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From: mario@astrovax.UUCP (Mario Vietri)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: sexual differences, environment
Message-ID: <342@astrovax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-May-84 18:36:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: astrovax.342
Posted: Wed May 16 18:36:12 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 17-May-84 04:25:21 EDT
References: <158@decwrl.UUCP>
Organization: Princeton Univ. Astrophysics
Lines: 59








William Hughes has posted an article , where he claimed that there is no
evidence to either prove or disprove the claim that women are less talented 
in math than men, and protesting the attitude of the people who refuse to 
consider the issue in a strictly technical sense (i.e. as a 'scientific' 
issue, where the weight of the argument should have precedence on the social,
political etc. implications of the results). He also resented that the danger
of the conclusions should be used as an argument to dismiss the importance 
of such studies .
Lisa Chabot has replied to him that , whatever the findings of the study, they 
should be irrelevant for the single individual, who , be she/he a woman or a 
man, should be entitled to all the encouragement, the support, the stimulation 
and, above all, all the consideration he deserves, independently of which group
(the more talented or the less talented one) she/he belongs to .
I would also like to make the following remarks :
	1) W.H. assumes that the answer to the question 'who is more 
	math-talented, men or women ?' exists. Who says so ?
	Psychologists have troubles defining what an IQ test should look
	like, and we should believe that such questions as above admit 
	of an answer ? Maybe I might suggest to whoever is interested the
	reading of 'The mismeasure of man' by J. Gould, a book where some of
	the distortions by which the 'objective tests' of someone's
	superiority have been plagued are documented . In any case,
	I don't believe for a moment that anything like 'natural talent'
	can be disentangled from the plethora of social conditionings 
	which L.C. has illustrated so vividly.And, if a question cannot be
	answered, where is its scientific value ?
	2) Is it not peculiar that, from time to time, we should run into 
	these objective tests that tell us that an oppressed minority of
	some kind is actually oppressed because it actually is inferior ?
	We have found them all the time : were not Blacks supposed to be
	less intelligent than whites ? And non-arians than arians ? And
	how about Lombroso, who within his own society, could distinguish
	the criminal from the non-criminal from the sizes of the skulls?
	The point I am trying to make is this: in times of tension between 
	two social groups, there is always one,the dominating one, which
	uses the so-called 'objectivity' of science to justify its 
	oppression of the other one. What I question is not only this 
	use of science , but above all the fact that SCIENCE IS NOT 
	OBJECTIVE AT ALL IN THESE STUDIES . What I question is whether 
	questions as the above-mentioned one can be asked at all within a 
	scientific context, and , since most scientists' answer is NO, who
	is benefited by posing the question in such terms .
Let me finish by summing up : L.C. has rejected the importance of the studies
because they should have no saying on the behaviour of the individual . I 
reject it too, also (!!) because i) the question cannot be answered on a 
strictly scientific basis, and ii) if so, it obviously can only be used to
reaffirm the superiority of a ruling social group (in this case men, earlier
in our history whites, Nazis, etc) over another one. Thus there are 
both scientific and political reasons to reject the argument .

					Mario Vietri
				Princeton University, Astrophysics