Laura: Should I have explained it in terms of your being Jewish? Geometry is more about logic and symbols, what the WAIT calls “Verbal” intelligence, than it is about visuospatial intelligence (which may be related to why its on the SAT). Does anyone think that its significantly less common for women to be competent sketch artists than for men to be? That honestly never occurred to me. But hey, you are a med student; how good are you at identifying expected drug-ligand interactions based on molecular shapes compared to similarly trained men (preferably gentile men) who are your approximate equals (have you met any?) at anagrams or at writing papers? If the answer is “quite, thank you” then I was wrong in my attribution to you of strong verbal relative to visuospatial skills. You know your abilities better than I do. Even in that case I think my comment above still stands. It just isn’t an insult to claim that two people differ in their relative strengths, at least so long as those strengths are socially held in approximately equal regard. Why should this be different for groups of people?
I definitely do think that it could be an insult to claim that people or groups differ in relative strengths if the strengths in question are NOT held in similar regard, and I am aware that this is a real tendency. It is also a real and unfortunate fact that the same strengths can be socially held in high regard when held by members of one gender (almost always male) and in low regard in the other gender (almost always female). Really though, that is not plausibly what is going on here. Verbal abilities are held in MUCH higher regard in our society than visuospatial abilities. If anything, the visuospatial tasks are included in non-military IQ tests partly as a habitual carry-over from a time when visuospatial abilities were more useful and more highly regarded, partly for the sake of including a wide variety of tasks and partly for the sake of inflating male IQs to equal those of women.
Laura: Should I have explained it in terms of your being Jewish? Geometry is more about logic and symbols, what the WAIT calls “Verbal” intelligence, than it is about visuospatial intelligence (which may be related to why its on the SAT). Does anyone think that its significantly less common for women to be competent sketch artists than for men to be? That honestly never occurred to me. But hey, you are a med student; how good are you at identifying expected drug-ligand interactions based on molecular shapes compared to similarly trained men (preferably gentile men) who are your approximate equals (have you met any?) at anagrams or at writing papers? If the answer is “quite, thank you” then I was wrong in my attribution to you of strong verbal relative to visuospatial skills. You know your abilities better than I do. Even in that case I think my comment above still stands. It just isn’t an insult to claim that two people differ in their relative strengths, at least so long as those strengths are socially held in approximately equal regard. Why should this be different for groups of people?
I definitely do think that it could be an insult to claim that people or groups differ in relative strengths if the strengths in question are NOT held in similar regard, and I am aware that this is a real tendency. It is also a real and unfortunate fact that the same strengths can be socially held in high regard when held by members of one gender (almost always male) and in low regard in the other gender (almost always female). Really though, that is not plausibly what is going on here. Verbal abilities are held in MUCH higher regard in our society than visuospatial abilities. If anything, the visuospatial tasks are included in non-military IQ tests partly as a habitual carry-over from a time when visuospatial abilities were more useful and more highly regarded, partly for the sake of including a wide variety of tasks and partly for the sake of inflating male IQs to equal those of women.