aggregation
Today, I subscribed to read http://feministing.com/ and http://feminist.livejournal.com/
The feminist LJ community, if you take a look, self-structures in a way to explicitly be a safe space for feminist discussion.
I can see why they do that. Otherwise, you probably get twelve angry (white) men, and others, causing trouble every single day.
Reading arguments online recently, I see a lot of people who want to talk about -isms without any discourse on power and oppression, and a smaller minority that tries to take back the language of -isms to talk about such ideas consistently.
And, it seems, it leads to a lot of conflict...
Today, I also came across an article on "The Myth of 'The Boy Crisis'", which notes that not only has this kind of "crisis" been championed a hundred years ago, and reminds us that "[w]hen it comes to academic achievement, race and class completely swamp gender."
The authors also vaguely mentioned research that supports the hypothesis that verbal and mathematical skills between males and females are not so different from each other, but I'd still like to know more about how these statements are made (I'll add Halpern's work to my reading list). But as the article points out, we do know that non-trivial differences biological differences exist, on average, but we don't know what those differences mean in the end.
The article also mentions, as other literature does, that there's greater variance within the male population and within the female population than there is between men and women on average, but to me, this isn't a very strong argument for ignoring group differences, as from an information theoretic perspective, that gender-based classifier still gives you some information, and thinking geometrically, I would imagine that just knowing that two clusters show a large intra-group variance greater than the variance between the cluster means does not imply that the cluster mean distance is trivial or that we should infer that the clusters are very similar on average.
Bleh, enough theory for today.
The feminist LJ community, if you take a look, self-structures in a way to explicitly be a safe space for feminist discussion.
I can see why they do that. Otherwise, you probably get twelve angry (white) men, and others, causing trouble every single day.
Reading arguments online recently, I see a lot of people who want to talk about -isms without any discourse on power and oppression, and a smaller minority that tries to take back the language of -isms to talk about such ideas consistently.
And, it seems, it leads to a lot of conflict...
Today, I also came across an article on "The Myth of 'The Boy Crisis'", which notes that not only has this kind of "crisis" been championed a hundred years ago, and reminds us that "[w]hen it comes to academic achievement, race and class completely swamp gender."
The authors also vaguely mentioned research that supports the hypothesis that verbal and mathematical skills between males and females are not so different from each other, but I'd still like to know more about how these statements are made (I'll add Halpern's work to my reading list). But as the article points out, we do know that non-trivial differences biological differences exist, on average, but we don't know what those differences mean in the end.
The article also mentions, as other literature does, that there's greater variance within the male population and within the female population than there is between men and women on average, but to me, this isn't a very strong argument for ignoring group differences, as from an information theoretic perspective, that gender-based classifier still gives you some information, and thinking geometrically, I would imagine that just knowing that two clusters show a large intra-group variance greater than the variance between the cluster means does not imply that the cluster mean distance is trivial or that we should infer that the clusters are very similar on average.
Bleh, enough theory for today.
posted by L. Wu @ 9:13 PM
1 Comments:
At 6:07 PM,
L. Wu said…
Now that I've read some more, I see that when popular journalists or non-scientists claim that Halpern's work supports the hypothesis that men and women show trivial differences when measured for mathematical ability, it seems that they're noting that Halpern points out that medoid-based or similar comparison (comparing medians or means) shows little difference when compared to intra-group variance.
This is true -- the group averages aren't so far apart -- but males show so much greater variance, that at the elite tail of the distribution, the biological differences between men and women are that much more noticable.
That said, I think of the researchers and writers of I've found so far, Halpern and her philosophy make the most sense to me.
I'll have to meet her one day and see if she wants to join forces for a while :)
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