Interesting numbers, but it'd be vastly improved by being able to filter for age ranges too.
Gauss and Degauss are the two that jumped out at me. I'd be curious to know how many people of either gender have encountered it, if they're young enough to have never lived with CRT TVs.
Same, although I also know degauss as it relates to CRTs. "Gaussian blur" -- almost always mispronounced -- is also relatively commonly encountered by anyone doing image or video editing. Though of course, that's a completely different term described by the same person's name.
FWIW, the Google Search pronunciation guide[0] says Guassian like "gouse-ian", which is the only way I've heard it pronounced (US east coast). It's also what I see as the phonetically-written pronunciation when checking a couple dictionaries[1], and this English blog post[2].
I'm a man, and would have answered no to degauss, although I'm 32 (so old enough to have had a crt tv in college). I remember the word upon looking it up though. Gauss I would have assumed was a trick question (he's a person!), but on further reflection I remember that it's a unit for something or another in electrostatics.
...Gauss is one of the most important mathematicians who ever lived. The gaussian distribution is the single most important random distribution there is. The standard 2d coordinate system is often also referred to as the gaussian plane. I'm guessing more men know him due to this reason: more men are in STEM.
>The standard 2d coordinate system is often also referred to as the gaussian plane
Hmm, never heard of this. I wonder what are the reasons, Gauss really had nothing to do with coordinate systems. Even the complex numbers link is due to Euler, De Moivre and many many people before Gauss.
I have a half-joking hypothesis it's due to Germans not wanting to attribute things to a french mathematician, but that still doesn't explain why they went with Gauss and not Euler.
I remember growing up and thinking that Gauss showed up all time, everywhere:
Gauss's law, Gaussian elimination, Gaussian distribution, Gauss formula, Gaussian filter, CRT degauss, Gauss cannon.
Those are the ones I remember, and I went into CS, I don't want to imagine how it was in math.
Weird choice of vocabulary to study - fabric and fashion words stressed for women, and techno-babble for men. Was the vocabulary completely random, or was this result forced by anticipating the outcome?
Thanks for the link. Here's a little bit of detail about their sample gathering, which I found interesting:
The test was made available on a dedicated website (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/). Access to the test was unlimited. Participants were asked whether English was their native language, what their age and gender were, which country they came from, and their level of education. For the present purposes, we limited the analyses to the first three tests taken by native speakers of English from the USA and the UK.Footnote 1 All in all, we analyzed the data of 221,268 individuals who completed 265,346 sessions. Of these, 56% were completed by female participants and 44% by male participants.
The site encourages participation with a hook similar to that used by many online quizzes:
Word test
How many English words do you know? With this test you get a valid estimate of your English vocabulary size within 4 minutes and you help scientific research.
Is this a representative sample? I doubt it. Probably it went viral in some specific communities.
Maybe there's still something interesting to learn from it... but I'd take it with a grain of neodymium.
The "male" words aren't technobabble though. They're just scientific language. The data certainly seems to very clearly represent the impact of the historical bias in education, entertainment, and the world in general to emphasise "science" as a pursuit for males and "craft" as a pursuit for girls.
Same (male) but only because it came up in the context of reading Wikipedia deep dives that led to court cases blocking their import[1] and the Hippocratic oath, which, oddly enough, prohibits administering them (along with abortion):
"Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion."
There are other differentiating factors there that could lead to the preference choice that are not related to whether something is mechanical in nature. Things like color, texture, etc. have been shown to have strong biases between the sexes.
A possible control they did not employ during the study would be to have a series of toys that were identical in all ways except color, for example.
Also *very* worth noting:
As shown in their Fig. 1, when play time with toys is examined in human children (Berenbaum and Hines,1992) and rhesus macaques of all ages, males spend significantly more of their play time with the “male” toy(s) than with the female toy(s), while females spend about equal times with “male” and “female” toys. This is true both for frequency of interactions and in time spent playing (Hassett et al., 2008). **Therefore, one key difference between males and females in these studies is that males actually show a toy preference while females do not!**
These aren't trucks and dolls though. It's a pretty big leap from "female monkey babies prefer anthropomorphic toys" to "adult women are biologically predisposed to a deeper understanding of textiles." A cultural explanation is much more parsimonious.
I think the point is that a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology and nearly all is at least influenced by biology.
The ultimate counterexamples would be societies where women are in charge of the engineering/construction and to my knowledge there are none which is a sign that there's something deep within our psyche which drives these interests. I'd love to hear counterexamples if anyone has them though.
If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying.
> a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology
That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's influenced by biology to some extent (imagine what society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is defined by biology based on that.
Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields — how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome plus not many others. But look at something like cooking, which is old: There's tons of weird gender stuff there that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd gender-food rules too.
> Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields
The mental tasks required of engineering are far, far, far, older. Things like abstract reasoning, distance estimation and measurement, rotation and scaling of objects, maps, and abstract shapes in one's head, ability to standardize and compute measures and weights, etc, were all adaptations that improved our effectiveness at hunting, building shelter, and both defense against, and offense toward, opposing tribes.
Modern engineering is an enormous pile of abstractions on top of "Grog think rock weigh seven stick".
I'd settle for any society where women built the huts. Nearly every society has needed to construct some form of shelter or build some sort of tool. Basketweaving comes to mind.
Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a masculine activity. Ovens used to be much more dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it's a feminine activity. If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine. I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.
To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there. But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I think there's a biological explanation for most of it. Maybe even all.
> I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.
I think you have the motivations a little incorrect. My guess would be that men traditionally took care of the dangerous jobs because they wanted to protect the child-bearing members of society from them. As a fertile man, you're more likely to pass on your genes if you keep women out of harm's way.
So yes, this does count as a "biological reason" for men and women going different ways, but you seemed to be implying that these biological reasons had more to do with brain structure and development, which I don't think is supported by what we know.
But you have to ask why men step up to take the dangerous jobs? We didn't sit down and have a Socratic discussion about who takes which job. I posit that it's more than merely logic, that the motivations are rooted in our intuition.
It's also simply not true that this is not supported by what we know. "Common sense" says that men die younger than women. And indeed we can find statistical proof of this wherever we go. Take car accidents. No one wants to get into a car accident. Yet men are 3x more likely to die in car accidents than women.
Getting into car accidents yourself doesn't prevent child-rearing members of society from getting into car accidents of their own. What else explains this gender difference? Maybe men have worse vision? Worse reaction time? Are women stronger at turning the wheel than men? Maybe men are more distractable than women? I think not. People who have been driven by both mom and dad know: men drive more dangerously than women do.
Every statistic related to safety shows that men are more willing to get into danger than women. Even in suicide rates, men are more likely to succeed, even with women trying more often.
There are so many examples like this. It's almost certainly true that men have a higher predilection for danger compared to women that is driven by some biological factor. If you think it's not the mind, then you would have to come up with a different explanation for every disparate piece of evidence out there. Not that it's impossible, but there's a simpler conclusion to draw.
There are significant behavioural differences between the sexes in basically every animal. Even among mice the males are more inquisitive and take more risks than the females, so you find many more males than females in traps etc. Female animals tend to care much more about children. There is no reason to believe that humans evolved past this and all our differences are just us planning it out rationally.
> If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine.
I think this is motivated reasoning. From what I can tell, the "grilling is manly" thing started in the '50s (well after cooking stopped being dangerous) and is mostly limited to the United States (instead of being universal, as we would expect with something biologically-motivated). And what's the difference between frying, roasting, and grilling? All involve using a gas-operated cooking device to cook meat (assuming you own a gas stove); they're all equally safe.
Not only does this strike me as being cultural, this strikes me as obviously cultural. And yet you dismiss that out of hand and go looking for a biological explanation ("grilling is extra dangerous") that doesn't really line up with the facts of the example. So it seems to me that you're engaging in motivated reasoning — assuming that masculinity can't be a product of culture, reaching for biological explanations even when they don't really make sense.
The discussion here is: what parts of culture are motivated by biology? It's obviously cultural. But what is motivating the culture?
Also interesting to me that grilling is manly started in the 50's. That seems to be about the time that household appliances like microwave were getting popular, no? Maybe men who liked to cook needed to find a manly outlet.
FWIW, as an amateur historian I did a high-level talk on the history of barbecue, especially as it relates to the grilling styles found in California (popularized as "Santa Maria BBQ"). Long story short, men were running the pits not only in the 1950s, but also the 1850s, 1750s, 1650s, etc. Why? It might have been because meat was the product of the hunt. It might have been because running a barbecue could mean many hours of hot, smoky, dirty work that often involved physically strenuous activity. For quite a lot of American history, barbecues were often conducted for large numbers of guests and may have started the day before with transporting fuel, digging a trench, pre-heating the trench overnight, processing one's pigs, mutton, poultry, beef, or what have you, making your coals and keeping the supply up throughout the cook, etc. Also, the cuts of meat used were often far larger/heavier than we're used to — the original Santa Maria Barbecue cooks used top blocks of beef and similarly large cuts, not itty bitty tri-tips.
Famed barbecue "masters" were universally men, though if everyone is being honest much of the hard work at many large barbecues (with hundreds of guests) was actually performed by black men (or Californios, or what have you depending upon the location). Large barbecues were generally tied to political efforts or organizations, festivals, and the like. During the Depression there were large government-subsidized barbecues so everyone could get some meat in their bellies and enjoy one another's company during those tough times, and there again we see men and women typically taking on disparate roles in the cooking process.
Contemporary accounts of the barbecues of years past generally have women inside doing not easier work, but different work. Making pies, side dishes, baking, etc. Even the pre-Columbian/Spanish Chumash tended to split their work pretty strictly, with women doing things like grinding acorn flour in bedrock mortars with the kids, while the men fished, hunted, gathered shellfish, etc. Contemporary drawings of various indigenous peoples show them smoking/grilling fish and iguana, but again everyone in the images are male. I confess I don't firmly know what kind of sex differences existed in the roles played in the cooking American slaves did for one another, something I really should remedy, but when it came to big gatherings the differences were apparent and as I wrote above.
I can't really speak to causality, but in terms of time scale the M-F patterns seem to substantially pre-date the 1950s.
Oh, and fun fact: the offset smoker was invented in Texas in the 1970s. That little factoid seems to blow people's minds...
Computing back then was more like typing numbers into machines rather than writing software. It's akin to typewriting jobs which were also dominated by women.
yes. but perhaps more apropos I am old enough to have met some of the women programmers (not calculators) from the earlier generation when I started in the 80s. its completely anecdotal, and you may attribute this to many factors, but the likelihood that someone I met was more competent, informed, and/or more clever than I was greater for females than males.
Well it's not about who is more clever. I think the research shows that its pretty even between men and women after all is said and done. It's about what naturally interests us and there are differences there.
maybe. I just have seen a time when it wasn't unusual to see a highly-regarded and competent woman in software. not that they were the majority. so I'm alot less inclined to just accept that there are important genetic differences that inherently make women less suitable for that kind of work.
maybe team genetic-differences should be adopting the burden of proof
My grandmother was a programmer working at a university, so I know. Nobody here said women aren't suited for that type of work. It is just that when video games became mainstream in the 80's you saw an avalanche of boys wanting to learn to program, and ever since then the field has skewed heavily male, like most other engineering fields where you build things that moves. My grandmother might have been a programmer, but she was never interested in computers as a hobby, it was just work to her.
Note that the number of women entering the field didn't decrease, it was just the number of men increasing so much.
Interesting. Maybe it's video games. This was true for me. If that's the case, we might see a surge of female programmers since more women become gamers than before.
>> "If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying."
It's only a mystery if you ignore the ample writing and research on the topic. Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted. This also impacts men in fields they don't dominate like nursing and K-12 education, so it's got nothing to do with stereotypes about how different gender assignments cope with adversity (the usual thing wheeled out to explain it).
1) I think it's worth removing all gender-based forms of adversity from every field. These do exist in STEM fields in the forms of biases and microaggressions. It's not evil - it's human. It's just what naturally happens when a field is dominated by one group and our minds forms patterns. We must always take a conscious effort to combat it.
2) Women may not be interested (organically) in certain STEM fields. It's still worth figuring out if we can change that. Only after understanding what it would take should we have a discussion of if its worth it. The benefits are real. Every field could benefit from having more diversity in perspectives - just like every species benefits from having diversity in traits.
> Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted.
That doesn't explain why countries where women are more free to pursue what they want have fewer women in STEM. For example, in Iran and Saudi Arabia more women earn science degrees than men.
Its HN so you never know with things like this, but i think it was a joke meant to emphasize the ridiculousness of the argument that women are genetically predisposed to liking fabric craft.
GP is obviously not saying that. He's saying that sex chromosomes cause differences between men and women which also manifest in different preferences which cause a small gap in knowledge between the sexes.
Small clarification: the feminine-analogous toys used in the original (Hasset, 2008 [1]) study were plush rather than the more common plastic dolls sold to children. Although the difference may or may not be minor, it does remind me of the famous Harlow monkey experiment where monkeys showed a preference for the soft “mother” figure over the biologically sustenance “mother” figure.
Edit: Another commenter has already perpetuated this very misunderstanding it seems. Out of the Hasset female-coded toys, only one (a Raggedy Ann doll) was “anthropomorphic.” All six others were animals.
How historical are you going back here? I'm almost 50 years old and as far back as I can remember, everybody with any authority was working non-stop to teach science to girls and crafts to guys - even to the point of rejecting guys from science classes.
I'm pretty sure that in most of my science classes (biochemistry/biology), outside of advanced grad-level organic synthesis, which then had a "fighter pilot jock"-vibe, the gender ratio was 50/50 if not more female than male, so this trend goes back 20+ years. But if you look at the list, the scientific terms skew physics, and for... cultural reasons, I suspect the non-specialist penetration of a lot of those terms probably skews male.
Exactly. Many respondents who know "parsec" don't know it because they're astronomers, they know it because the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve of 'em.
This study uses self-reported recognition of the word. Later in the study they compare their results to other tests that try to identify understanding of the words' meaning.
I also wonder if there's any gender differential between male and female respondents in willingness to say they "know" a word that sounds vaguely familiar... and if the sound of a word also affects people's willingness to take a leap. The study doesn't seem to have included fake words or anything like that to catch guessers out (and I don't think that was relevant to what they were trying to determine, anyway).
