Willful Ignorance
In her essay “Sex Differences in Cognition”, Melissa Hines discusses sex differences in cognitive abilities. She claims that the differences are not linked to either organizational or activational effects of hormones and genetic explanations have received little or no empirical support at all. She also believes that the sex differences in some aspects of abilities explain the underrepresentation of women in science doesn’t seem to make sense because “scientific success depends on so much more than performance on tests of these abilities” (109). By relying on what the tests tell us, we will be oversimplifying the situation. For example, the results from the main study are different from that of subsequent studies. This could be a result of selection bias and that’s why researchers would sometimes enroll relatives as control subjects. It is problems like this that makes me question the reliability of tests. There are many factors that could come into play when conducting a research. Though the tests give us some idea of what might be going on, it would be wrong for us to come to any conclusions solely based on them.
Unlike some of the essays that I’ve read, this essay takes both sides of the story into account. She provides not only studies that support her thesis, but studies that actually say the complete opposite. However, she still manages to maintain her stand in the discussion. For example, while there are studies such as Maccoby & Jacklin (1974) that say an X-linked recessive gene was thought to cause sex differences in spatial abilities, there are also studies including Hines’s very own study (2004) that say otherwise. With larger sampling sizes, it failed to replicate the initial findings. In my opinion, I think that this kind of writing is very effective if you’re trying to convince your reader. It shows that you have actually considered all possibilities before coming to a conclusion. It makes you sound more objective even though it is very clear that you have a position. Having a position but not sounding biased is extremely hard but she did it. I don’t think any of the authors that I’ve read so far uses contradicting findings to support their opinions.
I’ve never believed the possibility that biological sex differences are why women are underrepresented in the STEM field. Some people think that this belief could make their lives easier because it wouldn’t be the woman’s fault or anyone’s fault for that matter that less of them end up making it to those “male-dominated” fields. Instead they simply are not biologically cut-out to be in the field. Sure, it would explain everything- it would explain how there are more female secretaries or teachers than there are male and why it is so hard to get rid of this unbalanced ratio of two genders. Sometimes we pick the answers that make us feel most comfortable and that perfectly describes willful ignorance that we all have within ourselves. It is normal for children to be afraid of the dark, however, when grown-ups are hesitant to take risks in order to find out the real answer, it is truly sad. Believing that innate sex differences are the root of the problem makes everything easier in a sense that it would make more sense and would therefore be easy to understand and perhaps even accept. But I agree with Hines- there are way more to this issue than just genetics and hormones.
Hines talks about many factors including the economy, politics, expectations and beliefs. I think what most people often overlook is expectations and beliefs. “Expectation alone can cause dramatic changes in behaviour” (109) through her family (Tiedemann, 2000) and peers, but most importantly, they could come from herself. Personally, I think the lack of faith in yourself can cause you to not succeed even if the rest of the world believed in you. And this lack of confidence come from many different places, such as education. Even till this day, some young girls are rarely encouraged to pursue the STEM field, which is problematic because many studies show “a lack of belief in intellectual growth can actually inhibit it”. For example, Pajares (2005) found that gender differences in self-confidence in STEM subjects begin in middle school and increase in high school and college: girls started reporting less confidence than boys do in their math and science ability. Maybe it’s all in their heads, but what is certain is that education is definitely one of those places where girls get the idea that perhaps they are not good enough. By encouraging the girls and putting the right ideas in their head, we can help them not only develop their confidence in their ability to learn, but we can also help motivate their interest in these fields.
To conclude, being a girl makes me more or less biased but after reading all these essays, I feel like we could be going a bit off track. We decided to look into the issue in the first place because we wanted to know how we can somehow increase the number of women in the STEM field. However, I feel as if few of the authors spend more time on justifying the problem and less on what we can do as members of this society. I’m not saying that it is not important or necessary to get to the bottom of the issue since knowing what causes it could obviously help us resolve it. I just think that maybe we should spend some time on trying to figure out, for example, how to boost girls’ confidence and “[how] to encourage girls to do better in areas in which they are underperforming” (109). As complicated as this issue may be, some things don’t have to be the cause of the shortage of women in STEM if we simply don’t let them.
Sources:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2012/06/20/stem-fields-and-the-gender-gap-where-are-the-women/
http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/Why-So-Few-Women-in-Science-Technology-Engineering-and-Mathematics.pdf
Why Aren’t More Women in Math and Science? — Sex Differences in Cognition by Melissa Hines