gender and mathematical ability December 20, 2007

Despite the attention paid to claims of substantial differences in various types of abilities—including mathematical, spatial, and verbal—between the sexes, it is remarkable that most research finds these differences to be trivial or small (even assuming that they can be measured properly and that all intervening factors can be accounted for). For example, using large national datasets on mathematical performance among children in the United States, sociologists Erin Leahey and Guang Guo found that there was only “a slight, late-emerging male advantage in mathematics among the general population of students,” with “no male advantage until later in high school, where the largest gender difference is 1.5%.” Furthermore, they did not even find large differences among high-scoring students, where it is commonly assumed that males will be most dominant. Using meta-analysis of existing research, psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde and her colleagues have found that not only are differences in mathematical performance across genders typically small, they have generally decreased over time (indicating that they are mutable), often favor women, particularly at younger ages, and that the gender that scores higher differs across ethnic groups. Furthermore, research shows that differences in mathematical performance among children across nations dwarf gender differences within nations.These types of findings have led Hyde to propose the “gender similarities hypothesis,” which holds that men and women are similar on most psychological variables, counter to the widespread, but largely unsupported, assumption that there are substantial gender differences. Read here the rest of the paper “Gender and Mathematical Ability: The Toll of Biological Determinism” by Richard York and Brett Clark

Feminism of the Anti-Capitalist Left September 4, 2007

1. Feminism and democratic, progressive and revolutionary currents

Feminism must be declined in its plural, feminisms, as women belong to various classes and cultures and have different political reference points. For example, there is a form of feminism in Italy among right-wing parliamentarians and career women, who lay claim to their share of power with the aid of traditional feminist arguments, decry the dynamics of exclusion and marginalization and demand anti-discriminatory measures.

an interview with Judith Butler August 20, 2007

Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler taken by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, London, 1993.

RP: We’d like to begin by asking you where you place your work within the increasingly diverse field of gender studies. Most people associate your recent writings with what has become known as “queer theory”. But the emergence of gay and lesbian studies as a discrete disciplinary phenomenon has problematised the relationship of some of this work to feminism. Do you see yourself primarily as a feminist of as a queer theorist, or do you refuse the choice?

Butler: I would say that I’m a feminist theorist before I’m a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist. My commitments to feminism are probably my primary commitments. Gender Trouble was a critique of compulsory heterosexuality within feminism, and it was feminists that were my intended audience. At the time I wrote the text there was no gay and lesbian studies, as I understood it. When the book came out, the Second Annual Conference of Lesbian and Gay Studies was taking place in the USA, and it got taken up in a way that I could never have anticipated. I remember sitting next to someone at a dinner party, and he said that he was working on queer theory. And I said: What’s queer theory? He looked at me like I was crazy, because he evidently thought that I was a part of this thing called queer theory. But all I knew was that Teresa de Lauretis had published an issue of the journal Differences called “Queer Theory”. I thought it was something she had put together. It certainly never occurred to me that I was a part of queer theory.

I have some problems here, because I think there’s some anti-feminism in queer theory. Also, insofar as some people in queer theory want to claim that the analysis of sexuality can be radically separated from the analysis of gender, I’m very much opposed to them. The new Gay and Lesbian Reader that Routledge have just published begins with a set of articles that make that claim. I think that separation is a big mistake. Catharine MacKinnon’s work sets up such a reductive causal relationship between sexuality and gender that she came to stand for an extreme version of feminism that had to be combatted. But it seems to me that to combat it through a queer theory that dissociates itself from feminism altogether is a massive mistake.