valentinite: Ray from Delta and the Bannermen (kick ass take names)
valentinite ([personal profile] valentinite) wrote2008-07-07 12:49 pm

Carol Gilligan can't explain me

Completely unrelated, Slate (which I don't generally read, but thought this was worth linking) has a nice round-up of why almost every piece of pop-culture fluff on "why men and women are different" is complete rubbish.

http://www.slate.com/id/2194486/

It's mostly based on some statistical meta-analysis, and you have to dive into some of the links to see the real data, but it's all pretty well explained. (Well, I've taken classes in experimental design and meta-analysis, but I think everything linked is lay-accessible if one is willing to read carefully.)

(The reason for my subject line is simple; for 9 years, I attended one of the schools that Carol Gilligan studied for her big work on "why girls learn differently". If I'd started at that school a year earlier, I'd have been in her data set, mucking with her experimental findings. Alas, I was not.)