Spatial ability is, of course, traditionally considered to be a "male" ability. If we did things the way you suggest, my superior spatial ability would be irrelevant, because I am female, thus, cannot possibly be wired better in spatial ability than males.
I think you're being sidetracked by an assumption that, if we studied brain wiring, we'd find that everyone with a penis has one kind of brain wiring and everyone with a uterus another but that's not necessarily the case. There's no reason to expect it to be so binary. There could be a complex of wiring diagrams with women more likely to have a, b, and e and men more likely to have c and d. Just as men and women both have both testosterone and estrogen, there are sliding scales.
You and I with our superior spatial ability (yes, that was where I always scored highest when we took those tests in high school) demonstrate that there's a sliding scale. This has always been of particular interest to me because I "score" male in a number of the thinking skills and temperament criteria. I scored a negative number on one of the Myers-Briggs criteria. When I asked how that could be I discovered that they score those things differently for men and women. I was off the chart for women on "thinking" but not for the overall population, thus the negative score.
People definitely do process information differently. Even something as simple and non-gender-related as introversion and extroversion manifests in different learning and communication styles. I spent a chunk of my career facilitating group decision making. People think differently. Sometimes when working with groups you can see clearly male and female patterns but mostly not. I, for one, would like to see more study. I just hate to see the findings popularized in simplistic Mars/Venus frames because that feeds the bigotry. |
