Why Science Says Men & Women Will Never Be The Same - David Geary

You can take a brain pattern of a 10-year-old and predict whether that brain belongs to a boy or a girl about 93% of the time, almost as good as you can by looking at an adult face of a male or female. So, huge difference.

Why do you think the discussion about sex differences between men and women has become so hotly contested recently?

Yeah. Great, great question. I, I, I think it's always been hotly contested to some extent. Um, it just kind of, uh, flares up and then down, uh, just depending on, um, conditions. I, I, I think the, the, one of the main drivers is there are, um, many individuals who don't wanna believe that there's biological basis to anything, and if there's a biological basis to anything, it- it's gonna show up in- in sex differences. And there are, um, gender activists who don't wanna believe that there are differences between men and women that have a biological basis to them, and therefore, they don't wanna consider that those potential differences contribute to socially important outcomes, like the percentage of males in computer science or engineering or, you know, teaching or whatever it might be. And so-

You, you did a bunch of research, right, looking at STEM, uh, and seeing what it was that contributed to, uh, women's lower participation in STEM subjects.

Right. Yeah, so, so we looked at, um, we- we've looked at a variety of, uh, sex differences in, in a number of things and- and one, um, 2018 study, we looked at the, um, proportion of women, college students, who were getting degrees in inorganic sciences. So, computer science, engineering, physics and so forth. And, um, we plotted that against things like, um, gender equality, which is, uh, would be... A high gender equal country would be one that... Uh, that they tend to be generally pretty wealthy, liberal, um, there's high levels of, um, female participation in the labor force, there's women in Parliament or Congress or whatever, um, it might be, a lot of women in higher ed and so forth. So, the standard argument has been, for the last, uh, four or five decades is that as countries approach that type of, um, wealth and, uh, liberal openness, that basic psychological, cognitive and other sex differences will begin to disappear. Um, so, so we looked at that generally. We looked across countries and we found the exact opposite of that, that as countries became more gender equal, there was proportionately fewer women going into these inorganic sciences. They were going into, uh, other areas, um, presumably. So, the gap in these, um, these particular STEM fields actually increased as societies became more open to women participating in a variety of, kind of, cultural endeavors.

Have you got any idea whether this is due to interests or abilities?

Right. Probab- probably a coup- a couple of different things. Um, interest for sure. Um, there are sex differences in, um, interest in science generally, and there are sex differences in particularly interest in, uh, mechanical, um, types of things, how, how inorganic things work. Um, in terms of abilities, the, probably one of the primary movers is intra-individual strength. So, if you're inter-... And so, what, what are you best at? Reading or math or reading or science or whatever it might be? And throughout the world, girls are generally, their best subject is generally reading, meaning that their comparative advantage is in fields that are more reading heavy than math or science heavy. Even if their overall levels of, uh, math and science are high, or even higher than boys, um, if their strength is reading, they're still more likely to go into other fields, uh, than, than STEM related.