Reddit reviews Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps -- And What We Can Do About It
We found 6 Reddit comments about Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps -- And What We Can Do About It. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Mariner Books
Given my username this is probably not a surprise, but I speak freely about brain sex, no matter how libfem the company. I'm a scientist and I have no patience for ladybrain garbage. I've found that even the libfemmy-est of libfems can't really get offended when I say there is no ladybrain -- or at least they can't get offended aloud without betraying their internalized misogyny.
Here are a couple of book you could read about the subject to bring up and discuss: Pink Brain, Blue Brain is by Dr. Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist, and Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine.
The author of that quora answer criticize James Damore for providing only a "few hand-picked papers" to make his case. I can't help but notice that she does an even worse job than he did.
Here is a breakdown of all the link she listed in her answer :
Self quote, where she quote herself... sometime on completely unrelated questions :
Mainstream media article (vox, business insider, financial times etc.) :
Blogs :
Wikipedia articles :
Broken links :
Books :
Scientific studies (most of which seems to be unrelated to the claims made in the Google memo)
After coming across this interesting article in Skeptic summarizing the evidence surrounding sex differences in cognitive ability I decided to pick up a book on the same subject by the author (Diane Halpern), Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, which I haven't read through yet but I noticed it did have the following discussion of Baron-Cohen's hypothesis:
>Numerous researchers have offered stern criticisms of the idea that female and male brains are "essentially different," especially in ways that Baron-Cohen has suggested (e.g., Eliot, 2009; Spelke & Grace, 2007). According to Baron-Cohen, it is high levels of prenatal testosterone that make the male brain good at systemizing. But males who are exposed to very high levels of testosterone while still in the womb (i.e., CAH males) are not more masculine or better at male-typical tasks than males who are exposed to normal levels of prenatal testosterone. In fact, the idea that high levels of prenatal testosterone cause autism, which might be expected from this theory, has not been supported. In addition, one prediction from this hypothesis is that autistic boys would be "hypermasculine," which is not supported with any research (Eliot, 2009). The experiment with newborns that Baron-Cohen frequently cites as evidence that girls are born with an interest in faces and boys are born with an interest in objects has been criticized on methodological grounds, including experimenter bias, small sample size, and failures to replicate (Spelke, 2005). ... In addition, numerous studies have found no sex differences in aptitude for science or mathematics in young children (Fine, 2010).
Excuse me as I'm just stumbling about on reddit, but I came across this post's title and was intrigued enough to dip deeper. Doing this mostly to save these links for later but am up for a robust discussion on the matter.
Across all scientists in the US, only 6% identify as Republican and 9% as conservative: http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/
The only empirical study of evolutionary psychologists suggests that PhD students who self-identify as adaptationists are much less conservative than the general public, and no more conservative than non-adaptationists: http://www.unm.edu/~tybur/docs/Testing_the_Controversy.pdf
There is nevertheless a perception that evolutionary psychologists are coming from a right-wing standpoint: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26785604
There are well-known cases where evolutionary psychologists have published very bad science with clear ideological bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa
Published criticism of evolutionary psychology comes generally not from social psychologists, but cognitive scientists, neurobiologists, biological anthropologists (EDIT and philosophers of science):
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/adapting-minds
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KeqiKNFa3YgC
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Getting-Darwin-Wrong-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/1845402073
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alas-Poor-Darwin-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0099283190
https://instruct.uwo.ca/psychology/371g/Smith2001.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.04.003
Innate sex differences in children would be a likely implication of the veracity of evolutionary psychology. However there is little solid evidence for sex differences in children's brains:
https://www.amazon.com/Pink-Brain-Blue-Differences-Troublesome/dp/0547394594/
https://sites.google.com/site/dianehalperncmc//books/sex-differences-in-cognitive-abilities
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16366817
I have so much to say about all this but I have to head out for the day. So for now, I just want to point out that the differences between male and female brains are 1) extremely minor and 2) usually observed in adults who have been living with very different expectations for their whole lives.
I suspect there are indeed innate differences between men and women on average (setting aside self-identified trans and nonbinary folk for the purposes of this comment), but the exact degree of difference is impossible to tease out when the environment is anything but a neutral playing field. I err toward acknowledging possible differences while attempting to treat people as though they could have any capacity for whatever type of thought, and letting them take it from there.
Additionally, I'm continually disappointed by the tendency of people who think of themselves as smart and skeptical to assume that the social mores of era in which they just happen to live are the truly right and appropriately equal ones, with "the way things used to be" as obviously wrong and progressivism as obviously pushing things too far. If you're resisting change toward equality now, yes, you would have been exactly that guy saying "I just don't understand why blacks and whites can't be happy marrying their own kind."
Obviously I don't give my acquaintances a feminist values quiz when I meet them, but I will not keep anyone as a friend, male or female, if they start spouting nonsense like "feminism has gone too far".
we are very much treading into some deep metaphysical questions, as old as the hills (the greeks and medievals characterized it as nominalism vs realism, modern thought calls it constructivism vs essentialism). I am a social constructivist, and I am arguing for that position, let me explain it in some more depth (pardon if I'm explaining stuff you know already, but it's not necessarily common terminology).
There is an objective reality to the universe, but the specific way that the world is organized is a human social construction. A good analogy would be this - california is a real place, but it's boundaries are a consequence of human history.
Gender is like that. there is a physical reality to the sexual dimorphism of the human species, but the set of associations are culturally constructed. as such, switching between genders is process with a physical component, but what it means is a cultural construction. Evidence - the Hijiras of india, the kathoeys of thailand, the muxes of oaxaca - these are all different cultural constructions (with different characteristics) of similar phenomena. "transsexuality" is a western cultural construct of the same.
as to the neuroplasticity issue, this book is very enlightening and well research - there may be underlying neurological difference, but the cultural construction of those differences (men are from mars etc) create a much much greater difference in the long run.