I found that test to be fascinating in that it confirmed a lifetime of observations as to which traits tend to skew toward on gender or the other. However as a female Chemical Engineer I expected to end up myself as weak correlation feminine .... and instead I ended up a strong correlation masculine (94%). Which once I then dug deeper into my personal results left me with more questions about our social defaults and a view of just how much of an outlier I am on a broad range of traits. I was an extreme outlier on not just several male traits but on several female ones as well. So I am really curious as to how the algorithm weighted things to get its result. But that is mostly just the nerdy part of me getting really intrigued and wanting to dig even deeper into methodology now. Which is part of why I am a scientist/engineer. ;)
That’s exactly what I keep thinking when it comes to the Buttigieg thing—why is no one trying to give leave and support to the mother of the baby? There are physical ramifications to carrying a baby and giving birth that should be given different support. Not that other kinds of parental leave shouldn’t be available, but the reality is women experience a myriad of physical consequences having a baby and healing is necessary. And the attachment and care of an infant by their mother in their early days is vitally important and inherently different than care from the father. The more we deny these realities the more disservice we do to everyone within the family.
Is there a technical term for traits that are socially acquired, but those social conditions can be traced back to innate differences? One case I have in mind is the male tendency to physical violence. It seems obvious (famous last words...) that part of the male/female split here is innate and part of it is cultural. But it also seems like the cultural features that intensitfy male violence are common throughout the world. Maybe those cultural features are in some sense "caused" or "stabilized" by underlying innate differences? Could we call those cultural features innate, in some more abstract sense of innateness?
Only tangentially related: have you read The Dawn of Everything? I think you'd enjoy it, and it does touch a fair bit on the development of culture, common cultural features, etc.
I am skeptical of this claim, "there are some notable differences on average." What Clearer Thinking found was that for the vast majority of their survey questions there was no noticeable difference between how men and women responded. For the 18 traits where there was a difference, the vast majority of respondents fell in the middle, regardless of gender.
Take Compassion for instance. Here's what they said in the Clearer Thinking post:
"if you knew for a fact that a person had an extremely high compassion score (a score of 3), your guess that they are female would be about twice as likely to be true than if you guessed male. Likewise, if you knew that a person had a very low compassion score (e.g. -1.5 or lower) you would almost certainly be right if you guessed they are male!
And yet... there is only a **small difference on average** between male and female compassion scores.
So that means if you randomly pick a male and a female in the U.S. chances are they won't differ that much in their compassion. But when you only consider the most extreme outliers (i.e. people who are extremely compassionate or who very much lack compassion) you get a much more gendered result."
I don't see how this could back up a claim that women are 'generally more compassionate than men' or really point toward any argument for innate differences between men and women. I also quibble with clearer thinking's equating respondents *saying* they are extremely compassionate with *actually* being extremely compassionate. When people self report they are inherently more likely to take into account social norms (and make themselves look better).
FYI the tests didn't ask you if you think you are compassionate. They ask questions that gage traits based on both a response and the strength of that response. So for example a question like I always give assistance people who are on the roadside holding signs asking for help ... and then you rate your answer on a 5 pt scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. In their larger sample huge question test they asked people many hundreds of questions which indicate something about certain quality traits, but they asked them in totally mixed fashion without giving them any indication beforehand what they were specifically looking for. So it is a lot harder to game a test like that. Sure their is likely to be some self bias in individual answers. We all tend to think things about ourselves that are a bit rose colored. But if you have enough different questions that approach each trait from different angles you can usually get some reasonably revealing results. This short test/tool only had 2 questions for each trait so it was/is not as discerning as the much larger data base from the real studies they conducted
ooh! did you find the original surveys and results? I couldn't find them myself. I did take the test and thought the 2 questions per trait would lead to issues with accurately categorizing folks.
No sadly I didn't find that. I would love to read though more of it. However if you clicked on all the "learn more" links, including the ones in your results sections they go into more detail about the methodology. They list the number of total questions and how many different traits they were looking at etc. Along with number of people in sample size and some of the follow up tests they had them take to refine data after the original test and things like that.
