Guest post: Why is there a need?
Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on More threats.
It’s an easy, and lazy, argument to make that chess is played with the brain, not the genitals or the muscles therefore saying there is a need for a separate women’s category is demeaning to women. It relies on the trope of men’s brains and ladyeez brains and assumes women’s intellect is inferior to men’s.
Susan Polgar – Hall of Famer, the Winner of 4 Women’s World Chess Championships,12 Olympic Medals (5 Gold, 4 Silver, 3 Bronze), and the first woman in history to break the gender barrier in chess would like to disagree.
“Why is there a need for Girl’s or Women’s tournaments?”
This is probably one of the top 5 questions I have most often been asked over the past 15 years, since creating the Susan Polgar Foundation in 2002.
I would like to walk you through some history and then explain to you some challenges girls / women face in chess. But before we start down this journey, I want to make one thing abundantly clear. I have not changed my point of view. I do strongly believe that if given equal opportunities, women are just as capable in chess, and many other STEM fields, as are men. However, I still adamantly believe that there is a serious need for SOME “girls only” or “women only” events.
Polgar then goes on to address the 5 questions, pointing out how hard it is for girls to compete against aggressive males, that women’s achievements are belittled and diminished, how barriers are put in their way at every level.
When she qualified to enter the world championships, she was told she couldn’t enter because she wasn’t a man. Can’t have a girly brain showing up those muscular manly brains, can we?
The article concludes
Within 48 hours after I posted my article about “Why is there a need for Girl’s or Women’s Tournaments?”, between my website and various social media outlets, this article has reached well over 400,000 readers. Many made comments in the comment sections, in private messages, email, and tweets, etc. While the overwhelming majority were very supportive and understanding, some comments were eye openers. Here are just a few of the best ones:
– Why is it a problem if some girls are sexually harassed by male players at tournaments? It will make them stronger to deal with the real world.
– …shielding girls from the realities of the world isn’t the way to improve the conditions. What this does is subconsciously reinforce the notion that they are somehow inferior.
– If the girls didn’t provoke first, there would be no problem at all.
– If you have Girl or Women’s tournaments that exclude men, then shouldn’t you have Men’s tournaments that exclude women?
– Oooh, you’re so pretty. Are you married?
– If girls can’t deal with the reality of chess, maybe they could try something less challenging?
– Get a grip. Girls won’t ever be as good as boys.
– It’s good to have more girls in chess, especially the pretty ones.
– Chess is a men’s sport. You can’t change the fact.
– Girls are surely seeking attention when they go to chess tournaments. What do they expect?
– Why do you always wanna to rock the boat? Why can’t you accept it?
Now, why wouldn’t women want to be in a room with men like these?
Nicely said.
These issues are present as well for arenas where there is a physical ability difference. Yet so much of the rhetoric, for and against allowing men in the women’s divisions, seems focused on the physical ability differences, whether they exist, whether they can be mitigated.
It reminds me of the sexism in musicianship. It wasn’t until auditions were blind — the evaluators could hear, but not see, the candidates — that female musicians began to be hired in orchestras and bands.
@maddog1129:
This is an oft-repeated myth, but is pretty much not true. See here for example.
PS After decades when “progressives” argued for blind auditions (to root out unconscious bias, though how much affect unconscious bias has in the real world is arguable), they are now arguing against blind auditions. Why? Because you can’t do “affirmative action” if you don’t have that information. E.g. link.
@David Brindley:
Can we please move beyond the era where possible sex differences in women’s and men’s brains are discussed in dismissive and sarcastic tones?
A few decades ago, feminists were then asserting that men and women are identical in terms of sporting ability. This was blatantly and obviously wrong, and everyone sensible has now realised it. A human body going through puberty steeped in oestrogen turns about different from one going through puberty steeped in testosterone.
Well, human brains also grow up either steeped in oestrogen or steeped in testosterone. And we know that this has a big effect on brains. As a blatant example, the testosterone-steeped ones have propensity to violent aggression and sexual aggression a factor 10 to 30 times greater.
