No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it’s only a question of degree. – W. C. Fields
R.K. asks,
Are all women crazy? I’ve heard this to be true from both sexes, and though I feel it’s a cop-out I was wondering if you thought there might be some truth in it?
The glib answer is that “women are crazy and men are stupid”. Now obviously, that’s an exaggeration, but there is some very real truth in it. The male brain tends to be better at deductive reasoning, while the female tends to be better at inductive reasoning. In other words, men tend to be much better than women at following a logical process and coming to a conclusion via building one fact upon another; this is why men are generally better at math, engineering and other technical subjects. Women, on the other hand, tend to be much better than men at inference, the process of comparing a thing as a whole to other wholes in her experience and determining which prior situation it most closely resembles. The advantage of the male approach is that it allows wholly new solutions to be formed from bits and pieces; the advantage of the female approach is that it allows the solution of problems for which there is insufficient data by comparing them with previous problems which have already been solved. You might say the male brain is more digital, and the female more analog.
But when a man or woman who has not studied the cognitive differences, or a person who believes in “social construction of gender” and therefore denies that those differences exist, considers the thinking of the opposite sex, he or she is apt to be very confused. Inductive reasoning, because it relies on comparison of wholes, tends toward all-or-nothingness; either a woman “gets” the problem right away or she doesn’t get it at all. So imagine Mr. and Mrs. Exemplar trying to solve the same problem; if it matches something in Mrs. Exemplar’s (personal or learned) experience she might come to the solution immediately, while Mr. Exemplar is still putting all the facts together. Her conclusion? “Boy, he sure is stupid”. Meanwhile Mr. Exemplar sees his lady apparently drawing an answer from thin air, with no thought involved; he therefore assumes she must be crazy. This mismatched perception is bad enough if they arrive at the same solution, but it’s multiplied if they arrive at different ones, all the more so because each will insist that his or her solution and means of arriving at it are the only “right” ones.
The reason the “women are crazy” perception is more universal across both sexes is that inductive thinking is far more prone to “garbage in, garbage out” errors than deductive. To a degree, deductive thought is self-correcting; a person who masters it can recognize when there is something wrong or missing with the facts he has been given, and proceed accordingly. In other words, deductive logic, though slower, is less prone to error in the long run; the process is more powerful than the data, and an erroneous conclusion can later be corrected with additional facts. Inductive logic, on the other hand, is critically reliant on its data, and if those data are corrupt the process is liable to produce the sort of garbage we see from neofeminists all the time. Faulty deductive logic tends to lead to incomplete (“stupid”) conclusions, while faulty inductive logic tends to lead to complete but erroneous (“crazy”) ones; if the initial premises from which induction began are irrational, warped or false, the end result can be totally bat-shit insane. And upon exposure to the results of this kind of GIGO cognition nearly all men, and any woman whose initial premises more closely reflect the real world, come to the same conclusion: the woman who has arrived at these bizarre conclusions is “crazy”, though in truth she is simply a victim of her own flawed axioms.
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Hmmmmm. An interesting theory Maggie. There are of course many more and the debate goes on. Here’s one link with additional links I found useful:
http://www.livescience.com/20011-brain-cognition-gender-differences.html
On the subject of women talking more than men, I did a bit of my own research a while back and blogged about it here:
http://amazingwomenrock.com/do-women-really-talk-more-than-men
I seem to remember there being a paper a few years ago suggesting that while the extreme male brain (high in systematizing, low in empathizing) produces autism, the extreme female brain (high in empathizing, low in systematizing) produces psychotic disorders.
Wait, that can’t follow, then there would be NO women who get autism. Its probably the other way around- male brains tend to be more towards the autistic, female more towards the psychotic.
Autism is heavily skewed towards boys (I’ve seen 5:1 diagnostic rates, but those may be old). And autism-male, psychotic-female is what I originally wrote. Empathizing and systemizing are continuous variables; men and women differ on average on both, but there’s nothing inherently stopping a woman being really high in systemizing and really low in empathizing (or the reverse for a man).
Interesting take on it, Maggie! I’m one of those extremely logical men. (IT Security), married to a more-logical-than-most woman, but…as you say, GIGO still happens to her sometimes.
I’m much more logical than most women, but still capable of a fairly high degree of intuition, so I tend to be self-correcting. Of course, nobody’s perfect, but I can eliminate a lot of GIGO-type conclusions that way. Unfortunately, I sometimes outsmart myself and dismiss inductive conclusions that later turn out to be correct!
Tfff. I work with several dozen engineering guys, and they tend to be just as wildly intuitive as me (and my non-engineering sisters). The difference is, that after the wild conclusion, you have to go back and reconstruct the answer logically.
