. So if we want to determine whether, say, gendered toy preference, for instance,

is biological or social in nature, or is more biological or more social, we would have to have some way of separating the effect of socialization from the effects of biology. So in order to do that, what we would need is examples of biological females who are treated like males or biological males who are treated like females or something like that. Now, there are some interesting cases you might have heard of. For example, there's one famous case of a young boy whose penis was burnt off in a botched circumcision and was henceforth raised as a female, but then ultimately came to question his gender identity

and I believe had his sex change operation or something like that, had his penis reconstructed. There were some interesting cases like that, but the numbers are too small and uncontrolled to make very firm conclusions on those bases. And there's confounding factors as well. You know, it may be the case that, for example, this individual who had their penis burnt off, it may be the case that they were treated differently, particularly by their parents, who knew the true situation, than ordinary males. And so there are potential confounding variables there in these unusual cases. One particularly interesting case, though, is that of a condition called congenital adrenal

hyperplasia. Now, this is a condition which is found in both men, both male and female children, but is really only relevant to girls, because basically what it does is it causes the adrenal gland in the young girls to, well, in utero that is, to excrete large quantities, in other words, much larger quantities than would normally be the case in females of androgens. And this has the effect of masculinizing the external genitalia of the females to some extent. But the very interesting thing is that girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia exhibit male patterns of behaviour and toy preference, for instance.

So girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia are more likely to express a preference for male toys. They're more likely to be described as tomboyes. They're more likely to engage in rough and tumble play and be more aggressive, this type of male pattern behaviors, despite the fact that they look like girls and are raised like girls in essentially all the regular ways.

Now, one hypothesis to explain this finding was that parents know that their children have that the girls have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and so perhaps they treat them differently, there isn't really any evidence for this. And in fact, if anything, there's evidence for the reverse, that it seems that if anything, parents attempt to encourage the girls to engage in gender-appropriate or gender-consistent behavior and toy play and such.

But regardless, the girls still tend to develop a preference for male toys and for male-type behaviors. There's just a point that I want to make here, which probably would have been better made in the first episode, in part one of this series. However, I'll just discuss it now, and that is that it's problematic to ask parents how they treat their children, because generally they'll say that they treat male and female children the same, that there's no difference. But this really isn't true.

I mean, again, as we've seen, people are not very good at introspecting about their motives and behaviors, and so self-reports are not necessarily very reliable. It's much better to observe how they actually behave in naturalistic settings, and when we do that, we do find that parents tend to encourage the play that is consistent, with perceived gender roles. They give more approval to girls for dressing up in feminine clothes and playing with dolls and asking for help and things like that. Whereas they give more discouragement when boys do that sort of thing, and they encourage boys to engage in more active activity playing with blocks and cars and things like that

and discourage feminine type behavior, often in relatively subtle ways, but you can document these effects with close observation. And the point is this type of differential treatment of male and female children occurs regardless of whether the parents are aware of it or admit to it, or anything like that. So it's not necessarily a conscious thing. Anyway, coming back to congenital adrenal hyperplasia. So this effect of masculinization of the behavior of girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia is supported by other studies of various other conditions that alter the hormonal levels in the neonatal period,

which show a federically dose response effect. Higher androgen levels lead to higher rates of male typical play and male typical attitudes and behaviors. There's also some evidence that girls with congenital adrenalin or hyperplasia grow up to be more likely to be bisexual or homosexual, although the chance is still relatively low. In other words, most girls with this condition still become exclusively heterosexual, but the rates of bisexuality and also of gender confusion do tend to be a fair bit higher.

Also, one interesting finding is that not only do these females tend to be more aggressive, they're also less interested in children and nurturing, and those sort of traditionally maternal type of activities. So the conclusion of this body of evidence is there does seem to be quite strong evidence that particularly prenatal hormonal levels do have strong effects on the behaviors and attitudes of children. And it seems to be dependent on the time as well. It has to be particular points during the pregnancy when these hormone levels are present. It's not really understood exactly how the hormones affect these sort of fairly high-level behaviors. It's hypothesized that there's effects on the brain, that the hormonal levels have an effect on the development of the brain in utero.

That, in some sense, obviously has to be true because behavior is the product of the brain, and so if behavior is different, the brain has to be different in some way, but it's not really known how it's different or exactly what the hormone does. It's the sort of thing is too poorly understood. There's also another piece of evidence which supports a role for biological differences, specifically in toy preferences, and that is, and I found this result very, very surprising, but there have been at least two independent studies, so this effect has been replicated, of a gendered toy preference,

in non-human primates. So I think these studies have done with chimpanzees that a male chimpanzee, I think they did with children, preferred to play with trucks and other things like that, whereas the females preferred to play with dolls. So these findings were, I think, quite surprising to many people. There was something surprising for me when I found out about them,

and they're still controversial. They're fairly recent. So there's always the possibility of methodological problems, but on the face of it, they seem to be legitimate findings. So if that's the case, it may well be that the hormones have some sort of very fundamental or basic sort of underlying structural effect on the brain, it's been hypothesized that they may encourage the development or the differential development of the regions of the brain responsible for vision or for spatial dexterity or something like that. In other words, some sort of

very basic underlying faculties which are relevant both to chimpanzees and to humans, and then through various processes of experience and social reinforcement and so on, become manifested in more specific differences in interests, like an interest in cars versus dolls. So it's not that the hormones are directly leading to this toy difference. The idea is that the hormones lead to some gross, that is sort of broad scale, structural difference or sort of functional differences

in the brain, and that this is then manifested in different preferences for toys and different behavioral behaviors and high levels of aggression and so on. But that's all largely speculative. We don't really know what these hormones are doing in very much detail. But there seems to be little doubt that there is some effect.

