trends

This is a synopsis of major works on the psychology and development of gifted women, summarized from chapter 5 of Smart Girls.

-There were an abundance of negative steriotypes about gifted children in the early 1900s. Terman studies (1921-1922) of the top 1% of students in some California school districts as sorted by the stanford-binet IQ test revealed above average physical and social development and slightly lower grades than expected.

-Kaufmann presidential scholars study (1981 and 1986) discovered that in the extrordanarily gifted sample she studied, women were less likely to have married or had children than their less gifted counterparts, and that they were still underpaid compared to the men. She also learned that those who had mentors were paid as well as the men.

-The Illinois valedictorian project (Arnold 1994) showed a steady attrition of female subjects starting in the sophmore year of college, with a severe decrease in intellectual self-esteem. This decrease did not show up in male subjects despite identical academic achievement. Over the same period, female subjects became very concerned with combining family and career, and for this reason began dropping out of academically challenging programs; males did not. Most of the females intended to interrupt their education and/or careers for childrearing, and the males did not. Career status ten years after graduation, for female subjects, was largely dependent on “values surrounding career and family combinations, as well as willingness to interupt career plans.”

-The Groth vocational development study (1969) discovered that gifted girls developed an intense desire for affection and love around the age of fourteen, which continued until the age of 40—at which point “self-esteem regained importance.” The gifted males in the study, on the other hand, “tended to maintain strong interests in achievement throughout adolescence and adulthood, into retirement age.” Later research has confirmed that gifted females tend experience more need for achievement during specific critical periods. (Reis 1996)

-Brown and Gilligan (1992) found that while younger girls (primary school) were often outspoken and opinionated, by the teen years many of the same individuals had lost confidence in their own perspectives; their communication became filled with qualifiers, pauses, and especially the phrase “I don't know.” This was found to be associated with “learning to be nice,” and “hiding opinions and feelings which they considered possibly hurtful to others.”

-In 1990, Holland and Eisenheart found that among their sample of high achieving female college students with serious intentions towards having a career, “less than 25% of their activities were directed towards schoolwork or career. . . the dominant topic of conversations between participants and their peers was relationships with men. Even talk about other women centered around those women's ties to men.” Confirming earlier research, they also found that while social status and prestiege for men were centered around achievement, social status and prestiege for women were centered around relationships with men. The women in the study generally downsized their original career goals, shifting to less challenging majors.

-Card, Steele, and Abales (1980), devised a metric for comparing the level of “achievement potential” (early achievement and expectations) with the level of it's realization. They found that in all socio-economic groups men had a better “potential”/”achievement” ratio than women—and that in the group with the highest achievement potential, women fell the furthest behind men. These results have been confirmed by more recent studies (Loprest, 1992).

-In 1979, Rodenstein and Glickhauf-Huges defined their terms and then categorized subjects as career focused, homemakers, or integrators. They found that the career focused subjects had more scientific interests, and homemakers had more social ones, with integrators falling between. All had had parental support for their choices, but the career focused were the most likely to have ignored both positive and negative feedback from parents. Perhaps most importantly, integrators were as satisfied with their careers as career focused women, and as satisfied with their roles as wives and mothers as homemakers.

A question for the missionaries

The Fundamental Attribution Error happens (all them time) when people attribute poor behavior to the fundamentally bad nature of the people who are behaving poorly--when in fact, it is a matter of their choices and especially circumstances.

We know that poor behavior is significantly a function of circumstance because of evidence from trials, like the Milgram Experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

As far as I'm aware, there are only two reasonable interpretations of said evidence. We can decide that virtually all people are fundamentally bad, or we can decide that virtually all people are fundamentally malleable. I believe that people are fundamentally malleable.

If we accept this premise (and you're welcome to debate it with me), we come swiftly to the conclusion that the circumstances in which people are placed, circumstances shaped by our societal institutions, are of paramount importance.


Having laid this groundwork, I now pose a question which applies to any conservative (/"conservative"?) form of Christianity. Research has shown that three greatest predictive factors for how frequently rape happens in a given society are:

-Separation of genders
-Level of power women hold
-General level of interpersonal violence.

Therefore, why would God--presuming there is a God, who desires a world where the occurrence of rape is minimized, within the constraint of preserving human agency--set up organizations and social structures in which genders are segregated and women are prohibited from holding primary power positions?

