Blog 2- Chelsea Eareckson
An Opposition
By: Chelsea Eareckson
Doreen Kimura tackles an opposing viewpoint in her essay “‘Underrepresentation’ or Misrepresentation” to the previous essay we read, “Women at the Top in Science – and Elsewhere” by Virginia Valian. While Valian focused on asserting that women could be just as successful as men in math and science fields if they weren’t exposed to bias, Kimura instead looks for biological differences that could account for the lack of women in the top of the math and science fields. Kimura sites hormones as key factors, for “an optimal level of prenatal androgens (‘male’ sex hormones) is a possibly sufficient condition for some instances of superior spatial ability” (Kimura 41). Spatial ability is an important skill to have when being tested on math and science, and because it is the male sex hormone, males generally have elevated spatial abilities when compared to women. Kimura also looks to the animal kingdom to explain why she believes men and women are biologically built to be better at separate things; “Research into cognitive sex differences… has shown that many human cognitive sex differences are …parallel to certain sex differences found in nonhumans in which social influences are, either naturally or by virtue of a laboratory environment, absent or minimal” (Kimura 40-41). Kimura believes that evolution has crafted the sexes to be innately different both in talent and interest, which may be why we misinterpret the absence of women in some fields and the absence of men in others as sexism.
Though I think there definitely could be a great deal of misrepresentation going on in the social and work community, I do not agree with Kimura on the fact that women’s biology prevents them from excelling in math and science. As we have previously acknowledged, the issue at hand is extremely complex. Our world has been left in the hands of men for a very, very long time. Men have created a world in which they can excel in. Our society is tipped to accommodate the biological quirks exclusive to men. Learning and teaching has been shaped to help men understand, because learning was originally a privilege exclusive to males. Math tests are designed to test spatial ability, because that’s what marks a man successful in math. I do believe that biological differences exist. In fact, I wrote my last blog about that very fact. I think we as a society need to re-evaluate how we approach teaching and learning to accentuate the skills that women excel at, like” tasks such as verbal memory.. and object location memory” (Kimura 40). It’s very important to acknowledge our biological differences, because they are there and ignoring them will prevent progress. However, we shouldn’t view as our biological difference as hindrances in the fields like math and science, just as men shouldn’t allow their biological differences to limit them.
I also believe Kimura is oversimplifying issues when she discusses the discrepancies in graduate degrees between men and women despite the progress and programs dedicated to helping women succeed in education. She writes, “Although enrollment of women in the sciences at the undergraduate level in North America has increased substantially in recent years, their representation still decreases at successive graduate levels” (43). Kimura takes progress for granted, because as we learned in Chapter 1, sexism is still a huge issue affecting all ranges of women. We are ingrained that as women, we are not expected to do as well as men. Progress is important, but it takes time. Graduate degrees are very difficult to achieve, and women are constantly underestimating themselves. It may not be lack of interest or skill in graduate degrees, but lack of confidence that is keeping the women out of the graduate programs. Regardless, Kimura introduces many interesting points to consider in her essay and definitely make me view the previous essay in a new light.