Now, moving on from hormonal differences, we will talk a bit about other biological differences between male and female, particularly what I want to focus on are differences in the brain. Now, recently there have been with the rise of neuroscience and various neuroimaging techniques, there have been a large number of studies purporting to show various structural and functional differences between male and female brains, and there's an enormous amount of literature on this. A huge number of potential differences or diversities have been discovered. I'll just mention a few of them. Well, one finding that is fairly well replicated,

so this one is fairly well accepted, is that female brains, on average, are smaller. I think it's something like 10% smaller than male brains. That doesn't necessarily have mean anything in very much consequence. It's thought probably just to be a product of smaller average body size. But even if that is not the case, there's no real connection between intelligence and brain size in humans anyway. So a few studies have found very minor effects, but in general it's not accepted that brain size relates to intelligence in any particularly strong way, or even moderately strong way. So that difference in sizes, it's not necessarily any particular significance. But anyway, some other differences that have been found include the size of the cerebrum compared to the rest of the brain.

The volume of white matter, the volume of cortical matter. So the apparently females exhibit a larger quantity of gray matter compared to white matter. Gray matter being cell bodies, white matter being the axons that connect the neurons together. Various regions of the cortex having different sizes or being a slightly different locations. difference in cell packing density, particularly in language-related fields like Brokazaria and Vernica's area, which are parts of the brain responsible for types of particular language behaviors. Differential connections between different parts of the brain. Differential prefrontal cortex and the orbiter frontal cortex.

Differences in certain gyrides, which are the ridges that stick up out of the cortex of the brain. And also differences in the corpus callosum, which is a series of wire tracks, basically, axons bundled together, which connect the two halves of the brain together. that is supposedly more dense in females than males. So there's a wide variety of morphological differences that have been found, some replicated, some not, and some robust, and some not, differences between male and female brains.

And these are often widely reported. Now, I think these differences really have to be taken with a very big grain of salt, a very, very large amount of salt, in fact. Not so much that the differences aren't real, although some of them might not be, because remember, it's problematic if you do a very large number at like hundreds, even thousands of these sorts of studies and compare two groups, males and females.

Just by chance you're going to get a certain proportion of statistically, of statistically significant differences, especially when there's essentially an unlimited number of variables you can compare. You can compare any two different brain regions to see if there's any differences. You can compare cell density size. You can compare the structure. You can compare functional relationships. You can compare connectivity.

There's no bounds, because there's no theory that's underpinning this search for differences. It's just, can we find any differences between males and females? and you look for them, of course, there are differences. The real question is, is there any significance to these differences? Did they really mean anything? And the jury's really out on that. We have, I think it's fair to say that we have no idea if there are any real functional or behavioral significance

to any of these morphological differences that have been discovered. Certainly, many differences have been proposed. I think basically none of them have any particular evidence. Some of them might be plausible. I think sort of the ones that tend to make the rounds in the popular media about, you know, women's brains being wired to be better for multitasking or for empathy or whatever, and male's brains being wired. It tends to be a phrase hard-wide, which is often used, and I'll come back to that,

hard-wired for spatial tasks or special tasks or for, I don't know, decision-making or whatever. So these inferences are really not warranted by the evidence that's available. What we can say is that there are structural differences, and there are certain functional differences in terms of the levels of activation of different regions. What we can't say is whether these are meaningful in any way or have any particular behavioral consequences. The other thing is that the fact that there are differences between male and female brains is completely unsurprising. Because remember, we have established that there are very substantial differences between male and female behavior.

We've just talked about that in this episode, and particularly in part one, about how males and females have different behaviors, how they dress differently, how they tend to go into different occupations, how they're socialized in different ways, on and on and on. We'll talk about more of those differences later on. There's emotional differences in interests, differences in conversations. there are heaps of differences between males and females. So obviously, those differences have to be instantiated in the brain somehow, because all behaviour and all attitudes and all memories and everything is ultimately instantiated somewhere in the brain. So if there are behavioral and attitudinal differences between males and females,

of course there are going to be brain differences. That should come as no surprise whatsoever. It could not possibly be any other way. The fact that there are brain differences, therefore, only tells us that there may be some sort of behavioral or attitudinal differences between males and females. But of course, we already knew that was the case anyway. So really I'm quite skeptical about how much these brain studies, these fMRI and MRI studies, really tell us about the differences between males and females. At the level of sophistication that

they have currently reached, I don't think they really tell us anything that we didn't already know. They tell us that there are some differences. We already knew that. They don't tell us about the nature of those differences, in particular, and this is very important to understand. They don't tell us anything about whether those differences are genetic or biological or hormonal or are the result of socialization and experience. Because any change, whether it's genetic or hormonal or social in nature, any change that results in memory formation or experience or anything like that, is going to be instantiated in the brain. Just by looking at changes in the brain, you can't tell if that change was caused by genetic influences or hormonal influences in utero or whether it was the result of

socialization. If you look at children who have been raised in deprived circumstances, particularly like orphanages or in extreme cases, those who have been subject to abhorsela. abuse and have not had exposure to language or a rich environment, you can certainly tell differences in the brain. There are very obvious differences in brain development. So it's certainly known that differences in socialization will have effects on structure and function of the brain. Indeed, it could not possibly be any otherwise. There's this concept that biology somehow translates to being determined or unchangeable, but that's just really not true at all.

There's very little about biology that's truly determined. even things like sexual organs can be, at least with modern technology, change to some degree. You can have penis reconstruction or a vagina reconstruction and other things like this. There are hormonal treatments that can result in changes to secondary sexual characteristics, like body hair and other things like that. And that's, of course, at the extreme end of the spectrum. But most other things aren't even as close to being as biologically determined even as that. Any sufficiently complicated behavior is the product of a very complicated interplay of biology and of society.