From there, it is an empirical question (not, contrary to woke supposition, a moral question) as to what other systematic differences there might be.
Though tournaments were open to women before the Polgar era. Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze are examples of women who played in “men’s” tournaments (more-properly called “open” tournaments) prior to Polgar and who attained the Grandmaster title.
Can you support this claim? Which world championship did Susan Polgar qualify for? Which was she not allowed to enter? I don’t think this is true.
[Note that her younger sister, Judit, did qualify for and play in the 2005 world championship.]
As above, I’m fairly sure that official tournaments were “open” long before the Polgar era.
Indeed Wiki tells us that this had been settled in 1976: “Rohini Khadilkar became the first female to compete in the Indian Men’s Championship. Her involvement in a male competition caused a furore … and caused the World Chess Federation … to rule that women cannot be barred from national and international championships”.
In most countries they’d been open well before that. E.g. Wiki tells us that María Teresa Mora won the Cuban championship in 1922.
At the risk of over-doing the commenting, I’ve just done some sleuthing. Regarding David Brindley’s claim:
This claim presumably comes from the Chess Daily News piece linked to. First thing to note is that that is Susan Polgar’s personal website. Anyhow, there the claim is stated as:
That little word “cycle” is important here (I added the bolding). The world-championship “cycle” works by the best players from each country qualifying for a “zonal” tournament. The winners of that qualify for an “interzonal” tournament. Those who come top then enter a “candidates tournament” and the winner of that then challengers the current champion in the “world chess championship”.
It was the first of those stages, the “zonal”, that Susan Polgar (nearly) qualified for, as the 6th-best Hungarian player, losing out (it seems) by a half-point tie-break. You can read an account of this, by someone who claims to know, here. It was not because the rules didn’t allow women to enter.
Qualifying for a zonal is, anyhow, vastly different from qualifiying for the “world championship”. Susan Polgar was never a top-100 player (her younger sister Judit was, peaking at being ranked 8th in the world for one six-month period, and qualifying on one occasion for the equivalent of the candidates tournament).
That piece also claims:
This is unfair to the two earlier women who had attained a Grandmaster title (Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze). Again, the exact wording of the claim matters. Earlier, the qualification for “Grandmaster” was attaining 3 Grandmaster “norms” (sufficiently good scores in tournaments against players who are already grandmasters).
At some point, a rule was added that you also needed an ELO rating above 2500. Susan Polgar seems to be the first women to have gained the title after the rule change, but the earlier two gained the title fair-and-square under the rules of the time, on the same basis as men then did.
So, overall, I don’t trust Susan Polgar’s website as a source on these matters.
It’s been mostly the same in the world of rock music, too. I would often hear from male musicians that “chicks can’t rock.” And while the most common response is to list women who have proven that yes, “chicks can rock,” has been to list such as Susan Tedeschi, Nancy and Ann Wilson, Debbie Harry, Chrissie Hynde, and on and on and on, I think think the most effect response is to ask “why not?”
There is no physical reason that “chicks can’t rock.” And as the Riot Grrrls movement in punk and grunge from the nineties showed, it’s really been a matter of women having to push their way in to make their case. Guys were just not letting them in through the standard paths of success for music. They weren’t being taken seriously but were considered novelty acts. My own sister-in-law asked me once while watching a video of The Bangles, “Do they even play their own instruments?” Yes, for the record, they did. Or, if they did make it, had to put up with a lot of bullshit and harassment along the way. An example of this is the Runaways, with the lead singer costumed in lingerie as a teenager. Romeo Void’s lead singer, Debora Iyall, had to fight the record company to be shown in the videos because the record company considered her “too fat” and would turn off the potential buyers who saw her on MTV. Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes has had to fight this, too. Women-led acts have had to also fight the rule in classic rock radio not to play songs from two woman-led bands in consecutive order.