It could just be that engineers tend to be more intuitive then your average Joe, but I suspect that the whole “intuitive vs logical” thing is more just on either side of the line, rather then either side of a field, and that there is a lot of crossover.
Both intuition and logic can be trained into people though (not to start a nature versus nurture argument).
Zen Koans are intended to train intuition just as geometric proofs are intended to train logic.
In that case, though, people should be taught to be adept at using both methods of thinking- there are advantages and disadvantages to both- and the more people can be trained for both, the better.
Buddhist based cultures do teach both, since intuition is the favored form of acquiring spiritual knowledge in Buddhism, but logic is seen as the best way to get through the day to day grind.
Of course, in more traditional Buddhist cultures, guys who are great at intuition often go off to become monks. (Traditional Buddhist culture also allows women to become nuns, but some countries have dropped the female monastic tradition for sexist reasons. Ironically in this case the more tradition based Buddhism had a place for women, but the more modern and novel interpretations exclude them).
Oh, I think you’re right on target there.
It’s just that I get the ‘flashes’ of inductive reasoning fairly often, and then instinctively sanity-check the flash with deductive. I’m a troubleshooter by trade, who does IT security for a living.
My wife’s a reading specialist who has a knack for understanding *why* Johnny or Jenny can’t read. She is usually more deductive than ‘most’ women I’ve observed, but doesn’t automatically sanity-check her ‘flashes of insight’. So, when she’s good, she’s really good, but her thinking fails tend to be epic in proportions. 😀 😀
Now, my 19-year-old daughter is one of those who ends up standing *on* the center line.
Again, I’m not saying that all me or women are at either (as you say) end of the field, but I do agree with Maggie that it’s probably more likely to find males and females on opposite sides of the middle.
Then there is the cynics position, which is that women are all nuts, and that men are no different in that regard.
My Father, who was a professor, expressed the difference in how men and women think in a manner that strikes me as radically different from what you have described. He saw male graduate students making long jumps of reasoning, which he (as their teacher) had to make them go back and fill in with smaller steps to prove their points. Female grad students, by contrast, worked slowly from a to b to c and had to be encouraged to make the jump to x.
I can’t explain the difference in your models, but I believe that both may be valid for certain conditions.
I tend to believe that women are generally more intelligent than men. I haven’t studied the problem-solving process of the two sexes the way you have.
My biggest problem with women is that they ask – nay, demand things that they really don’t want. They want a workplace that is “equal” – and then they demand maternity leave that has absolutely no repercussions on their careers although it has stunningly negative repercussions on the workplace.
They demand that women be allowed in military combat units – and then refuse to serve themselves in such a role. This makes women the BIGGEST “chicken-hawks” on the planet.
Now, the above are just “general” comments. I’ve known a lot of women who seriously had their shit in one sock. I’m reminded of one female Sailor who showed up to do the semi-annual physical readiness test two weeks after she had delivered a new baby boy. When i told her that she had six months – and could extend out to a year before taking the PRT again, she responded … “It was my choice to have a baby and I’m here to do my duty as a Sailor, Master Chief”.
That girl put tears in my eyes – she completed the 1.5 mile run that day in 10 minutes 30 seconds. My own time only bested her by 15 seconds.
But – this was the same girl who, several years later – had her kids taken from her by a Virgina judge who told her … “If you wanted to be a mother – you would not have re-enlisted in the Navy.” So her kids went to the husband who had cheated on her.
The good guys and girls in this society are PENALIZED in order to ensure they behave like the rest of the sheep in this nation. This is why, as a nation, we stand completely fucked right now.
I posted this on Twitter, but one other difference someone sent me that most women I’ve asked say sounds right: “imagine a browser with 2857 tabs open. All the time.”
That browser sounds like me.
Nice article you wrote. I won’t say I’m a very logical thinker, although I like deductive reasoning more than reasoning based on incomplete (the data concerning sex work will always be incomplete anyway) and plausible data. I’m a bit of a philosopher, but I’ve never really paid attention to the kind of reasoning I’ve always used up to now. :p
I am familiar with the GIGO aspect. A couple of my exes were prone to making judgments about strangers based on very little information. They never had a way to contradict these judgments, since the people were strangers, so they assumed they were correct in their judgments. These gave them a very high degree of confidence in their judgments, creating a sort of feedback loop.
Deductive reasoning as you term it does seem to be more of a talent than a teachable skill. High demand for this skill in computer programming careers.
I’ve both taught CS at university and done hiring mentoring for companies. 30yrs now.
Anyway, you’ll find the talent in women but they are generally “different” and you find it in maybe 10% of men. We try to teach because there are more jobs than people with the talent. But it usually doesn’t take.