I found that test to be fascinating in that it confirmed a lifetime of observations as to which traits tend to skew toward on gender or the other. However as a female Chemical Engineer I expected to end up myself as weak correlation feminine .... and instead I ended up a strong correlation masculine (94%). Which once I then dug deeper into my personal results left me with more questions about our social defaults and a view of just how much of an outlier I am on a broad range of traits. I was an extreme outlier on not just several male traits but on several female ones as well. So I am really curious as to how the algorithm weighted things to get its result. But that is mostly just the nerdy part of me getting really intrigued and wanting to dig even deeper into methodology now. Which is part of why I am a scientist/engineer. ;)
That’s exactly what I keep thinking when it comes to the Buttigieg thing—why is no one trying to give leave and support to the mother of the baby? There are physical ramifications to carrying a baby and giving birth that should be given different support. Not that other kinds of parental leave shouldn’t be available, but the reality is women experience a myriad of physical consequences having a baby and healing is necessary. And the attachment and care of an infant by their mother in their early days is vitally important and inherently different than care from the father. The more we deny these realities the more disservice we do to everyone within the family.
Yes, a very important topic: birthing leave. Things are complicated in our society.
Is there a technical term for traits that are socially acquired, but those social conditions can be traced back to innate differences? One case I have in mind is the male tendency to physical violence. It seems obvious (famous last words...) that part of the male/female split here is innate and part of it is cultural. But it also seems like the cultural features that intensitfy male violence are common throughout the world. Maybe those cultural features are in some sense "caused" or "stabilized" by underlying innate differences? Could we call those cultural features innate, in some more abstract sense of innateness?
Only tangentially related: have you read The Dawn of Everything? I think you'd enjoy it, and it does touch a fair bit on the development of culture, common cultural features, etc.
I haven't!
I am skeptical of this claim, "there are some notable differences on average." What Clearer Thinking found was that for the vast majority of their survey questions there was no noticeable difference between how men and women responded. For the 18 traits where there was a difference, the vast majority of respondents fell in the middle, regardless of gender.
Take Compassion for instance. Here's what they said in the Clearer Thinking post:
"if you knew for a fact that a person had an extremely high compassion score (a score of 3), your guess that they are female would be about twice as likely to be true than if you guessed male. Likewise, if you knew that a person had a very low compassion score (e.g. -1.5 or lower) you would almost certainly be right if you guessed they are male!
And yet... there is only a **small difference on average** between male and female compassion scores.
So that means if you randomly pick a male and a female in the U.S. chances are they won't differ that much in their compassion. But when you only consider the most extreme outliers (i.e. people who are extremely compassionate or who very much lack compassion) you get a much more gendered result."
I don't see how this could back up a claim that women are 'generally more compassionate than men' or really point toward any argument for innate differences between men and women. I also quibble with clearer thinking's equating respondents *saying* they are extremely compassionate with *actually* being extremely compassionate. When people self report they are inherently more likely to take into account social norms (and make themselves look better).
FYI the tests didn't ask you if you think you are compassionate. They ask questions that gage traits based on both a response and the strength of that response. So for example a question like I always give assistance people who are on the roadside holding signs asking for help ... and then you rate your answer on a 5 pt scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. In their larger sample huge question test they asked people many hundreds of questions which indicate something about certain quality traits, but they asked them in totally mixed fashion without giving them any indication beforehand what they were specifically looking for. So it is a lot harder to game a test like that. Sure their is likely to be some self bias in individual answers. We all tend to think things about ourselves that are a bit rose colored. But if you have enough different questions that approach each trait from different angles you can usually get some reasonably revealing results. This short test/tool only had 2 questions for each trait so it was/is not as discerning as the much larger data base from the real studies they conducted
ooh! did you find the original surveys and results? I couldn't find them myself. I did take the test and thought the 2 questions per trait would lead to issues with accurately categorizing folks.
No sadly I didn't find that. I would love to read though more of it. However if you clicked on all the "learn more" links, including the ones in your results sections they go into more detail about the methodology. They list the number of total questions and how many different traits they were looking at etc. Along with number of people in sample size and some of the follow up tests they had them take to refine data after the original test and things like that.