Re: Female coders (was Re: help...)

cynthia gage (cgage@haverford.edu)
Sun, 10 Nov 1996 11:10:51 -0500

I'm just wondering how any of these studies were done in order to avoid
culturally induced gender characteristics and differences. The
experiments studied the strategies used by "boys" and "girls" to "parse
sentenses and meanings they give to words"?...I was alwasys under the
impression that language and grammer and speech WERE culturally induced?
:)
Cynthia

In article <01bbcde6$bd1d3240$169072ce@hammurabi.blarg.net>, "Brandon Van
Every" <vanevery@blarg.net> wrote:

> Mike McCarty <jmccarty@sun1307.spd.dsccc.com> wrote in article
> <55u01s$vv@sun001.spd.dsccc.com>...
> >
> > I'll go beyond this. There have been experiments performed which pretty
> > conclusively show that boys are more active, and more attracted to
> >
> > playing alone or competitively
> > disasembling/designing machinery
> >
> > whereas girls are more attracted to
> >
> > playing together or cooperatively
> > playing with other children
> >
> > This has been done in more than one culture, and in more than one place.
> > One woman has written a book "Genderlects" which pretty conclusively
> > shows that women and men have different outlooks on life, not culturally
> > induced, reflected in the strategies they use to parse sentences and
> > meanings they give to words.
>
> I'll buy that "studies were done," and that they may even be representative
> of particular cultures (USA, for instance.) But as a guy who came a hair
> away from being a Sociocultural Anthropologist, I will not buy your
> cross-cultural conclusions. Very little if anything has ever been "proven"
> in a cross-cultural context. Cross-posted to sci.anthropology to see what
> folks think....
>
> > It seems to be something connected to the way our brains are wired
> > differently.
>
> That's what the "nature" school would have you believe.
>
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Brandon J. Van Every | Free3d: old code never dies! :-)
> | Starter code for GNU Copyleft projects.
> DEC Graphics & Multimedia |
> Windows NT Alpha OpenGL | vanevery@blarg.net www.blarg.net/~vanevery