Now my playlist and library are full of acts led by women, or indeed bands made up of women, and they are not treated as novelty acts or dressed up on stage as titillating tarts (I mostly listen to the punk and alternative bands and can’t speak for pop music.)
There are many reasons beyond just ability to rock that have made it more difficult for women to achieve the plateaus of rock greatness, but the nonsensical prejudice that “chicks can’t rock” has been laid to rest.
Coel,
But another empirical question – and as yet unanswered – is: how much of the behavioural differences are due to biological tendencies, as opposed to socialisation? No data currently available to us answers this, as all data is derived from people whose behaviour is known to be at least partially social in origin. Data is tainted by this influence, and will continue to be so long as there are differences in the behaviours expected of the different sexes.
If/when socialised differences are eliminated or at least greatly diminished, what remains can be examined and perhaps attributed to inherent biological origin.
@Holms:
I agree with your general point that separating out social influences from biological ones is in general hard. But we can still get a rough idea. If a pattern holds across a wide range of societies, it’s likely not just socialisation.
On the topic of chess, in the Soviet era the Soviet Union, Eastern-bloc countries and China put a lot of effort into promoting women’s chess. They screened lots of children for talent and then coached them from a young age (as they did in other areas where they thought they could out-shine the West).
The outcome was that they dominated women’s chess. Their women were way better than Western women chess players. But they were still not as good as either the Eastern-bloc men or indeed Western men.
In the 50 years since 1971, when FIDE started giving official rankings lists every 6 months, there have been 3 women in the Top 100.
These are Chiburdanidze (peaked at number 48 in 1986) Judit Polgar (peaked at number 10 in 1996) and Hou Yifan (peaked at number 55 in 2015).
Over that period the number of men who were ever in the Top 100 is over a thousand. Currently there are no women in the Top 100, Yifan is the only woman in the Top 200 and the 2nd-highest-ranked woman is at number 347.
A difference that big is hard to account for as socialisation alone, especially given the screening, support and coaching from a young age in the Eastern countries.
I don’t agree with the implication that biology-based differences should be treated as a “last resort” explanation. The default for such things should be that both biology and socialisation are important. And biological factors are never just “inherent”, they always play out entwined with environmental and social factors.
I suggest that anyone who looks at the above numbers and opines that it’s all down to socialisation is judging based on what they want to be the case. But at some point it becomes as perverse as arguing that men and women are of equal ability in all sports. Firstly it’s a lost cause, and secondly you don’t need it to be the case in order to have a society in which women are treated fully equally.
…even though they are in fact inferior.
@Ophelia,
If that’s an addendum to my comment, let me ask:
Would you say that the fact that women (in general) cannot compete with men at rugby means that women “are in fact inferior”? Or are they just different?
Would you say that feminists, or anyone wanting a society in which women are treated equally, needs to argue that women are just as good at rugby as men, or admit that they are “inferior” beings?
Coel, I had a thorough and longish comment written to you, but my computer decided to erase it at the last minute. Suffice it to say, there is a lot of reason not to accept that women’s and men’s brains are as different as you think. The hormones that wash our brains prepare us for sexual reproduction; our bodies have different roles and different physiognomies for that. It is necessary. As for studies of the brain, it was discovered that fewer than 50% of women have the so-called “woman’s brain”. That is why we continue to dismiss the studies; there is obviously something wrong with the fact that more women have men’s brains than have women’s brains.
@iknklast:
Well you’ll have to point me to the specfic studies you’re referring to if you want me to comment.
And I’d readily accept that there are plenty of junk studies on such topics; and anyhow, currently, brain scanners are not nearly good enough to discern personality, so as yet they’re fairly irrelevant to discussion of this topic.
There seem to be a lot of odd declarations, assumptions, and conclusions about this chess decision. The first thing that stood out to me was the statement from FIDE that “trans men who had won women’s titles before transitioning would see their titles abolished”. Which makes absolutely no sense if they are trying to base their policies on biology.
