There's a lot of evidence to suggest that boys learn best when taught by men, and girls learn best when taught by women. Male and female brains are very different, and we think differently about problems.

So if your school has 80% women teachers, then the girls are going to do better on average than the boys in that school, which is concerning.

In fact, it seems like each would support the other.

It's the same reason that women excel in technology management roles (while generally being inferior in technical roles because of inadequate training or aptitude, exceptional cases like Marissa Mayer excepted).

Even a woman with average communication/empathy skills relative to other women (emphasis on 'empathy' - because this is what really separates men from women in communication) is often far better at management/planning than 99.99% of male technologists.

Now, naughty kids get 'diagnosed' and given a cool label, get a 'teachers assistant' assigned to them - effectively praised for being naughty.

I agree with your point about women excelling at empathy and communication, but I'd say the movement away from male teachers has also been due to the removal of discipline in schools, and a movement toward empathising with bad behavior rather than correcting it.

I think naturally, when faced with bad behavior women will try to empathize and reason, whereas men will tend to punish/kick into line.

If you empathise with someone, it is harder to cause them discomfort because it causes you discomfort also. Thus, someone with lesser empathy would be better at discipling children.

"I disagree that men are better at disciplining children than women are."

You can't have it both ways, Sarkozy. Which is it?

Any man with the skills needed to perform well in childcare(especially) and teaching jobs are discouraged from taking those jobs, as any woman would 'naturally' be better in such roles (not to mention the significant 'pedo scare' barrier). This is the sort of latent discrimination that forces people away from the jobs they are best suited to.

The sexes have obvious physical differences, as well as obvious mental differences. To deny either of them is stupid.

I'm saying women are better managers because they are less prone to the types of socially tone-deaf interpersonal problems you see lampooned in Dilbert.

In other words, if I had to choose between a male manager who could create a succesful company versus a female manager who knew how to foster a harmonious working environment, I would choose the harmonious working environment over monetary "success" every time.

In the end, what does it matter to me if the company I work for is financially successful or not? On the other hand, if my manager is able to help create an environment that is more pleasant for every involved, that's something I'm interested in and that's where I think women in general are more naturally capable than men.

But to bring it back to the subject, my son's kindergarten was 1/2 staffed by males (we're in Norway). He loved every minute of it.

Okay, that's a cheap shot. I know you don't have any such study. Tell you what, I'll settle for any study demonstrating that the divergence between the mean of all women and the mean of all men is greater than the divergence between individuals of either gender.

In any metric.

Now, why is it that you are entitled to an opinion and he is not?

I have no problem with other people having opinions. I likewise have no problem with publicly disapproving of opinions which I think are socially harmful.

I don't have any illusions about changing a bigot's mind, but I can hope that others will see my disapproval and think that bigotry is just that much less cool.

For example, what would you do if your own opinion (that is, your honest best assessment of what the truth actually was) was an opinion you judged to be socially harmful? Would you continue to hold the opinion, but try to avoid mentioning it? Would you publicly lie about your opinion? Would you express the opinion and expect public disapproval? Would you intentionally try to change your own opinion somehow?

I mean, looking at it logically, thinking that all women want to have children wouldn't be prejudiced if all women actually did want to have children. Would it still be wrong to say so? I can't see how.

I guess if my assessment of the facts were greatly opposed to my values it'd probably imply some more significant cognitive dissonance.

I was merely trying to elucidate the broader point that shaming can be appropriate in the case of "differences of opinion"— after all, bigotry is just the extremity of the belief that one's personal prejudice is well-grounded in fact.

Of course I appreciate that you're willing to discuss this civilly, and I hope you'll forgive the hyperbole.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/abs/nature04...

Come on. There are countless studies that show the biological differences between the sexes and the way their brains work. It's not rocket science.

If you believe in evolution, surely you believe that over time, the female and male brains have developed for different functions. I've never understood why people disbelieve this and try to pretend that the sexes are identical.

I really can't understand how anyone who accepts evolution (Surely most people), but doesn't accept the idea that perhaps the female and male minds have evolved and optimized to different things.

Given that we have obvious and numerous physical differences, it seems terribly unlikely that we have no mental differences. Especially given that physically and internally the sexes brains differ quite a lot (size, weight, number of neurons etc).

For example:

  Number of neocortical neurons (females) = 19.3 billion
  (Pakkenberg, B., Pelvig, D., Marner,L., Bundgaard, M.J.,
  Gundersen, H.J.G., Nyengaard, J.R. and Regeur, L. Aging
  and the human neocortex. Exp. Gerontology, 38:95-99, 2003
  and Pakkenberg, B. and Gundersen, H.J.G. Neocortical
  neuron number in humans: effect of sex and age. J. Comp.
  Neurology, 384:312-320, 1997.)

