The Bookman
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2015–2018
38:53 · 238K views · May 26, 2014
First episode of the Norwegian documentary series Hjernevask, in which Harald Eia interviews researchers on the nature versus nurture debate. It focuses on the gender equality paradox and gender differences in career choice.
HN commenters cite it, especially during the Google memo debate, as expert testimony on biological contributions to gender differences.
10 comments from Hacker News
watch this: this video (even better if you see it all) biology comes before history, history can be a consequence of biology > If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill This is what scares me of this society. If someone is bad at something lets force him/her to improve at the things he/she is bad at. Instead of focusing on the things a person is good at and try to put them on the next level and make a difference that way, let's focus on the bad things and get a mediocre individual. I love maths, but are you saying art is not a valuable skill compare with maths? Should the great artist bad at math study math and give up in art? You might think that not training someone at something that he/she is bad at is stupid, but some people like me think the stupid thing is to no to focus in what make someone special and good at. And finally, why do you think there is a bias? Couldn't be the reason that there are not more female CS engineers that they choose freely not to be because they just don't like it? The answer is in the video I put before.
Alright, I'll bite. But, I've never heard of any research suggesting women have a different cognitive capacity than men. I read some research a number of years ago suggesting cross-culturally women had better language skills than men, but I don't know if this is still considered to be true. I can't remember reading anything in the manifesto which suggested women are less capable as software engineers. The essay did suggest women were less interested in programming than men (obviously true - see enrolment figures) and that at least some of the effect size is due to biological factors (probably true - see below). --- None of these links suggest any capacity difference. Only that there is a biologically influenced gender difference in interests. Here's an essay contextualising and summarising the historical specifics of male and female gender roles in society: [LINK] Here's a study of how prenatal androgen effects psychological thing vs people orientation, and how it influences career choice: [LINK] A summary of studies looking at big 5 personality distributions and other effects. Of note is the long section describing blindspots in current research: "Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where and Why?" [LINK] Here's a Dutch documentary where they send a camera crew around asking different researchers about gender differences: this video The full documentary is great. Their conclusion is that biological factors result in an overlapping but different distribution o
> “I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.” This documentary is really interesting in that regard: this video It's a Norwegian documentary from 2010 about "Why do girls tend to go into empathizing professions and boys into systemizing professions? Why does the labor market become more gender segregated the more economic prosperity a country has?" A lot of the scientists interviewed didn't even bother to consider evidence that innate sex differences exists.
There is a documentary called Hjernevask from Norway that had a lot of controversy because of the topic. It is good to see different opinions of experts and what happened there: this video
> Your two examples list physical differences, not mental ones. Look what the experts say: this video If you see the whole video you hear different opinions > you don't have to be tall to [play basketball] Look at the height distributions of the global population and the basketball players and think twice of what you said. > There are no biological "skills" that men might possess innately that should make them a first-choice by default Exactly because those skill can also be in women, but some are more likely to be in men as some are more likely to be in women. I don't see anything wrong with it.