Are men really inclined towards the exact sciences, and women towards the humanities?

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The choice is influenced not by the structure of the brain, but by social stereotypes.

There is still an opinion that women are not given to do mathematics and other exact sciences. This is usually explained by the fact that the female brain is simply arranged "differently." Or that the inherent psychological qualities of women are more suitable for the humanities. Some supporters of this idea even advocate the separate education of boys and girls. Although there is no reliable scientific evidence.

In contrast, research shows that male and female brains are not all that different. “Scientists have found almost no gender differences in children's brains,” says Professor Diane Halpern, former president of the American Psychological Association, “except that boys 'brains are larger and girls' brains end earlier. But neither one nor the other is related to learning."

Halpern and colleagues analyzed The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling. work on the effects of split learning. And we found no support for the opinion that it improves academic performance. But it definitely strengthens gender stereotypes.

There is growing evidence that girls are no worse than boys in the exact sciences. In almost every country in the world, they show The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education. the same results as the boys, and sometimes even overtake them. And here it is in no way possible to refer to the inappropriate structure of the female brain. And they refer to him quite often, saying that men have better developed spatial thinking, and women have more verbal thinking. However, scientists have proven that these differences are exaggerated.

Psychologist Elizabeth Spelke has been studying early human development for many years, examining the reactions of infants and young children. At this age, the surrounding culture has a minimal effect on the individual, and the level of sex hormones in the body is very high.

She did not reveal gender differences in the skills on which mathematical thinking is based in children.

Spelke has done many experiments. For example, I checked how four-year-old children navigate in space. Each child was taken into a room with three containers of different shapes and allowed to look around. Then the researchers hid the item in the container, and the children saw it.

Then the child was blindfolded and turned around its axis several times to disorientate. When the bandage was removed, the child had to find a hidden object. Some children managed to quickly re-orientate themselves in the room, others did not. But the number of successful boys and girls did not differ much.

“The cognitive abilities involved in mathematical and scientific thinking do not differ between boys and girls,” Spelke writes. "There are general skills in representing objects, numbers and space, and children of different genders use them in the same way."

Nevertheless, in almost all countries, there is still a gender gap in areas related to the exact sciences. Even in countries like Finland and Sweden, where gender equality is today at a high level. To understand the reasons, Swedish scientists interviewed high school students from different cities. And we came to the conclusion that this difference is explained by two factors.

First, social affiliation influences the choice of specialty. Teens believe they will be more comfortable in areas where there are more members of their own gender. Secondly, many girls do not believe that they can succeed in the exact sciences. Even those who study on a par with boys or even better than them.

Boys, on the other hand, are not so insecure. They usually think they can handle both the exact and the humanities. And many choose technical specialties simply because they are more prestigious.

Drawing conclusions about a person's ability by looking at gender is a crude generalization. Both men and women are different.

For example, verbal abilities also do not depend on belonging to a particular gender, although women are often credited with primacy in this area. The researchers found that the development of language skills was influenced by the ratio of two hormones, estradiol and testosterone, in early childhood. They are produced in both male and female organisms.

A certain amount of these hormones at 5 months of age is related to how well a child will understand sentences at 4 years of age. Of course, this is not the only factor responsible for language skills. But he argues that gender is not the criterion by which to determine intelligence.