ter, boys worse. The item with the largest male/female gap of all involved sports statistics. Even my son -- no math whiz in high school and now an English teacher -- mastered sports statistics. They were important to him. By deleting that item and altering others, we were able to come up with a math test on which girls performed as well as boys.
Incidentally, "SAT" is not an abbreviation for "Scholastic Aptitude Test," even though most Americans think it is. Partly as a result of arguments I made to Nancy Cole, then Vice-President of Educational Testing Services, purveyor of the SAT, after Cole became president of ETS, the company removed "aptitude" from the title of the SAT (See The Validity of Testing in Education and Employment), renaming it the "Scholastic Assessment Test." A few years later, painfully aware that "Assessment Test" was redundant, ETS renamed the SAT once more. Now it merely stands for "S.A.T." -- the initials mean nothing at all!
Of course, our little teaching exercise was hardly the last word about gender and color. Indeed, a recent article in Smithsonian magazine (March, 2013) "50 Shades of Gray Matter," claims that women may have a genetic ability to distinguish colors better than men. The author, Libby Copeland, knows that "women possess a larger vocabulary than men for describing colors." This, she believes, already provides indirect evidence that it's genetic. (I would have thought exactly the opposite: the larger vocabulary suggests that girls have spent more time learning about colors and thinking about colors.)
As well, she cites research by Israel Abramov, "a psychologist and behavioral neuroscientist" at Brooklyn College. He found that "an object that women experience as orange will look slightly more yellowish to men." He deduces tentatively that Darwinian evolution is responsible: "males needed to see distant, moving objects, like bison, while females had to be better judges of color when scouring for edible plants." Copeland concludes, "Someday, further studies could reveal whether these traits could have implications for how men and women perform in fields such as the arts or athletics."
I suggest before we search for biological causes of gender differences, we first rule out likely social causes. Usually these exist in abundance. It's hardly rare to come upon a girl who by age twelve has been given dolls' outfits or girls' clothing in pink, scarlet, crimson, lake (yes, boys, "lake" too is a shade of red), vermillion, and magenta. It's hardly common to find a boy who by age twelve has not been given a football.
Looking for causation in the "hard" sciences may be trendier. And of course, it's hard to disprove that some eons-ago differentiation in occupation by gender led to higher survival rates for women with more color acuity. It is also difficult to prove such a causal argument, however.
And it's dangerous. When "hard scientists" conclude that girls have more ability in a given sphere by nature, feminists may applaud. They may not, when scientists conclude that girls have less ability by nature in some other sphere and therefore perhaps advise them against entering some important field of human endeavor. Certainly we should see where the evidence takes us. However, too-easy reporting like "50 Shades of Gray Matter" merely exemplifies lay credulity toward "science." Ms. Copeland along with Dr. Abramov may need a course in introductory sociology — may even need to experience our little color/football exercise.
comments powered by Disqus
- Watch Robert Kennedy Push Gun Control In Same Town As Recent Mass Shooting
- October is LGBT History Month
- Textbook publisher apologizes for passage referring to slavery as immigration
- 60 Minutes interviews the priest who’s made it his mission to expose the forgotten victims of the Holocaust
- ISIS Destroys Triumphal Arches in Palmyra, Syria
- Finally some good news for history grads
- Historians issue statement in support of European migrants
- Conservative historian Arthur Herman slammed for saying Obama is highly submissive to Putin and other s