Jan 30 2009
Nurturing Gender
Within a stack of old papers I found this article: Playing Video Games Reduces Sex Differences In Spatial Skills. It caused me to recall the whole flap caused by the Harvard University President who stated that women many never catch up to men in the hard sciences. (Is that a hard science in your pocket, or are you just glad to study me?). Much controversy ensued. The guy resigned.
I can see his point — it MAY be true that men are at an innate advantage over women when it comes to advances in theoretical physics, etc. But what the above article helped me to comprehend is that the advantage may consist of innate interest as much as it does innate ability.
Is it possible that men and women tend to excel at the activities they are most interested?
Toronto researchers have discovered that differences between men and women on some tasks that require spatial skills are largely eliminated after both groups play a video game for only a few hours.
My point: gender differences reflect more than innate abilities. Want more women to excel in the sciences? One way would be to make it more interesting to them. The gap may never be fully closed, but until the two elements of innate ability and innate interest are teased apart, we will never know.