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that male respondents are more likely to take a leap for "piezoelectricity" or "thermistor" than they would be for "peplum" and "chignon".
I'm not sure where you lived but geography and politics likely plays a factor here.
It absolutely wasn't this way when I did my schooling and I'm younger than you, growing up in Canada.
Another point to consider, aiming at a target doesn't mean hitting it. It's why you haven't seen the outcry about boys in stem until the past half decade or so. General public opinion and culturally ingrained sexism are very difficult boats to steer.
"Historical bias in education" seems like a bad justification that just draws on modern buzz words. Girls outperform boys in every subject in school, science included, and always have in our modern education system (last century or so). The idea that girls are getting worse education is not plausible.
On the other hand, there is an obvious explanation, which, I feel all of us with sufficient exposure to both genders must know - which is that women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while men are more interested in the science (or science fiction) and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.
> women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion
Why? There are only two possible answers: Either there's some sort of genetic predisposition for women to care about fashion (quite a claim!), or that disposition is a product of the way we raise girls.
Given that we know our culture strongly associates fashion with women, and we don't have any evidence for some "fashion gene," historical bias in how we rear our children is simply the least presumptuous hypothesis available to us.
If we view fashion as part of an effective female mating strategy, which it observably is, then it’s unsurprising that success at that intrasexual competition would be selected for.
If we were to enter a mental clean room where nothing we knew of life on Earth could accompany us, and then sit and speculate about the nature of men and women, I agree that we would have no reason to suspect an interest in fashion might be related to biology. At least, I doubt I would come up with the connection.
In reality we know that there are biological differences between men and women. We know these differences affect the brain in terms of size and structure. We know these differences affect the mind in terms of personality and emotional experience. Should we expect that men and women have identical biological predispositions towards areas of interest? I would say no. Given that we then expect to find differences of interest stemming from biology, and that we have found a difference in interest, and that there isn't a plausible alternative...
> Given that we then expect to find differences of interest stemming from biology, and that we have found a difference in interest, and that there isn't a plausible alternative...
There is a more plausible alternative though. Our society demonstrably raises boys and girls differently, and we know for a fact that the way we raise children affects who they are. In fact, women were much more common in the field of computer science until a cultural shift around the '80s that saw computers portrayed as "boy toys" [1], so we know this affects things as complex as career aspirations too.
Contrast that plausible and well-supported hypothesis with the other one: "There are biological differences between men and women. They affect many things. Therefore it's plausible that there is some effect on personal interest. Therefore it's safe to assume that any given difference in personal interests between sexes can be attributed to biology." This isn't even logically sound; it's fallacious to say that, if X affects Y, any behaviour exhibited by Y is likely attributable to X.
And this is still all a-priori non-empirical reasoning; there's no evidence that sex is responsible for areas of interest at such a granular level as this, while we do have such evidence for culture (e.g. pink used to be a boys' colour [2]).
Person 1: I've just measured a thousand men and women. I've found that men are typically taller than women. This is because our society systematically underfeeds infant girls so they don't grow to be as tall as their male counterparts.
Person 2: That's horrible! Is there any evidence of this systematic underfeeding?
P1: None at all.
P2: But, society at large tacitly endorses the practice of underfeeding young girls?
P1: Not at all. In fact, it would be a horrible scandal and a severe and rare crime if anyone were found to be intentionally depriving an infant girl of nutrition.
P2: So... why do you think this is the explanation for height differences?
P1: Well, it would explain my results in a way that accords with my political beliefs.
Your argument seems similar to Person One's argument. There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls fairly in science or any other domain. As I've previously referenced girls outperform boys in science (as well as every other subject) and have for the last century. It would, in fact, be a huge scandal if some school system were found to be educating girls differently.
You are pointing at these really small things, like commercials targeting toys to boys versus girls. You assume that these small things cause major changes (as opposed to companies targeting their commercials where they find they get the best return). You ignore giant influences like the education system which does a better job educating young girls in science and math than boys.
> Is there any evidence of this systematic underfeeding?
I provided evidence that our cultural ideas of what careers are and aren't masculine impacts women's interests in terms of career path. You provided no evidence that interests are a product of sexed brain chemistry. Your height analogy makes no sense and doesn't match up to our discussion.
> There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls fairly in science or any other domain.
I never argued that schools discriminate against women by offering them a worse education in those areas. I argued that our culture encourages certain interests above others in boys and girls by gendering those interests. Consider the example I linked, where the number of women pursuing careers in computer science fell precipitously after messing with computers became coded as a "boy hobby."
> You ignore giant influences like the education system which does a better job educating young girls in science and math than boys.
Girls get higher marks than boys in every subject, and the discrepancy is actually less pronounced in STEM fields [1]. But this is really irrelevant to our discussion.
Have you been around babies and small children? Or spoken with someone who has raised them?
Differences in character are evident between children, and statistical differences between boys and girls are very visible.
Your argument has a flaw. It's right we don't have evidence for the fashion gene but it's also right we know the female and male brain are different and behaviors are different (even if we cannot pinpoint the cause of the difference we see different behavior). It is sufficient to consider the genetic explanation as possible.
Anything's possible, but I find it less plausible, given that "we know sex has some effects on behaviour" is weak evidence, and we have strong evidence that gender norms affect life choices in adults (such as female CS majors declining after computers became a "boy thing" in advertising).
> which is that women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion
So, this is actually quite a modern phenomenon. At some point in the early 19th century, high status menswear started evolving into a near-uniform (it's finally started to pull away again a bit in the last few decades), while women's clothes started going in the opposite direction, especially in the early 20th century. But before that, high fashion was very much a male-focused thing. If someone in 1750 in Europe was obsessed with different fabric types, they'd be likely to be a wealthy man.
(For an example of this, see Pepys' Diary; he goes on about fashion constantly.)
I don't believe we have anywhere near the data needed to reliably describe the vocabulary or interests of the people of the 19th century. Most of all history is narrowly focused on the goings on of elites - which may, or may not be broadly representative. I don't think we have quantitative studies or surveys of populations from that time.
Oh, yeah, we basically only have what the elites wrote. Fashion would generally have been an elite thing then, though; it simply wasn't accessible to normal people.
You're dismissing millennium due to a generation of reasonable parity in education, and entirely dismissing culture passed between generations of women. My grandmother wouldn't really know any of those fabric words, she grew up on a plantation in the 30s. Probably means she's not a woman.
> On the other hand, there is an obvious explanation, which, I feel all of us with sufficient exposure to both genders must know -
I read this and immediately assumed you were going to say its obvious that women are taught how to behave, and that they're taught things related to what they're supposed to know.
Your comment alone is enough proof that society is telling women they aren't supposed to like science. Any young engineer reading HN may start/continue to subconsciously question their affinity to the field.
Women ARE taught that they don't belong in stem fields, and that science is not for them. I was picking out books for a 5yo girl and boy twins for christmas recently, and the nice lady at the bookstore told me to get a glittery princess book for the girl and a scientist book for the boy. It was not a malicious act meant to keep women out out science, but just something we take for granted in society. Fromm a young age we tell girls what is and isn't for them, subconsciously.
IEEE has studied the affects of engineering graduation and job retention, and its correlated to a womens self-identity as an engineer and their perception that they belong. Starting from a young age, society is damaging that perception. I'll link one study, but they've done a number of studies, including tracking workplace treatment of coworkers, and women are consistently treated worse and are questioned more and trusted less.
Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this trend reversed? Since women's relative disinterest in science apparently comes from society, and there are many societies on Earth, surely there are some societies in which women are more interested in science than men, right?
All of this stuff seems like obvious post hoc rationalization. You know girls aren't taught to be engineers because relatively few engineers are women. Are we socializing young girls to be accountants, claims adjusters, or advertising specialists? If girls are just reading sparkly books about princesses where do they get the idea to become accountants? (Accountants, by the way, are close to an even split on gender)
The survey you cite is pretty meaningless. They survey some engineering freshman and then find a few questions where the results are statistically different between men and women.
"We conducted t-tests to determine gender differences in
survey responses. We found that women tended to have
lower self-efficacy perceptions: they reported less
confidence in their ability to complete the physics
requirements (5.75 vs. 6.13, p < .05), less confidence that
they could do well in an engineering major during the
current academic year (5.75 vs. 6.07, p < .05), and less
confidence that they could complete any engineering degree
at this institution (5.08 vs. 5.41, p < .05). In contrast, women reported higher outcome expectations than men: they
reported greater agreement with the statement that
engineering will allow them to find a well-paying job (6.48
vs. 6.33, p < .05), and that doing well at math would increase their sense of self-worth (5.66 vs. 5.46, p < .05). "
So - women tended to have less confidence but higher expectations for their career and that's supposed to be evidence that society teaches women they can't be engineers?
> You know girls aren't taught to be engineers because relatively few engineers are women
No its clearly that there are few engineers who are women because we teach them they shouldn't be. You got it backwards. There is ample evidence of this.
> Accountants, by the way, are close to an even split on gender
Thank you for this example, by the way. I've never seen a single children's book on accounting, and its pretty even. I've seen lots on science, doctors, construction, nursing, etc. And they're pretty non-even careers.
> If girls are just reading sparkly books about princesses where do they get the idea to become accountants?
Because sparkly princess is not a job and most people need a job. We're not teaching anyone to be an accountant from a young age and people do it because it interests them. But when we teach only men to be engineers... we get a gender imbalance.
> Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this trend reversed?
This is a really weak argument. 1. There are plenty of matriarchal societies throughout history. 2. The identity of science as we see it in western society today is a relatively western idea that doesn't translate well historically. Euro-mediterranian history dominates our cultures idea of science, and that cultural history is male-leader dominated. Plenty of societies across the world had women do things, but we just learn about what happened in Europe (from men).
As you said in another comment, women outperform men at school, so why do they have lower confidence? That seems like a discrepancy that has a logical social explanation (they're told they don't belong, so they aren't confident in their work). Studies have proven this. Unless you think women are unconfident as a matter of biology? (studies have not proven this)
Aside, have you ever talked to a female engineer? MANY will tell you they were not pushed to be an engineer, and that they face sexism and were constantly told they're not supposed to be there. Many experience higher levels of criticism and mistrust over their work compared to male coworkers.
Sorry, but it's just not a serious thought to think that the subjects of children's books decide the demographics of careers later in life. Especially when you think decades of education do not.
Regarding your response to my quick question - which matriarchal societies are you thinking of? The "identity of science" (whatever that means) is not really at issue. We are discussing the reason behind why women know more fashion related vocabulary and men know more science and technical terms. If the "identity" of science changes over the years, that wouldn't seem to change whether or not men have greater interests in what we now call science.
Your theory, that career differences are caused by acculturation is first, absurd. The theme of children's books, kids TV shows, or whatever you posit is part of this, is minuscule compared to spending 8 hours a day in a classroom. Yet, you think the minuscule effects outweigh the massive effects, and nevermind the widespread effort to get girls into STEM.
Second, your theory is soundly rejected by evidence. Girls choose not to go to engineering because of those kids books, but they perform better in math and science throughout school? Where is the effect of these books in K-12 education?
Third, your theory predicts everything and therefore nothing. When a survey shows that girls have lower confidence and higher expectations, well, that's because their confidence is undermined by our patriarchal society! If the results were reversed, and girls were more confident but had lower expectations, why, that would be because despite their abilities they knew they wouldn't be treated fairly by our evil patriarchy!
Conversely, I would say that if you survey a thousand people, divided them into two groups, on dozens of questions, you will probably find some that have significantly different results. I would think the results were meaningless unless they confirmed some prior prediction or were all aligned in some surprising way. That is, actually, what I think about that survey.
No you're directly wrong, and its not absurd. The affects of those childhood books (and of course, the views and behaviors outside of literature of people who choose how to distribute them!) have a huge affect on someones life. Early childhood development is disproportionately important in someones growth as an adult.
The cultural affect of childrens books, tv shows etc doesn't stop in a classroom. Teachers are often complicit in furthering stereotypes and tropes throughout someones academic career. But again, someones home environment, even when smaller in time than a classroom will be more impactful.
Women do better in the classroom, but despite their performance, report that they feel less confident in their abilities than their male peers. At the same time, they say that a stem career would have a great improvement on their life. Then they choose to pursue another field, and you're interpretation is that they must like fashion more as a nature of human biology? THAT is absurd.
Again, if you ever talk to women in stem (or those who left stem), you'll quickly find tons of people who directly tell you why they act and think the way they do. And it is what i've been saying - they're being made to feel like they don't belong explicitly and implicity. I can confidently say you've never had a serious conversation with a woman about this topic based on how you discuss this.
> Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this trend reversed?
Iran, oddly enough; about 70% of STEM graduates are women.
More generally, though, the trend in the west has been, for any given subject, it's all male, then there are one or two women, then a few more, and suddenly a tipping point is hit and it's 50/50 within a few years. This happened to medicine and later biology and then chemistry in most places. I'd expect the pattern to continue.
My, uneducated, guess on Iran is that college-eligible men are likelier to go to madrassas or the like seeking government or religious power over education. Do you think that, or some other explanation, is right, or do you think that women are better represented in STEM in Iran due to a more egalitarian childhood?
> women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while men are more interested in the science (or science fiction) and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.
So why are there women in stem if they really want to learn about fabrics?
Or, do you really mean that women only enter jobs when men leave openings?
I think you're forgetting the term "tend". Even in Iran my expectation is that if you were to repeat the experiment from the featured article you would get similar results.
I assume though that Iran has a smaller portion of the population in college and that men are preferentially pursuing political or theological power over STEM education. Of course, these are assumptions which is why I'm asking questions to understand better.
Do you think that in Iran their children's books more prominently feature female scientists?
Neither. Obviously Iran is not an egalitarian society; the idea’s absurd. However, Iran is also not Afghanistan; most people have a broadly secular edification. Iranian men do go to university in quite large numbers.
I think you’re missing the obvious explanation; the gender biases in STEM may be basically arbitrary; go to a very different society and you’d expect them to be different.