More Zizek

"The perplexing fact about the "terrorist" attacks is that they do not fit our standard opposition of evil as egotism or disregard for the common good, and good as the spirit of and actual readiness for sacrifice in the name of some higher cause. Terrorists cannot but appear as something akin to Milton's Satan with his "Evil, be thou my Good": While they pursue what appear to us to be evil goals with evil means, the very form of their activity meets the highest standard of the good. The resolution of this enigma isn't difficult and was already known to Rousseau. Egotism, or the concern for one's well-being, is not opposed to the common good, since altruistic norms can easily be deduced from egotist concerns. Individualism versus communitarianism, utilitarianism versus the assertion of universal norms, are false oppositions since the two opposed options amount to the same result. The critics who complain how, in today's hedonistic-egoistic society, true values are lacking totally miss the point. The true opposite of egoist self-love is not altruism, a concern for the common good, but envy, ressentiment, which makes me act against my own interests. The true evil, which is the death drive, involves self-sabotage. It makes us act against our own interests."

"Rawls thus proposes a terrifying model of a society in which hierarchy is directly legitimised in natural properties, thereby missing the simple lesson an anecdote about a Slovene pesant makes palpably clear. The peasant is given a choice by a good witch. She will either give him one cow and his neighbor two cows, or she'll take one cow from him and two from his neighbor. The peasant immediately chooses the second option. Gore Vidal demonstrates the point succinctly: "It is not enough for me to win--the other must loose." The catch of envy/ressentment is that it not only endorses the zero-sum game principle where my victory is the other's loss. It also implies a gap between the two, which is not the positive gap (we can all win with no losers at all_ but a negative one. If I have to choose between my gain and my opponent's loss, I prefer the opponent's loss, even if it means a loss to me. It is as if my eventual gain from my opponent's loss functions as a kind of pathological element that stains the purity of my victory."

(from Violence.)

anything to dance like water

In response to this.


I find it a frustrating when people say, "I took a dance class, but I'm not any good." We wouldn't expect to have decent handwriting after studying it a couple hours a week for a year, but somehow dance is supposed to be different.


I have a theory about why this is.

Grace is when you belong in your body--when the conscious you and the physical you--all of it, not just brain and eyes and hands--are one. It lives in our breath, which acts on whole body movement, reflective of emotion and subject to conscious control.

So we can all Feel grace--feel how it's supposed to be, in our own breath and bones. When we hear that music on the street, our lungs and hearts are already responding, sending messages out about that Supposed To Be, but somehow the limbs and shoulders and hips have been left behind. . . because we've taught them how to sit still in class, but never how to move again. Busy with our brains and hands, we never taught our bodies how to write.


If you are serious about grace, start with two years of yoga and ballet, focusing on technique and breath. At maybe six months in, add hip hop or African, and movement analysis--focusing on Head-tail.

After two years you will have begun. :)


A favorite dancer, of late: here.
Photo is from here.

control freak

I don't think of myself as the kind of person who constantly wastes herself on petty arguments, but possibly I am. This comes up because I often hurt people badly without understanding how or why. Lately, attempting to approach such an insoluble problem, I've noticed a definite common thread: boundaries.

Of course, basically everything about human interaction can be boiled down to boundaries if we aim for it. These are the questions that try everyone; what's mine and what's yours? What do we have the right to do to each other? Perhaps most essentially, what is the just way to negotiate the grey overlap of our conflicting interests?*

I was mulling over this problem in the library today--trying, as I often do, to find something relevant from somebody else who had already thought it over. Since I was looking for a personal psychological level (instead of, say, just war theory), the best I could find was an unexceptional self-help book called "The control freak." Browsing, I came upon this: someone is a control freak whenever they care about the topic at hand more than anybody else involved does.

There's an important insight here, but I have to disagree with the formulation. Of course differing values have to be factored into the equation--but the way in which one asserts a greater attachment to a given outcome can be right or wrong. Perhaps, ultimately, whoever wants it more will win--but we don't all have the same threshold of desire that will push us into some invasive, obnoxious, or questionably ethical realm of tactics.

In the realm of personal relationships, there's always got to be some agreement about what's fair--about what actions are called for by given circumstances, by given levels of desire. For whatever reason, it seems that I'm blind to any number of these social agreements which make things possible.

I want rules to be fair; I want language to be precise; I want authority figures (and others, but especially anyone with power over me) to understand me, respect me, and make sense. These are not usually separate problems. In general, people do not care very much that language be precise, and as long as they are not effected personally very much, they are willing to accept rules that are not fair.

From my end, I often don't understand what is supposed to be embarrassing. I often don't understand the nuances of social grace, that protector of boundaries which keeps people safe, and I really don't understand people's deep attachment to the status quo.


All there is to do, really, is keep watching, reading, trying to figure out where everybody stands. . . and maybe it's more important that I understand the rules than it is for most people--because ultimately, in almost all situations, I'm going to be the one at the table who cares more than anybody else.




*Or put differently, the entire question of ethics is a question of boundaries.