If we were to examine a high school calculus classroom or the staff at an engineering program of a college or university, chances are that the male to female ratio would be significantly skewed. Why are women and men so different in their choices and behavior? The brunt of popular opinion focuses on the environmental cues that lead to our distinct behaviors. But is there also an innate biological basis to the choices and differing abilities between men and women? Cognitive functioning or brain processing differences in the two genders has been a point of interest and contention for many years. The purpose of this essay is to explore if neuroanatomical and genetic differences between males and females play a role in the development of "gender-specific" behaviors, perceived intellectual strengths and professional choices.
Equality regardless of gender or creed is an axiom that is crucial to our modern day society. And yet even in this 21st century, the number of women in certain "male dominated" professions, has remained fairly unchanged. Many social theorists believe that women are discouraged from such professions and that if they were given an unbiased, level playing field, that demand for these professions would be identical for both males and females. Mary Pipher, a psychotherapist for adolescent females writes, "With girls... their success is attributed to good luck or hard work and failure to lack of ability, with every failure, girls' confidence is eroded. All this works in subtle ways to stop girls from wanting to be astronauts and brain surgeons. Girls can't say why they ditch their dreams, they just 'mysteriously' lose interest" (10). Experiments have shown that women perform better when given tests that they...
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...nd environment play on sexual identity is uncertain.
References
1) Gender Identity Disorder by Anne Vitale
2) The Role of Estrogen in Sexual Differentiation by Elaine Bonleon de Castro
3) Gender Differences in Cognitive Functioning by Heidi Weiman
4) Sex on the Brain - Biological Differences between Genders by Deborah Blum
5) Cognitive Development
6) Gender-Related Heart Differences in Human Neonates by Emese Nagy
7) Boys will be Boys: Challenging theories on Gender Permanence by Josh Greenberg
8) Neural Masculization and Feminization by Mary Bartek
9) Thinking about Brain Size
10) Gender Issues - Excerpt from "Reviving Ophelia" by Mary Pipher
11) Women's Brains - More Effective?
12) Speech Processing in the Brain
13) The Nature Versus Nurture Debate
14) The Genetic-Gender Gap
15) Explanations of Criminal Behavior
The Hip-Hop Nation, written by Touré, is a very interesting and engaging essay. The first thing I noticed was that the essay is written in the first person which I believe was done to engage the readers and establish a connection between the author and the readers. I feel that it served its purpose very well as I felt very involved throughout the entire essay. An essay written in the first person seems more personal and allows readers, like myself, to really relate to the content of the essay. I decided that I would try to incorporate that style of writing into my essay as well. Previously, I said that writing in the first person allows the reader to relate better with the essay being written, however, I was unable to really relate with this essay in the sense that I don’t really understand the author’s passion for hip-hop and the hip-hop way of life. Personally, I am more of a Soul and Rhythm-and-Blues (R&B) person, so I can’t say that I belong to the Nation in any way.
The assumption is that men and women are fundamentally different, that women are for example naturally more empathetic or emotionally-centered. In particular the belief she questions is that differences between the sexes can be easily explained by "natural" sex differences in the brain. One example of this that she lambasts involved researchers examining brain activity while men and women performed an emotion-matching test and subsequently taking the findings as concrete support for the idea that men are naturally more rational and women more emotional2. Brain activity during these tests was at least partially present in different regions of the brain depending on the sex of the participant, but the use of these minor differences to reverse inference a psychological state from brain activity is fundamentally flawed.3 Less activation in an area can actually mean that the connections have become more "streamlined" as expertise has increased and the activation of different regions of the brain is also highly context
The United States free trade agenda includes policies that seek to eliminate all restrictions and quotas on trade. The advantages of free trade can be seen through domestic markets and the growth of the world economy. T...
Women's Brain When you look at the dictionary, the definition of 'Science' is "a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws" (Webster's dictionary). In order to make a truth, many scientists take the time to observe or test with scientific methods. In the nineteenth century, there are some incorrect truths, even if it looks like truths logically arranged by scientific method, because the scientists understood the priori that already assumed the outcome would be the same as their predictions. As I read Stephen Jay Gould's argument from "Women's Brains", he found some unequal conditions that supported scientific method for intelligence of man. Paul Broca tried to measure the inferiority of women with scientific criteria that were invidious comparisons such as races, classes, and sexes.
The once male dominated, corporate, "white collar" America has seen a phenomenal influx of women within the last thirty years. Although a female lawyer, physician, or CEO is no longer considered a rarity in our times, women still face quite a deal of oppression in comparison to their male counterparts. In retrospect, some professions have always been controlled by women, and men have not made a noticeable advance in these fields. In 1970, finding a female lawyer to represent you would be a difficult task, since less than five percent of the profession were women. Today, that number has risen to almost thirty percent. The percentage of female doctors has almost tripled in the course of thirty years. African Americans have not made such a conspicuous progression within the last fifty years, while women have made a tremendous impact on the corporate world. One may wonder, how did women make these extraordinary advances? For the most part, it is due to the education they receive. At the present time young girls are encouraged to enroll in classes dealing with math and science, rather than home economics and typing. As pointed out by Nanette Asimov, in her essay "Fewer Teen Girls Enrolling in Technology Classes", school officials are advocating the necessity of advanced placement, and honor classes for teenage girls, in both the arts and sciences. This support and reassurance than carries over onto college, and finds a permanent fixture in a woman’s life. While women are continuing their success in once exclusively male oriented professions, they are still lacking the respect and equality from their peers, coworkers, and society. The average male lawyer, and doctor make twenty-five percent more money than their female equivalent. Women have always lived with the reputation of being intellectually inferior to, and physically submissive to men. This medieval, ignorant notion is far fetched from the truth. In 1999, high school men and women posted similar SAT scores, being separated by a only a few points. In addition to posting similar scores on the SAT, the average males score was a mere two-tenths of a point higher than an average females score on the ACT. Even though a woman maybe as qualified as a male for a certain occupation , women receive unwanted harassment, and are under strict scrutiny. A good illustration of this would be the women represented in "Two Women Cadets Leave the Citadel.