Perhaps I am being naive, but it does strike me that chess is in a different category from more physical competitions like swimming and cycling. Somewhere in the middle might be things like billiards and darts (someone who knows more about these sports than I do may be able to challenge my intuition that simple strength does not confer enough of an advantage to make men inherently superior).
It is my understanding that the reason for women’s categories in sports such as swimming and cycling is that, because of the facts of biology and physics, a female-bodied-person is vanishingly unlikely to be able to win a competition against male-bodied persons. If men do have an inherent biologically-based advantage at chess (as asserted by Coel, though I remain unconvinced), then that opens an entire other can of worms, but does provide justification for disallowing trans women from women’s competitions. (But on that basis, I still can’t fathom the justification for removing transmens’ titles.)
On the other hand, if there is no inherent sex-based difference in chess abilities, then (at least) 2 questions are raised:
1) What is the justification for a sex-segregated system? Does it unavoidably concede the point that women are necessarily not as capable?
2) What can be done to investigate and potentially address the cause for the difference in outcome if there is no underlying difference in ability?
Seanna, it’s sort of like playwriting. Why do we have contests for women playwrights? Writing plays requires no particular physical skills, though performing in them sometimes does.
Women have been shut out of playwriting for some time, even though women have been writing plays for…well, from what I’ve learned, for as long as there have been plays. It is difficult to get produced. When considered blind, women’s plays get chosen as often as men’s. When names are involved, the same play will be substantially lower in the ratings if the name is a woman’s vs. a man’s.
Women’s plays sell more tickets, make more profits, and often run for a shorter length of time. So it isn’t economics. Women buy 70% of theatre tickets; I have been told women write plays about women, and who wants to see those? Well, maybe 70% of the ticket buyers?
There is also the sexual harassment, the condescension, the snickering, the grabbing, the expectations that you will bring donuts and coffee…I could go on, but I suspect you get the point. There are subtle ways and not so subtle to let women know they aren’t wanted.
I don’t usually go to the women’s festivals because my plays contain too many men (some of them are literally no male characters allowed, but I like the richness of having lots of options). I also am not one for sisterhood and consciousness raising; it makes me feel uncomfortable. I’m not into earth goddesses. Also, theatre women tend to be into woo (theatre men, too). But I do see a need for the festivals, even though playwriting is not something that is inherently easier for males.
My worst problem is the goddamn condescension I experience. I have passed the sexual harassment stage; they’re not interested in grabbing the ass of a 63 year old woman. Now I have reached the second childhood stage, where they treat me like a not-too-bright child…even though I am literally the only one in my playwriting collective who has an MFA in playwriting!
By the way, interesting observation. I have been participating in a playwriting festival for 8 years now. It is interesting to watch the development process on the plays. The plays written by males get produced as they are; it is rare the males even do a single edit or rewrite. They feel their plays are just right as they first put them on the page. (Edward Albee felt the same way, or claimed to never rewrite, but none of these males are Edward Albee…maybe in their dreams.) The female plays get twisted and bent until in some cases they are barely recognizable as what the writer brought in. If said woman won’t rewrite the play as the director dictates, some of the directors just do it anyway.
Overall, that doesn’t give the plays by males any chance to improve, of course. But in some cases, it ruins the plays by females, so that they end up saying the opposite of what was intended.
Morning All,
Ok, another question (since the above one hasn’t got an answer):
Tom has an IQ of 100. He has long worked as a fireman; he is regarded as solid and reliable by his collagues and friends, who value him, and over the decades he has saved several lives. He is a supportive husband and a good father to his kids. If a neighbour needs assistance he’s among the most likely to notice that and help.
Steve has an IQ of 150. He manages a hedge fund, using his cleverness to make money for his backers. But that hedge fund is very much a zero-sum game, effectively just moving money from one account to another. Very well paid, he spends his money on expensive holidays and vanities. He doesn’t see it as his job to be concerned about others in society. He could beat Tom at chess with ease.
Would anyone here want to label Tom as “inferior” as a human being to Steve?
