Green | July 22, 2008 | 16 comments

Women are bitches and guys are pigs...

source: http://bitchmagazine.org/article/mad-science

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jade_azul16
British scientists have uncovered the truth behind one of modern culture’s greatest mysteries: why little girls play with pink toys. Is it because toy companies flood whole store aisles with the color? Or because well-meaning relatives shower girl babies with pink blankets and clothing? Nope. According to the men in lab coats, it’s purely biological.

Apparently, women are hardwired to like pink because our cavewoman foremothers spent their days gathering red leaves and berries amongst the trees while their husbands were out hunting. Later, women needed to notice red-faced babies and blushing boyfriends. And why do men like blue? Because it’s the color of the sky.

This evolutionary just-so story takes up three pages of a 2007 issue of Current Biology. To back up the assertion that pink is a universal girly preference worth examining, the authors refer to a 1985 study finding that little girls use more pink and red crayons in their drawings than little boys do.

Dig further, however, and the story completely falls apart. British women do prefer pink, but the author’s claim of a “robust, cross-cultural sex difference” turns out to be neither. The scientists compared British natives with Chinese immigrants to Britain, and glossed over the differences. For example: The girliest color in the British results, a purplish-pink, was in fact the Chinese men’s favorite.

Nowhere do scientific findings get more mangled than when they’re about the differences between men and women. According to the science pages, women aren’t just biologically hardwired to prefer pink to blue. We’re also predisposed to backstab one another in the workplace, cry in the boardroom, and have both lower iqs and less of a sense of humor than men.

Some misleading stories come from bad science, where the study authors’ conclusions aren’t supported by their own data. Others are well-conducted studies whose conclusions mutate upon contact with the mainstream media. Newspapers and websites are prone to playing fast and loose with their reports on studies, often neglecting to reveal salient facts about a study’s sample group or methodology.

The fact is that science articles aren’t designed to be read by non-scientists. College and grad students in the sciences are trained in how to do it: They review papers and discuss them in journal clubs; learn how to question methodologies (Is that sample really big enough? Was that the right test to use?); and learn how to be critical of authors’ interpretations (Do the results really mean what they say they mean?). Students also know to look at context for each study, looking up previous papers on the subject, reviewing the authors’ previous work, and searching out any evidence of bias that might color a study’s findings

< I read this article a while ago and did not notice how long it was until i printed it because i devoured it. to all my fellow girls out there, read and remember the next time a crappy article surfaces explaining, scientifically of course, the differences between the sexes >
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    Green,   Earth and Science,   Science,   Sex and Love
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16 comments // Women are bitches and guys are pigs...

  • CarlosIsDown
  • Wetdog
    • 0
      Wetdog  

    • Toys companies make pink toys for girls, because that is what sells the most. People see pink toys for little girls all over the place because that is what the toy companies make, and decide that little girls must like pink, so they buy pink toys, so the toy companies have sold more pink toys, so the toy companies make MORE pink toys, so people see all the new pink toys, and decide that little girls REALLY REALLY LIKE pink, so they buy more toys, so the toy companies sell more pink toys, so they make EVERYTHING pink, so someone asks little girls if they like pink, little girls like to get toys, toys are pink, so OF COARSE little girls like pink, the pinker the better, especially if they get MORE pink toys.............................so the toy companies make MORE toys with MORE pink on them.............................................

      Little boys like red and camo, so the toy companies make red and camo toys for boys, so.............................etc.

      It's all very scientific, but it has nothing to do with biology...............................................it's called marketing.

    • 3 years ago
  • petarro
  • seanalyn
    • 0
      seanalyn  

    • i hated pink when i was a little girl (although now i love it...maybe i was a boy until i turned 21 or something).

      scientists can speculate all they want...but its all about gendering.

    • 3 years ago
  • SuperLayne
  • Screaming4Change
    • 0
      Screaming4Change  

    • I think it is important to look at any scientific study with some skepticism. Scientists, like all people, have underlying selfish motivations that even they may not recognize.