And to say that just because biology has an influence, that therefore that means the outcome is determined or unchangeable, is simply absurd. It doesn't follow at all. There's also been a history of using biological explanations to demean and subordinate women, so particularly in the 19th and even early 20th centuries, there was a...

The early studies of these sorts of sexual differences tended to focus on, in particular studying the female brain, and the finding that female brains tended to be smaller than male brains was used as evidence that women were less intelligent, and not only that, but a wide variety of other various biological differences were purported to be proof. The menstrual cycle is another one. To be clear proof of women's inferiority

and unsuitability for public office and other things like this. So we do have to be somewhat careful about biological explanations because historically they have been problematic. But of course, that doesn't mean that there aren't any biological explanations. But I think the most important thing

to take away from this is to understand that biology doesn't mean predetermined or unchangeable. I think to do science properly, we have to try and overcome these connotations of what biology means, both the positive and the negative ones, or the ones about biology being

unchangeable and immutable. and also the ones about how biology is being used to demean or to suppress women. We have to overcome those and just look at what does the evidence actually say. And at the moment, the evidence seems to say there certainly are influences of biology. In particular, we looked at the hormonal effects, and there is evidence about structural and functional differences in the brain. The questions that remain open are the extent to which there are real behavioral consequences of these structural and functional differences in the brain,

and also the extent to which these brain differences are the result rather than the consequence of socialization. So what causes these brain differences, in other words? And those are very much open questions. This is one other point that I want to make. Even if it's established that, say, for example, the corpus callosum in women connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is more densely connected, so that there's a stronger connection

between the two hemispheres of the brain. That's been positive by various studies. Let's suppose that it's true. It may well be. I think it's a little bit controversial at this stage, but let's suppose it's a real finding. Even if that holds, there is no. simple mapping between brain structures and behavioral or cognitive function.

In other words, just because there is a greater connection between the hemispheres in women, it doesn't follow simply from that, that women are therefore better at multitasking or better at synthesizing things or anything like that. This is just a really lazy and sloppy inference. You can't draw simple analogies or simple inferences about brain structure and behavioral or cognitive function in that way. We don't understand nearly enough about how brain structure particularly the gross level, you know, fibrochracks and functional regions and so on,

how brain structure at that level really results in particular behaviors or cognitions, in order to make any claims like that. I think this is more so the product of sloppy scientific reporting than the scientific literature itself, although sometimes, of course, researchers do tend to oversell their research, but I'm emphasizing this because I think it's a particularly big problem because these sorts of studies tend to get a lot of media coverage, because it's something that makes good headlines. but I just hope to paint a more nuanced and accurate picture about what these studies actually tell us.

They don't necessarily tell us anything we didn't already know, and furthermore, they don't tell us about, they don't tell us what the actual behavioral or cognitive implications of these structural differences are. You can't make a simple mapping. There's no real evidence for that, and there are good reasons to suppose that such a simple mapping, you know, between more connected brain, therefore more connected thoughts or something like that. There's a good reason to suppose that that's not the case at all. So, moving on from those biological differences, I now want to talk about occupational segregation, which is something that I'm sure everyone has encountered in various ways.

Women tend to go into some sorts of occupations disproportionately, and men tend to go into other sorts of occupations disproportionately. Now, part of this difference undoubtedly reflects discrimination and bias of the type we talked about in part one. But there is, I think, certainly a lot more to it than that, because there are massive differences in the race at which men versus women express interest and apply for and begin training for various different occupations. And so people have studied this.

And in particular, there's an interesting approach which I came across, which involves categorizing different interests and occupations and other such things on various axes. And in particular, one metric which was used was the extent to which the occupation or interest was related to things versus people. So this was referred to as the people versus things dimension. So things relates to, you know, working with gadgets or with cars or, you know, particularly engineering, very much things-oriented science in general or at least parts of science. Whereas people involves working in what working with helping people, particularly medicine, would be consistent with that, social activities, that sort of thing. This is the idea of the thing versus people.

And they interviewed a large number of people and got them to rank their interest in various different types of activities and potential career choices and so on. and their results showed that there was a very substantial difference between men and women in terms of their expressed difference, in terms of basically how they scored on the people versus things dimension. The overall effect size was, there's a way of measuring the effect size. I won't give the number because it won't mean very much to most people. It doesn't mean that much to me, but basically it's considered to be a large effect size as opposed to, for example, many of the biological differences that we spoke of before

that I just discussed about the differences in brain structure and function, Most of those are quite small effect sizes. There are average differences, but substantial overlap between the distributions of each gender. Whereas these effects here about the interest in people versus things and also some of the other axes as well, showed generally quite large effect sizes, which is quite interesting. Also, men tended to show much stronger interest in what was called the realistic dimension, which, again, involves working with things or working outdoors, science and maths and that sort of thing. And women tended to score much higher on the social metric, which involved. helping people and working with people and things like that. So these results are consistent with the stereotypes about women being more empathetic and interested in social interaction

and men being more investigative and egentic and interested in things. And to further examine whether this is the results of socialization or biological differences, we bring in our old friends, well, in a sense we bring in our old friends, girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, remember them? and as expected it turns out that females with congenital adrenal adrenal hypoplasia have score along the people versus things dimension much more like males than they do like females so this provides support for the notion that there are indeed hormonal effects on career choice and or at least interests that then go on to affect career choice and that this can account for at least some of the occupational segregation between men and women

There's also been some interesting work done regarding in particular the differential effects of various agents of socialization on particularly adolescence, career aspirations. And so one study looked at the effect of the parental socioeconomic situation and compared that to other factors. So in particular, this study identified three channels by which parents affect the career aspirations of their children. One, as I said, was the socioeconomic situation. and so that's a fairly obvious point. You know, the access to education and just literacy generally and social capital, other things like that will have an effect on the types of careers that children will aspire to. So that socioeconomic position is one manner by which parents affect the career aspirations of children,

but also there was a certain degree to which children directly imitated parental occupations. And again, that's not terribly surprising. We all know about the phenomenon of parents desiring their children to follow up in their footsteps in a given occupation. And the third method by which socialisation affect career aspirations was by children's learning of sex-type roles via their observation of parental behaviour and also through other agents of socialisation, media and so on.

