In Chapter 2 of Why aren’t more women in Science, writer Doreen Kimura takes a different turn on the controversial topic by talking about the cognitive differences between a man and woman. Females are supposedly better at tasks such as verbal memory and object location memory while males are better at mental rotation and mechanical reasoning. Although these differences should be taken into consideration, Kimura states that “using sex to determine quotas of admission to any program would be a mistake.” She makes a statement by claiming that we just have to accept “differential representation of the sexes.” Which I am having mixed feelings about. Is she saying that women should just continue being secretaries because we are female and have set cognitive abilities?
The cognitive differences mentioned before are influenced by prenatal and levels of sex hormones. A test was done showing that a male rat was better at learning spatial mazes than a female rat. However, hormonal manipulation shows that this could be reversed. Kimura explains that adults who engage in activities that involve spatial reasoning also did so when they were younger. This is simply a hypothesis and there is no data or statistic to back up her example. However, Kimura writes that it is “quite wrong” to claim that childhood experience determines adult activity. Kimura then explains a reasoning using test data. She explains that although females receive better marks on most subjects, males end up testing higher. There are similar results shown in the breaking through barriers power point on the FYS blog site. The results show that males do tend to score higher on tests compared to females (slide 9). Chapter one also mentioned the differences in test scores between boys and girls as well.
At one point in the chapter, Kimura makes a statement claiming that differential abilities have to be considered and that these social traditions are a result of a female’s cognitive abilities. She is basically throwing salt on the wound by claiming that women were put in these “traditional jobs” because of their limited ability. Basically women were secretaries because they were good at it. Really? I would disagree with her statement because I believe that sometimes our abilities are simply manipulated by the social boundaries and traditions. I just think that she got mixed up with what she was trying to convey. Even as we look back, the only kind of job openings that women were able to receive easily were secretary jobs or jobs lesser than a male’s occupation. When the majority of men had to go to war during World War II, women took jobs that normally men would do. I think that some of these jobs involved mechanics and math. This just proves that although a woman may be “wired” differently, that can’t stop her from performing jobs that require her to use any kind of science or math. On page forty-three, Kimura describes statistics that are similar to that of the breaking through barriers power point. There is a common pattern that is constantly mentioned which is that females tend not to study physics and that there are generally more females in biological science. I like how Kimura makes an effort to point out that women were indeed historically discriminated in faculty hiring. The statistics in solving the equation power point even show that women are still experiencing discrimination. They are being judged based upon looks rather than talent as well.
Overall, Kimura makes a great point by stating out cognitive differences. Although it is proven that males do have some sort of “upper hand” when it comes to special reasoning; hence, an advantage in math this does not mean males were built to be better than females in STEM. There must be other factors and a realization that everyone grows up under multiple and complex conditions that shape their interests in a certain subject or occupation. My only concern was why Kimura only talked about the cognitive differences. At times I felt that she was accepting the idea that males are smarter than females. Whose side is she really on? Also at one point in the chapter, I felt as if she was encouraging all females to just focus on something they are meant to be good at…nurturing and speaking.
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