Have authors such as
this been discredit somewhere? This looks like a woman with a PhD in neuroscience disagreeing with other scientists. There have been others as well, but that's the link I happen to have handy. So to me, I just see equally credible scientists debating with each other, which is the definition of "lack of consensus".
Debra Soh relies heavily on arguments involving prenatal exposure to testosterone, as in this example from your link:
As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.
We see evidence for this in girls with a genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb. When they are born, these girls prefer male-typical, wheeled toys, such as trucks, even if their parents offer more positive feedback when they play with female-typical toys, such as dolls. Similarly, men who are interested in female-typical activities were likely exposed to lower levels of testosterone.
The theory, simply put, is that prenatal exposure to testosterone restructures the brain, creating male or female patterns. The differences might be subtle and overlapping, but they are distinct enough to matter. This is also where you get Baron-Cohen's systemizers / empathizers dichotomy that Damore also references.
The problem comes with a book that I referenced earlier in this thread called "Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences," by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young. She spent thirteen years examining more than 400 studies, trying to find out what the studies actually said. And as
one review put it:
So where does this leave us? In light of Jordan-Young's meticulous synthesis, it's hard to name any specific feature of male-typical or female-typical behavior that consistently matches up with prenatal T levels across several models of research. No measure holds up: not aggressiveness, or masturbation habits, or even the ability to rotate objects in the mind, long viewed as the gold standard of sex-difference research because it is a skill on which average men and average women reliably differ. There are studies to cite for all of these claims. But what's missing is corroboration across approachesfrom studies that look at different kinds of people (say, those with a disorder like CAH or those without), or that try to gauge prenatal hormone exposures in different ways (say, through amniotic fluid or maternal blood or finger-digit ratio). After decades of determined research, if robust links between prenatal hormones and "male" or "female" minds really exist, shouldn't we see those links across lots of different kinds of studies?
And take Soh's example of the toy preferences of girls with CAH, from another review of the book:
In one stunning passage, Jordan-Young demonstrates that this pattern of misrepresentation and selective reading is true even of the one area where differences are consistently found, that of toy preference: Although girls with CAH spent significantly more time playing with masculine toys, and less time playing with feminine toys, than did the control girls, the most popular toy with all of the girls was a toy coded as masculine: the Lincoln Logs. . . . The second most popular toy among both sets of girls was also a so-called masculine toy: a garage with four cars. . . . On average, the normal control girls spent three times as long playing with the garage and toy cars as they did playing with the baby doll (23132).1
Jordan-Young spends an entire chapter deconstructing some of the arguments presented by girls with CAH, in addition to the time she spends on other studies. To be clear, it is not a book claiming that differences don't exist; it's a critique of a specific theory of sex differences.
What Jordan-Young's analysis uncovered is by turns fascinating and appalling. Investigators' assumptions morph; definitions slip and slide. For instance, the modern notion (currently slipping) that the male sexual appetite is greater than the female's "is the exact reverse of the idea in Renaissance Europe." Definitions aside ("one scientist's heterosexuals are another scientist's homosexuals"), when these studies are juxtaposed, what emerges is an absence of context a comparing of apples, Tuesday and Belgium. Left-handedness is more common in men than in women; lesbians tend to be left-handed; so do gay males. One study of "toy preferences" in vervet monkeys was ambiguous, since the boy vervets seemed most interested in the plush dog (a toy deemed "neutral") and the girl vervets paid relatively little attention to the doll. The girl vervets did prefer playing with the toy cooking pot, but exactly what they did with it was not reported. Children born with ambiguous genitalia because of prenatal hormone imbalance indeed perform differently from their "normal" peers in behavioral studies, but those children have undergone (often horrifying) medical interventions and have also been reared differently.
Jordan-Young's point "is not that hormone effects are not 'real.'... [T]hey do figure into development, including neural development, in a variety of important ways. Nor is the point that males and females aren't 'really' different.... The problem is the way that brain organization theory ... attributes an unrealistic specificity and permanence to early hormone effects, as well as a demonstrably false inevitability and uniformity to sex differences.... Even in rats, early hormone exposures do not create a solid foundation on which behavior must forever stand."
I freely admit that I am biased. But I think Soh has a
bad track recordI find her use of the phrase "gender feminists" telling, tooand perhaps more significantly I find her continuing to ignore a significant critique of a theory she relies on to substantiate her arguments to be questionable at best. Damore also uses the same arguments:
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences arent just socially constructed because:
● Theyre universal across human cultures
● They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
"there's a consensus that prenatal testosterone does affect a lot of personality traits, in particular one's interest in people vs. things"
Even if we stipulate that there are some differences (for instance, in any given society, men are consistently more violent than women, whatever the differences between societies), he still doesn't manage to explain how those specific differences connect to the specific outcomes we see at Google. He also doesn't explain why the arguments he uses to explain why women are less likely to be in tech explain why the same thing
didn't happen in, say, medical school, law school, or the physical sciences. Why is women's neuroticism a problem in tech, but not, say, as a legal or medical professional? He doesn't explain why women's apparent advantages (like working with people) wouldn't actually make them better at, say, managing teams, or why men's preference for working with things evidently isn't a handicap when it comes to promoting them to positions where they must manage people. How did women's biology change such that there was a precipitous drop in the 1980s for women's participation in tech when it was rising in the other categories? And he does not explain why average differences are relevant when, as
this piece notes, Google would tend to employ people who are near the tail end of the distribution, at least at the kinds of skills Google looks for. What is the support for the argument that the biological differences (to the extent that they are biological) are the cause of the disparities we see?
He doesn't address these things. He simply notes one observation (there are observed differences between men and women in studies), claims another thing (these difference are caused by prenatal testosterone), notes a second thing (women are underrepresented in this field), and then claims that, clearly, the observed difference, caused by prenatal testosterone differences, is the cause of that difference. But he (and Soh) don't do much of anything to address arguments that the prenatal testosterone argument is weak, that it is likely that sex differences are caused both biological (including but not limited to differences in exposure to prenatal testosterone) and cultural differences, or that differences in workplace outcomes in complex jobs isn't reducible to something as simple as "prenatal testosterone.
If you're interested in something more in-depth,
this is excellent.
