Talk:Mathematical abilities and gender issues

I guess I'll play devil's advocate here; doesn't this article seemed biased? Shouldn't there be something about those who believe that males are naturally better in math? ''-- comment by Nappy. Nappy didn't sign.''


 * Nappy, it's a tough one indeed. This is a good article Gender_and_intelligence discussing the differences and offering potential reasons. The most interesting findings are that there are many more men than women at the extremes of intelligence, very high intelligence and very low intelligence. Perhaps that article should replace this one altogether? --Aaron McDaid 20:42, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Environmentalists?
"Environmentalists argue that this difference is caused by gender biased education, while some other researchers argue that it is the characteristics of the genders that cause this ability gap."

By "environmentalists," I think the author meant advocates of the theory that the "gender gap" is caused by environmental conditions rather than innate talents, genes, or biological predisposition. However, we all know that in common usage, an "environmentalist" is someone who advocates protection of the natural environment, which is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. I think we need a better choice of words here.

Merge with Sex and intelligence
This article seems somewhat underdeveloped, and to a large extend concerned with issues of a highly g-loaded trait. The Sex and intelligence article is nowhere near perfect itself, but wouldn't both articles benefit from joining forces? Whatever issues this article debates that are not already covered at Sex and intelligence (for example, the educational perspective) would make welcome addition there. Arbor 17:38, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

IQ distribution
"Though males and females have the same average IQs, males have higher standard deviations, so they are more likely to be found at the extreme ends of the IQ distribution (i.e there are more mentally retarded males then females, and there are more males with extremely high IQs then females.)"

Do have any good empirical evidence for this claim that there are more men in the extreme ends of the distribution? There is a study from the 1930s in the gender & intelligence article but that seems a bit early to be considered particularly useful given the education differences at the time. The reason I'm curious is because the arguments from greater male variation that are given appear to depend on the IQ distribution being well formed at the extreme high end - i.e. they are extrapolations from the curve, rather than on empirical data showing that there are in fact more men at the extreme 1% (or whatever). This is important because we might expect the normal distribution to break down at extremes, or even for the male distribution to be skewed towards low scores due to the unfortunte frailties of the male genome.--Coroebus 11:25, 23 February 2006 (UTC)