As the editor who published this blog entry, I feel that I should justify it a little bit to those of you who reacted strongly against it. I did not agree with many of the explicit and implicit assessments this blog entry contained, but I decided to publish it nonetheless because I do believe it was written in the spirit that Danny described in his comment. In addition, while there are many possible counter-arguments for his points, the overall message is not devoid of merit. There is a legitimate argument to be made that the distinction between male and female is biological, and for most people, the question is only to what degree; I find this topic to be worthy of debate, and the blog is one medium for such discussion.
I sense that many of you reacted to the seeming implication that the current male dominance of the areas Danny mentioned is an acceptable and biologically inevitable status quo, without accounting for societal factors. However, I do not believe that this precisely reflects what he wrote. Danny took the conclusions of the study on territorial behavior and used them to help explain gender disparities, but he did not explicitly rule out other factors. In fact, his conclusion includes the sentence, "Men and women both pursue success in areas that they are passionate about." This statement rather undermines the notion that innate tendencies are deterministic on the individual level.
Not that an opinion didn't come across, and it would have been better to address some of the points made in comments within the main text in the first place. Perhaps the article too lightly dismissed or downplayed the role of environmental influences, but because these judgments fall within the realm of opinion, I believe that this blog entry, dissociated from my own views, is justified for provoking thought (and, I'm glad to see, discussion) in a non-malicious and ultimately constructive way.
As the editor who published
As the editor who published this blog entry, I feel that I should justify it a little bit to those of you who reacted strongly against it. I did not agree with many of the explicit and implicit assessments this blog entry contained, but I decided to publish it nonetheless because I do believe it was written in the spirit that Danny described in his comment. In addition, while there are many possible counter-arguments for his points, the overall message is not devoid of merit. There is a legitimate argument to be made that the distinction between male and female is biological, and for most people, the question is only to what degree; I find this topic to be worthy of debate, and the blog is one medium for such discussion.
I sense that many of you reacted to the seeming implication that the current male dominance of the areas Danny mentioned is an acceptable and biologically inevitable status quo, without accounting for societal factors. However, I do not believe that this precisely reflects what he wrote. Danny took the conclusions of the study on territorial behavior and used them to help explain gender disparities, but he did not explicitly rule out other factors. In fact, his conclusion includes the sentence, "Men and women both pursue success in areas that they are passionate about." This statement rather undermines the notion that innate tendencies are deterministic on the individual level.
Not that an opinion didn't come across, and it would have been better to address some of the points made in comments within the main text in the first place. Perhaps the article too lightly dismissed or downplayed the role of environmental influences, but because these judgments fall within the realm of opinion, I believe that this blog entry, dissociated from my own views, is justified for provoking thought (and, I'm glad to see, discussion) in a non-malicious and ultimately constructive way.