In giving your answer to that, would you need to hold that the differences between Tom and Steve are purely about socialisation and upbringing, and, were it not for that, they would be pretty much identical?
(My answers would be no and no. By the way, all of the above behavioural traits, by which Tom and Steve differ, have a strong genetic component.)
Coel, you could read Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. She provides her sources, so if you wanted to read further, it would be possible.
I have read so much on it, I don’t have time to give a conclusive list. That’s a source that pulls it all together in one nice package.
@iknklast:
You provide evidence that there is no inherent difference in ability between male and female playwrights; are you saying that segregated spaces are a reasonable way to address the evident inequality of outcome that is inconsistent with the equality of ability? (This is an honest question, not intended to be a point of disagreement – I have no familiarity with this field beyond being an occasional watcher of plays.)
@Coel:
I’m not sure why you are asking questions about the relative rankings of the value of humans. But here’s my question back to you: What happens when Tom’s daughter wants to go to university to study engineering, but she is told that girls don’t do engineering, most especially girls who come from low IQ family stock?
@Seanna Watson:
It wasn’t me who introduced the concept of “inferiority” to the thread,
I’d be surprised if that actually happened these days. Certainly no university engineering department would say it. If a school teacher said it then they’re greatly at fault for doing so.
But if it did happen then the statement should be rejected, and the girl should be encouraged and supported to head down whatever path she wishes to.
I’m open to the idea that there may be biological brain differences between various groups of people, such as between men and women.
The problem I have is this: essentially everyone I’ve known personally or read who argues this seems extremely eager to jump on biological brain differences as an explanation. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the dismissal of the concept, I don’t know. They also seem eager to reject the idea of current-day socialization effects: “Does anybody really do that now?” and so forth. Yes, people do really do that now. Sure some things are overstated, and some things are understated, but wholesale changes are difficult and unlikely.
It feels like a motte and bailey: the motte being “we can’t completely rule out brain differences” and the bailey being “brain differences are paramount”.
@Coel, I’ll agree there has clearly been some progress in the almost 50 years since my highschool vice principal said that it was inappropriate for a girl to take electronics. (I guess I proved him wrong by going to study electrical engineering at MIT, but I had the advantage of being stubborn plus coming from a middle-class family which valued all kinds of education, even for girls. Which didn’t make me a better engineer, just luckier.)
But as @Sackbut says, “Yes, people do really do that now”. Perhaps no longer as an explicit prohibition by the school administration, but definitely by means of caution from guidance counselors who still think that math and science are harder for girls, not to mention social pressures from peers and family (which recently seem to be getting worse) discouraging pursuing directions not typical for one’s gender.
As for brain biology, clearly there are some physical differences: No matter how hard I try, I am never going to teach my cat calculus. On the other hand, I would suggest that most humans would be able to grasp at least the fundamentals. And I don’t think we know enough yet to be able to tease out how much of the failure to learn would be due to socialization vs lack of inherent ability vs bad teaching.
@Seanna Watson:
This is one of the things that we do know, owing mostly to twin studies (and corroborated by other types of study such as adoption studies).
If, for example, we take kids of the same sex and race in the same country (and thus living in the range of families and environments, and going to the range of schools typical of that country), then the variation in ability at mathematics at age ~ 17 is attributable to:
~ 60% genetics.
~ 15% “shared” environment (factors that siblings living together would share)
~ 25% un-shared environment (factors siblings would not share).
Such findings are consistently replicated across studies.
This clashes with the common supposition that outcome disparities (again, this is same race and sex) would be mostly about family socio-economic status and family privilege/deprivation, along with school funding and school quality. The evidence is, however, that all of those added together (= “shared” environment) is the least significant of the above 3 factors, adding up to accounting for only ~15% of outcome variation.
(By the way, I think you’re over-estimating the extent to which one could teach calculus to the lower half of the ability range.)
@Sackbut:
Yes, exactly. The blank-slateist assumption (dismissing biological effects on behavioural traits) underpins most of the social sciences and other academic disciplines these days, and means much of it is simply invalid.