We see this in the west, too. From the 40s through 70s, women were far better represented in programming than today in western countries. Part of this was a legacy of the war, but that can’t explain the whole thing. And in the other direction, practically all chemists in the west were men until the 80s or so; this fairly rapidly flipped and now most new chemists are women in many countries (similar tipping point shifts happened earlier for medicine and biology).
I think you're seriously misreading the above person's comment to the point of putting words in their mouth. Saying "X gender is less likely to be interested in Y" is not saying that people of that gender "aren't supposed to like Y" as you put it. It's making the observation of different gender distributions. Women are more likely to be interested in equestrian sports. This is an objective fact, there's more than 2 women for every man in equestrian sports. This doesn't mean there's anything wrong with a man that shares this interest.
It's also difficult to see a correlation between weaker gender roles and more interest in STEM among women. If anything, the correlation is reversed: more equal countries see less women interested in science and technology [1]. Different preferences of toys among infants are observed even before they're able to talk [2][3].
It seems to me that these claims of societal influence or bias is rooted in the assumption that everything is going to be perfect 50/50 distribution, and thus anything that doesn't conform to an equal distribution is evidence of some sort of pressure or bias. On what grounds do we claim that 50/50 interest in science and technology is the default? This is almost never answered, people just postulate it as fact.
I have my doubts that most people can give a correct definition for those scientific words. So even if one person is familiar with the general area, it doesn't say much about their education. Perhaps about their preferences in media.
Plenty of female otaku/anime fans out there but anecdotally I'd say that it's still primarily male. Nowhere near as male as it was in the 90's/00's, though.
I take it she's also not watching the ones where the space robots jump into the air at azimuth 90, disengage their ailerons to get out of the atmosphere, then travel several parsecs in an femtosecond with their boson drive?
I think you're confused. These are not words they chose to study - these are the words with the largest difference in recognition, from a larger corpus of words.
You're projecting some kind of pre-bias onto the researchers that I don't think is there.
Perhaps you're right. I read their methodology and it seems fair. They did solicit demographic info from the participants, but didn't mention if before or after word testing. There's still wiggle room there for bias, but probably not.
It's interesting to me that the Japanese words in the table, "bushido", "katana", and "yakuza" are more known to (this dataset of) men than women. The fashion-related words (taffeta, chignon, espadrille, etc) being known more to women makes sense to me, but I'm not sure why the three Japanese words are more known to men.
I was just thinking there ought to be an AI chat agent that can recommend music based on themes and mood, perhaps with a periodic, paradoxically-opposite sense of humor.
The biggest weebs I knew in college were women. Sailor Moon is woefully underestimated in terms of how much it contributed to redressing the nerd gender balance. I won't say that it's completely redressed, but female anime fans and japanophiles are considerably more prevalent now than in decades past.
Now, the bits of culture that concern swords and warrior codes of honor? Yeah, those are boy things, mainly.
yeah that reminds me its something I’ve noticed too.
although I encountered something similar, in my schools they were a very distinct subculture defined by their affinity to Japanese culture, whereas what I see now amongst younger people is that many more attractive popular well adjusted women (people in general) are ok with or into anime, that style, and non-US cinema at all. I like this outcome.
My guess is that their martial link is why more men know of them, rather than the fact that the words are Japanese. I would suspect that the same would hold true for martial words of non-Japanese origin as well.
A code of honor, a sword, and a mob. These are stereotypically masculine topics, and also words that appear in video games and movies, sometimes as the title itself.
I doubt that particular word (katana) would be quite so permanently stuck in my head if not for watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a lot as a kid. That was a show that was for-sure aimed at boys.
The other places I could imagine having encountered it enough for it to have stuck are action video games and Japanese or Japanese-influenced action cinema & anime. I have some very confident guesses at how male and female interest rates in those would break down.
Sure, any particular person may buck their cohort trend, but that doesn't mean the trend's not there. Just as I'm sure there are some guys really into sewing or fashion who'd look at the original list and think, of the mostly-women part, "of course I know these, who doesn't?"
There's a comic strip I saw once about how to detect people pretending to be girls on online chats. Ask them "what do you think of [I can't remember the word]?" and if they go "Huh?" you know they're pretending to be a girl. The word was a word that meant decoration on windows, but I can't remember what it is...
I'm seeing Greek, Latin, Japanese, German, and Danish just skimming the "male words", and plenty of the "female words" have been used in English for ages. I think that's more a familiarity effect.
Of course the roots of English include Greek and Latin and German, but words like femtosecond or piezoelectricity or teraflop or milliamp are technical terms, not old but standard words imported from another language. Maybe "femtosecond" was used by Danish scientists in the 1800's or something, but it's definitely not a word that was common in another language and then imported into English.
Maybe "femtosecond" was used by Danish scientists in the 1800's or something, but it's definitely not a word that was common in another language and then imported into English.
Worth noting that by the percentages here fewer than 50% of males surveyed were familiar with it.
Interestingly, half of these words aren't even in Firefox's dictionary it seems. Even with "English (United States, large)" some words are underlined with red squiggles.
Most excessively male-recognised words seem to come from technical fields or science, or Japanese culture, weirdly enough. The only explanation I can give for most men seemingly knowing "shemale" is porn.
My conclusion for this data: men tend to know fewer words relating to clothes and aesthetics, women tend to know fewer words relating to science and Japanese culture. As the recognition for "female" words is much lower than that of the "male" words, I'd say that this is because of a lack of men with knowledge about clothes.
Wow I thought this was going to be a subtle effect but I literally knew all of the male words and zero of the female ones (I’m male). What’s even the context of those top words? The male ones are tech/games/science but the female? I think I half recognize jaquard as a fabric or fashion term.
Yeah, it's very nearly all fabric or textile-related from what I can tell. Bet you could make the same list by picking any two sex-skewed hobbies and charting words that see little use outside those interests.
A bunch but not all, Picking out a few I recognized (though I had to double check freesia).
A doula is basically a birthing coach often used for at home pregnancies, a pessary is a vaginal medical device, kohl is eye makeup, verbena is an herb, freesia is a flower, chigon is a type of hair bun.
I recognized it because I once destroyed a couch fabric in a rented apartment and had to choose a replacement. It’s as bad as choosing js framework, but you’re not a tech guy on top of that.
You probably already know this, but that makes you a seamster. I both sew and practice a particular LISP dialect, making me a seamster schemester (in the words of GJS).
Jacquard is actually an interesting one to me, because it overlaps the two major subject areas (fashion/textiles and science/tech). It's also one I (male) knew, while I didn't know most of the "more female" words.
The Jacquard loom was programmable with punch cards, and is a very important early predecessor of computers (especially Babbage's analytical engine). IIRC, there's one (or a replica) in the Computer History Museum.
Jacquard also refers to the kind of fabric the loom could produce.
Yeah, I (male) recognized jacquard, but only in the context of the Jacquard loom and superficial awareness that they're programmable textile making machines.
My guess is that most men would know it as a loom and most women would know it as a type of fabric. I wonder if jacquard fabric is still produced on anything resembling a jacquard loom.
Jacquard looms are still in use and the principle is the same, they’re just constructed with modern materials and the patterns are CNC driven instead of punched cards :)
I thought I recognized Jacquard as in the similarity measure, but it turns out that one is actually spelled Jaccard. Thereby arguably furthering the initial point.
The computer history museum had a full sized Babbage difference engine, not an analytical engine.
It was on loan and the owner took it back to put in his living room or something.
If i remember correctly, the cards used in Jacquard looms were then used for voting tabulation in the 1920s, by a small company called IBM. When computers came around in the early 40s, they were available as a source of input. This is where I first heard of jacquard looms anyway.
It was not, sadly, Jacquard who invented the loom that bears his name; Jacquard found one after the inventor died, made some improvements, and a lot of fabric.
The true inventor's name, Jacques de Vaucanson, is rarely mentioned. He also invented rubber tubing, and the chain drive, and the essential precision machine tools still used in every machine shop, and lately in CNC machines. Important stuff. He invented the rubber tube to use in a mechanical duck that would eat, drink, and crap. His inventions form the core of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Museum of Arts and Trades, in Paris, not to be missed.
No one cares but I went 12/20 on the female words. Most of the ones I knew are fashion-related or flowers. The ones I didn't know (and looked up) are female reproduction-related.
I don't think they do. The second step for a man to reproduce, after going through a male puberty, is to find a woman. The process is different for women, and may never even directly involve a man.
They're mostly about style in some manner. A chignon is a hairstyle, a bandeau is a garment, kohl is a type of facial makeup (with its own fascinating history). Jaquard, chambray, chenille, sateen, and damask are all words that apply to fabrics in some fashion. An espadrille is a particular style of shoe.
Verbena is a plant. A pessary is a medical device. A doula is a supportive person through a medical experience, often childbirth in an American context.
Suppository is one of those words that I would assume 99.9% of the population knows because of it being common over the counter, and in sitcoms and media. I'm assuming they're including children under 12 in the data? That would explain the low percentages.
That checks out. I'd say at least 80% of my encounters with the word have been jokes in media, or jokes between people (probably inspired by or ripped off from media). Most young kids wouldn't know it, though.
More people are functionally illiterate than you might expect if you're in a high IQ bubble like the tech industry. In 2017, 19% of American adults scored level 1 or below on the PIAAC literacy test: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69
If the US has so many non-English speakers that it materially affects national literacy statistics, one might wonder how we ended up with an immigration policy that produces a permanent underclass of people who are locked out of meaningful jobs and are entirely outside the protection of the law, due to being in the country illegally.
I had no idea what a suppository is, but I do recognise pessary. But that's probably because suppository is completely different in Dutch, which is not the case for pessary.
If it's the same as the Dutch word "pessarium", I think it's a form of birth control. Got mentioned in sex-ed in school, though obviously not something I (as a man) ever had to use. I guess it makes sense for women to be more familiar with a device that only women ever use.
Hey, I knew that one! And sateen. But those were the only two. I didn't expect the divide to be so stark.
In hindsight, I suppose it's reasonable that terms from the largest, most gender-unbalanced niches should have considerable predictive power, but I didn't expect it to be quite so effective going in.
Freesia is a plant too (my grandmother's favourite). I knew most of the fabric ones (ruche, tulle, chenille, etc) but that's my wife's hobby. I don't know if that counts as trade-specific jargon or not (I guess not if the majority of women know them, and not just dressmakers). People in our industry should definitely know jacquard, though.
I think the bigger surprise for me is now that the most gender imbalanced words are highly imbalanced, but that more than half of the male ones seem so common place and hardly obscure to me. I imagine women would react the same way to most of the female words.
Doulas are yuppie stuff in the US, mostly. Also connected with home births to a large degree, rates of interest in which I'd expect are also connected with income, to a point. I'd definitely bet most US fathers wouldn't be able to tell you what it means, though it's possible that a majority of fathers on this site know the term (I did—but then, of course I do).
I'd be interested to see how knowledge of a lot of these words breaks down by income. (I too know what a doula is; I'm not sure if I knew this before my partner was pregnant. We did not use a doula, but we're of the class of people who at least think about it.)
The eye makeup 'kohl' is in no way related to the German word for cabbage. Apparently it's an Arabic word (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kohl). Funnily enough, Kohle (with a schwa at the end) in German means coal (as a mass noun) which is of course black, like the eye makeup.
I am a bit surprised that sateen is on that list since it is one of the most/more common fabric used for bedding.
Damask is a bit more funny word in that video games tend to commonly use it for items, given that it was popular during the middle ages. Never seen it in clothing stores.
There isn't a wikipedia article about jacquard as a fabric, which is a bit odd. There is one about the Jacquard machine?
Chambray was an popular fabric in the 19th century, but I don't remember seeing it in clothes stores.
Sateen probably is a quite relevant example - I, as a male, have absolutely no idea what fabric is used for the bedding I sleep in or buy, it might as well be sateen but even when looking for bedding I would not care to read the part of the description where it could say 'sateen'; perhaps I might touch it while browsing in a store and use the sense as a criteria for choosing between, but it's not relevant enough to read and use the fabric name at the time, much less remember it. I know that there exist fancy beddings made of silk, but that's literally as far as my interest in bedding fabric has ever gone.
> There isn't a wikipedia article about jacquard as a fabric, which is a bit odd.
You got me curious, here are the lengths of the Wikipedia articles for the top three words:
Women know better
- peplum: 886 words (disambiguation is the default)
- boucle: 187 words
- rouche: 196 words (disambiguation is the default and leads you to "Gather (knitting)")
Men know better
- shemale: 1257 words
- howitzer: 2211 words
- parsec: 2505 words
Is this the reflection of some sort of gender bias in Wikipedia contributors and editors?
Wikipedia's own article on it states:
> In a 2018 survey covering 12 language versions of Wikipedia and some other Wikimedia Foundation projects, 90% of contributors reported their gender as male, 8.8% as female, and 1% as other.[1]
> France has most (or a significant percentage) of the leading fashion houses and cosmetic brands. So it makes sense.
Also, I think French words (in general) have associations of "high class" and "fashionable" in the American context, so calling something by a French word is an easy way for a marketer to fancy something up (for certain classes of something).
There are no English words of non-French origin for many of these; it's not a marketing tactic: it's just the only way to denote e.g. boucle fabric or chenille yarn.
I attempted to learn French at one point and one thing I realized is that fancy words in English are frequently their direct translation in French. I assume this comes from royalty generally speaking both English and French. If there's a French user here, do you know if the reverse happened too?
Arguably goes back to the Norman conquest. You muck about in the fields with the Germanic swine but eat the French-derived pork. You raise cows but eat beef. Likewise mutton.
Military words also tend to come from French, which is how they got to be eating those fine foods.
For context: She's starting off the article with that obviously false malapropism sometimes attributed to George W. Bush as a springboard to talk about entrepreneurship in France, and it's clear that she is using it as a joke.
Indeed. It's tongue-in-cheek. As an aside, I heard a rumour it was Regan, not Bush who first uttered it. As a second side, I'm not sure it's technically a malapropism.
And here I was thinking I knew one of the "female" words because I recognized verbena. Verbena also means a party in Spanish, so I just assumed it was taken with that meaning in (American) English.
Same here, but I’m also surprised only around 30% of women know the word “yakuza”. Although I’m sure those same women would be shocked by my not knowing what a chignon is.
