To start the week, a blast from the past….
This weekend’s “This American Life” episode was a replay of a crowd-favorite dating back 15 years to August 2002, on the subject of testosterone. The whole episode is wonderfully entertaining, but I always especially enjoyed “Act 2” with a transgender man, born as a female, but reporting on the results of undergoing years of testosterone treatments:
I’ve written about it here before because of one brief section that is fascinating (in a non-PC sort of way). I’ll simply re-quote from that earlier posting:
“….After relating a lot of already interesting stories to host Ira Glass about how the change in gender affected him, the interviewee is asked by Ira if there are any other alterations due to testosterone he thinks worth mentioning. The individual responds that after taking testosterone he "became interested in science; I was never interested in science before." To this Ira can't help but chuckle and respond, "NO WAY!" adding that such a response is "setting us back 100 years." The individual goes on to insist that testosterone resulted in "understanding physics in a way I never did before." (…the specific exchange occurs around the 22:30 point of the whole episode)
It is concerning, but also funny, to think of our abilities/skills being so subservient to our biochemistry, even if this is just one lone anecdotal case. Anyway, the entire segment is fascinating and worth a listen (assuming you enjoy the style of “This American Life;” however the part I’m noting above is the only bit that actually relates back to math or science; the rest is mostly social/psychological in nature).
In a quite long interview over at the Edge site a few years ago, Simon Baron-Cohen, a major researcher in this area, had this to say following a question from Marcus du Sautoy about the relationship between tendencies toward math, and human biology/testosterone:
“…you mentioned mathematicians, and I think you're right, that there are these areas of human activity, math is one of them, where we do see very disproportionate sex ratios. My understanding is that in mathematics, at university level, it's about 14 males for every one female sitting in the audience in those lectures. That's a very big difference. And there are other sciences, as we know, which used to be like that but which have changed dramatically. Medicine is a very good example. It used to be male dominated and it's now certainly 50-50, or if anything, it's gone beyond and there are now more female applicants and thankfully, successful applicants. If you look at the audience in medical lectures, the sexes are, if not equally represented, maybe even more women than men. But there remains this puzzle why mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, the so-called STEM subjects, why they still remain very male biased. I’m the first to be open to anything we can do to change the selection processes at university, or change the way we teach science and technology at school level, high school level, to make it more friendly to females, to encourage more women to go into these fields. But there remains a puzzle as to why some sciences are attracting women at very healthy levels, and other sciences, including mathematics, remain much more biased towards males. Whether that's reflecting more than just environmental factors, and something about our biology, is something that I think we need to investigate.”
Controversy continues....
[...much of Baron-Cohen's research, by the way, studies the possible link between high pre-natal testosterone exposure and autism]
[...much of Baron-Cohen's research, by the way, studies the possible link between high pre-natal testosterone exposure and autism]
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