That they are not the level of Kant or Hume that is certain. But that doesn't mean they aren't great philosophers. Kant and Hume, just like Wittgenstein, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Aquinas, etc. these people are unique - they are on an entirely different level. When we speak of philosophers, we don't speak of those very rare few only. Probably nobody in the whole world (whether they be male or female) today is at the same level as those people, and that alone speaks volumes. — Agustino
You're setting the bar unreasonably high. — Michael
This is probably the best critique so far.
My own bias tells me that Murray is not pointing to a curious fact in need of careful investigation and analysis, but attempting to justify the gender disparity as natural and inevitable rather than constructed. — unenlightened
This was my suspicion as well and I think you’re partly right on this one. But I also think that he is mostly spot on regarding innate differences between the genders. Ascribing everything to discrimination is scientifically completely unsound.
He points out a few well-established facts:
(
1) The standard deviation in IQ among men is significant higher than among women, which makes men dominate both ends of the extreme on the spectrum. The results is that pretty much all exceptional geniuses and idiots are men.
(
2) Philosophy is the only humanities major that has an average IQ that is above economists and engineers, while the field is still dominated by men. Also note the clear correlation between IQ and Gender in different majors.
(3) The Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, has been given to 44 people since it originated in 1936. All have been men. (...) In a large sample of mathematically gifted youths, for example, seven times as many males as females scored in the top percentile of the SAT mathematics test. We do not have good test data on the male-female ratio at the top one-hundredth or top one-thousandth of a percentile, where first-rate mathematicians are most likely to be found, but collateral evidence suggests that the male advantage there continues to increase, perhaps exponentially.
Men also consistently outscore women on SAT Maths scores.
(4) Even in the 20th century, women got only 2 percent of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences—a proportion constant for both halves of the century—and 10 percent of the prizes in literature.
(5) Thus, for reasons embedded in the biochemistry and neurophysiology of being female, many women with the cognitive skills for achievement at the highest level also have something else they want to do in life: have a baby. In the arts and sciences, forty is the mean age at which peak accomplishment occurs, preceded by years of intense effort mastering the discipline in question.
(6) I have omitted perhaps the most obvious reason why men and women differ at the highest levels of accomplishment: men take more risks, are more competitive, and are more aggressive than women.
(7) Evolutionary biologists have some theories that feed into an explanation for the disparity. In primitive societies, men did the hunting, which often took them far from home. Males with the ability to recognize landscapes from different orientations and thereby find their way back had a survival advantage. Men who could process trajectories in three dimensions—the trajectory, say, of a spear thrown at an edible mammal—also had a survival advantage. Women did the gathering. Those who could distinguish among complex arrays of vegetation, remembering which were the poisonous plants and which the nourishing ones, also had a survival advantage. Thus the logic for explaining why men should have developed elevated three-dimensional visuospatial skills and women an elevated ability to remember objects and their relative locations—differences that show up in specialized tests today.
(8) One hypothesis for explaining this paradox is that three-dimensional processing absorbs the extra male capacity. In the last few years, magnetic-resonance imaging has refined the evidence for this hypothesis, revealing that parts of the brain’s parietal cortex associated with space perception are proportionally bigger in men than in women.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The links can be found in either the text or
here.