They wrote and spoke of them as katanas, yes. But you're also talking about a series who treated the Sai as a sharp weapon (which is round and a striking and blocking weapon)... though, I don't think they did this in the comic. It's been a while).
I bet if you charted hours spent with media in which the word "katana" occurs, you'd see a male/female ratio very similar to the "knows what 'katana' means" ratio in TFA.
I don't know if this would affect the observed/reported differences between sexes, but there are also different levels of knowing.
I would have known that neodymium is some kind of a substance, but I wouldn't have known or remembered that it was an element without checking. I'd probably answer I knew the word "degauss" but if I had to explain what it physically is, I'd struggle. I might not remember what distinguishes howitzers from other artillery pieces. Out of these, I'd probably report not knowing neodymium, knowing howitzer, and be a bit torn on degaussing.
Someone might know that a katana is a weapon, or "some kind of a ninja thing", or maybe even a sword, but might not feel comfortable enough about the details to report knowing it. Also, it might be more well-known among younger people who know the pop culture than people who don't.
But then, I guess it might also be that people just have rather different areas of familiarity, as the article indicates, and a significant part of the English speaking population might be as clueless about katanas as I am about tulles, or whatever the plural for that is. I only knew one or two of the words from the upper half. I'm not a native English speaker, though, which perhaps not only limits my vocabulary compared to native speakers but might also tilt things even further towards the science/tech words.
If someone swallows more than one, they can pinch together different parts of the intestine or bowl and cause a perforation, which is a serious medical emergency that if untreated will lead to death.
It's dangerous for anyone, but babies and toddlers are most likely to actually swallow them.
That's pretty much what I'd know about it, too. IIRC its supposed purpose was to fix distortion on CRT displays caused by, uhm, probably something magnetically related. Exactly the level of "knowing" where I'd feel ambivalent.
In case anyone wondered, here "AFAB" means "assigned female at birth" [1] and as far as I can understand simply means that the person was determined to be female at some point, by visual inspection basically.
It's really to do with gender roles though. Nurse sees a penis on the baby - writes M on the birth certificate - child ends up being told by teachers they're not allowed to cry because they're a boy.
Non binary people think those gender roles don't make sense for themselves, and in that respect, I think almost everyone is at least a little non binary. Maybe not enough to feel it's worth declaring, but I've never met anyone who really loves everything about their gender role.
Even if you make the distinction, "female" describes sex, not gender. So the acronym "AFAB" is a bit internally contradictory if you remember that it was created in order to underline the distinction. Then again, these days more often I see people denying the existence of sex, and replacing it with gender altogether, so maybe it's not that surprising after all.
> Female (symbol: ) is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction.
> Sex is a multidimensional spectrum. "Sex" categories are, in fact, genders--social constructs.
Sex is not a multidimensional spectrum. There are two sexes: male and female, this is statistically observable as a binary. Deviations from this binary are not "third" or "fourth" sexes. It's not a social phenomenon.
The reason why people seem incapable of saying this today, is for political and legal aims (if you can't change legislation that refers to "sex", change what the word means), or a misguided attempt to be progressive.
> Sex consists of multiple different traits which have a bimodal, not binary, distribution.
Sex traits in most cases follow a binary distribution, unless you take something like phenotypical height. In the aggregrate, they also form "sex" which is binary. Differences in sexual traits do not create "third, or fourth" sexes.
> Those binary sex categories are a social construct layered on top of the multidimensional physical reality.
This is an ideological perspective, which is pushed forwards by those who want to change the law around sex, by redefining what sex means.
For example, under the Equality Act 2010 (UK), hospital wards are allowed to keep sex segregated for reasons of privacy and dignity, which to some is unacceptable.
Sex is an observation of a physical reality, not a "social construct". It would have been unremarkable to say this even 5 years ago. The physical reality around sex has not changed, rather the ideology around it has, which is why I'm going to leave this discussion there, as there's no reasoning with that.
Sex is a bimodal distribution that is so _extremely_ polar that calling it binary would be more accurate and helpful than bimodal. Calling sex bimodal is in the large misleading, even if correct in the narrow definitional sense.
That multidimensional physical reality is, in turn, layered on top of the binary reality that in adult, diploid mammals, the key chromosome pair is either XX or XY, and that every cell (except the somatic line) in that individual will have the same pair.
The issue is that you are saying that the sexual phenotype is primary, while I claim, on the basis of biology, that the sexual genotype is primary.
You appear to reject the existence of sexual genotype. On what basis?
The determination of sex in a biological context is based on chromosomes, hormone levels, and secondary sex characteristics.
For a 101 understanding of biology, by far the most common chromosome possibilities are XX and XY, but XXY is possible, as are mutations in one chromosome that combine pieces of X and Y such that a mix of secondary sex characteristics appear. It's also possible for someone with XX chromosomes to have abnormally high levels of testosterone, or someone with XY chromosomes to have abnormally low levels of testosterone and high levels of estrogen, with results such that a visual inspection would not be able to accurately guess the underlying chromosomes.
I agree with you regarding the chromosome possibilities. However, aside from rare mutations and developmental anomalies, mammals are either XX or XY. The exceptions prove the rule, and one doesn’t discard all that evidence just to accommodate minor anomalies which have adequate explanations. If you did, science would make no progress.
Regarding your first paragraph, replace “biological” with “sociological”. Then, that is what has been done traditionally, in the absence of the recent ability to determine sexual genotype by DNA analysis.
The Wikipedia pages on Sex[0] and Phenotypic trait[1] are actually pretty neutral.
Bimodal still implies that most things fall into one of two categories. Binary implies that they all do. You've basically admitted that the distinction is not binary.
Further, we still don't do DNA analysis on the vast majority of people to determine whether they are biologically male or female, certainly not before making a determination for a birth certificate. Even if we did, there's not one true X chromosome and one true Y chromosome that all XY people have, which a strictly binary interpretation would imply. Genetic crossovers between the two are a natural part of reproduction.
The biology of this is really fascinating, and I think it's both disingenuous and incurious to attempt to reduce all of this to a strictly binary model.
Male and female genotypes don't form a distribution, they are one or the other, modulo very rare transcription errors or mutations (which generally don't survive the first few cell divisions following fertilization).
So, talking about "bimodal" as if they were a combination of two normal distributions is not reflective of objective reality, since neither one is stochastic. There is no normal distribution of male genotype-ness, and no super male chromosome.
All X chromosomes differ from all other X chromosomes, but there are no half-X, half-Y chromosomes.
Because of this, in virtually all cases sex at birth is obvious to a medical practitioner. In questionable cases exhibiting abnormal genitalia we can, these days, do a quick DNA test to decide the matter. Wishful thinking is unnecessary.
> binary reality that in adult, diploid mammals, the key chromosome pair is either XX or XY, and that every cell (except the somatic line) in that individual will have the same pair.
Unless one adopts a different definition of “individual” than the one usually applied to humans, this is wrong (germline chimerism is a thing), and right or wrong it's a weirdly narrow claims, as most cells are in the somatic line, anyway.
> The issue is that you are saying that the sexual phenotype is primary, while I claim, on the basis of biology, that the sexual genotype is primary.
Biology and medicine refer to people with phenotypical traits more associated with maleness despite XX chromosomes as “biologically male” and “XX male” (and those with traits associated more with femaleness despite XY chromosomes as ”biologically female” and “XY female”), and similarly (with variations by karyotype) based on phenotype for individuals with non-(46,XX or 46,XY) karyotypes, so even in the sense of the way biology and medicine bucket people into a forced binary, you are wrong.
And karyotype (which is what you seem to mean when you say “genotype”) still isn't binary even if you view it as “primary”, and actual genotype is even less so.
How is being able to be a specific party in the reproduction process a social construct? Is the categorization of penguins into egg-layers and egg-fertilizers also a social construct?
> Nurse sees a penis on the baby - writes M on the birth certificate
Sex is determined at conception and parents today often know what it is before birth.
> Non binary people think those gender roles don't make sense for themselves, and in that respect, I think almost everyone is at least a little non binary.
You only say that because of rigid thinking about what boys and girls are.
When someone says to a boy "stop crying like a girl" he's displaying a rigid definition of what a boy is. Instead of saying that some boys can be very sentimental too, you're saying he's non-base-2. That's no different from the person saying boys shouldn't cry.
That's only a part of it. Embryonic development plays a part too.
>and parents today often know what it is before birth.
They don't know for sure. Not even the doctors can determine it 100%. The estimation is done by looking for a penis with ultrasound. Sometimes the estimation isn't correct and the opposite gender is assigned after.
Same here. Even for the few male words I didn't know exactly what they meant, I had a vague ideas about them, while the female ones are complete gibberish to me.
Imagine you have a set of legal words (legalese) and then you have a set of scientific words or statistical words (all cants) and you show the sets to those not associated with those sets… we’d see similar results.
It’s neat to find these oddities but that’s all it is, linguistically.
I only know because we attempted a home birth and my wife trained to become one, but a doula is an assistant to a midwife. It would make sense most men would have no idea what this is but a lot of women have probably watched YouTube videos thinking about how they want to give birth, so doula would be a well defined word for them.
I feel like this is cheating a bit. Like peplum.... I had no mental construct of peplum as a thing. So it's not like I just don't know the word. I didn't know that there was even a thing that a word could exist for. The underlying mental conception is the thing that's actually missing.
It largely follows gender stereotypical interest lines. In this one, my wife describes the list as "fashion related stuff". Here's another older list from a different study[0]
Interesting. I (male) recognize all but one of the "female" words in this list (and can define most of them), but recognized only 6 from the list in the article, and could define only one or two. I wonder why the article's list is so much "harder".
(I recognized and could define all of the "male" words in both lists, so I do seem to conform to this stereotype...)
"taupe" was a punchline of sorts in a very popular British TV advert back when we had 4 (maybe 3?) channels. So, people of a certain age in UK would all likely know it from that.
Same. I have multiple undergraduate and graduate degrees and consider myself wide read. I knew every single "male" word and none of the "female" words. Though, I did have some recognition of a few of the "female" words, I just have no idea what their definition is.
A lot of the left half was words I only vaguely knew, and that's because I've seen most of them used in games before. A good chunk just in Final Fantasy XIV alone, but the fabrics and clothing items tend to pop up a fair bit in the sort of item-intensive games that need to reach for words to make this particular shoe sound better.
Interesting, I thought a lot of male words are related to games as well.
aileron/azimuth/strafe: flight games
bushido/yakuza/katana: martial arts or Japanese games
howitzer: strategy games
checksum: downloading games
degauss/teraflop: stuff for playing games
shemale: ...okay maybe not this one...
> Conclusion, they're not gaming words you're just a gamer?
The claim wasn't "originated from video-games" it was "related to games." More broadly, aside from the direct technology terms, most of those are the sort of words that you only encounter in media.
Videogames are a medium that tends to stretch for more words to describe things (as do novels, compared to snappier media like film/music/tv), so it's a very likely point of first exposure for those of us young enough to have grown up with them.
> I literally knew all of the male words and zero of the female ones (I’m male)/
I find it kind of astounding that someone can know what aileron or azimuth is, but not what a doula is. The former I have never, ever encountered, whereas I feel like doulas come up as a routine topic in culture.
From the Wikipedia article, it seems like doula is of fairly recent American coinage. And the fact that it's comes up as a routine topic probably says more about your social circle than anything else.
> And the fact that it's comes up as a routine topic probably says more about your social circle than anything else.
Not really. Unless my 'social circle' also has a monopoly on metrics like Google Trends, doula is a more popular term than either aileron or azimuth in the majority of countries for which metrics are available.
I had never heard them called duallies (duallys?) before this millennium. First encountered the word at a drive-thru (-through?) car wash, where they were not allowed, and was left to figure out from context what it must mean.
I'm a bit more in the middle. I don't know all of the "male" words, and I do know some of the "female" ones, though I still strongly lean "male". I'll ask my wife what she thinks.
It's worth noting that, based on the paper, this is really "words known better by males (who complete free online quizzes) than by females (who complete free online quizzes)". This likely explains a significant amount of the fashion and video game words. For example, it seems unlikely to me that 60% of all US and UK women know the word "peplum", but reasonably plausible that US and UK women who complete free quizzes on the internet also spend more time browsing clothes on the internet than the average woman, and would therefore have more knowledge than the average woman about clothing terminology.
I'm going to disagree here. I'm a woman and I had the same results as every man replying here: I recognized all the science, game, and action terms and almost none of the fashion and textile ones. Never once when I have gone clothes or makeup shopping (always exclusively in person) have I encountered any of those terms, written or otherwise. I feel I might have been more familiar if I actually shopped online where these words might be displayed.
Would love to see a similar list but weight by the ratio of men who don't know versus women who don't know aka words that known by 90% of males and 80% of females (or visa versa). This is very interesting but not that surprised that many people don't know boson or servo or checksum or technical words.
I'm a techno-nerd guy but knew all those fabrics most guys apparently don't. In my early 20s I was really into sewing, which is fascinating from an engineering perspective, highly recommend as a hobby to get you away from that monitor. Both the tools and processes used in sewing are really interesting.
Most of the fabric words I have distinct memories, as an adult, of asking some one (usually a woman) what the word meant. Tulle in particular was hilariously difficult to figure out.
I've gotten into sewing lately, and I know exactly what you mean about the engineering thing. I see sewing as a tool for designing and building custom "devices", like bag inserts, covers, etc. Do you know of any resources on sewing with that perspective? I have attended meetups, shopped at sewing boutiques, etc, but every person I have interacted with has just been interesting in garments, purses, and mending. Those are also interesting sewing topics! But the design skillset is a bit different, so I have a hard time getting help with my projects.
On topic: Even with sewing as a hobby, I mostly just care about the engineering properties of materials. I knew very few of those words.
Sorry, I don't have any good advice on resources for sewing non-garment devices. My first instinct would be to visit a fabric store for upholstery, neoprene or other outdoor fabrics. We have a fabulous store "The Rain Shed" nearby and they have patterns for things like you mention. It's a small store so they might answer the phone and be able to direct you. Here's their patterns link:
Sateen is not "phony/archaic/marketing". Its a totally legitimate word. Same with the other female-known words.