    • 3 years ago
  • PixieStik
  • jade_azul16
  • renbyrd
    • 0
      renbyrd  

    • Back in the day when I was a marketing major, I learned a lot about generalized social behavior for target audiences. When finding the psychographics for the intended audience, I did tend to use these generalizations to help tweak the campaign to better fit the targets. It is very important to realize these findings were very generalized and in no way indicative of "scientifically-proven" results. They were only used to help predict behaviors in certain situations. And just like in statistics, there is always a chance of exceptions.

    • 3 years ago
  • bluestranger
    • 0
      bluestranger  

    • Who would want men and women to be the same? There is no person who fits one mold, male or female. The world would be a pretty dull place if people did fall into neat little categories. One more issue to divide us, thats all we need.

    • 3 years ago
  • huntre
    • 0
      huntre  

    • So...if I like pink and blue equally or boars with short tempers, does that make me...um..."Bi"?
      I've much to learn about Venus and Mars.

    • 3 years ago
  • Amber_LaStrega
  • jade_azul16
  • Brendan_M
    • Brendan_M  
    • This comment was removed as a violation of community guidelines.
  • jade_azul16
  • jade_azul16
  • jade_azul16
  • jade_azul16
  • Vierotchka
  • WriterWriter
    • 0
      WriterWriter  
    • Brendan_M:

      Really? Women drivers are terrible?

      That must be why men pay much higher insurance premiums... or is it because men are risk takers and demonstrably poor drivers, much more often involved in accidents and motor vehicle deaths, much more likely to drink and drive; much more likely to die in a car crash; men are road hogs who use their vehicle to demonstrate the 'manlihood' although those demonstrations instantly prove they're not men, because real men never show off....

      Yeah. The stats totally support that women are poor drivers...

    • 3 years ago
  • JanaPokana
    • 0
      JanaPokana  

    • Love this post! There is nothing worse than insultingly reductive biologistic explanations of sexual difference and unfortunately, there are too many of them!

    • 3 years ago
  • jade_azul16
  • jade_azul16
    • 0
      jade_azul16  

    • Journalists looking for a quick story, however, do little such research. And in an age where news sites, wire services, and blogs pick up stories with lightning-fast speed, bad research gets around. When London’s Sunday Times reported on a 2007 study claiming that men get dumber in the presence of blond women, the paper got the name of the journal wrong, citing the Journal of Experimental Psychology rather than the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Nearly every subsequent news article repeated the error because they were content to simply reword the Times’ version of the story rather than finding and discussing the study itself.

      The Times reported that blond-exposed subjects “mimic the unconscious stereotype of the dumb blonde.” But that’s not exactly what the study tested. Rather, subjects—most of them female—fared slightly worse on online trivia quizzes after rating hair color (is she a blond, brunet, or redhead?) on pictures of beauty queens. You could just as easily say that beauty queens make people dumb, or photos of dazzling smiles make people dumb. It seems this study made the news mostly because it could be illustrated with photos of Marilyn Monroe and filled out with dopey quotes from blond models and actresses, as well as blond jokes from the Times itself.

      Ben Goldacre, who writes the “Bad Science” column for the UK’s Guardian, speculates that science stories come in three varieties: the wacky story, the breakthrough story, and the scare story. Most widely reported studies on gender seem to fall into the wacky category—the supposed innate preference for pink is one of them—and their media strength is that they tend to support existing stereotypes of women, reassuring readers that social stereotypes do, in fact, reflect reality.

      We can’t put all the blame on mainstream media, of course. Scientists are part of the same culture as the rest of us, and they too have biases that shape their hypotheses and interpretations. The scientific community can also be as fad-driven as popular culture, creating a climate in which many researchers simultaneously geek out over one specific theory while competing ideas get lost or abandoned. So let’s learn how to read between the lines of these dubious articles. Next time you see an article reporting that women are happiest when they’re picking up their man’s dirty socks, try asking these questions:

    • 3 years ago
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