Dec 28 2009
RP) Good Science and One Bad Word
(Recycled material: I’m in holiday/travel mode. This material first posted on Dec. 30, 2008)
Women Are From Not-Quite-Mars?
Gender differences interest me. And so this finding would naturally grab my attention:
Men tend to perform better than women at tasks that require rotating an object mentally, studies have indicated. Now, developmental psychologists at Pitzer College and UCLA have discovered that this type of spatial skill is present in infancy and can be found in boys as young as 5 months old.
Okay, that finding certainly didn’t come from out of left field, so to speak. But detecting it that early in development certainly is news. And I fully agree with the attitude of the researchers.
“We don’t know why men are better than women at this task or why boys are better than girls at this, but we do now know that this difference extends all the way back to 5 months of age,” Johnson said. “We have shown that this gender difference is present in a pre-verbal population, a population too young to have learned it from manual experience with objects or from extensive learning processes, although learning certainly could be involved.”
“We are interested in this question because the visual-spatial skills of male and female adults, on average, are different, and as developmentalists, we are interested in exploring the origins of these differences,” Moore said. “While we believe we have found a phenomenon worthy of additional study, good science entails a circumspect approach to our conclusions; it would not be prudent to draw particularly strong or wide-ranging conclusions from the results of this single study.”
What I do disagree with, however, is the wording of the title: Gender Gap In Spatial Skills Starts In Infancy, Psychologists Report.
Why not “gender difference”? Doesn’t a gap, in terms of human cognitive development, imply a deficit, something to be fixed?
When is a difference a gap? When you want to close it.
I wonder if gap is the word to challenge – a gap is really just a seperation not necessarily better or worse / upper or lower, just seperated — but the word to ask clarification of might be “gender.” Is it a gender difference or a sex difference.