So there's no single one simple causal mechanism by which parents and did society in general socialise children leading to occupational segregation. There's a variety of methods, as we've said, there's socioeconomic pressures, there's direct imitation, and there's learning of sex-type roles there by predisposing children to interest in different occupations according to their sex. It's reasonable to suppose that these effects are diminishing in recent decades as the proportion of women in many traditionally male occupations increases, but no doubt these effects still persist.

Okay, so moving on from talking about occupation in general, we'll have a look at one particular application of occupational segregation, which is particularly relevant and gets brought up fairly frequently, and this is the presence or relative absence of women in STEM fields. Previously, I referred to it as math and STEM fields, but that's rather redundant since STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, so you don't really need math and STEM. But anyway, so the basic observation is that in most STEM fields, some more than others, there's a dramatic under-representation in women,

and this has, this underrepresentation has perpetuated in spite of the dramatic rise in the number of women, say, in fields like law or business. Just to illustrate the extent of the disparity, in all fields in 2009, these figures are from the United States from 2009, there were slightly more doctorates awarded to males. Fifty-three percent of doctors were awarded to males, about 47 percent to females. So that's reasonably close to parity. However, the proportions differ greatly depending on the field in question. So, for example, in psychology, about 70% of the doctorates were awarded to females, only 30% to males. In the social sciences, it was basically 50-50, and in the biological sciences, it was pretty close to 50-50 as well, slightly more females there. But in mathematics, 70% roughly, of doctors were awarded to males and only 30% to females.

And it's a similar story in the physical sciences, so physics and chemistry, about 70% male, 30% female. Well, in engineering and computer sciences, it was even more skewed. About 80% of the doctorate were rewarded to males and only about 20% to females. So there is a very significant disparity in some fields and a much smaller one in others. And indeed, there's a disparity in the opposite direction in some fields like psychology and fields in biology. Now, I gave the figures for doctorates because this is where the disparity is the most extreme, at least in the maths and statistics field. So as we saw that only about 30% of mathematics, doctorates were awarded to females.

But the percentage of bachelor degrees awarded in mathematics and statistics to females is, in that same year, 2009 in the US was about 43%, so only slightly skewed towards the males. If we look at some of the other figures for bachelor's degrees, now, again, not doctors. Well, first of all, it's important to understand that in all fields, there were more bachelor's degrees awarded to females. 57% of all bachelor's degrees in the US were awarded to females in 2009. In science and engineering fields, it was exactly 50-50, pretty much right on. So in science and engineering as a whole, at least at the bachelor level, women are not underrepresented.

At the doctoral level, we've seen they are slightly underrepresented. Again, this is in science and engineering. If we look at the different subfields of sciences, though, in the biological sciences, again, this is bachelor's degrees. Women are awarded about 60% of biological science degrees, so that's an over-representation. 77% of psychology degrees, bachelor's degrees awarded to. women. But if we look at fields like the physical science is only about 40% of degrees, and if we look at computer science and

engineering, less than 20% of the degrees about 18% in both cases. So basically we can set up a hierarchy which is constant more or less across bachelor's degrees and doctorates, although generally for doctorates you can sort of scale down in pretty much all fields, the percentage of females.

Even in psychology, the percentage of females at the doctoral level is a bit less than the percentage at the bachelor level. But anyway, we can sort of rank field psychology as by far the most women, a substantial majority of women, of people in psychology of women. Then down from that we have biological sciences, then mathematics and statistics with a slight majority of males, and then the physical sciences, physical chemistry, and then the lowest proportion of all are in engineering and the computer sciences. So what are we to make of this fact that there is a substantial over-representation of women in some fields and a substantial under-representation in others.

And this pattern is broadly similar over the bachelor's and doctoral degrees. I think it's broadly similar across other countries as well. I've been giving figures for the US. There are differences across countries, but it would take too long to go over all of those. But the broad pattern is largely similar, although you do see some differences, for example, in some Middle East in countries. I think that there's a very high proportion of women in certain science and technology fields. But certainly Western countries tend to show a similar pattern to the US.

So I think there's a few interesting things to say here. And there's a couple of effects that we want to separate out. First of all, there's the effect of women going into science just by itself. Then there's the issue of mathematics, and there's been a long-standing question in science and sort of in the popular culture generally about whether women are worse at mathematics than men are or whether there's a difference there.

And then there's the issue in particular about the, as we mentioned before, the things versus people dimension of interests. I think that the fact that women tend to be much more interested in the people dimension of things rather than the things dimension is consistent with the fact that very few women go into, in particular engineering and computer science, which are very much, if any disciplines were focused on things, it would be engineering in particular, but also computer science, arguably.

And the very large majority of women in psychology, and to a somewhat lesser extent, biology, is also consistent with the tendency for women to be more interested in people dimension than the things dimension. So I think we can explain at least part of this effect purely on the things versus people interest dimension. But mathematics, I don't think we can explain in those ways. That's why I separated that out as a separate issue.

So there's the things versus people distinction, which can explain, I think, engineering and psychology. But math is different, because math isn't really about things, all people. It's very abstract. And so I think there's something different going on here, and we need to look below the surface and have a look at some of the research about women in mathematics. So first of all, is the question of, are men better at math than women?