And it underpins Wokeism. If one were to sum up Wokeism in one statement it would be: Any disparity in outcomes between Group A and Group B can only be explained by “privileged” Group A being beastly to and oppressing “minoritized” Group B; hence we need to keep challenging Group A until “equity” (equal outcomes) is attained.
And yet, the evidence is that — as a good rule of thumb — biological factors and socialisation effects are roughly equally important in explaining disparities between humans, and they act together in entwined ways, and thus equity (equal outcomes) cannot be attained, or not without totalitarianism, starting with shutting down any speech that dissents from that central statement of Wokeism.
Thus, virtually all the “culture wars” taboos have at root a denial that there are biological differences between humans. Hence the denial, for example, that trans-IDing male cyclists or swimmers have a biological advantage over women. Or the denial that trans-IDing male prisoners would be more likely than women prisoners to be sexually agressive towards other inmates. These ideas cannot be supported on the evidence, so need to be maintained by shouting down any dissent as “hateful”.
Coel @ 22
“Yes, exactly”? So you’re agreeing with my assessment that people who argue for the existence or consideration of sex-based brain differences in humans do so extremely eagerly, perhaps because of a reaction to blank-slateism? Or are you just agreeing that that some of their argument is a reaction to blank-slateism, and not agreeing that the reaction is excessive?
@Sackbut:
Is the reaction over-eager and excessive? Well there are a lot of different people with a lot of different motivations, so I guess that from some people it might be.
But, in general, no I don’t think it is. It’s merely the necessary amount of “eagerness” necessary to question a dominant paradigm that (some of us think) is corrupting the discourse in a lot of academia and wider society.
I would, instead, suggest that those keen to discount biological factors, treating them as a grudging, last-resort explanation, are the ones being over-eager.
There’s a 14-yr-old boy, Abhimanyu Mishra, who is currently ranked 243 in the world at chess. That makes him better than all but one woman (in fact, given that rankings are based on past games, so inevitably lag a junior’s current ability, he could well be better than any female on the planet).
Can disparities that big (and that persists in all different times and different societies) be explained purely as socialisation? It strikes me that that would require Talibanesque levels of discouragement of women. (And again, this is after China and Eastern-bloc countries have for decades put effort into discovering and nurturing chess talent among girls.)
Thanks for clarifying, and thanks for providing an example that I think shows the problem.
I’m not disputing the idea that there are genetic differences between individuals in intelligence. I’m not disputing that there might be some differences that can be reliably tagged to men versus women. But what I’ve seen has indicated that sex-class differences are negligible, not compared to differences within sex classes. I think these points are well made in various books, and I have no interest in trying to either dig up references or dredge vague memories.
But I do think that people who wish to oppose blank-slateism (you, for example) go out of your way, not just to suggest that there is a genetic component to intelligence, but that this component is different between sex classes in a large enough way that it must be considered as the first factor in looking at things like education.
I don’t think the example you give, of a single intelligent man (let’s presume chess skill is related to intelligence, not too far off), has any bearing on the point, although obviously you do.
My disagreement with you has nothing whatsoever to do with blank-slateism, a position I do not hold.
@Sackbut:
Yes, that’s right in general. There is close to zero difference in the means, and any such difference is small compared to the dispersion within any class.
But that’s a different question from whether there is a sex difference in very narrow, esoteric and abstract styles of thinking, right at the top end of the distribution. (Which is what we’re talking about regarding leading chess players or, say, professional mathematicians.)
What is the case in the broad middle of a distribution (where most people are), is a different question from what is the case at the extreme fringes, both at the upper end and the lower end.
It’s also a different question from whether there is a sex difference in desire to pursue an activity such as chess to the near-exclusion of all else, which is also very relevant to an activity like top-end chess.
… which is overwhelmingly established …
No. Flat out no. I have not said anything remotely like that. And it is quite obviously false.
