Hierarchical differences: Female academics less likely to cross rank in collaboration, study finds

women were supposed to be the cooperative sex... like usual the feminists were either lying or just wrong

(h/t CHSommers)Women of different social or professional “ranks” within academic departments collaborate less than men do, according to a new Harvard study, suggesting that female full professors prefer to work on academic papers with other female full professors rather than assistant professors. When the pool was narrowed to women of the same rank, collaboration was equal to that of men.

The study’s authors are Joyce Benenson, an associate of Harvard’s Human Evolutionary Biology Department and a professor of psychology at Emmanuel College; Richard Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology; and Henry Markovits, a professor of psychology at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The work was described in a paper published March 3 in Current Biology.

Benenson and Wrangham have been pursuing parallel lines of research over a number of years with both children and chimpanzees. Their studies demonstrate that males are more likely to interact in large groups consisting of various ranks, whereas females form one-on-one, exclusive relationships with equals. It seemed that the findings would translate into different forms of cooperation in actual organizations, but the idea had never been tested because of the difficulty involved in establishing objective measures of cooperation.

“The question we wanted to examine was: Do men or women cooperate differently with members of their own sex?” Wrangham said. “The conventional wisdom is that women cooperate more easily, but when you look at how armies or sports teams function, there is evidence that men are better at cooperating in some ways.”

Benenson and Wrangham settled on co-authored academic papers as an objective measure of cooperation, and began by identifying 50 institutions from across the United States and Canada with at least two male and female full professors and two male and female assistant professors in their psychology departments. Researchers then identified all articles written by senior faculty from 2008 to 2012, and recorded how often within the same department senior faculty worked with other senior faculty of the same sex, and how often senior faculty worked with junior faculty of the same sex.

While the research focused on the world of higher education, lead author Benenson said she first became interested in differences between how men and women cooperate during her work with children.

“When I studied young children, I noticed that boys were typically interacting in groups, and girls tended to focus on one-on-one relationships,” said Benenson, who discusses these findings in her new book, “Warriors and Worriers.”

“There is even evidence that these differences exist in 6-month-olds — but you can see it with the naked eye by about 5 or 6 years old, where boys form these large, loose groups, and girls tend to pair off into more intense, close friendships.”

What makes the differences particularly provocative, Benenson said, is that chimpanzees organize their relationships in nearly identical ways.

“Chimpanzee males usually have another individual they’re very close with, and they may constantly battle for dominance, but they also have a larger, loose group of allies,” Benenson said. “When it comes to defeating other groups, everybody bands together. I would argue that females don’t have that biological inclination, and they don’t have the practice.”

That’s not to suggest women are inherently flawed when it comes to cooperation.

In fact, Benenson said, women are often thought of as being more egalitarian than men. “But there’s a flip side no one thinks about, which is: What happens when they’re with someone who isn’t the same rank?”

While the study offers evidence that women, in some situations, may not collaborate as often as men, Wrangham made it a point to emphasize the host of unanswered questions behind those differences.

“There is cross-cultural evidence for this phenomenon, you see it in early development, and in one of our closest relatives,” said Wrangham. “That pushes us into thinking that there is a strong biological influence here, but we would never suggest this is impervious to environmental and cultural influences as well.

“Nevertheless these are the kinds of fascinating questions about fundamental sex differences in social relationships that would be tremendously important to recognize if you want to change the way in which women’s access to higher ranks happens,” he added. “What we need to know, now that we have recognized these patterns, is what can we do to ameliorate them?”

Major new study from Cambridge University just out: male and female brains are different.PC feminists won't like it

(Cambridge)(h/t CHSummers) New study examines thousands of brains from two decades of research to reveal differences between male and female brain structure.

For the first time we can look across the vast literature and confirm that brain size and structure are different in males and females

Amber Ruigrok

Reviewing over 20 years of neuroscience research into sex differences in brain structure, a Cambridge University team has conducted the first meta-analysis of the evidence, published this week in the prestigious journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 

The team, led by doctoral candidate Amber Ruigrok and Professors John Suckling and Simon Baron-Cohen in the Department of Psychiatry, performed a quantitative review of the brain imaging literature testing overall sex differences in total and regional brain volumes. They searched all articles published between 1990 and 2013. A total of 126 articles were included in the study, covering brains from individuals as young as birth to 80 years old.

