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"How 'bout some serious studies of gender?"
04/18/2003 Entry
Kieran via a post at Farrellblogger explains some of the major problems in one of the most recent additions to the literature on how inherently different are women's and men's brains. Matt Yglesias also comments.
Kieran does a great job of explaining how leading questions on surveys can easily give you the data you seek so I won't go into that. He raises some other issues as well so be sure to read his post. I'll save you my rant about survey construction right now as well. Let me just say that writing surveys is both an art and a science and it is incredibly frustrating to see people throw them together as if you could write a good survey in five minutes on any topic (in this case the researcher should've known better given his area of work, but it's probably fair to assume that he had an agenda so the bad survey was purposeful). But all these issues, I'll save for another time.
Right now, I thought I'd take up the issue of gender differences and some of the serious questions that still remain without adequate answers and where I wish some of the research efforts would be focused. I recently did an extensive review of existing work on gender differences in the use of computers and information technologies for a related paper I wrote with my friend and collaborator Steven Shafer. It turns out that much of this literature is focused on attitudes and self-efficacy measures, that is, people's perceived abilities with respect to using these technologies as opposed to their actual abilities. For the most part, women tend to rate themselves lower skilled than men and express lower levels of interest in these technologies. Unfortunately, many of the research papers don't give details about their survey instruments so the differences in the self-efficacy measures could be explained by the particular survey questions. But let's assume the questions were not as horrendous as the one's in the study mentioned above and there really are some differences in how women and men perceive their abilities in these domains. (Earlier, I posted an entry asking for pointers to work on people's self-assessment of their skills in domains other than math, science (incl. medical and engineering fields) and the use of computer technologies to see whether women would perceive their abilities higher in more traditionally "female domains", but there doesn't seem to be much out there for comparison.)
Unfortunately, there is relatively little work that links perceived ability to actual ability (which is what our paper tries to do with respect to Web use skills). I found a very interesting piece by Shelley Correll on "Gender and The Career Choice Process: The Role of Biased Self-Assessments" published in the American Journal of Sociology (2001; 106:1691-1730). She looked at the career-related decisions of young men and women based on their beliefs about their math and science abilities and their actual math and science abilities using a large national data set. She found that controlling for actual abilities, women were less likely to end up in math and science related careers. This suggests that women pursue such careers less not because their brains are less wired to deal with the skills required by those careers but, perhaps, because culturally speaking they've been socialized to think of math and science fields as less appropriate for women. That's one possibility. Point being, that's where a real puzzle lies. What is it in early childhood - based on the literature, increasingly I'm thinking the issues have to do with what happens in early socialization - that makes girls and women *think* that they are worse at math, science, computers than boys and men despite the fact that often they are not (of course, even if they were, similar socialization issue remain to be explored). There is some work that has tried to explore this topic, but I think much work remains to be done.
So instead of bogus surveys, could we please see some good work on these questions?
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