Introduction The topic of gender differences must understandably be approached with caution in our modern world. Emotionally charged and fraught with ideas about political correctness, gender can be a difficult subject to address, particularly when discussed in correlation to behavior and social behavior. Throughout history, many people have strove to understand what makes men and women different. Until the modern era, this topic was generally left up to religious leaders and philosophers to discuss. However, with the acquisition of more specialized medical knowledge of human physiology and the advent of anthropology, we now know a great deal more about gender differences than at any other point in history.
In conclusion, we can see that Dante presents the reader with a potentially life-altering chance to participate in his journey through Hell. Not only are we allowed to follow Dante's own soul-searching journey, we ourselves are pressed to examine the state of our own souls in relation to the souls in Inferno. It is not just a story to entertain us; it is a display of human decision and the perpetual impact of those decisions.
Historically our society drives men and women toward different socially acceptable behaviors and careers. Stereotypically men are the capable breadwinners that choose careers as: firemen, policemen, mailmen, garbagemen, milkmen, and the list continues. However, women are the warm caregivers that may choose one of three titles: teacher, nurse, or secretary. The above career pathways have been driven by societal norms, subsequently leaving women with marginal room for vertical mobility and limited leadership representation.
Physicalism starts off with the premise that there exists nothing that is not physical where everything that exists is physical; however, how does one define what it means for something to be physical? Intuitively, when one thinks of the word physical, one thinks of things that are material and concrete, but there are things that are immaterial yet physical such as vacuums and fields. The things that are physical that predicate both material objects, such as matter and energy, and immaterial objects, such...
Most Americans would say women are still being oppressed, even if inadvertently, by society’s current structure. Women are typically paid less, put under more pressure to have a career and a family, and are often underrepresented in high profile career fields. Anne-Marie Slaughter would agree. In her essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, she outlines the ways women are still unable to have a career and family life successfully. She especially focuses on the ways women are constantly being pressure to choose one over the other, or to try to accomplish both, and how much damage this pressure can cause. She writes, “I had been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all, and do it all, regardless of what field you’re in. Which means, I had been in part, albeit unwillingly, of making millions of women feel they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and, also have a family and an active home life.” (679). This passage captures the amount of pressure put on young women to commit 100% to their families and their careers simultaneously. Unfortunately, as she also points out, there will be criticism for choosing one over the other as well. Ellen Ullman also understands the pressure on women in their career fields. Her essay, How To Be A Woman Programmer, explores the difficulties for women in a male dominated field.
Communication is an essential part of human life. People perceive things in a different way because of ethnic background differences, attitudes and beliefs, etc. These differences may affect our ability to communicate with our counterpart. Therefore, it is necessary to keep our mind open so that we can reduce the risk of communication breakdown. Men and women are different as everyone knows that. However, their differences are no just physiological and anatomical. Recent researches have concluded that there are remarkable differences between the two genders in the way their brains process information, language, emotion, cognition etc. Scientists have discovered the differences in the way men and women carry out mental functions like judging speed, estimating time, spatial visualization and positioning, mental calculation. Men and women are strikingly different not only in these tasks but also in the way their brains process language. This could account for the reason why there are overwhelmingly more male mathematicians, pilots, mechanical engineers, race car drivers and space scientists than females. On the other hand, there are areas in which women outperform men. Women are naturally endowed with better communication and verbal abilities. They are also effective than men in some of the tasks like emotional empathy, establishing human relations, carrying out pre-planned tasks and creative expressions (Kimura 1999).
It is proven that the male and female brains differ, but can one prove that it affects the behavior? Many scientists would agree that ones behavior is determined by his/her gender. Although others are convinced that social conditioning is the cause for the differences between the male and female, it is very unlikely that biological differences play no role in behavior. The male and female brains differ not only by how they work, but also on the size. For example, Natalie Angier and Kenneth Chang, neuroscientists, have shown that the women’s brain is about 10 percent smaller than the male’s, on average, even after accounting for women’s comparatively smaller body size. Three brain differences that affect ones behavior are the limbic size, the corpus collosum size, and the amount of gray and white matter.
Physicalism is the position that nothing can exceed past what is physically present, and what is physical is all that there can be. This idea is reductive in that it suggests there is no more to the universe than physical matters, including brain processes, sensations, and human consciousness. J.J.C. Smart explains sensations as a means of commentary on a brain process. He believes that, essentially, brain processes and what we report as sensations are essentially the same thing in that one is an account of the other. He writes in “Sensations and Brain Processes” that “…in so far as a sensation statement is a report of something, that something is in fact a brain process. Sensations are nothing over and above brain processes,” (145). Though
The women in these positions wanted to be treated like men and did not want preferential treatment because of their gender. Unfortunately women still do not choose these occupations mostly by choice but also because of the sex-typing of these positions (Hulme 165). The article relates to my gender experience by pointing out that gender should not play a role on whether or not you are qualified for the job. I did not want special treatment and I proved that I could do the job better than a man and I take pride in that. I understand that sex-typing of traditionally male occupations is why women tend to resist pursuing
Life should be happy and stress free! Ways to prevent heart disease does exist. Life itself isn’t fair without a healthy heart. The fact that heart disease is the leading killer of both men and women should be a wake up call for everyone. So get up, start jogging, and get ready for a healthy, happy life!