While reading through Spelke and Grace’s chapter in Why Aren’t More Women in Science? I found myself wondering if this dream of an essay could possibly be too good to be true. I believe I had this reaction because of the large amount of studies they reported that I had never heard of. Reports of women having lesser mathematical ability, lesser spatial ability, and of being predisposed at birth to people instead of objects are widely known, almost considered common knowledge at this point; however, Spelke and Grace swoop in, research in hand, and attempt to discount almost all of it.
They ask a series of hotly contested questions and use many studies to back up their responses, and believe me, I hoped what they were saying to be true quite strongly – but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off, if only because they were challenging the very studies that had been drilled into the media for so long. But as I read closely and finished the chapter, I noticed how well researched and logical their arguments were, and how they cited some of the same arguments used so often in the media, and interpreted them differently; or pointed out where they were mistaken.
They first address the question of whether boys are attracted to objects, and if this leads to their success in the science and math fields. They take the original research that claims that infant girls are attracted to people while boys are attracted to objects, and discount it by proving that while the study did find differences between the babies, a predisposition to people or objects wasn’t one of them. They point out how the findings of this study have been misreported for so long; and even foresaw the surprise I would feel when reading it: “the tidal wave of interest in Baron-Cohen’s thesis will surprise those who have followed the literature on the development of sex differences,” (58). They then proceed to cite various studies and findings that show no difference at all in the interests of male and female babies. And I wonder; why isn’t the media jumping to snatch this crucial missed piece of information? The answer to this question may very well be one of the main problems holding women back in today’s society.
Another part in the essay that struck me as something I should have known about earlier was how the SAT-M is actually reportedly known to be easier for boys. I say ‘easier,’ but what I mean is that girls and boys have been found to be equally good at math overall; but when tested on certain skills rooted in math, girls and boys have separate strengths and weaknesses. Spelke and Grace report that while all research findings show that men and women perform at the same level considering math, “the SAT- M systematically underpredicts the college mathematics performance of women, in relation to men,” (60). This has been olds news for a while, apparently, and no one was informed….the media certainly never made it known. The authors informs readers that this information has been, “widely acknowledged in the testing literature but is seldom mentioned in public discussions of cognitive sex differences,” (60).
This chapter has opened my eyes to the manipulation possible when it comes to reporting the findings of research, and how easy it is to make something out to be one way, when it really is another. You have to be very diligent and extremely careful when you read things, making sure that what the author is saying and the reports they’re citing match up.
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