OH YEAH, and math ability vs being american would be another good thing to look into. There is a huge gap between american kids and everyone else, sooo I guess it is because moving to america damages your brain in areas that are mathmatically important, right?

The lower performance statistics alone are only convincing for someone who has an interest in believing women are inferior in the first place.

That must explain all those women who go from fast pitch softball to Major League baseball or why the last time a woman made it onto a PGA tour she finished so poorly that she didnâ??t even make the cut. Must have been Sorenstam’s lack of practice.

Mike H, I suggest you read this:

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/12/why_are_there_so_few_female_chess_grandmasters.php

“In an elegant new study, he has shown that the performance gap between male and female chess players is caused by nothing more than simple statistics.”

I would contend that the gap in sports arises from mostly the same reasons. The other factor is for the well-documented average difference in stature and upper-body strength between men and women – but the throwing study I discussed corrected for that. Professional sports doesn’t (and shouldn’t, I’d say).

Nobody here is disputing that men and women have significant and innate physical differences. However, the chess study above covers another endeavor that, like math, is purely intellectual. Somehow innate intellectual differences between males and females seem to be harder to actually document – and the ones that have been found seem to be relatively insignificant. A difference in means, but the bell curves overlap a lot.

Somehow this has to be put on a tee-shirt

Of course, the being generally hateful doesn’t really help counteract the impression that you’re terrified because you’ve stumbled into a world you can’t handle.

“Stumble” would imply the ability to walk. That wasn’t my impression, despite my suspicion that MikeH was able to walk within hours of birth.

And, yes, gender roles are acquired and (gasp!) the way that they’re acquired has some rather serious public-policy implications. Which means that gender sociologists are in demand outside of academia. Not that MikeH is likely to grasp that fact, especially with only one hand free.

That was snark. After that, I kinda lost interest.

Of course, the being generally hateful doesn’t really help counteract the impression that you’re terrified because you’ve stumbled into a world you can’t handle.

In warfare, you can win a battle by neutralizing the opponent’s main thrust. In a verbal argument, that does not work.

That must explain all those women who go from fast pitch softball to Major League baseball or why the last time a woman made it onto a PGA tour she finished so poorly that she didnâ??t even make the cut. Must have been Sorenstam’s lack of practice.

Anyhooo……

Were $DAUGHTER not taking her comps this week, I’d sic her on our MikeH — gender socialization being her subject.

Gender soclailization?!? What, is that some kind of joke? Do accredited institutions really give out bullshit degrees like that? If so, at least she will be well prepared for her future at Barnes and Noble.

.. and no, Larry has revised his comments and learned some stuff about this topic, and has a much better attitude now.

Summers was lynched and ate pie for the good for his career, nothing more. Some truths are bit too inconvenient.

The gender [1] skew in mathematics is not uniform between cultures. In fact, the USA seems to have much higher skews than even countries such as India, Turkey, and Iran (!) I leave it to MikeH to explain this fact.

[1] Not sex — for those who know the difference