I'm guessing you're male? Consider maybe your assessment is just part of the same gender-difference that results in this trend and not some objective underlying fact.
(I don't want to get dragged into specific words, but certainly "bushido" is more archaic - it refers to a completely obsolete concept - and probably also phony - I've heard, but done no research on, that bushido only really exists as a rosy nostalgic view of a philosophy that was not really meaningful in the period it refers to).
Doula is apparently a well established profession (I just learned that too!). A pessary is a medical device.
"Shemale" is a colloquial, somewhat demeaning term used mostly in porn.
I think it takes a rather special type of reasoning to assume that your knowledge of only the latter term is because the former words just aren't as important or useful...
Sorry, I don't want to misunderstand you: you're saying that the words better known by women are all phony, archaic, or marketing buzzwords; and the words identified by men are, contrariwise, all "real"? And they are phony or archaic because you, the smart one with a 75k vocabulary, don't personally know them? I can't believe someone could be so out of touch.
Just as one counter example, "bushido" is totally archaic, has been irrelevant for 150 years since the Meiji restoration.
You claim your vocab is sufficiently large that you should have known all the words, and as you suggest, exhibit a strong bias towards male-known words illuminated by the study, and therefore suspect the entire dataset is fraudulent because you didn't recognize the female-familiar words?
Is this satire? "Study showing males don't know certain things deemed completely fraudulent by person on internet technology forum. 'I would have known those things if they were real', claims person of unknown gender known as 'errcorrectcode' on forum 'hacker news'."
Honesty compels me to admit that I also expected not to be surprised by the female side of the graph, and was quite wrong (I got 4ish).
In hindsight, I realize the error I made is that even if I have an above average vocabulary, there is still going to be the extreme outliers of gender-connected words that I shouldn't expect my vocabulary to overcome. It may well be the case (and I'm serious here) that there's only another dozen or two words "female words" that I wouldn't recognize. I certainly doubt it runs for another few hundred words. But it shouldn't be surprising that there the extreme outliers are things I have entirely missed.
For instance, I knew what a doula is... but only by the skin of my teeth, so to speak, by overhearing my wife discussing it with other women at a very specific time in our lives that has only happened a limited number of times. If it had so happened I'd whiffed those windows of perhaps a few minutes total in my entire life, I'd still not know.
Femtosecond, by contrast, heck I've seen that hundreds of times easily. My wife has the requisite science training to know what that is, even if I'm not sure if she's ever used it. As it so happens just a couple of months ago I used "thermistor" in front of her and had to explain the word. She understood the concept just fine (again, had the requisite science training) but was not familiar with the word. Perhaps a bit ironically, it was in the context of describing how to fix kitchen temperature probes that were misreading.
(Since that may make someone curious, they can misread if water makes it down to the thermistor part. You can fix it by leaving it in a 200 degree oven for a while. Protip: The probe end goes in the oven, the plastic end stays outside. A, err, "friend" of mine can attest to the fact that if you cock that up through sheer idiocy, it may still work afterwards, but the plastic end certainly gets an exciting new modern art look.)
Laser, sonar, radar. Many, if not most, acronyms become words on their own at some point in English, especially if they enter the popular lexicon (leave their initial niche).
I'm skeptical half the men really know what piezoelectricity is, for example. Much less 75% being able to define boson. Maybe if the survey was at an engineering college.
"familiar with the word" doesn't mean "knows exact definition or the facts from the first paragraph of the wikipedia article".
"a boson is a particle in physics" would be adequate definition, no need to actually know the details. Similarly, "piezoelectricity" is "the thing used in electric cigarette lighters / guitar pickups", no need for details. Women who know about fabrics don't necessarily know how they are manufactured.
It's fuzzy. I know exactly what a terraflop is including that most people use it to refer to 32 bit floating point operations by default but it can still mean other widths if specified. I thought a parsec was somewhere between 2 and 20 light years which is correct but still imprecise. I know damask is a fabric associated with dresses I've run into in books but have no idea what it looks like. So do I know 1, 2, or 3 of those words? It's fuzzy.
I would be surprised if any of my male and females friends from Georgia Tech ('07) couldn't identify and accurately describe every technical word in great detail, or even talk about them for hours on end. The same apples for colleagues I work with daily.
Among the general populace, I'm guessing that's less likely.
This startled me in the same way as a really excellent magic trick. You are convinced it's not going to catch you out, but then it does. I pride myself of having a wide vocabulary (or so I thought) and the premise sounded unlikely to me and yet I knew all the male words and didn't know the majority of the female words. What an eye opener!
The female words are largely romance language loan words because they're related to textiles and fashion and, in the English speaking world, France and Italy dominate those fields (or did for a long enough time, historically, that tons of the terminology comes from their languages, anyway).
It's a little interesting how many from both sides of the list are loanwords, though - on the "male" side there's examples like howitzer, aileron, strafe and katana. I wonder if there's an effect here because loanwords are harder to learn?
I had the same thought! I (rather arrogantly) assumed that I would know most or all of the "female" words. Turned out I recognized less than half, and could define only a couple.
I actually knew most of the words; apparently though I'm in the minority of men for not knowing taffeta. After looking it up, I'm slightly surprised that tulle is so much lower than taffeta given that both are used in gowns and I run into references to tulle in poetry all the time[1].
On the other hand, I am in good male company for being completely mystified by peplum only to find it's another word for "overskirt."
I'm also in the 1/8 of all men in not recognizing the word shemale, though if wikipedia is right it's just she-male missing the hyphen? Perhaps I was primed by all of the fashion words but I read it with a french pronunciation...
Even if you completely ignore the meaning and usage context of these words, there are some significant differences.
The male words are sharper, rougher, more incisive. Azimuth, teraflop, neodymium, yakuza. The female words are rounder, smoother, less threatening. Verbena, doula, sateen, chenille.
This is extremely interesting and not subtle at all
Are you referring to how the words "feel" in your mind (≈ average of a cluster of associated words) or about the sounds in the words?
Plosives (PaT), sibilants (Sassy/SHow) or glottals (CoCKpit) sound "sharper" to me than their voiced equivalents (BaD, Zoo/menaGerie, GooGle). Fricatives (FaVorite, baTH/baTHE) or nasals (NuMber) or taps (RoLe) tend to sound longer and softer.
It's definitely both. It's not just the physical sounds I make when pronouncing them, but the mood and the overall "atmosphere" of the words that is different.
A lot of the "female" words are fashion/style related. For a long time, France (and Italy) dominated the fashion world, so a lot of technical terms around fashion are French, which probably explains the distinction.
Hmm I'm not so sure about that. To a textile worker, the difference between sateen and corduroy would be as sharp and incisive as the difference between azimuth and altitude is to an astronomer.
This is an interesting observation, because the next question should be whether they know the word exists or they just "feel like" it exists (see sibling comment about the Bouba/Kiki effect).
Love that story. Makes me think playing Codenames in German, where all kinds of words are made by mashing other words together, would be a great advantage over playing in English.
Well, this rather makes the game annoying to play with people who think they are so clever and start constructing completely new words no one before them ever used. Which the rules don’t allow, by the way.
Sure, you can construct arbitrary new words in German. That works. However, that is certainly not the spirit of the game. Which the game does make abundantly clear in a quite long section of the rules. (I just got the game and its rules from our board game shelves, used the new OCR feature in iOS to copy and paste the relevant text into DeepL, cleaned up the translation and am now pasting it here with my own annotations in brackets. That was a cool experience.)
Excerpt from the rules:
Compound words
German is notorious worldwide for its compound words. There are two ways to form such in German. „Tischdecke” (tablecloth) is one word. „Mehrzweck-Fräsvorsatz“ (multi purpose milling fixture) is in principle also a word, because the hyphen merely serves to make it easier to read. „Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz“ (beef labeling monitoring tasks transfer law) actually used to be a real (and awful) word, which probably would have been a little easier to read with a few hyphens. (We won't discuss the bad habit of breaking up compound words in German with – incorrect – spaces here). Strictly speaking, then, all such words can be valid clues, but only if they correspond to actual usage. It is easy in German to simply invent composites: „Tentakeltrabant“ (tentacle satellite) would theoretically be a great clue for „Oktopus” (octopus), „Mond“ (moon), and „Auto“ (car, because of the East German car „Trabant”), for example, but since it's only a word creation that you can't find in any dictionary, you can't use it.
Prefixes
This actually belongs to the previous rule, but should be mentioned explicitly: Simply turning a word into its opposite by putting a syllable like „kein-“, „nicht-“ or „un-“ (non-, un-) in front of it should only be allowed if this word is colloquially used. „Unlebendig“ (unalive) is therefore not a permitted clue for „Tod“ (death), „untot“ (undead) on the other hand would be permitted as a clue for „Skelett“ (skeleton).
Probably "grenade". A flashbang grenade is a bright and loud but less destructive grenade used to startle people before an attack. Widely used by American police investigating possession of trivial amounts of marijuana.
Something police use to disorient and theoretically help disperse a crowd - like a grenade except it creates only a mostly-harmless noise and flash of light.
Not that harmless. They don't throw fragmentation shrapnel but they are strong enough to punch holes into people when in direct vicinity. US police regularly throw these into cribs and kill or maim babies and toddlers.
Since it's codenames, I would guess some of the words on the board they were hinting at would be WW2/war/call of duty/video games related stuff like France, Ear, Lag, Light, Hand, Hurt, Mud, Radio...
In that game, the number said after the clue tells you how many of the words in play are related to the clue. So the word flashbang wouldn't be hinting at a codeword, but four of them.
So it could really be anything, e.g. bang, army, light and blind.
Diverse results on a word comprehension test probably correlates with cultural diversity better than ethnicity does. It could be easier and more reliable to assemble a culturally diverse workforce via word comprehension clusters than by personal history. It's not hard to see how diversity measured like this can contribute to a team. It would tend to add people who have interests orthogonal to each other, broadening their joint perspective.
Ah, that's a good catch. I'd have trouble providing a precise definition for a lot of these, but I know them. ("servo" is some type of engine; "degauss" is a button I pressed on CRTs to make them go "boing"; a "doula" helps with birthing somehow in a non-medical capacity.)
Most of the words I "know" from the female list are ones I've encountered in articles or novels that I didn't need to look up to get the gist of what I was reading. Same for a few on the male list, I've never needed to do anything with a thermistor or servo so I can only assume I recognise those words from SF.
I once used this phenomenon to build a tool to reliably determine whether a male or female had written a given text. I was surprised how accurate it was even when trained on a relatively small corpus. Used CRM114. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRM114_(program)
What does it mean to "know" a word? I have heard/read most of the male words hundreds of times, and probably used them myself, but asked to define them I would be either inaccurate or unconfident. For example, I know that ailerons are flaps on an airplane, but I'm not sure which ones. I know that a femtosecond is a small unit of time, but I'm not sure what fraction of a second.
I find that giving a precise "dictionary definition" of a word is actually quite hard in general for many common words.
Anyway, the data is based on [1], which asks "I know this word"/"I don't know this word". It's also available in Dutch[2] which is a bit different and asks "this word exists"/"this word doesn't exist". Both tests include both actual words as well as made-up words. I did this test a few years back and my "score" was about 80% for Dutch (my native language) and 60% for English. I was a little but surprised by the fairly large gap between Dutch and English, since I've been speaking English almost exclusively for the last ten years (on account of living abroad), which goes to show just how hard it is to really learn a language to native-levels.
I think strafing has something to do with combat aircraft (a strafing run, probably fly by shooting?), but where I know it from, is early shooters (haven’t played any in over a decade, not sure if that word is still used), strafing was moving sideways.
edit: my guess for the actual meaning was close-ish:
> Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons
> The word is an adaptation of German strafen, to punish, specifically from the humorous adaptation of the German anti-British slogan Gott strafe England (May God punish England), dating back to World War I.
Re “shemale”: I wonder what other slurs they included in the data set. I have a hard time believing “shemale” is the only slur with gender polarization.
Fascinating; as a man, I can roughly define every single better-known-by-men word in the chart ("bushido" gave me the most trouble); whereas of the better-known-by-women words, I recognize only three and can define them very poorly (without checking my answers to a dictionary: I believe that "kohl" is some kind of mineral cosmetic [historical?]; "verbena" is an herb; and I'm most sure of "sateen" being a kind of cotton cloth which can be used in bedding).
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadGauss and Degauss are the two that jumped out at me. I'd be curious to know how many people of either gender have encountered it, if they're young enough to have never lived with CRT TVs.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=pronounce+gaussian&rlz=1C5GC...
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gaussian
[2] https://painfulenglish.com/2014/01/26/how-to-pronounce-gauss...
Hmm, never heard of this. I wonder what are the reasons, Gauss really had nothing to do with coordinate systems. Even the complex numbers link is due to Euler, De Moivre and many many people before Gauss.
I have a half-joking hypothesis it's due to Germans not wanting to attribute things to a french mathematician, but that still doesn't explain why they went with Gauss and not Euler.
Those are the ones I remember, and I went into CS, I don't want to imagine how it was in math.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9
The test was made available on a dedicated website (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/). Access to the test was unlimited. Participants were asked whether English was their native language, what their age and gender were, which country they came from, and their level of education. For the present purposes, we limited the analyses to the first three tests taken by native speakers of English from the USA and the UK.Footnote 1 All in all, we analyzed the data of 221,268 individuals who completed 265,346 sessions. Of these, 56% were completed by female participants and 44% by male participants.
The site encourages participation with a hook similar to that used by many online quizzes:
Word test
How many English words do you know? With this test you get a valid estimate of your English vocabulary size within 4 minutes and you help scientific research.
Is this a representative sample? I doubt it. Probably it went viral in some specific communities.
Maybe there's still something interesting to learn from it... but I'd take it with a grain of neodymium.
"Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath#Earliest_surv...
Edit: But even then, I didn't know e.g. what they looked like, or anything about them specifically.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Package_o...
Even baby male monkeys prefer to play with trucks while baby female monkeys prefer to play with dolls.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755553/
A possible control they did not employ during the study would be to have a series of toys that were identical in all ways except color, for example.
