Sweet, sexism doesn't exist because experience doesn't happen! Forgot I might be talking to a robot and I must have a repeatable scientific experiment to validate my individual experience. Otherwise it means nothing.
Oh, except those rules for a scientifically valid and repeatable study don't count when he cites it himself:
"The evidence for an inborn, male predisposition for systematizing comes from a single experiment on newborn infants, tested with a single person and object. The person was the report's first author, who surely knew the experimental hypotheses and who, we now learn, may have known the sex of the infants whose attention she elicited. The experiment provides no evidence that the basis of infants' preference, if real, had anything to do with the categorical distinction between the displays. Would infants show the same preferences for other face/object pairs? Would they maintain this preference if low-level properties of the two displays, such as their speed of motion, were equated? One need not object to Baron-Cohen's politics to be less than persuaded by his data."[1] says Elizabeth Spelke[2].
Sad Trombone.
Go validate your sexist culture another way. Evopsych:Psychology::Astrology:Astronomy
And yes, I watched that entire clip. It sucked and wasn't worth the time. It's by a comedian who gets scientists with competing models react to each other's statements. And only the newborn baby one has any bearing on gender vs environment when it comes to women avoiding CS.
I'll include another excerpt below because it's just too good to leave out:
"
More important, Baron-Cohen fails to consider the extensive evidence that has accumulated, over the last thirty years, on infants' developing understanding of object mechanics. Hundreds of well-controlled experiments reveal no male advantage for perceiving objects or learning about mechanical systems. In most studies, male and female infants are found to discover the same things at the same times. Both males and females come to see the complete shapes of partly hidden objects under the same conditions and at the same ages. They figure out how objects support one another, through the same series of steps. They reach for objects by extrapolating their motions, with equal accuracy. They make the same errors when they search for hidden objects, and they get over those errors at the same time. Sometimes female infants have an edge: In experiments by Laura Kotovsky and Renee Baillargeon, for example, females start to learn about the relation between force and acceleration (the harder a stationary object is hit, the further it goes) a month earlier than males do. Males catch up, however: by 6 1/2 months, you can't tell them apart."
"Whatever the newborn infants in Baron-Cohen's experiment were doing, the male and female participants in three decades of infant research have followed a common path, engaging with objects and people. Infants don't choose whether to systematize or empathize; they do both, and so do we all. Baron-Cohen's categories may seem as quaint as left and right brains by the time his newborn subjects are old enough to read about them."
Oh, except those rules for a scientifically valid and repeatable study don't count when he cites it himself:
"The evidence for an inborn, male predisposition for systematizing comes from a single experiment on newborn infants, tested with a single person and object. The person was the report's first author, who surely knew the experimental hypotheses and who, we now learn, may have known the sex of the infants whose attention she elicited. The experiment provides no evidence that the basis of infants' preference, if real, had anything to do with the categorical distinction between the displays. Would infants show the same preferences for other face/object pairs? Would they maintain this preference if low-level properties of the two displays, such as their speed of motion, were equated? One need not object to Baron-Cohen's politics to be less than persuaded by his data."[1] says Elizabeth Spelke[2].
Sad Trombone.
Go validate your sexist culture another way. Evopsych:Psychology::Astrology:Astronomy
And yes, I watched that entire clip. It sucked and wasn't worth the time. It's by a comedian who gets scientists with competing models react to each other's statements. And only the newborn baby one has any bearing on gender vs environment when it comes to women avoiding CS.
I'll include another excerpt below because it's just too good to leave out:
" More important, Baron-Cohen fails to consider the extensive evidence that has accumulated, over the last thirty years, on infants' developing understanding of object mechanics. Hundreds of well-controlled experiments reveal no male advantage for perceiving objects or learning about mechanical systems. In most studies, male and female infants are found to discover the same things at the same times. Both males and females come to see the complete shapes of partly hidden objects under the same conditions and at the same ages. They figure out how objects support one another, through the same series of steps. They reach for objects by extrapolating their motions, with equal accuracy. They make the same errors when they search for hidden objects, and they get over those errors at the same time. Sometimes female infants have an edge: In experiments by Laura Kotovsky and Renee Baillargeon, for example, females start to learn about the relation between force and acceleration (the harder a stationary object is hit, the further it goes) a month earlier than males do. Males catch up, however: by 6 1/2 months, you can't tell them apart."
"Whatever the newborn infants in Baron-Cohen's experiment were doing, the male and female participants in three decades of infant research have followed a common path, engaging with objects and people. Infants don't choose whether to systematize or empathize; they do both, and so do we all. Baron-Cohen's categories may seem as quaint as left and right brains by the time his newborn subjects are old enough to read about them."
[1] More at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge158.html (Search for her name as there are a lot of people there tearing Simon Baren-Cohen a new one.)
[2] Her Bio http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/index.html?spelke.html