  Number of neocortical neurons (males) = 22.8 billion
  (Pakkenberg et al., 1997; 2003)

I think that if you disagree with the above, there's no point continuing. It'd be like trying to argue with someone who denies evolution.

I completely get that we should not discriminate UNFAIRLY based on any attribute of anyone. But to deny obvious differences that clearly exist is just silly.

"The following specific differences in behavior are attributable to biological differences between male and female: _____" is a rather different claim from "There exist biological differences between male and female." I believe the former claim is the one being challenged. Disproof of the latter claim, while sufficient to disprove the former, is not strictly necessary.

Since you mentioned spatial awareness, you'll probably like this one. Having both groups play Medal of Honor for only 10 hours total narrowed the spatial gender gap into nonsignificance, with women benefitting much more than men. The benefits were still visible months later, without any instruction to continue playing.

Considering the wildly different toys and games we encourage boys and girls to play from infancy through adolescence, to say that this calls the idea that the spatial gender gap is genetic into question is quite an understatement.

So, uh... got any evidence that it is?

I think we're getting nowhere here. You clearly have an agenda to follow rather than a desire to find out the 'truth'.

I'm also guessing from your comment about toys that you don't have kids yet.

It's totally wild.

It shows that women can 'learn' to get better at spacial awareness. Just like men can 'learn' to get better at communication.

It doesn't "directly contradict" anything.

The general point here is that there is much, much more overlap between the sexes than there is difference between them. That's why although you certainly can make interesting statistical inferences about populations, applying the same statistics on an individual level (this person is a woman, she's probably [whatever]) is very likely to be false and is equivalent to blind prejudice.

Look at page 11. 19 year old women in the 90th percentile are still shorter than 19 year old men in the 50th percentile. Now, while I was never very good at statistics, I'm pretty sure if we had a running bet over who was taller in any random male/female pairing, I would drain your bank account dry.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/abs/nature04...

It's studying adults, so it can't and of course doesn't make any claims about genetics like you're trying to.

I can only find one place with any information about individuals (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/fig_tab/natu...), but according to that one graph the difference among all men is more than twice the difference between the average of all men and the average of all women. Even the cultural implication isn't valuable for making statements about individuals.

Doesn't really look like it answers either of my points.

The second page has a graph of individuals by "empathic concern" (ignoring the brain activity axis, which is what the study is actually demonstrating...)

Note that although women, on average, have higher scores than men (a mean difference of 2 on a scale of 1-20), almost half of the men have scores higher than the female average, and a quarter of the women have scores lower than the male average.

In more intuitive terms, out of this sample of 16 men and 16 women, the 7 most empathic men were more empathic than the 8 least empathic women. If you were trying to guess how empathic someone you meet is based on their sex, you would do slightly better than just flipping a coin. From this you're getting that "women are more empathic"?

Or are you using a slight statistical association to rationalize your cultural prejudice?

http://www.springerlink.com/content/r2k31831780w417w/

On the "Empathy Quotient" test, the average female score is 47 while for males it is 42.

So, no, I'm not using "a slight statistical association to rationalize" either (a) "a cultural prejudice" or (b) "bigotry" (which you unfairly accused me of in an earlier comment). I could just as easily accuse you of denying the weight of the scientific evidence because of misogyny but that would be silly. The fact is, there is room here for reasonable debate and your attempt to paint this issue in black and white is unjustified.

If that study were a hiring situation and you figured that, since "women are more empathic than men", you should only consider the female applicants, you would be tossing out nearly as many qualified applicants as you'd be keeping. It's just not a useful thing to say based on that data.

When you add in the fact that saying "women are more empathic than men" contributes to the broader social condition that empathy is encouraged in women and discouraged in men, and that mean women get a free pass because they're women and caring men can't get a job teaching children because they're men, it becomes a positively damaging thing to say.

And what do you get out of it?

If you have a man and a woman in a room together, it's going to be more or less a toss-up which of them happens to be more suited for a particular task, since what the body of research mostly shows is that, in general, men and women are pretty much the same.

Considering that, it strikes me as disingenuous to say something like "men are better at [x] than women" — which is vague by the most generous reading, outright false by the most literal — when what you really mean is "the mean for [x] among all men is 5% higher than the mean among all women."

I think the reason people don't say that instead is because it's obviously a very weak statement.

1) Any similar argument about women and another profession would instantly be met with cries of sexism.

2) This is a great example of the types of unsubstantiated mass hysteria that seem to be more and more common. I find it really depressing, not least of which because I can't think of a solution.