What we should do in education is treat everyone according to their individual abilities and interests (regardless of their various “identities”), and this follows because, as you say, dispersions within identity classes are bigger than between identity-class means. Hence “identity” tells you rather little about any individual’s abilities and interests.
For example, sticking with chess, Hou Yifan is a woman, but that tells you close to nothing about her chess ability. And she is better at chess than 99.99999% of men on the planet.
Nothing I’ve said rested on any single individual. In my previous comment the point was that a ranking placing someone 243 overall is ahead of all but one woman.
Your disagreement seems to be with things I’ve not said and don’t think.
Coel, let me just quote this one paragraph from your recent comment:
This, to me, sounds like rejecting the size of the impact of socialization and seeking a genetic explanation.
I would in fact expect disparities that big and persistent to be explained purely as socialization. I would expect people looking to explain these disparities to look at socialization first and foremost. I might expect genetic differences to be considered only after socialization investigations had proved fruitless.
Other people I know also gravitate toward genetic answers and dismiss (or minimize) socialization. They seem very eager for there to be genetic answers. The eagerness bothers me.
@Sackbut:
So would it be fair to say that you are eager for a socialisation explanation? If so, why?
[My stance on such questions is that, in general, we should treat the two as equally likely (and often a mixture of both) and not default to one or the other.]
Coel:
No. It would be fair to say that I’ve read enough to think that socialization explains a great deal, and to be wary of people who push genetic explanations. The latter group tends to say things like “Maybe women don’t go into these fields because they really don’t want to, or because they don’t have the right cognitive skill set, not a darn thing we can do about it”. Just to pick one example. Sexism is a thing of the past, racism is a thing of the past, most of the problems seen by these oppressed groups are just about how they are, don’t ya know. So no, I’m not eager for a socialization explanation, I’m eager to push back against people who push a do-nothing genetic explanation.
@Sackbut:
As I see it, people who “paraphrase” strawman versions of their opponents are pretty much avoiding having to deal with the world how it actually is.
Seanna Watson @21:
There is the “guiding” or indirectly limiting your choices by what they say you can be when you grow up.
Saying: “You’re good at math. You could be a math teacher.” Not saying: “You’re good at math. You could be a mathematician.”
Saying: “You’re good at science. You could be a science teacher.” Not saying: “You’re good at science. You could be a scientist.”
@Karen the chemist:
Exactly that. And the limiting guidance is done with such Good Intentions – they want to help protect the students from disappointment. Which of course just plays into the Imposter Syndrome that many kids (girls especially) who excel in non-traditional areas are already steeped in. How many of them will say to themselves something like “I’m not really sure that I’m good enough at math and science to be a mathematician, scientist, or engineer. But the teacher thing sounds like a safe bet. And the money is good.”
@Karen the chemist:
One of the consequences of discounting the very large role of biologically-rooted personality, is that people then over-estimate the effect of this sort of thing.
To a blank slateist, where outcomes are all about socialisation, the cumulative effect of this sort of comment has to be what determines a career path.
But actually producing evidence for this would be rather hard. And things like twin studies tell us that kids’ personalities are way less malleable than commonly supposed.
For one thing, how kids perform on tasks relative to their peers is something they’re hugely attuned to, relative rankings in their peer group matter to them; they don’t need to be told by adults, they already know.
@Seanna Watson:
Imposter Syndrome is real, but affects boys as much as girls and affects those achieving in traditional areas as much as non-traditional ones.
To quote wiki: “When impostor syndrome was first conceptualized, it was viewed as a phenomenon that was common among high-achieving women. Further research has shown that it affects both men and women, in the collective sense that the proportion affected are more or less equally distributed among the genders”.
A similar claim is Stereotype Threat. The claim was that, if you tell girls that girls are not as good at maths, then they do worse on a maths exam. But subsequent research has shown that, as with much of the social sciences, the studies were poorly done. Overall, Stereotype Threat is at best a weak effect.
I’m not saying that socialisation has no effects, it does, but it’s much less powerful than usually supposed.