Pinker vs. Spelke on Gender Differences and Science
This is a really cool debate at Harvard between evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker, who gets almost everything wrong (note his consistent efforts to label his opponents with descriptions they wholeheartedly reject) and real psychologist Elizabeth Spelke, who is consistently intellectually honest and empirically grounded. It's a lot of fun to listen to her school Pinker, the "superstar" Larry Summers recruited from MIT and then immediately misread in public.
From Spelke:
I suggest the following experiment. We should take a large number of male students and a large number of female students who have equal educational backgrounds, and present them with the kinds of tasks that real mathematicians face. We should give them new mathematical material that they have not yet mastered, and allow them to learn it over an extended period of time: the kind of time scale that real mathematicians work on. We should ask, how well do the students master this material? The good news is, this experiment is done all the time. It's called high school and college.Here's the outcome. In high school, girls and boys now take equally many math classes, including the most advanced ones, and girls get better grades. In college, women earn almost half of the bachelor's degrees in mathematics, and men and women get equal grades.
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