{"id":40599,"date":"2011-10-25T11:45:24","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T16:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=40599"},"modified":"2011-11-09T14:17:02","modified_gmt":"2011-11-09T19:17:02","slug":"sex-society-and-spatial-ability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/10\/25\/sex-society-and-spatial-ability\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex, Society, and Spatial Ability"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the kind of finding to warm the hearts of us liberal, Larry-Summers-hating,\u00a0 gender-egalitarians.\u00a0 Summers — you saw him in \u201cThe Social Network\u201d as the Harvard president who had no patience for the Winklevoss twins (he didn\u2019t have much patience for Cornell West either and probably many other things) — suggested that the dearth of women in top science and engineering positions was caused not so much by social forces as by innate sex differences in math ability (more\u00a0here<\/a> and many other places).<\/p>\n

As others were quick to point out, those differences are greater in societies with greater gender inequality.\u00a0 That\u2019s why the math gender gap in the U.S. has become much narrower over time.\u00a0 In societies with greater equality, like Sweden, Norway, and Israeli kibbutzim, the male-female gap in math disappears. \u00a0But even in those societies, males still score higher on one type of mathematical skill: spatial reasoning.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m sure that evol-psych has some explanation for why male brains evolved to be more adept at spatial reasoning.\u00a0 I\u2019m equally sure that those who favor social explanations can find residual sexism even in Sweden to explain spatial differences.\u00a0 That\u2019s why a field experiment reported last summer is so interesting.<\/p>\n

The research team (Moshe Hoffman and colleagues, pdf<\/a>)\u00a0tested people from two tribes in northern India — the Karbi and the Khasi.\u00a0 These had once been a single tribe but had split recently — a few hundred years ago.\u00a0 (Recent is a relative term, and we\u2019re talking evolution here.)\u00a0 So they were similar economically (subsistence farming of rice) and genetically.<\/p>\n