Chapter 7 Flashcards
Cognitive abilities
Mental skills, such as paying attention, reasoning, remembering, solving problems, speaking, and interpreting speech
Things keeping women out of STEM careers
- Intense work demands
- Greater natural aptitude of men
- Sex-based patterns
General intelligence (g)
General capacity to understand ideas, think abstractly, reason, solve problems, and learn
Evidence to support general intelligence
- Spearman came up with this idea in the early 1900s after noticing that children’s score in one school subject was correlated with their scores in other subjects
- Predicts academic performance, job performance, is stable over lifetime, heritable, and environmental factors do play role as well
Are there sex differences in general intelligence?
Most studies found negligible differences in general mental ability
- Small differences that do not consistently favor one particular sex
- However, IQ tests built so that they do not show sex differences and items are taken out that consistently yield a difference
Sex differences in verbal ability
- Girls learn to talk younger
- Early on girls have better vocab
- This early advantage disappears in later childhood
- Girls have advantage in reading and this advantage is highest in countries that have more gender equality
- Verbal advantage not seen for verbal reasoning
Sex differences in quantitative ability
- Recent data from over 2 million people showed little evidence of sex differences
- As gender equality of a country increases, men’s math advantage decreases
Visual spatial ability
Cognitive skills that help individuals understand relationships between objects and navigate three-dimensional space
- Mental rotation
- Trajectories
- Location of objects
Spatial perception
- The ability to understand and interpret spatial relationships, including the position of objects and one’s own body in relation to the environment
- Small male advantage in childhood
- Increases to moderate advantage in adulthood
Spatial location
- The specific position or area where something is situated in relation to its surroundings
- Remember where objects are
- Female advantage
- Foraging
Why do sex differences exist
Play preferences in childhood
- Boys prefer toys/games that increase spatial skills
What role do hormones play in sex differences
Advantages come early before exposure to toys
- Prenatal hormone exposure
Greater male variability hypothesis
- Men show more variability than women in their distribution of scores on cognitive performance measures
- Men are more likely to be top and bottom scorers on cognitive tests
- Genes may play a role, as there are more boys with intellectual disabilities
Greater male variability hypothesis across cultures for math
- In 88% of over 40 countries, men have greater variance in math performance
- Greater male variability than female variability in white students but not Asian students
- Greater male variability in math does not emerge in some countries and tends to decrease in countries with more equality
Has greater male variability hypothesis remained the same over time?
Top scoring male test takers have declined since 1980s
Stereotype threat
Anxiety people feel when they risk confirming a negative stereotype about their group
- If a young woman is told that women are worse at STEM fields and then takes a math test, she may experience stereotype threat and then she may perform worse
- Research supports that reminding woman of negative gender stereotypes before a test lowers performance
Response to feedback
- Women’s self-evaluations more responsive to both good and bad feedback
- Men approach performance situations as an opportunity to compete
Discrimination against women in STEM
- More benevolent sexism in STEM courses
- 33% of women in STEM discriminated against
- Viewing fake applicants with same profile, male applicant for lab position rated more competent and “hirable”
- Male scientists at top universities employ more male graduate students in their labs
Role of gendered family responsibilities in women in STEM
- Women willingly work fewer hours than men
- Women in STEM with children less likely to be promoted compared to men with children
Men and women prefer activities and jobs that differ
Women prefer jobs that emphasize interactions with others, while men prefer jobs that emphasize working with machines or computers
