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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Women and Chess
Message-ID: <1280@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Oct-83 16:38:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1280
Posted: Wed Oct 12 16:38:19 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Oct-83 00:49:04 EDT
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een men and women (or blacks and whites,
	or any of a number of other bases) are a sensitive issue.
	Differences in physical characteristics are a dangerous topic;
	differences in mental characteristics are strictly taboo.

	Why?  It's OK to talk about differences in the mental
	characteristics of individuals - some people are smarter than
	others, some more obnoxious, etc.  Why is it wrong to discuss
	the possibility that some of these differences might be correlated
	with sex/race/national origin/whatever?  And if the subject is
	broached, why is an apologetic - but of course group x is better
	at y - always appended?

Why?  Very simple.  Such arguments have historically 1) been scientifically
unfounded and 2) used to justify existing prejudices against groups.  Did
you know that Eastern European Jews were, by and large, feeble-minded?  No?
Well, according to IQ tests performed around the beginning of the century,
they were!  And these "scientific facts" were used to justify restrictive
immigration policies at the time.  The history of all arguments about
differences in mental abilities is a rather unsavory one, and frankly I
think anyone offering such claims about mental abilities had better expect
to be asked a lot of very hard questions.  Stephen Jay Gould wrote a good
book on the subject, "The Mismeasure of Man", and I seem to remember another
recent book on the same subject.

Not being a biologist, I don't know how credible any claims about correlations
between race/sex/national origin and intelligence are.  I can't say, for
example, whether the gene pool of a given racial or national group is
homogeneous enough to be able to make such claims sensibly.  Furthermore, I
can't say whether the known biological differences between races and sexes
(I have never seen any evidence of a gene for Frenchness, so we will ignore
the question of national origin here) could cause differences in mental
ability.  I have seen it claimed (does anybody have a reference, so that
this claim can be checked up on) that in Germany women have more difficulty
with verbal as well as mathematical skills, while in Japan both sexes do
about equally well on both verbal and mathematical skills; a connection was
suggested between what the sexes were expected to be good at and what they
ended up being good at (it has also been claimed that students show more
ability when they are given more attention by teachers, and that males are
given more attention in school than females).

	So what if group A is better (on average!) than group B at
	activity C?  It is still wrong to deny b's the same chance
	as the a's.  We do not have to deny the difference to proclaim
	the injustice.  Denying the difference is dangerous (you might
	be refuted) and distracts attention from the real issue.  Why
	do we go out of our way to do so?

Nobody is totally denying the difference.  It is merely being said that
1) the evidence for the differences is weak, at best; 2) in the past,
people offering "evidence" for these differences *were* refuted; and 3)
those people turned out to have axes to grind.  Given this, I think it
worthwhile to go out of my way to question somebody offering such claims
(just as I consider it worthwhile to go out of my way to question claims
about "paranormal" phenomena, even though some might just say "well, those
scientists (I do not claim to be one, I'm just speaking generically here)
just won't look at anything that doesn't fit their world view).

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,mcnc,we13,brl-bmd,allegra}!rlgvax!guy