Or is there a different average or something like that? There's been an immense amount of study on this, and it's really... So we won't go into the details of all of these studies, because it's just overwhelming. Basically, if there is a difference, it's small and context-dependent. So it's important to understand that one can't just talk in a generic sense about men or women being better at one thing or another thing, because obviously there's an enormous variation within men and within women about math ability. So what we're looking at are two overlapping distributions, a distribution of mathematics ability in men and that in women.

And if you were to plot these distributions and superimpose them, you would see that they overlap almost completely. So the question is not whether men or women are better at maths. The question is, do the distributions overlap completely, such that there is no discernible difference at all between men and women, or is there a slight difference in the distribution such that men are on average slightly more likely to be slightly better at mass than women or something like that. Another hypothesis, which is related to that, is that there may be more

variation in the mathematics performance of men, such that there are more men who are really bad at maths, but also more men who are really good at maths than women. From my research, there does seem to be some support for this greater diversity, greater male diversity, it's called, at least in the US, but it doesn't seem to hold in all countries and across all racial groups either. So there's sort of limited support for that. It may be true, it may not be true. Also, even if it is true, it's, then there's the question of whether this is a sort of a social, cultural thing, or whether it's a biological thing, and I don't think we really have enough information to determine that. There does seem to be some evidence that certain types of

visorospatial tasks men tend to perform better than women, but again, there's a substantial overlap into distributions, and anyway, that's, that by no means, from that, by no means, follows that men are better at maths than women, because, you know, a visorospatial task is only, at best, somewhat related to a small component of what maths is. So, the overall evidence for men being better at mathematics than women is scant at best and highly mixed. If we just look at math scores in terms of high school test scores, there isn't any difference anymore between the performance of men and women. It's true that there used to be. Largely that's thought to have been the results of essentially women taking fewer math

courses, particularly at the high school level, and fewer advanced math courses than men did. But that is no longer the case. Women in the US, and I think in most Western countries now, take just as many advanced math courses as men do and score just as well at them, again, on average. That's not quite the same question as whether men and women are as good at maths against. There's the studies that look at test results, and then there's different studies which will look at more basic psychological experiments, which can try and measure more basic abilities. And as I've said, in those, there's very mixed evidence, and maybe there's some advantage in certain visor spatial task to males, but the distributions overlap a very large amount, and it's by no means clear that there's a particular,

that there's much of a difference at all. But it is the case that there is a fairly substantial difference in, particularly in the number of doctorates awarded to males versus females in mathematics. So how can we explain this? What factors may be contributing to the relative under-representation of women in maths and some of the other sciences as well? There is some very interesting research about how children are socialised both by parents and by teachers in different ways when it comes to science and maths education. And I think that it's these socialisation, differential socialisation between men and women, boys and girls, which can largely explain the difference in enrollment and interest in maths and some sciences between men and women. It's also important to point out that the difference has been shrinking,

so in the 1950s only 5% of maths PhDs went to women, whereas now it's closer to 30%. So the trends have been moving in the direction of great equality, but we still have a significant inequality. And as I pointed out, mathematics and other physical sciences have trailed, say, biology and and psychology and social sciences in the number of women who have been entering these fields. So there seem to be certain effects that are distinctive to these fields. And as I'm about to argue, that I think that this can be traced to differential socialization when it comes in particular to maths and science, which does not exist so much when it comes

to, say, social science or psychology or other things. So let's take a look at some of this evidence. Well, first of all, there's a lot of interesting evidence about the ways that parents perceive the math's abilities and talents of their children. Again, it's important that one examines this carefully, because if you just ask parents about, you know, are boys better at math than girls? Well, actually, some parents may say different things.

There is still a stereotype there. So although some stereotypes do still exist, when you directly ask parents about whether they, you know, treat their child differently or whether they consider their child to be more or less skilled at math, depending on whether they're a male or female, they're less likely to exhibit a prejudice or a bias. there than if you actually test them in a more naturalistic setting or something like that.

So it does turn out that parents tend to have a higher expectations and greater confidence in the mathematics abilities of their male children than their female children. And there is evidence that parental expectations of this sort do have an effect on the performance of children. So in other words, there does seem to be some evidence that if parents expect girls to perform worse at mathematics, then that experience. in some subtle way then does go on to affect actual performance and lead to poorer performance overall. But more interestingly than that, because those effects aren't especially large,

because remember overall boys and girls perform relatively equally in terms of math tests. But one study found that parents of boys tended to rate natural talent as a much more important reason for their child's math successes than in parents of girls. So in turn, parents of girls tended to rate effort as a much more important for their mathematical successes. So even if parents don't necessarily consider there to be a difference in the math performance of boys and girls, they will tend to say that if a boy's good at math, that's because they have a natural talent, whereas if a girl's good at math, it's because they must have tried very hard or put a lot of effort in. There are other differences in the way that parents treat their boys and girls as well.

