Rady School of Management, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Sep 6;108(36):14786-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1015182108. Epub 2011 Aug 29.
Women remain significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology workforce. Some have argued that spatial ability differences, which represent the most persistent gender differences in the cognitive literature, are partly responsible for this gap(.) The underlying forces at work shaping the observed spatial ability differences revolve naturally around the relative roles of nature and nurture. Although these forces remain among the most hotly debated in all of the sciences, the evidence for nurture is tenuous, because it is difficult to compare gender differences among biologically similar groups with distinct nurture. In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society. We also show that about one-third of the effect can be explained by differences in education. Given that none of our participants have experience with puzzle solving and that villagers from both societies have the same means of subsistence and shared genetic background, we argue that these results show the role of nurture in the gender gap in cognitive abilities.
女性在科学、工程和技术领域的代表性仍然严重不足。有人认为，空间能力差异是认知文献中最持久的性别差异之一，这在一定程度上导致了这种差距。形成观察到的空间能力差异的潜在力量自然围绕着先天和后天的相对作用。尽管这些力量仍然是所有科学中最激烈争论的话题之一，但后天的证据是脆弱的，因为很难比较具有明显后天因素的生物相似群体之间的性别差异。在这项研究中，我们使用了一项涉及近 1300 名参与者的大规模激励实验，表明通过解决谜题的时间衡量的空间能力性别差距，在我们从父系社会转变为毗邻的母系社会时就会消失。我们还表明，这种影响的约三分之一可以用教育差异来解释。鉴于我们的参与者都没有解决谜题的经验，而且来自两个社会的村民都有相同的谋生手段和共同的遗传背景，我们认为这些结果表明了后天在认知能力性别差距中的作用。