However, the very highly skilled men at deductive reasoning also struggle now in CS. 25yrs ago the lone code warrior was the norm and those who saw everything as series of steps thrived. But now the projects are too large and require collaboration. And those same highly deductive (popular term now is “spectrum disorder”) get frustrated with their coworkers “irrational” decisions.
Those guys tend not to have relationships. If you can’t get along with the 10% of men who see everything as numbers, good luck with the average lady. 😉
I see you are of the “data is the plural of datum” camp rather than the “data is a mass plural” camp.
I, personally, think of it a mass plural, so it takes me a minuet to get over it when someone uses it the other way.
Wouldn’t that be datum, data, datae? In the sense of singular, plural, mass plural?
Incidentally, there is only one Lt. Cmdr. Data, hence he is singular.
I think one could also make the comparison that the (stereotypical) man is “open-source” and the (stereotypical) woman is “closed-source,” like software. Men will generally point to what has lead them to their conclusion, so that their ideas can be examined by all, and women tend to tell you how their feelings feel through anecdotes and often can’t readily identify why they came to a certain conclusion. Men tend to be proud to lay out their reasoning for someone, women tend to get very angry and defensive (and adopt a victim stance) if you press them for answers on why they do or believe something. It’s easier to see what men have going on in their heads, women are more like patented proprietary software that makes your computer explode if you try to reverse engineer it to see how it works.
Laura, I suddenly want to hug you.
Dear Sailor B, I’m wondering why? Please know I think it’s wonderful you want to and I’m glad to return the favor next time I see you.
Sometimes, when we argue, I get terribly frustrated over your tendency to hop around like a grasshopper on crack and acid from one subject to another. I tend to interpret this as you no longer caring if you’re right or wrong (or if I’m right), but instead you desperately looking for additional things to fight about. And sometimes, that might be what you’re doing, but sometimes you might just be doing some sort of free-association thing my male brain just can’t keep up with.
And then of course I start saying things like, “Yeah, whatever. What we’re talking about is…” And then of course you get frustrated about that.
I don’t know that we can adjust ourselves to each others’ “arguing brain,” but maybe we can be a little less frustrated with each other when you start being terribly female and I start being terribly male.
Oh SNAP! NOW THAT’S a great line!! LMAO!!
Agreed!
I have my doubts that has anything to do with biology and suspect cultural factors. My experience is that creative thinking (sorry, inductive reasoning is something from mathematics and just as rigorous as as deductive thinking) is present in men and women to equal parts. The difference is that men tend to use deductive skills to verify what they came up with before shooting off their mouth, while women are less inhibited. The reason I see is simple: Men are ridiculed no end if they say something stupid, while cultural prejudices let women get away with saying insane things as they are still not considered as rational.
Now, it should also be said that the deductive powers of the average man are not that good. It just takes a bit so see where they are wrong, but usually they are and having it not immediately obvious is actually dangerous.
On the other hand, when I compare the highly intelligent and educated specimen I know, I find no difference in the capabilities of men and women. Talk to a female mathematician, engineer or scientist and you find they are primarily mathematician, engineer or scientist when using their powers of reasoning and gender becomes unimportant. (
Like most things related to human behavior, I expect there is a degree of both. But you right, women are “expected” to be “crazy” whereas men are “expected” to be “logical” and so neither is encouraged to develop the opposing cognitive skill.
Except when they are (female scientists, male musicians), and those people tend to be firmly in the middle of the pack.
Women TEND TO BE and men TEND TO BE; there’s considerable overlap.
Perhaps that might explain why the worst managers I ever worked for was female… but also why the only good one I ever had (unfortunately, by a very wide margin) was also female. The male bosses I had simply seemed mildly mediocre-to-average in comparison. It seemed to me that my male managers only made bad decisions when pressurized into them (for whatever reasons), while some of my (not so good) female managers made bad decisions quite off-the-cuff. I know I’m generalizing here, but since I used to be quite the job-hopper in my working days, I got to see quite a lot of working environments managed by many different types – and I’ve always been struck by the differences in working styles between people of differing genders, and this hit a nerve. Also, as an aside, a lover I once had struggled severely to follow complicated movie plots; every one we watched had to be repeatedly paused while I explained the plot to her (which I didn’t actually mind at all). Yet in a tight spot (and thanks to her wild-streak we had plenty of those) she could display a kind of quick-witted resourcefullness that would probably leave McGyver dumbfounded (not to mention me). The thought that she may be crazy didn’t really occur to me; I just thought she was awesome. Sorry for the trip down memory lane… this article just reminded me of that.