The problem with all this gender essentialist stuff is that what the sentence "Women are X; men are Y" really means is "On average, women are more X than men and men are more Y than women."
It's leaving out (1) the sample on which this claim is based (if, indeed, there is one at all, and it's not just based on what "everybody knows"); (2) the magnitude of the difference in averages (it might be negligible); (3) the standard deviation (the spread within one group could far outweigh the difference between groups). (That article touches on the idea of distributions at the beginning but then completely ignores it afterwards.)
And evolutionary psychology is mostly a big pile of just so stories. Look at how radically it's changed over the years; it can be used to justify anything.
Evolutionary psychology (as it's typically practiced) is saying, "I believe that difference X exists between groups A and B, and that the difference is biological. Let me come up with an evolutionary reason for it." It's justifications for already held hypotheses. It is not empirically based.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-01-07 09:23 pm (UTC)It's leaving out (1) the sample on which this claim is based (if, indeed, there is one at all, and it's not just based on what "everybody knows"); (2) the magnitude of the difference in averages (it might be negligible); (3) the standard deviation (the spread within one group could far outweigh the difference between groups). (That article touches on the idea of distributions at the beginning but then completely ignores it afterwards.)
And evolutionary psychology is mostly a big pile of just so stories. Look at how radically it's changed over the years; it can be used to justify anything.
Evolutionary psychology (as it's typically practiced) is saying, "I believe that difference X exists between groups A and B, and that the difference is biological. Let me come up with an evolutionary reason for it." It's justifications for already held hypotheses. It is not empirically based.