Regardless of numbers or justification, you're also accepting a form of discrimination that would be much less acceptable for any other situation. Hell, even "I would never get a gay babysitter" would likely provoke more outrage.

The worst part is that I completely understand your argument. When it comes to our children, all bets are off - forget statistics and numbers, if your kid gets hurt and you feel you could have prevented it, no matter how unlikely the event, you'll never forgive yourself for it. That's normal, it's natural - it's also likely to lead to completely irrational behavior, which can easily grow into hysteria. That's what bothers me the most - that in a way it's normal.

The media has such a ridiculously lopsided view of risk, but the general public buy it. They hop in their car to drive to the shop, leave their kids with that weird uncle without a second thought.

But because of media induced hysteria, worry about getting on a plane or leaving their kids with a male nursery assistant.

I'd place the blame firmly with the media, rather than with human nature.

This is how junk science gets peddled. Instead of thinking logically when presented with evidence that doesn't make sense scammers rely on base instincts even though we know its not true.

For example, how many people were lead to believe that vaccines caused autism? Even when the junk science number were statistically small, and eventually found to be false, parents just assume their kids would hit the unlucky lottery and get autism.

The worst thing is the US invented the 24-hour news channel and they have to fill a 24hour slot so they'll pump out whatever junk they can find. This is what Michael Moore was getting at in Bowling for Columbine. Guns aren't bad, people with guns aren't bad, the constant beat of paranoid, locked and loaded, TV viewers is the problem. People die because they feel like they are at general quarters everyday of their lives.

What if all the good ones packed up and left when they were treated like predators-to-be?

It is specifically about lifting the lid on abuse perpetuated by females, and not a "cherry picked" story.

Here's a site that is more numbers focused: http://www.yellodyno.com/html/child_molester_stats.html

Here are some numbers: Nearly all the offenders in sexual assaults reported to law enforcement were male (96%). - Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement, 7/00, NCJ 182990, U.S. Department of Justice

Males are reported to be the abusers in 80-95% of cases -Thoringer, D., et al., 1988

All but 3% of offenders who committed violent crimes against children were male. -BJS Survey of State Prison Inmates, 1991.

The typical offender is male, begins molesting by age 15, engages in a variety of deviant behavior, and molests an average of 117 youngsters, most of whom do not report the offense. -Dr. Gene Abel in a National Institute of Mental Health Study.

What are the chances of my child's teacher (of any gender) being a molester?

The answer to that, as always is: vanishingly low.

So sure, I'm willing to go along with the notion that, in the absurdly improbable case that your child's teacher is a molester, it's probably a man and not a woman.

So? Your child is orders of magnitude more likely to be abused by a known family member than by a stranger or known authority figure. You're proposing that we exclude an entire gender from a legitimate profession because of this? If you're that concerned about this tiny, astronomically improbable occurrence, I suggest you also ban your uncles, aunts, and neighbors from visiting - statistically they pose a far graver threat to your child than any teacher.

This strikes me as a similar attitude to people refusing to be seated at the front of a plane since, in the case of a crash, people in the back are statistically more likely to survive. This paranoia is fueled with the complete ignorance of the fact that the odds of a commercial airliner crashing is ridiculously low.

At least the airline seat paranoid folk aren't harming anyone with their paranoia. Yours however, does.

"In North America, for example, approximately 15% to 25% of women and 5% to 15% of men were sexually abused when they were children.[11][12][13] Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often brothers, fathers, uncles or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as 'friends' of the family, babysitters, or neighbors; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases.[11] Most child sexual abuse is committed by men; studies show that women commit 14% to 40% of offenses reported against boys and 6% of offenses reported against girls.[11][12][14] Most offenders who sexually abuse prepubescent children are pedophiles,[15][16] although some offenders do not meet the clinical diagnosis standards for pedophilia.[17][18]"

If you read my other link there's a study from the UK that notes 20% of studied male daycare workers had a sexual interest in children (maybe selection bias or reporting issues, but no indication that such a problem exists in that data).

And regarding harming someone, I'm an incremental customer. My choice does no more harm than someone else's incremental choice to not fly at all due to "irrational fears" or not solicit a certain neighborhood bar due to "irrational fears".

I just can't look at this data and see what you see. I'm sorry. I really wish I could see things your way. Honestly I do. But I can't seem to find a way to slice the data that gives me the warm fuzzies you have. And at the end of the day I'm not going to place my child in a situation that I'm weary of in order to make other people feel good.

How are you combating the largest source of sexual abuse: i.e., family and friends? And why is that not applicable to your child's education where their risk factors are far lower?