Also *very* worth noting:
(Emphasis mine)The ultimate counterexamples would be societies where women are in charge of the engineering/construction and to my knowledge there are none which is a sign that there's something deep within our psyche which drives these interests. I'd love to hear counterexamples if anyone has them though.
If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying.
That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's influenced by biology to some extent (imagine what society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is defined by biology based on that.
Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields — how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome plus not many others. But look at something like cooking, which is old: There's tons of weird gender stuff there that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd gender-food rules too.
The mental tasks required of engineering are far, far, far, older. Things like abstract reasoning, distance estimation and measurement, rotation and scaling of objects, maps, and abstract shapes in one's head, ability to standardize and compute measures and weights, etc, were all adaptations that improved our effectiveness at hunting, building shelter, and both defense against, and offense toward, opposing tribes.
Modern engineering is an enormous pile of abstractions on top of "Grog think rock weigh seven stick".
Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a masculine activity. Ovens used to be much more dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it's a feminine activity. If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine. I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.
To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there. But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I think there's a biological explanation for most of it. Maybe even all.
I think you have the motivations a little incorrect. My guess would be that men traditionally took care of the dangerous jobs because they wanted to protect the child-bearing members of society from them. As a fertile man, you're more likely to pass on your genes if you keep women out of harm's way.
So yes, this does count as a "biological reason" for men and women going different ways, but you seemed to be implying that these biological reasons had more to do with brain structure and development, which I don't think is supported by what we know.
It's also simply not true that this is not supported by what we know. "Common sense" says that men die younger than women. And indeed we can find statistical proof of this wherever we go. Take car accidents. No one wants to get into a car accident. Yet men are 3x more likely to die in car accidents than women.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/192074/drivers-in-fatal-...
Getting into car accidents yourself doesn't prevent child-rearing members of society from getting into car accidents of their own. What else explains this gender difference? Maybe men have worse vision? Worse reaction time? Are women stronger at turning the wheel than men? Maybe men are more distractable than women? I think not. People who have been driven by both mom and dad know: men drive more dangerously than women do.
Every statistic related to safety shows that men are more willing to get into danger than women. Even in suicide rates, men are more likely to succeed, even with women trying more often.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-kil...
There are so many examples like this. It's almost certainly true that men have a higher predilection for danger compared to women that is driven by some biological factor. If you think it's not the mind, then you would have to come up with a different explanation for every disparate piece of evidence out there. Not that it's impossible, but there's a simpler conclusion to draw.
I think this is motivated reasoning. From what I can tell, the "grilling is manly" thing started in the '50s (well after cooking stopped being dangerous) and is mostly limited to the United States (instead of being universal, as we would expect with something biologically-motivated). And what's the difference between frying, roasting, and grilling? All involve using a gas-operated cooking device to cook meat (assuming you own a gas stove); they're all equally safe.
Not only does this strike me as being cultural, this strikes me as obviously cultural. And yet you dismiss that out of hand and go looking for a biological explanation ("grilling is extra dangerous") that doesn't really line up with the facts of the example. So it seems to me that you're engaging in motivated reasoning — assuming that masculinity can't be a product of culture, reaching for biological explanations even when they don't really make sense.
Also interesting to me that grilling is manly started in the 50's. That seems to be about the time that household appliances like microwave were getting popular, no? Maybe men who liked to cook needed to find a manly outlet.
Famed barbecue "masters" were universally men, though if everyone is being honest much of the hard work at many large barbecues (with hundreds of guests) was actually performed by black men (or Californios, or what have you depending upon the location). Large barbecues were generally tied to political efforts or organizations, festivals, and the like. During the Depression there were large government-subsidized barbecues so everyone could get some meat in their bellies and enjoy one another's company during those tough times, and there again we see men and women typically taking on disparate roles in the cooking process.
Contemporary accounts of the barbecues of years past generally have women inside doing not easier work, but different work. Making pies, side dishes, baking, etc. Even the pre-Columbian/Spanish Chumash tended to split their work pretty strictly, with women doing things like grinding acorn flour in bedrock mortars with the kids, while the men fished, hunted, gathered shellfish, etc. Contemporary drawings of various indigenous peoples show them smoking/grilling fish and iguana, but again everyone in the images are male. I confess I don't firmly know what kind of sex differences existed in the roles played in the cooking American slaves did for one another, something I really should remedy, but when it came to big gatherings the differences were apparent and as I wrote above.
I can't really speak to causality, but in terms of time scale the M-F patterns seem to substantially pre-date the 1950s.
Oh, and fun fact: the offset smoker was invented in Texas in the 1970s. That little factoid seems to blow people's minds...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
maybe team genetic-differences should be adopting the burden of proof
Note that the number of women entering the field didn't decrease, it was just the number of men increasing so much.
It's only a mystery if you ignore the ample writing and research on the topic. Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted. This also impacts men in fields they don't dominate like nursing and K-12 education, so it's got nothing to do with stereotypes about how different gender assignments cope with adversity (the usual thing wheeled out to explain it).
2) Women may not be interested (organically) in certain STEM fields. It's still worth figuring out if we can change that. Only after understanding what it would take should we have a discussion of if its worth it. The benefits are real. Every field could benefit from having more diversity in perspectives - just like every species benefits from having diversity in traits.
That doesn't explain why countries where women are more free to pursue what they want have fewer women in STEM. For example, in Iran and Saudi Arabia more women earn science degrees than men.
[1]: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why...
It is not our job to disprove your half-baked suppositions.
Small clarification: the feminine-analogous toys used in the original (Hasset, 2008 [1]) study were plush rather than the more common plastic dolls sold to children. Although the difference may or may not be minor, it does remind me of the famous Harlow monkey experiment where monkeys showed a preference for the soft “mother” figure over the biologically sustenance “mother” figure.
Edit: Another commenter has already perpetuated this very misunderstanding it seems. Out of the Hasset female-coded toys, only one (a Raggedy Ann doll) was “anthropomorphic.” All six others were animals.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
How historical are you going back here? I'm almost 50 years old and as far back as I can remember, everybody with any authority was working non-stop to teach science to girls and crafts to guys - even to the point of rejecting guys from science classes.
That's a good point - I wonder if the question was "do you recognize this word?" or "can you correctly define this word?" (followed by a quick check)
I also wonder if there's any gender differential between male and female respondents in willingness to say they "know" a word that sounds vaguely familiar... and if the sound of a word also affects people's willingness to take a leap. The study doesn't seem to have included fake words or anything like that to catch guessers out (and I don't think that was relevant to what they were trying to determine, anyway).
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that male respondents are more likely to take a leap for "piezoelectricity" or "thermistor" than they would be for "peplum" and "chignon".
It absolutely wasn't this way when I did my schooling and I'm younger than you, growing up in Canada.
Another point to consider, aiming at a target doesn't mean hitting it. It's why you haven't seen the outcry about boys in stem until the past half decade or so. General public opinion and culturally ingrained sexism are very difficult boats to steer.
Do you have a source for this?
On the other hand, there is an obvious explanation, which, I feel all of us with sufficient exposure to both genders must know - which is that women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while men are more interested in the science (or science fiction) and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.
https://time.com/81355/girls-beat-boys-in-every-subject-and-...
Why? There are only two possible answers: Either there's some sort of genetic predisposition for women to care about fashion (quite a claim!), or that disposition is a product of the way we raise girls.
Given that we know our culture strongly associates fashion with women, and we don't have any evidence for some "fashion gene," historical bias in how we rear our children is simply the least presumptuous hypothesis available to us.
In reality we know that there are biological differences between men and women. We know these differences affect the brain in terms of size and structure. We know these differences affect the mind in terms of personality and emotional experience. Should we expect that men and women have identical biological predispositions towards areas of interest? I would say no. Given that we then expect to find differences of interest stemming from biology, and that we have found a difference in interest, and that there isn't a plausible alternative...
There is a more plausible alternative though. Our society demonstrably raises boys and girls differently, and we know for a fact that the way we raise children affects who they are. In fact, women were much more common in the field of computer science until a cultural shift around the '80s that saw computers portrayed as "boy toys" [1], so we know this affects things as complex as career aspirations too.
Contrast that plausible and well-supported hypothesis with the other one: "There are biological differences between men and women. They affect many things. Therefore it's plausible that there is some effect on personal interest. Therefore it's safe to assume that any given difference in personal interests between sexes can be attributed to biology." This isn't even logically sound; it's fallacious to say that, if X affects Y, any behaviour exhibited by Y is likely attributable to X.
And this is still all a-priori non-empirical reasoning; there's no evidence that sex is responsible for areas of interest at such a granular level as this, while we do have such evidence for culture (e.g. pink used to be a boys' colour [2]).
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-happened-all-... [2]: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/colorscope-pink-boy-gi...
Person 2: That's horrible! Is there any evidence of this systematic underfeeding?
P1: None at all.
P2: But, society at large tacitly endorses the practice of underfeeding young girls?
P1: Not at all. In fact, it would be a horrible scandal and a severe and rare crime if anyone were found to be intentionally depriving an infant girl of nutrition.
P2: So... why do you think this is the explanation for height differences?
P1: Well, it would explain my results in a way that accords with my political beliefs.
Your argument seems similar to Person One's argument. There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls fairly in science or any other domain. As I've previously referenced girls outperform boys in science (as well as every other subject) and have for the last century. It would, in fact, be a huge scandal if some school system were found to be educating girls differently.
You are pointing at these really small things, like commercials targeting toys to boys versus girls. You assume that these small things cause major changes (as opposed to companies targeting their commercials where they find they get the best return). You ignore giant influences like the education system which does a better job educating young girls in science and math than boys.
I provided evidence that our cultural ideas of what careers are and aren't masculine impacts women's interests in terms of career path. You provided no evidence that interests are a product of sexed brain chemistry. Your height analogy makes no sense and doesn't match up to our discussion.
> There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls fairly in science or any other domain.
I never argued that schools discriminate against women by offering them a worse education in those areas. I argued that our culture encourages certain interests above others in boys and girls by gendering those interests. Consider the example I linked, where the number of women pursuing careers in computer science fell precipitously after messing with computers became coded as a "boy hobby."
> You ignore giant influences like the education system which does a better job educating young girls in science and math than boys.
Girls get higher marks than boys in every subject, and the discrepancy is actually less pronounced in STEM fields [1]. But this is really irrelevant to our discussion.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/girls-get-better-...
Differences in character are evident between children, and statistical differences between boys and girls are very visible.
Your argument has a flaw. It's right we don't have evidence for the fashion gene but it's also right we know the female and male brain are different and behaviors are different (even if we cannot pinpoint the cause of the difference we see different behavior). It is sufficient to consider the genetic explanation as possible.
So, this is actually quite a modern phenomenon. At some point in the early 19th century, high status menswear started evolving into a near-uniform (it's finally started to pull away again a bit in the last few decades), while women's clothes started going in the opposite direction, especially in the early 20th century. But before that, high fashion was very much a male-focused thing. If someone in 1750 in Europe was obsessed with different fabric types, they'd be likely to be a wealthy man.
(For an example of this, see Pepys' Diary; he goes on about fashion constantly.)
I read this and immediately assumed you were going to say its obvious that women are taught how to behave, and that they're taught things related to what they're supposed to know.
Your comment alone is enough proof that society is telling women they aren't supposed to like science. Any young engineer reading HN may start/continue to subconsciously question their affinity to the field.
Women ARE taught that they don't belong in stem fields, and that science is not for them. I was picking out books for a 5yo girl and boy twins for christmas recently, and the nice lady at the bookstore told me to get a glittery princess book for the girl and a scientist book for the boy. It was not a malicious act meant to keep women out out science, but just something we take for granted in society. Fromm a young age we tell girls what is and isn't for them, subconsciously.
IEEE has studied the affects of engineering graduation and job retention, and its correlated to a womens self-identity as an engineer and their perception that they belong. Starting from a young age, society is damaging that perception. I'll link one study, but they've done a number of studies, including tracking workplace treatment of coworkers, and women are consistently treated worse and are questioned more and trusted less.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5673614
All of this stuff seems like obvious post hoc rationalization. You know girls aren't taught to be engineers because relatively few engineers are women. Are we socializing young girls to be accountants, claims adjusters, or advertising specialists? If girls are just reading sparkly books about princesses where do they get the idea to become accountants? (Accountants, by the way, are close to an even split on gender)
The survey you cite is pretty meaningless. They survey some engineering freshman and then find a few questions where the results are statistically different between men and women.
"We conducted t-tests to determine gender differences in survey responses. We found that women tended to have lower self-efficacy perceptions: they reported less confidence in their ability to complete the physics requirements (5.75 vs. 6.13, p < .05), less confidence that they could do well in an engineering major during the current academic year (5.75 vs. 6.07, p < .05), and less confidence that they could complete any engineering degree at this institution (5.08 vs. 5.41, p < .05). In contrast, women reported higher outcome expectations than men: they reported greater agreement with the statement that engineering will allow them to find a well-paying job (6.48 vs. 6.33, p < .05), and that doing well at math would increase their sense of self-worth (5.66 vs. 5.46, p < .05). "
So - women tended to have less confidence but higher expectations for their career and that's supposed to be evidence that society teaches women they can't be engineers?
No its clearly that there are few engineers who are women because we teach them they shouldn't be. You got it backwards. There is ample evidence of this.
> Accountants, by the way, are close to an even split on gender
Thank you for this example, by the way. I've never seen a single children's book on accounting, and its pretty even. I've seen lots on science, doctors, construction, nursing, etc. And they're pretty non-even careers.
> If girls are just reading sparkly books about princesses where do they get the idea to become accountants?
Because sparkly princess is not a job and most people need a job. We're not teaching anyone to be an accountant from a young age and people do it because it interests them. But when we teach only men to be engineers... we get a gender imbalance.
> Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this trend reversed?
This is a really weak argument. 1. There are plenty of matriarchal societies throughout history. 2. The identity of science as we see it in western society today is a relatively western idea that doesn't translate well historically. Euro-mediterranian history dominates our cultures idea of science, and that cultural history is male-leader dominated. Plenty of societies across the world had women do things, but we just learn about what happened in Europe (from men).