Compared to parents of boys, parents of girls are less likely to buy mathematics-related toys and games, and they are more likely to report that mathematics is less important than other subjects, again, for their girls compared to their boys. Furthermore, there have been some interesting studies where researchers looked at how parents gave assistance to their children while doing maths homework in a naturalistic setting. And one of these experiments found that instances of uninvited help and interference, which were referred to as intrusive support, you know, so this is where a parent jumps in and provides the answer or gives a hint when they're not explicitly asked for assistance by the child. They found that these instances of intrusive support were more common when girls were. were doing maths homework compared to when boys were doing maths homework. And furthermore, that girls who received more such intrusive support had lower perceptions

of their own math ability than the boys who received less of that sort of intrusive support. So this confluence a fact is about parents' attitudes, about their behaviours while supporting children doing maths homework, and about purchasing of games and toys, all seem to contribute to girls having a lower concept of their own mass ability and considering maths to be less important and less of a thing that girls should be interested in or should be concerned about. And this effect is not just found from, is not present only in parents as well. There's many interesting studies about how teachers treat girls and boys differently, particularly in regard to maths and science. So first of all, similar to parents, teachers show gender stereotype to

beliefs about students' math abilities. So for example, in one study, first grade teachers in the US rated that their best male students as being more logical and more competitive and more independent and capable in math, and also in liking math, more than their best female students. Other studies have examined the way in which teachers interact with their students and how they rate their students work. And this research has tended to show that teachers will give the same overall amounts of positive and negative feedback to male and female students. However, the nature of the feedback is different. So repeatedly, studies clearly show that girls are much more likely to have the neatness of their work praised, as opposed to the actual content of the work

praised, whereas boys would tend to be criticized on the messiness or organization of their work or other aspects of their behavior, but their work tends to be rated higher based on the quality of the information or of the mathematical correctness and things like that. So in other words, boys tend to be praised for the intellectual content of their work, whereas girls tend to be praised for non-intellectual aspects of their work. and in a fascinating follow-up study to these results, these patterns of positive and negative feedback were randomly assigned to boys and girls.

That is, groups of boys and girls will randomly assign the boys pattern of feedback, and another group was randomly assigned to the girls' pattern of feedback. And it was found that the boys' pattern of feedback, remember, which is relatively more positive feedback about the contents of the work as opposed to neatness, some of the things, tends to lead to the children to attribute their academic failures to lack of effort, whereas the girl's pattern of feedback tended to lead to those who receive that type of feedback

to attribute their academic failures to lack of ability. And various other studies have demonstrated that it's much more beneficial for learning and for conscientious effort and things like that, if children attribute their successful failure to effort rather than ability, I think for fairly obvious reasons. So it's very interesting, it seems to be that the actual ways in which the types of feedback and ways that the teachers interact with students actually differentially pre-exposes them to have a relatively greater or less interest in and confidence in their mathematics ability. Other studies have also found that girls tend to receive less attention from teachers than boys, regardless of the subject or age of the students. There's some argument that there may be a greater disparity in science and math classes than in other classes.

boys tend to ask more follow-up questions and comments on ideas related to the work, whereas girls tend to be more complimented for their looks or the neatness of their work. So, again, very distinct differences in the way that teachers interact with their students. And again, this applies to female and male teachers, not exclusively to one or the other. Other studies have looked at the children's attitudes to see how they feel about their ability and interest in science and mathematics. One interesting study found that boys do have more positive attitude towards science than girls, although the effect was quite small, so small but significant. It was particularly small in biology and larger in the physical sciences, which is consistent with the relative proportions of men and women in these fields.

Interestingly, in these type of studies where they asked girls to talk about what they thought about science, a number of girls made a somewhat interesting distinction between a scientist, someone who studies biology or zoology or something like that, and a scientist scientist who uses chemicals or work with rockets. And so this seems to be consistent with the distinction between the, again, remember the people versus things dimension that we talked about earlier. and again a common reason that many of the girls gave for their interest in life science as opposed to physical sciences was their desire to care for people and or animals. But it seems that we can't simply attribute the differential enrollments and awardings of degrees in maths and science and engineering to differences in interest, although that seems to be part of the reason. But it's also the case that even when men and women are equally well prepared for scientific or other technical majors in terms of the courses that they've done and the grades that they've received and so on. women still tend to drop out of these programs at considerably greater rates than males.

And it's not exactly clear why this is the case. Issues relating to desires to raise family and have children may be part of it, but probably that's not the whole story. So it's not exactly known why there's this higher dropout rate, but certainly it seems that even for women who are interested in pursuing careers in science and engineering and such, that there are various factors that operate to mitigate against success in those endeavors. And one factor that people are pointing to is the sort of just heavy male domination and potentially sort of misogynistic attitudes that still persist in these sorts of disciplines that are heavily dominated by males and the sort of subtle ways in which sometimes not so subtle ways in which women are marginalized or are treated poorly and discriminated against in various ways.

For example, the ways that teachers tend to rate males work more highly or take questions from males more than females, these sorts of effects that we've discussed before. So it's probable that those are contributing to the effect, but there may also be other factors as well. So it seems that overall the reasons for the gender differences in STEM fields are complicated and multifaceted, as indeed all of the contributing factors to all sex differences. Now let's move on to talk a bit about emotions and differences in emotions, and particularly emotional display, between men and women. So first of all, it's important to understand the concept of emotional display rules, and these are defined as being culturally and socially transmitted rules and habits about what emotions are appropriate and in what ways they can be appropriately displayed by men and women.

So, famous example, males should not cry and females should generally not show anger. These are emotional display rules. They are very strongly, as I said, overlearned, so very strongly transmitted and enforced. So if men or women contravene these actions, then and engage in emotional, displays which are considered to be inappropriate for their gender, then there tend to be fairly strong negative reactions from social receivers. So the one of men crying is arguably somewhat less strongly enforced now than it used to be. But women showing anger does seem to be fairly strongly enforced even today. And we see this indeed in the business context, as we discussed

earlier, about women who display anger or ambition and these sorts of things are perceived as being aggressive and angry and disagreeable people. So that's an example of the negative. reactions from social perceivers that we see in response to a transgression of gender display rules. And how are these gender display rules transmitted? How does the socialisation process occur? Well, there's a fair bit of evidence that a large portion of this is the product of the parent's behaviour.

