Wednesday Open Thread

Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. Or can I call it Wednesday-seems-like-Tuesday? I’m going to be confused all week. What’s on your mind today?

Recent polling in Louisiana found that a majority of voters were not aware of the prostitution scandals surrounding Senator David Vitter. The Louisiana Democratic party wants to make sure that his actions are not forgotten. They’re raising money to run this ad on television:

All I can say is dayum. That’s one brutal ad.

I must read this book: “Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference.” The hypothesis of the book is that most studies that claim to show differences in male & female brains are flawed and just plain wrong. The author did an interview with Slate:

Why are people so intent on misrepresenting the differences between the male and female brain?

We look around in our society, and we want to explain whatever state of sex inequality we have. It’s more comfortable to attribute it to some internal difference between men and women than the idea that there must be something very unjust about our society. As long as there has been brain science there have been misguided explanations and justification for sex and inequality — that women’s skulls are the wrong shape, that their brain is too small, that their head is too unspecialized. It was once very cutting-edge to put a brain on a scale, and now we have cutting-edge research that is genuinely sophisticated and exciting, but we’re still very much at the beginning of our journey of understanding of how our brain creates the mind.

…

You write that one of the obstacles that women face in the field of math is something called “stereotype threat.” What is that?

It refers to the difficulty for people who belong to a group stereotypically seen as being not very good at a particular thing they’re trying to do. For a woman doing a math test, she has an acquired stereotype threat that if you do badly, people are going to judge you because you’re a woman and that you’re going to confirm what everyone already “knew,” that women are bad at math. It creates a whole host of harmful psychological effects in people’s minds. And psychologists have discovered if you make gender seem not relevant to a task, then men and women perform equally well. Right now, when it comes to women in traditional male domains, it’s like a track star running into a headwind — their performance is impeded.

I’ve read of studies that support this view regarding math. If before a test, girls are told that girls are worse at math they score significantly lower.