As you said in another comment, women outperform men at school, so why do they have lower confidence? That seems like a discrepancy that has a logical social explanation (they're told they don't belong, so they aren't confident in their work). Studies have proven this. Unless you think women are unconfident as a matter of biology? (studies have not proven this)
Aside, have you ever talked to a female engineer? MANY will tell you they were not pushed to be an engineer, and that they face sexism and were constantly told they're not supposed to be there. Many experience higher levels of criticism and mistrust over their work compared to male coworkers.
Regarding your response to my quick question - which matriarchal societies are you thinking of? The "identity of science" (whatever that means) is not really at issue. We are discussing the reason behind why women know more fashion related vocabulary and men know more science and technical terms. If the "identity" of science changes over the years, that wouldn't seem to change whether or not men have greater interests in what we now call science.
Your theory, that career differences are caused by acculturation is first, absurd. The theme of children's books, kids TV shows, or whatever you posit is part of this, is minuscule compared to spending 8 hours a day in a classroom. Yet, you think the minuscule effects outweigh the massive effects, and nevermind the widespread effort to get girls into STEM.
Second, your theory is soundly rejected by evidence. Girls choose not to go to engineering because of those kids books, but they perform better in math and science throughout school? Where is the effect of these books in K-12 education?
Third, your theory predicts everything and therefore nothing. When a survey shows that girls have lower confidence and higher expectations, well, that's because their confidence is undermined by our patriarchal society! If the results were reversed, and girls were more confident but had lower expectations, why, that would be because despite their abilities they knew they wouldn't be treated fairly by our evil patriarchy!
Conversely, I would say that if you survey a thousand people, divided them into two groups, on dozens of questions, you will probably find some that have significantly different results. I would think the results were meaningless unless they confirmed some prior prediction or were all aligned in some surprising way. That is, actually, what I think about that survey.
The cultural affect of childrens books, tv shows etc doesn't stop in a classroom. Teachers are often complicit in furthering stereotypes and tropes throughout someones academic career. But again, someones home environment, even when smaller in time than a classroom will be more impactful.
Women do better in the classroom, but despite their performance, report that they feel less confident in their abilities than their male peers. At the same time, they say that a stem career would have a great improvement on their life. Then they choose to pursue another field, and you're interpretation is that they must like fashion more as a nature of human biology? THAT is absurd.
Again, if you ever talk to women in stem (or those who left stem), you'll quickly find tons of people who directly tell you why they act and think the way they do. And it is what i've been saying - they're being made to feel like they don't belong explicitly and implicity. I can confidently say you've never had a serious conversation with a woman about this topic based on how you discuss this.
Iran, oddly enough; about 70% of STEM graduates are women.
More generally, though, the trend in the west has been, for any given subject, it's all male, then there are one or two women, then a few more, and suddenly a tipping point is hit and it's 50/50 within a few years. This happened to medicine and later biology and then chemistry in most places. I'd expect the pattern to continue.
> women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while men are more interested in the science (or science fiction) and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.
So why are there women in stem if they really want to learn about fabrics?
Or, do you really mean that women only enter jobs when men leave openings?
I assume though that Iran has a smaller portion of the population in college and that men are preferentially pursuing political or theological power over STEM education. Of course, these are assumptions which is why I'm asking questions to understand better.
Do you think that in Iran their children's books more prominently feature female scientists?
I think you’re missing the obvious explanation; the gender biases in STEM may be basically arbitrary; go to a very different society and you’d expect them to be different.
We see this in the west, too. From the 40s through 70s, women were far better represented in programming than today in western countries. Part of this was a legacy of the war, but that can’t explain the whole thing. And in the other direction, practically all chemists in the west were men until the 80s or so; this fairly rapidly flipped and now most new chemists are women in many countries (similar tipping point shifts happened earlier for medicine and biology).
It's also difficult to see a correlation between weaker gender roles and more interest in STEM among women. If anything, the correlation is reversed: more equal countries see less women interested in science and technology [1]. Different preferences of toys among infants are observed even before they're able to talk [2][3].
It seems to me that these claims of societal influence or bias is rooted in the assumption that everything is going to be perfect 50/50 distribution, and thus anything that doesn't conform to an equal distribution is evidence of some sort of pressure or bias. On what grounds do we claim that 50/50 interest in science and technology is the default? This is almost never answered, people just postulate it as fact.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160715114739.h...
3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7
(Japan likes using a lot of flower references which they think give a classy Western literature feeling but which we’ve never heard of.)
I think you're confused. These are not words they chose to study - these are the words with the largest difference in recognition, from a larger corpus of words.
You're projecting some kind of pre-bias onto the researchers that I don't think is there.
Those three words in particular feature heavily in lots of video games and films. That could explain some of it.
For the closest real-world analogue, check out m-flo.
I was just thinking there ought to be an AI chat agent that can recommend music based on themes and mood, perhaps with a periodic, paradoxically-opposite sense of humor.
Now, the bits of culture that concern swords and warrior codes of honor? Yeah, those are boy things, mainly.
although I encountered something similar, in my schools they were a very distinct subculture defined by their affinity to Japanese culture, whereas what I see now amongst younger people is that many more attractive popular well adjusted women (people in general) are ok with or into anime, that style, and non-US cinema at all. I like this outcome.
The other places I could imagine having encountered it enough for it to have stuck are action video games and Japanese or Japanese-influenced action cinema & anime. I have some very confident guesses at how male and female interest rates in those would break down.
https://shiftwa.org/fast-food-chains-announce-automation-pla...
Such dataset could be used as a gender captcha.
- (Women's) clothing and cosmetics (peplum, bandeau, kohl, espadrille, whipstitch)
- Hair style (chignon)
- Fabrics and weaving (ruche, bouclé, chenille, voile, sateen, jacquard, damask, chambray)
- Women's health (pessary, doula)
- Flowers (Freesia, Verbena)
Interestingly, half of these words aren't even in Firefox's dictionary it seems. Even with "English (United States, large)" some words are underlined with red squiggles.
Most excessively male-recognised words seem to come from technical fields or science, or Japanese culture, weirdly enough. The only explanation I can give for most men seemingly knowing "shemale" is porn.
My conclusion for this data: men tend to know fewer words relating to clothes and aesthetics, women tend to know fewer words relating to science and Japanese culture. As the recognition for "female" words is much lower than that of the "male" words, I'd say that this is because of a lack of men with knowledge about clothes.
Discoverable, Rebecca, amongst, captcha, jokester - just to give a few examples of normal words that Firefox doesn’t know.
[1] - https://weareher.com/what-percentage-of-the-us-population-is...
When I was 20, if throwing out the sports deck, no one wanted to play Trivial Pursuit with me. Lol.
Without trying to google any of them, I think they're colors - I think chambray is a color, but I don't know what color it is.
A doula is basically a birthing coach often used for at home pregnancies, a pessary is a vaginal medical device, kohl is eye makeup, verbena is an herb, freesia is a flower, chigon is a type of hair bun.
https://thewell.northwell.edu/pregnancy/doula-vs-midwife
The Jacquard loom was programmable with punch cards, and is a very important early predecessor of computers (especially Babbage's analytical engine). IIRC, there's one (or a replica) in the Computer History Museum.
Jacquard also refers to the kind of fabric the loom could produce.
If you don't blanche at spending $100+ on a single towel. ;)
https://bocpages.org/wiki/Jacquard_Causeway
https://vimeo.com/69572175
The true inventor's name, Jacques de Vaucanson, is rarely mentioned. He also invented rubber tubing, and the chain drive, and the essential precision machine tools still used in every machine shop, and lately in CNC machines. Important stuff. He invented the rubber tube to use in a mechanical duck that would eat, drink, and crap. His inventions form the core of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Museum of Arts and Trades, in Paris, not to be missed.
Verbena is a plant. A pessary is a medical device. A doula is a supportive person through a medical experience, often childbirth in an American context.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ
- pessary was known by 53% of females, 19% of males
- suppository was known by 88% of females, 80% of males
Here's a sample reading test: https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Literacy%20Sample%20Items.... It's a drawing of an ear, and the options are "ear", "egg", "lip" and "jar". You have to pick the correct word.
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-e-chapter...
Hey, I knew that one! And sateen. But those were the only two. I didn't expect the divide to be so stark.
In hindsight, I suppose it's reasonable that terms from the largest, most gender-unbalanced niches should have considerable predictive power, but I didn't expect it to be quite so effective going in.
We used a doula, but only as a support person (I believe in medical advances, hah) and she was fantastic for that role.
[1] http://www.kacl780.net/frasier/transcripts/season_11/episode...
> Not in the US, I bet. The only reason I know is that I had a male co-worker whose wife was one.
Yeah, I also feel the term and role could be very subculture-specific, and mainly limited to urban, very-liberal women interested in "wellness."
I've seen the term given brief treatment in some new parent books, but I would not have registered it if I hadn't already had some familiarity.
Damask is a bit more funny word in that video games tend to commonly use it for items, given that it was popular during the middle ages. Never seen it in clothing stores.
There isn't a wikipedia article about jacquard as a fabric, which is a bit odd. There is one about the Jacquard machine?
Chambray was an popular fabric in the 19th century, but I don't remember seeing it in clothes stores.
Chenille seems to be a fabric used in yarns.
You got me curious, here are the lengths of the Wikipedia articles for the top three words:
Women know better
Men know betterWikipedia's own article on it states:
> In a 2018 survey covering 12 language versions of Wikipedia and some other Wikimedia Foundation projects, 90% of contributors reported their gender as male, 8.8% as female, and 1% as other.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouch%C3%A9%27s_theorem
- boucle: loop
- ruche: beehive
- chignon: hair bun?
- chenille: caterpillar
- bandeau: headband
- voile: veil
…
Also, I think French words (in general) have associations of "high class" and "fashionable" in the American context, so calling something by a French word is an easy way for a marketer to fancy something up (for certain classes of something).
Much of the loan words from Old French are considered classier compared to equivalent words from Old english
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dua...
Military words also tend to come from French, which is how they got to be eating those fine foods.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisoncoleman/2014/02/14/entrep...
I would have known that neodymium is some kind of a substance, but I wouldn't have known or remembered that it was an element without checking. I'd probably answer I knew the word "degauss" but if I had to explain what it physically is, I'd struggle. I might not remember what distinguishes howitzers from other artillery pieces. Out of these, I'd probably report not knowing neodymium, knowing howitzer, and be a bit torn on degaussing.
Someone might know that a katana is a weapon, or "some kind of a ninja thing", or maybe even a sword, but might not feel comfortable enough about the details to report knowing it. Also, it might be more well-known among younger people who know the pop culture than people who don't.
But then, I guess it might also be that people just have rather different areas of familiarity, as the article indicates, and a significant part of the English speaking population might be as clueless about katanas as I am about tulles, or whatever the plural for that is. I only knew one or two of the words from the upper half. I'm not a native English speaker, though, which perhaps not only limits my vocabulary compared to native speakers but might also tilt things even further towards the science/tech words.
Now that I have a baby crawling around I pray that I haven't misplaced any in some crevice of the house...
It's dangerous for anyone, but babies and toddlers are most likely to actually swallow them.
It's a button on old monitors.
That's all I know about it. It sounds like it undoes something magnetic-field related, but I have no clue what.
(No joke)
They are AFAB, interested in japanese culture and STEM, but also sew rather much.
[1] https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sexopedia/a38294924/afab-amab/
Non binary people think those gender roles don't make sense for themselves, and in that respect, I think almost everyone is at least a little non binary. Maybe not enough to feel it's worth declaring, but I've never met anyone who really loves everything about their gender role.
Sex is a multidimensional spectrum. "Sex" categories are, in fact, genders--social constructs.
> Female (symbol: ) is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction.
[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female>
Sex is not a multidimensional spectrum. There are two sexes: male and female, this is statistically observable as a binary. Deviations from this binary are not "third" or "fourth" sexes. It's not a social phenomenon.
The reason why people seem incapable of saying this today, is for political and legal aims (if you can't change legislation that refers to "sex", change what the word means), or a misguided attempt to be progressive.
Sex consists of multiple different traits which have a bimodal, not binary, distribution.
> There are two sexes: male and female,
Those binary sex categories are a social construct layered on top of the multidimensional physical reality.
Sex traits in most cases follow a binary distribution, unless you take something like phenotypical height. In the aggregrate, they also form "sex" which is binary. Differences in sexual traits do not create "third, or fourth" sexes.
> Those binary sex categories are a social construct layered on top of the multidimensional physical reality.
This is an ideological perspective, which is pushed forwards by those who want to change the law around sex, by redefining what sex means.
For example, under the Equality Act 2010 (UK), hospital wards are allowed to keep sex segregated for reasons of privacy and dignity, which to some is unacceptable.
Sex is an observation of a physical reality, not a "social construct". It would have been unremarkable to say this even 5 years ago. The physical reality around sex has not changed, rather the ideology around it has, which is why I'm going to leave this discussion there, as there's no reasoning with that.
> Sex traits in most cases follow a binary distribution
Which is exactly saying they, in the whole, actually follow a bimodal, rather than binary, distribution.
The issue is that you are saying that the sexual phenotype is primary, while I claim, on the basis of biology, that the sexual genotype is primary.
You appear to reject the existence of sexual genotype. On what basis?
(Edit: s/haploid/diploid/)
For a 101 understanding of biology, by far the most common chromosome possibilities are XX and XY, but XXY is possible, as are mutations in one chromosome that combine pieces of X and Y such that a mix of secondary sex characteristics appear. It's also possible for someone with XX chromosomes to have abnormally high levels of testosterone, or someone with XY chromosomes to have abnormally low levels of testosterone and high levels of estrogen, with results such that a visual inspection would not be able to accurately guess the underlying chromosomes.
Hence, bimodal, not binary.
Regarding your first paragraph, replace “biological” with “sociological”. Then, that is what has been done traditionally, in the absence of the recent ability to determine sexual genotype by DNA analysis.
The Wikipedia pages on Sex[0] and Phenotypic trait[1] are actually pretty neutral.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotypic_trait
Further, we still don't do DNA analysis on the vast majority of people to determine whether they are biologically male or female, certainly not before making a determination for a birth certificate. Even if we did, there's not one true X chromosome and one true Y chromosome that all XY people have, which a strictly binary interpretation would imply. Genetic crossovers between the two are a natural part of reproduction.