Parents seem to be more responsive to boys' disarmony's emotions and to girls' dismissive emotions. So in other words, they reinforce gender-appropriate emotional displays by giving them more attention. Parents use more anger-related words with boys than girls, and they tend to. to use more sadness and happiness-related words with girls. There is also likely to be, as we've discussed earlier, an effect of direct emulation of parents' behaviour. So if fathers and mothers behave in different ways, as they do tend to, and consistent

with gender roles, then children will tend to emulate that to an extent. So there seems to be an element of emulation of parent behaviour and also of reinforcement of gender-appropriate behaviour by parents, in the form of greater attention to behaviour that's considered to be consistent with gender emotion display rules. So now let's turn to look at some particular emotions and examine the gender differences there. Empathy. Basically, as one would expect, studies indicate fairly conclusively

that women score much more highly in empathy than men do. In particular, if you look at the very top and very bottom of the spectrum of empathy scores, empathy quotients it's called, about three times as many men sit at the very bottom, in the very lowest range of empathy, and about three times as many women as men sit at the very top super empathetic range. Now, whether this reports women's greater willingness to report empathetic behavior or their actual high levels of underlying empathy cannot really be determined.

Aggression. Now, this one has received, I think, quite a lot of research. First of all, it's very clear that men are dramatically overrepresented in almost all socially problematic behaviors involving aggression and criminal behavior, particularly those that are linked to impulsivity. So, taking some figures from the US, for example, 97% of dangerous driving offences are committed by men. Men have significantly higher rates of death from falls, drowning, choking, execution, firearm accidents, and fires. Men are physically and verbally aggressive, much more than women, across different data sources,

and this applies across countries. This isn't just from the US. There's no question that men are far more physically and verbally aggressive than women. Men constitute 76% of all criminal arrests in the United States. They commit 89% of homicides and 82% of all violent crime, which actually surprised me a bit. meaning that 18% of all violent crime is committed by women. I would have thought it would be a much lower percentage than that, but nonetheless still dramatically overrepresented by men there.

Worldwide, men use drugs much more than women. They're more likely to participate in extreme sports, like skydiving and mountain climbing. Men are also more likely to exhibit various psychopathologies involving externalizing and impulsive behaviors, such as antisocial personality disorder, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, and intermittent explosive disorder.

So there's no question that, in terms of impulsivity, recklessness and violence and aggression men are dramatically overrepresented. However, whether this represents a true difference in underlying levels of anger or aggression or merely a difference in behaviour is a different question. And a couple of interesting studies that I found seem to indicate that it might be more of an instance

of social display rules and the way that boys versus girls are socialised to react to their feelings of anger or frustration and the way that they're socialised to deal with imbossivity as well. So, for example, when studies try to differentiate between what's called direct and indirect aggression, they tend to find quite substantial differences. So direct aggression includes things like physical aggression and direct verbal attacks on people. And they are overwhelmingly, boys and men exhibit much higher rates of direct

aggression than females. However, when you look at indirect aggression, the levels are between males and females are essentially the same. Indirect aggression includes things like gossiping, denying of social status, exclusion, and things like that. So more subtle methods of expressing a dislike or aggression towards another person. And as I said, these levels, the rates of these aggression tend to be roughly the same between males and females. So this points to the fact that it may not be necessarily the case that men are angrier than women.

They may respond to their anger in different ways and be less able to control their impulsive urges. Whether this is a social or a biological question is, again, another matter. I suspect that it's probably related to both socialization and probably hormonal differences. There is a correlation between levels of top. testosterone and aggression, of course, whether that's causal is a different matter, but it does seem to be the case that hormones have a role in differential rates of aggression between the males and females, but I think also differential socialization and social expectations play an important component as well. And one further piece of evidence regarding the importance of social reinforcement is some interesting studies regarding how men who express anger versus sadness are treated, particularly in a professional context. these studies found that men who expressed anger in a professional context or in a business or something like that were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness.

However, both male and female evaluators conferred lower status on angry female professionals as compared to angry male professionals. As we discussed before, it seems to be that women's emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics. You know, she's an angry person, whereas men's emotional reactions were attributed to external characteristics. So, again, this is consistent with what we discussed before about occupational segregation and internal versus external emotional attributions, which are made differentially depending on the gender of the person in question. Now we'll move on to talk a bit about fear. As with the other emotions we've discussed,

there are gender differences in self-reports of fear. In particular, women compared to men report greater fear of animals like snakes and dogs. In contrast, however, there are a few gender differences for social fears, like, for example, public speaking, and also for other fears of bodily injury. such as car accidents or something like that, or classic phobia, like confined spaces. So only certain things seem to have differential, seem to exhibit gender differentials in degrees of fear, so particularly repulsive or harmless animals.

Women do seem to be, or are, I should say, at greater risk of anxiety disorders, depression and other mood disorders compared to men. There's much higher rate there. It's not precisely known why that's the case. There have been some interesting studies comparing levels of negative affect, which is negative emotion like sadness and things like that, of boys and girls as they age and develop. During the first few months of life, boys actually show greater levels of negative affect as compared to girls,

but as they age, that ratio reverses, and girls begin to show greater and greater propensities towards negative affect as they age. So, if anything, it seems that there may be a biological effect operating to increase the rate of negative affect of males, but that this is increasingly attenuated relative to the effect of environmental experience, which tends to predispose girls and women towards greater negative. give affect than males. Compared to men, women are more likely to overestimate the probability of danger in an ambiguous situation and to expect more at greater degrees of harm and to anticipate poorer coping abilities than men. In terms of, so these results so far have been mostly related to self-reports. What about actual physiological differences? There are differences in, say,

the levels of skin conductivity and blood pressure and other such physiological measures between men and women when placed in stressful or difficult situations. However, it's very hard to, infer from this whether that means that there is an actual sort of experiential difference. In other words, it really depends on how you measure it. There are some physiological factors that differ, some that do not, and it's hard to know which of these are important and which aren't. Overall, I'd say that the physiological evidence is ambiguous as to whether there is a significant difference in fear response or anything like that between males and females. I think that it's difficult to say with any degree of confidence there. Overall, though, there is no question

that, at least in terms of self-reports and expression of emotions, there are significant differences between men and women. Whether this is a result of biological differences or socialization is not easy to say. I think there's definitely evidence that it's at least partly the result of socialization. There's not very good evidence of any particular biological effects other than that of hormones and particularly aggressive behaviors. So moving on to our very last topic, that of conversational differences. Now this might seem like a bit of an odd inclusion. It's not perhaps one of the more traditional areas where one thinks of gender differences like the occupational segregation and emotions and mathematics as we've discussed before.