I don't know about you - but I'm not going to ban my neighbors from seeing my child, nor would I give Uncle Bob the stink eye every time he gets near my niece. The reasonable stance in this case seems to be one of vigilance and education - be mindful that it may happen, educate your child to report untoward things, and do your best to vet people close to you.

You do this for your babysitter too. So why not your educators?

Your concerns are valid, but IMHO your reaction is entirely disproportionate. If your stance is proportionate to risk, you wouldn't ever leave your child alone with a family friend, or your own siblings for that matter. It still seems unreasonable to ban an entire gender of educators from your child's life over this.

To be clear, I'm not trying to dismiss your concerns in their entirety (though I do question the weight of these concerns). What seems absurd is that most families fail to address the far larger, far scarier risk factor while devoting all of their attention to a relatively tiny slice of the child abuse pie. It also seems absurd that these same families are willing to throw male educators to the wolves while Sketchy Uncle Bob gets a free pass.

[edit] As an aside:

> "studies show that women commit 14% to 40% of offenses reported against boys"

That's a gapingly wide confidence interval there. What sort of data are we basing this on?

The only male family member I'd leave my child with is my father. I have two sisters, so the sibling angle not so big of a deal. And one brother-in-law who is a crimina ldefense lawyer, so won't stay alone in a room with kids anyways :-)

So maybe in some sense the family structure has made it easy for me to sidestep this potential conundrum.

And I agree about education and such. As the child is older I'd certainly relax things, but a toddler isn't going to know what is going on.

And regarding friends, I don't really have any male friends that I'd be comfortable leaving a toddler with -- even sexual abuse aside.

As children get older this changes, but 0-5 I just don't know if my child were around many men alone. And none regularly.

But I will grant you this... I'm at a more extreme side of the spectrum than most when it comes to risk avoidance in general. Especially compared to the HN crowd.

Now add to this the fact that most men don't have a strong interest in children. But all pedophiles do. So among men who choose to deal with children all day, you have to expect much higher rates of pedophilia than in the general population. If it is an order of magnitude difference, you'd get to 20% pretty easily.

All of that notwithstanding, the best way to protect children seems to me to be to teach them what they should bring up with other adults. Abuse depends on secrecy. The best protection is light. This is much better than tarring 80% with the problems of the remaining 20%. Particularly if you believe, as I do, that it is important for children to have both male and female role models.

Furthermore it seems to me that we're creating our own problem. The more we demonize men who want to deal with children, the more we drive non-pedophiles away from that, then the higher the fraction of those left who are going to be pedophiles.

I understand your decision to react differently based on the data. But I don't agree with it.

I agree with that, and I don't like it. I don't particularly like the position I have. I struggle to take on a different one though.

According to kenjackson's post and data, it's closer to 110 people. This seems to put the real number closer to 0.2% of the population.

That being said, this type of context-less extrapolation can be dangerous.

It should be noted that I started drawing my figures with the assumption that I'd find that the number was hopelessly overinflated. When I got done I could have easily picked other numbers to show that. But I decided to be honest and report the first set of reasonable numbers that I tried.

I don't usually like "studies of studies" because of quotations like this. Its disturbing when the margin is +/-20% difference between the high estimate and the low estimate.

What are the statistics on the number of men who are pedophiles? Better yet, what are the statistics on the number of male teachers (who are screened before they are hired) who are pedophiles?

If there was only one pedophile in the world, and he happened to be male, you could say that 100% of pedophiles are male and so you should never leave a child alone with a man. But that doesn't make sense, does it?

Statistically there was a 7.5% risk he would gas the students (6 million Jews/80 Million Germans)

I can't give you any reassurance like that. I can't say that men with college degrees don't do it. That it hasn't happened in the US. Or has happened at all in the past 10 years or even past week.

There doesn't exist an objective measure, that I know of, that I can use to rationally reduce risk. Now I've left this open, and clearly stated "that I know of".

If you can show me a key piece of statistical evidence that I've missed that will make this clear, I'd be happy to see it. And I will make an effort to avoid Nazi daycare teachers.

The point of the article though is that an unofficial blanket ban on male teachers - in case they are abusers - makes as much sense as a ban on Muslim airline pilots, or on Germans in uniform.

These statistics are also in relation to the total number of molesters in the US population, which if my memory serves me (at work, no desire to look up the specifics on my work connection) is less than .01% of the US population.

That's a pretty small chance of a random male of being an offender, much less so a male teacher.

2. Regarding Mr. Abels quote, I think you'll find that female abusers go unreported more often precisely because of this bias.