The biology of this is really fascinating, and I think it's both disingenuous and incurious to attempt to reduce all of this to a strictly binary model.
So, talking about "bimodal" as if they were a combination of two normal distributions is not reflective of objective reality, since neither one is stochastic. There is no normal distribution of male genotype-ness, and no super male chromosome.
All X chromosomes differ from all other X chromosomes, but there are no half-X, half-Y chromosomes.
Because of this, in virtually all cases sex at birth is obvious to a medical practitioner. In questionable cases exhibiting abnormal genitalia we can, these days, do a quick DNA test to decide the matter. Wishful thinking is unnecessary.
And, yes, biology is absolutely fascinating.
Unless one adopts a different definition of “individual” than the one usually applied to humans, this is wrong (germline chimerism is a thing), and right or wrong it's a weirdly narrow claims, as most cells are in the somatic line, anyway.
> The issue is that you are saying that the sexual phenotype is primary, while I claim, on the basis of biology, that the sexual genotype is primary.
Biology and medicine refer to people with phenotypical traits more associated with maleness despite XX chromosomes as “biologically male” and “XX male” (and those with traits associated more with femaleness despite XY chromosomes as ”biologically female” and “XY female”), and similarly (with variations by karyotype) based on phenotype for individuals with non-(46,XX or 46,XY) karyotypes, so even in the sense of the way biology and medicine bucket people into a forced binary, you are wrong.
And karyotype (which is what you seem to mean when you say “genotype”) still isn't binary even if you view it as “primary”, and actual genotype is even less so.
Applying it to the population at large is absurd, but has become popular within some social circles.
Sex is determined at conception and parents today often know what it is before birth.
> Non binary people think those gender roles don't make sense for themselves, and in that respect, I think almost everyone is at least a little non binary.
You only say that because of rigid thinking about what boys and girls are.
When someone says to a boy "stop crying like a girl" he's displaying a rigid definition of what a boy is. Instead of saying that some boys can be very sentimental too, you're saying he's non-base-2. That's no different from the person saying boys shouldn't cry.
That's only a part of it. Embryonic development plays a part too.
>and parents today often know what it is before birth.
They don't know for sure. Not even the doctors can determine it 100%. The estimation is done by looking for a penis with ultrasound. Sometimes the estimation isn't correct and the opposite gender is assigned after.
Imagine you have a set of legal words (legalese) and then you have a set of scientific words or statistical words (all cants) and you show the sets to those not associated with those sets… we’d see similar results.
It’s neat to find these oddities but that’s all it is, linguistically.
I figured that I'd be old/wise/literate enough to know many of the "female" words. Nope
Higher recognition rates by males:
- codec (88, 48)
- solenoid (87, 54)
- golem (89, 56)
- mach (93, 63)
- humvee (88, 58)
- claymore (87, 589
- scimitar (86, 58)
- kevlar (93, 65)
- paladin (93, 66)
- bolshevism (85, 60)
- biped (86, 61)
- dreadnought (90, 66)
Higher recognition rates by females:
- taffeta (48, 87)
- tresses (61, 93)
- bottlebrush (58, 89)
- flouncy (55, 86)
- mascarpone (60, 90)
- decoupage (56, 86)
- progesterone (63, 92)
- wisteria (61, 89)
- taupe (66, 93)
- flouncing (67, 94)
- peony (70, 96)
- bodice (71, 96)
[0] https://www.insider.com/gender-and-vocabulary-analysis-2014-...
(I recognized and could define all of the "male" words in both lists, so I do seem to conform to this stereotype...)
Science, war and... the last one.
A lot of the left half was words I only vaguely knew, and that's because I've seen most of them used in games before. A good chunk just in Final Fantasy XIV alone, but the fabrics and clothing items tend to pop up a fair bit in the sort of item-intensive games that need to reach for words to make this particular shoe sound better.
Azimuth, space.
Degauss, TVs
Checksum I think probably from Linux installs (around the millennium).
Teraflop, supercomputers.
Shemale ... hmmm, never saw it, but The Crying Game (TV show) I think would be the source for me.
Conclusion, they're not gaming words you're just a gamer?
The claim wasn't "originated from video-games" it was "related to games." More broadly, aside from the direct technology terms, most of those are the sort of words that you only encounter in media.
Videogames are a medium that tends to stretch for more words to describe things (as do novels, compared to snappier media like film/music/tv), so it's a very likely point of first exposure for those of us young enough to have grown up with them.
One of the things I was pointed to when learning a foreign language was: "Want to learn more adjectives? Read cheesy romance novels in the language."
I find it kind of astounding that someone can know what aileron or azimuth is, but not what a doula is. The former I have never, ever encountered, whereas I feel like doulas come up as a routine topic in culture.
Not really. Unless my 'social circle' also has a monopoly on metrics like Google Trends, doula is a more popular term than either aileron or azimuth in the majority of countries for which metrics are available.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=do...
I googled doula because I don't know what it meant. I don't think I ever googled azimuth or aileron.
Also one of the forerunners to the modern computer (its a type of automated loom that can be "programmed" using punch cards)
No clue what "peplum" is, I'm afraid.
https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
Would love to see a similar list but weight by the ratio of men who don't know versus women who don't know aka words that known by 90% of males and 80% of females (or visa versa). This is very interesting but not that surprised that many people don't know boson or servo or checksum or technical words.
Tulle is just orange bags, but not orange. The more you know.
On topic: Even with sewing as a hobby, I mostly just care about the engineering properties of materials. I knew very few of those words.
https://www.therainshed.com/shop/Patterns--Kits.htm
Recently I read an interesting article about how smoke jumpers make their own kit (suits, bags, etc.):
https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/content/news/Smokejumpers...
I'm guessing you're male? Consider maybe your assessment is just part of the same gender-difference that results in this trend and not some objective underlying fact.
(I don't want to get dragged into specific words, but certainly "bushido" is more archaic - it refers to a completely obsolete concept - and probably also phony - I've heard, but done no research on, that bushido only really exists as a rosy nostalgic view of a philosophy that was not really meaningful in the period it refers to).
"Shemale" is a colloquial, somewhat demeaning term used mostly in porn.
I think it takes a rather special type of reasoning to assume that your knowledge of only the latter term is because the former words just aren't as important or useful...
Just as one counter example, "bushido" is totally archaic, has been irrelevant for 150 years since the Meiji restoration.
"Carl" and "fie" are archaic.
I miswrote. Allow me to nail myself to the cross next to Whoopi. :)
You claim your vocab is sufficiently large that you should have known all the words, and as you suggest, exhibit a strong bias towards male-known words illuminated by the study, and therefore suspect the entire dataset is fraudulent because you didn't recognize the female-familiar words?
Is this satire? "Study showing males don't know certain things deemed completely fraudulent by person on internet technology forum. 'I would have known those things if they were real', claims person of unknown gender known as 'errcorrectcode' on forum 'hacker news'."
I suggest you re-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and apologize.
In hindsight, I realize the error I made is that even if I have an above average vocabulary, there is still going to be the extreme outliers of gender-connected words that I shouldn't expect my vocabulary to overcome. It may well be the case (and I'm serious here) that there's only another dozen or two words "female words" that I wouldn't recognize. I certainly doubt it runs for another few hundred words. But it shouldn't be surprising that there the extreme outliers are things I have entirely missed.
For instance, I knew what a doula is... but only by the skin of my teeth, so to speak, by overhearing my wife discussing it with other women at a very specific time in our lives that has only happened a limited number of times. If it had so happened I'd whiffed those windows of perhaps a few minutes total in my entire life, I'd still not know.
Femtosecond, by contrast, heck I've seen that hundreds of times easily. My wife has the requisite science training to know what that is, even if I'm not sure if she's ever used it. As it so happens just a couple of months ago I used "thermistor" in front of her and had to explain the word. She understood the concept just fine (again, had the requisite science training) but was not familiar with the word. Perhaps a bit ironically, it was in the context of describing how to fix kitchen temperature probes that were misreading.
(Since that may make someone curious, they can misread if water makes it down to the thermistor part. You can fix it by leaving it in a 200 degree oven for a while. Protip: The probe end goes in the oven, the plastic end stays outside. A, err, "friend" of mine can attest to the fact that if you cock that up through sheer idiocy, it may still work afterwards, but the plastic end certainly gets an exciting new modern art look.)
Your computer has 1 teraflop performance? One trillion floating point operations per _what_, then?
"a boson is a particle in physics" would be adequate definition, no need to actually know the details. Similarly, "piezoelectricity" is "the thing used in electric cigarette lighters / guitar pickups", no need for details. Women who know about fabrics don't necessarily know how they are manufactured.
Among the general populace, I'm guessing that's less likely.
- peplum - late 17th century: via Latin from Greek peplos .
- boucle - late 19th century: French, literally ‘buckled, curled’.
- pessary - late Middle English: from late Latin pessarium, based on Greek pessos ‘oval stone’ (used in board games).
- doula - 1960s: modern Greek, from Greek doulē ‘female slave’.
- chignon - late 18th century: from French, originally ‘nape of the neck’, based on Latin catena ‘chain’.
- tulle - early 19th century: from Tulle, a town in SW France, where it was first made.
etc
Doula is one I would have never known had it not been for the pregnant women in my life.
They're still English.
It's a little interesting how many from both sides of the list are loanwords, though - on the "male" side there's examples like howitzer, aileron, strafe and katana. I wonder if there's an effect here because loanwords are harder to learn?
On the other hand, I am in good male company for being completely mystified by peplum only to find it's another word for "overskirt."
I'm also in the 1/8 of all men in not recognizing the word shemale, though if wikipedia is right it's just she-male missing the hyphen? Perhaps I was primed by all of the fashion words but I read it with a french pronunciation...
1: e.g. https://poets.org/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479 (written by a woman)
I got most of the women ones a lot are clothes/fashion/hair. I guess gay helps get a larger vocabulary ;)
The male words are sharper, rougher, more incisive. Azimuth, teraflop, neodymium, yakuza. The female words are rounder, smoother, less threatening. Verbena, doula, sateen, chenille.
This is extremely interesting and not subtle at all
Plosives (PaT), sibilants (Sassy/SHow) or glottals (CoCKpit) sound "sharper" to me than their voiced equivalents (BaD, Zoo/menaGerie, GooGle). Fricatives (FaVorite, baTH/baTHE) or nasals (NuMber) or taps (RoLe) tend to sound longer and softer.
None of the women on my team knew what it meant. Every guy in the room did. We lost the game, but it was a very interesting social experiment.
If you come up with a word and you aren't sure if it exists check if it is in the dictionary or if Google knows it.
So no making up words like
Mixerversicherungsfahrzeug
Sure, you can construct arbitrary new words in German. That works. However, that is certainly not the spirit of the game. Which the game does make abundantly clear in a quite long section of the rules. (I just got the game and its rules from our board game shelves, used the new OCR feature in iOS to copy and paste the relevant text into DeepL, cleaned up the translation and am now pasting it here with my own annotations in brackets. That was a cool experience.)
Excerpt from the rules:
Compound words
German is notorious worldwide for its compound words. There are two ways to form such in German. „Tischdecke” (tablecloth) is one word. „Mehrzweck-Fräsvorsatz“ (multi purpose milling fixture) is in principle also a word, because the hyphen merely serves to make it easier to read. „Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz“ (beef labeling monitoring tasks transfer law) actually used to be a real (and awful) word, which probably would have been a little easier to read with a few hyphens. (We won't discuss the bad habit of breaking up compound words in German with – incorrect – spaces here). Strictly speaking, then, all such words can be valid clues, but only if they correspond to actual usage. It is easy in German to simply invent composites: „Tentakeltrabant“ (tentacle satellite) would theoretically be a great clue for „Oktopus” (octopus), „Mond“ (moon), and „Auto“ (car, because of the East German car „Trabant”), for example, but since it's only a word creation that you can't find in any dictionary, you can't use it.
Prefixes
This actually belongs to the previous rule, but should be mentioned explicitly: Simply turning a word into its opposite by putting a syllable like „kein-“, „nicht-“ or „un-“ (non-, un-) in front of it should only be allowed if this word is colloquially used. „Unlebendig“ (unalive) is therefore not a permitted clue for „Tod“ (death), „untot“ (undead) on the other hand would be permitted as a clue for „Skelett“ (skeleton).
With the literal English translation of flying mouse man.
Apparently the word fledermaus originates 1200 years ago and is derived from “flattern” (to flutter).
Not that harmless. They don't throw fragmentation shrapnel but they are strong enough to punch holes into people when in direct vicinity. US police regularly throw these into cribs and kill or maim babies and toddlers.
So it could really be anything, e.g. bang, army, light and blind.
I knew almost all of the "feee-male" words, though, despite being cis-male, because of reading historical fiction that's not military wankery.
wondering what the gender breakdown is on that category?
Anyway, the data is based on [1], which asks "I know this word"/"I don't know this word". It's also available in Dutch[2] which is a bit different and asks "this word exists"/"this word doesn't exist". Both tests include both actual words as well as made-up words. I did this test a few years back and my "score" was about 80% for Dutch (my native language) and 60% for English. I was a little but surprised by the fairly large gap between Dutch and English, since I've been speaking English almost exclusively for the last ten years (on account of living abroad), which goes to show just how hard it is to really learn a language to native-levels.
[1]: http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start
[2]: http://woordentest.ugent.be/woordentest
“Gauss” I just thought of the mathematician; forgot it was a science thing.
I’m not at all sure what to make of where “shemale” ranks
edit: my guess for the actual meaning was close-ish:
> Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons
> The word is an adaptation of German strafen, to punish, specifically from the humorous adaptation of the German anti-British slogan Gott strafe England (May God punish England), dating back to World War I.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing
And I might as well post the gaming page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing_(video_games)
So on a standard two-stick controller layout your left stick is strafe and your right is aim.
I expect more people have played halo than flown planes.
I was reading these thinking "Oh fuck, I know all the male words and none of the female ones, I'll never pass as a woman with a vocabulary like this".
At the bottom, "Shemale". Tada! That's why I know all the male words! I'm a sh**ale!