But this was one small body of literature which I came across and that called my attention was that of differences in conversational behaviours between men and women. So there's sort of two aspects to this one is that of interruption and the other is that of conversational topics. So I'll talk about interruptions first, just very briefly. So there have been a number of studies which have attempted to determine whether males are more likely to interrupt in a conversation as opposed to females and whether this effect is variable depending upon the gender of the conversational partner.

Now, the results in this field have been somewhat mixed. It seems that overall, according to a meta-analysis that I read, men are slightly more likely, but the effects size only being small, slightly more likely to initiate an interruption in a conversation than women are. However, when you actually look at the type of interruption and the nature of the situation, the differences become a bit more pronounced. So if you restrict your attention to what the authors described as intrusive interruptions,

which are attempts to usurp the speaker's turn and exhibit sort of a demonstration of dominance in the conversation rather than the type of interruptions where you're affirming what the current speaker is saying or extending on a thought. Intrusive interruptions is more like generally expressing disagreement or at least trying to take the conversation turn away from the current speaker towards yourself. Those type of interruptions were significantly more common among, significantly more likely to be initiated by males than females. There's also an interesting gender effect in that females, are just as likely to interrupt males and females, so females don't seem to discriminate based on who they interrupt. But males

do. Males are much more likely to interrupt females than they are to interrupt other males. And as I said, their interruptions are much more likely to be of a negative variety or of an intrusive variety, whether they're expressing disagreement or attempting to take over the active turn in the conversation. Another related finding is the way that boys and girls and men and women tend to socialize is a bit different.

There seems to be a preference for girls to socialize smaller groups, whereas men tend to socialise in larger groups, and it may be the case that larger group size contributes to these sorts of behaviours in men, so more likely to interrupt, and indeed maybe other interesting and subtle effects of how the group size and dynamics of male socialisation differs from that of females, but I didn't read specifically too much about that. Another interesting finding of this literature was that males are more likely to initiate negative and intrusive interruptions, as we established before, but also the odds of a man yielding the floor to a negative interruption from a female are much, much lower than about

one third as likely, in other words, as females are to yield up the floor to a male. So in other words, if a female interrupts a male with a negative intrusive interruption, the male is quite unlikely to yield up the floor and allow that it to speak, whereas if a male does the reverse and interrupts a woman, much more likely that he is going to be successful in usurping her return in the conversation. So it's interesting how these sort of subtle conversational effects and can exhibit the social disparities in terms of power relationships that are present in the wider society. One final little study that I found concerns topics of conversation among groups of males and

females. So these were not conducted in laboratories. These were real-world observational experiments. A number of them conducted at various times and places. I think many of them were conducted at universities, but not all of them, some of them were members of the general public. It was found that, and the purpose of the studies was just to ascertain what the topic of conversation was and to see whether there was any difference in conversation topics between male groups and female groups. In all of the studies, women held the majority of conversations about people and relationships. So 70% of all conversations about people and relationships were in groups of women, obviously compared to 50% if it was purely even. While men held most of the

conversations about work and money, about 70%. So there's a clear difference there between women and men in terms of what they tend to talk about. Leisure activity was also a more popular topic among men, although it seems to be that mostly this was a result of men talking a lot more about sport, because obviously that was incorporated under leisure activities. A large majority of conversations about appearances, about 80% across all the different studies, were held among women. Also, there was a slightly smaller tendency for men to be more likely to talk about social and political issues. So perhaps somewhat unsurprising, women tend to talk more about people, relationships, and appearances,

men tend to talk more about work, money, and sports, as well as politics. It should be noted that these studies are hardly completely representative of all cultures, well, they're not representative of all cultures or of all aspects of society. As I said, mostly, I think they were done among college students, but not exclusively. And there is evidence that the discrepancy has been decreasing. So the first of these studies, I think, was done in the 1920s or 30s, and the differences there were quite substantially larger than the differences in more recent studies. So there has been some convergence, it seems.

But it's unsurprising, given the evidence that we examined earlier about the differences in interests, and, you know, the people versus things to mention between the genres, that there should also be a difference in conversational topics. Remember also that there tends to be a difference in group sizes between male and female social groupings, and that also perhaps may make a difference in terms of the topics of conversation. So, I hope you enjoyed this double-part episode. I hope you learned a few things. I know it was a little bit perhaps disorganized in terms of just lots of materials all over the place,

but this literature is rather disorganized. There are so many different topics. There are many things we didn't cover that we could have. I chose a selection of topics that I thought were of most interest. But if you have any feedback or criticisms, questions or anything, send me an email. My address is Fods12 at gmail.com. F-O-D-S-1-2 at gmail.com. Also, jump on the Facebook page. Just type in Science of Everything podcast into Facebook and you can give us a like and help spread the word about the podcast. Favorable reviews left on iTunes on the podcast page are also greatly appreciated. Help increase the visibility of the podcast. So thanks again for listening and I'll talk to you next time.