3. Do you also avoid black people? Statistically they are much more likely to be criminals. So you only allow your family to be around white people right? Do you feel safer that way?

This is an excellent question. Do I avoid Black people? Honestly, there are some Black people I do avoid. The difference between "Black people" == criminals and male childcare workers == pedophile, is my ability to differentiate when I think those equalities are true in a specific instance.

The majority of crime by Blacks fits into a subset of the Black population that is distinguishable by a variety of factors. Not perfectly (not near perfectly), but close enough that I don't roll through certain areas of Detroit or BMore at 2am. I work with Blacks on the job, and they're no more likely to commit crime than Whites.

I seriously wish the same could be said of pedophiles. Seriously, I'd pay money for that ability. I don't have that ability or insight. If someone else does, more power to them, I'd love to know what you know.

Here's a quote based on their data, "In summary this study found that a sexual interest in children is relatively common among male public sector child care workers".

Here's another study about educators: http://www.taasa.org/library/pdfs/TAASALibrary142.pdf

Choice quote, "The vast majority (96%) of the abusers in our study were males".

But lets be clear, I'm not saying to ban male daycare teachers at all. I'm just saying I won't send my children to one. And I think the numbers make this very clear as to why one might make this decision. Now clearly you don't think those numbers prove anything and that's fine. Like I said in another post, it's a great arbitrage opportunity for you.

You are condoning the ostracism and discrimination of an entire gender from an entire field of occupation, and the best comment you can come up with regarding it is hey, maybe people can get some sweet deals from all the male caretakers who will now be working at slave wages just to find work.

Imagine if we replaced "male" with "black". Would it seem like such a reasonable position then? Would we be okay with condoning the economic exploitation of blacks by encouraging an uneven employment playing field?

So why are we ok with doing this to all men?

This study is mindbogglingly dodgy, if you actually take it seriously I understand your hysteria, but a few thoughts;

1) Basic sanity check, you seriously buy that approximately one in five male workers in public sector child care work diagnose themselves as pedophiles? That's the most absurd up front point that just doesn't stand up to any kind of real world critical thought.

2) The methodology of the study claims that two questions were asked with responses on a likert scale "I am sexually attracted to some children" and "I would have sex with a child if it was certain noone would find out and there would be no punishment" with levels ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. On this seven point scale anything from 4-7 is considered to mean that the person is a pedophile. Children are defined as "before the subject's sixteenth birthday", by this measure someone who was unsure if they found a Britney Spears music video sexually attractive might potentially incriminate themselves as a pedophile.

3) further, the actual responses even by their dodgy methodology doesn't bring up the quoted 20% figure you offer, but these figures; Female childcare workers sexually attracted to some children 2%, Male childcare workers sexually attracted to some children 12%. I would have sex with a child if it was certain noone would find out and there would be no punishment, female 2%, male 4%.

By these methods they actually then come to the conclusion "sexual interest in children is relatively common among male public sector child care workers".

It is for reasons like these that I as a 31 year old male with no children or criminal history of any kind and an otherwise pronounced protective streak, would if walking down a dark street at night seeing a child crying and alone on the corner by themselves, not just keep on walking but move to the other side of the street. It should be terrifying to parents that this is the rational response for otherwise concerned strangers, but I guess that's more your problem than mine, and you can see how we come to that position by persecutory hysterical media such as the cited "study".

However - what proportion of 25year old TAs have a sexual interest in 19year old students? Perhaps we should allow the men to be kindergarten teachers but ban them from being junior professors?

Actually in my new lab we got these nice new offices with big heavy doors. We got 'advised' not to be in a room alone with students, then we got 'advised' by the fire dept that we couldn't wedge the doors open - so much advice for one little physics dept.

It's like saying that one should always walk on the sidewalk because land mines are always planted in soil. Whether or not that's good advise depends very much on how much I expect to encounter land mines on my travels.

But piano teachers and other tutors seem like they'd often be alone one-on-one with a child. I was always dropped off by my parents (or rode my bike across town) for those kinds of things. Do parents today really cart their children around and sit and watch them every second? Geez.

To be clear, in no way am I advocating that paranoia against male piano teachers or tutors is justified.

So rather than trusting your husband to drop your kids off in the SUV and worrying about the gym teacher - you would be safer letting them walk with strangers.

At least, you can't deny that it's possible. In other words, your reasoning is wrong ("So ..."), no matter the actual truth value of your conclusion.

I'll provide a citation for my claims if you provide one for yours. The plural of anecdote is not data.

I'd really appreciate a citation on that.

I don't think the problem is the citations or the data, but rather the viewpoint.

Lets be clear, you don't want citations or data. You want me to change my mind.