#2 - women see mauve, men see purple
#3 - women love to talk: the area in the brain responsible for language is 17% larger in women
#4 - women are wimps: women have more pain receptors, so they feel more pain then men do.
#5 - women cant drive or park: in young children girls see in two dimension while boys had the gift of seeing 3 dimension so they could see more depth
For most of these stereotypes I always thought they were just made up. I didnt realize that some of the gender stereotypes we see have been proven by science. It makes me wonder what stereotypes are true about men? are they actually incapable of feeling the same way women do?
http://www.cracked.com/article_18529_6-absurd-gender-stereotypes-that-science-says-are-true.html
wow this is really interesting..on the other hand from what you were saying, i always thought of stereotypes to be some sort of truth. weather they are judgemental or not, i always have believed that stereotypes are based on true facts. and seeing this made it a whole lot clear for me. this was really cool to see! thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI have several fundamental questions about the so-called “scientific studies” and the interpretations of those studies offered in the cracked.com article.
ReplyDeleteLet’s examine the claim, for example, that women are bad drivers. If you look at the actual telegraph article that is linked to, it notes that the actual study discusses gender differences in "navigation and spatial awareness." The assumption that this makes women and gay men "bad drivers" is something that is put forth by the newspaper and the further leap in argument that women "can't park for shit" is made by the author of the article on craked.com. The authors of the actual study instead say that it is possible that it might take women and gay men “a lot longer to reach their destination, [make] more errors, [take] wrong turns etc." This is not the least bit the same as saying that women and gay men are "bad drivers." In fact, if one judges "bad driving" on the basis of majority of car accidents and traffic violations, it would be men who would be considered "bad drivers” and not women.
I am not saying all this to claim at all that men are worse drivers than women or vice versa. I don’t think there is any “objective” way of knowing this as long as women are constantly being bombarded with messages that they are inherently bad drivers and until we settle on a definition of what “good driving” actually entails. What I am trying to do is point out that we should take some of these web articles and "scientific studies" with a grain of salt. We shouldn't be afraid to question knowledge simply because it is being espoused by a "scientist." Furthermore, we should question how scientific knowledge is further interpreted for mass, popular consumption.
Again, for example, the cracked.com article interprets a scientific study that claims that "Language-associated cortical regions are proportionally larger in the female brain" to mean that women talk more. Of course, this is not the interpretation that the study itself offers. In fact, if you look at the actual conclusions of the study itself, it claims that their observations "correlate with superior language skills previously demonstrated in females." Having superior language skills is obviously not the same thing as talking more.
Finally, we should ask why we keep looking toward science to "prove" gender stereotypes which essentially work to subjugate women or put them down. What is gained essentially by making, at best disputable, claims that "women are wimps," “women are bad drivers,” “men are slobs,” or that "women talk more?"