They found that males on average have larger total brain volumes than women (by 8-13%). On average, males had larger absolute volumes than females in the intracranial space (12%; >14,000 brains), total brain (11%; 2,523 brains), cerebrum (10%; 1,851 brains), grey matter (9%; 7,934 brains), white matter (13%; 7,515 brains), regions filled with cerebrospinal fluid (11.5%; 4,484 brains), and cerebellum (9%; 1,842 brains). Looking more closely, differences in volume between the sexes were located in several regions. These included parts of the limbic system, and the language system.

Specifically, males on average had larger volumes and higher tissue densities in the left amygdala, hippocampus, insular cortex, putamen; higher densities in the right VI lobe of the cerebellum and in the left claustrum; and larger volumes in the bilateral anterior parahippocampal gyri, posterior cingulate gyri, precuneus, temporal poles, and cerebellum, areas in the left posterior and anterior cingulate gyri, and in the right amygdala, hippocampus, and putamen.

By contrast, females on average had higher density in the left frontal pole, and larger volumes in the right frontal pole, inferior and middle frontal gyri, pars triangularis, planum temporale/parietal operculum, anterior cingulate gyrus, insular cortex, and Heschl’s gyrus; bilateral thalami and precuneus; the left parahippocampal gyrus, and lateral occipital cortex.

The results highlight an asymmetric effect of sex on the developing brain. Amber Ruigrok, who carried out the study as part of her PhD, said: “For the first time we can look across the vast literature and confirm that brain size and structure are different in males and females. We should no longer ignore sex in neuroscience research, especially when investigating psychiatric conditions that are more prevalent in either males or females.”

Professor Suckling added: “The sex differences in the limbic system include areas often implicated in psychiatric conditions with biased sex ratios such as autism, schizophrenia, and depression. This new study may therefore help us understand not just typical sex differences but also sex-linked psychiatric conditions. It is important to note that we only investigated sex differences in brain structure, so we cannot infer anything about how this relates to behaviour or brain function. Integrating across different levels will be an important goal for future research.”

Professor Baron-Cohen commented: “Although these very clear sex differences in brain structure may reflect an environmental or social factor, from other studies we know that biological influences are also important, including prenatal sex steroid hormones (such as foetal testosterone) as well as sex chromosome effects. Such influences need to be teased out, one by one.”

Dr Meng-Chuan Lai, another member of the team, noted: “The advantage of conducting a meta-analysis is that we can summarise the best knowledge from a vast, heterogeneous literature, with a very large sample size. However, we found a bias in the existing literature towards the use of volunteers over 18 years old, probably because this is the easiest age group to recruit and to brain scan. We need more research exploring brain development over the entire lifespan, especially in the early, formative years”.

This study was supported by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Autism Research Trust, the Dr Hendrik Müller Vaderlandsch Fonds, the Carolus Magnus Fonds under the Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds, and the Waterloo Foundation. It was conducted in association with the NIHR CLAHRC for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.

- See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/males-and-females-differ-in-specific-brain-structures#sthash.0Gn3QE4N.dpuf)

Transgender Woman who Tried to Turn Herself Into a Man After Rejection by Mother Kills Herself

“I was the girl that nobody wanted,” Nancy Verhelst told Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper in the hours before her death.“While my brothers were celebrated, I got a storage room above the garage as a bedroom. ‘If only you had been a boy’, my mother complained. I was tolerated, nothing more.”Nancy Verhelst had hormone therapy in 2009, followed by a mastectomy and surgery to construct a penis in 2012. But “none of these operations worked as desired”. “I was ready to celebrate my new birth,” she told the newspaper. “But when I looked in the mirror, I was disgusted with myself. My new breasts did not match my expectations and my new penis had symptoms of rejection. I do not want to be… a monster. “

What we’re dealing with here of course is perception. Like the anorexic or the bulimic, this is a case of someone with a distorted self-image as a result of psychological dysfunction. Nancy was rejected by her mother. Instead of dealing with that problem, the establishment instead perversely decided to address the lack of a mother’s love by (mutilating) a grown woman into some warped creature that would only loosely resemble a man, but could never be a man, to meet the wishes of a mother who hated her. And when Nancy continued suffering. There was another solution. Death.

Senator’s sex scandal shuts feminist daughter’s mouth

(WND) While Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., is fighting for his political life following revelations that he and a wealthy donor are under FBI investigation for Dominican Republic trips the senator took on the eye doctor’s private plane as well as accusations he engaged in sex with under-age prostitutes while there, one prominent supporter has been conspicuously silent – his media-star daughter Alicia Menendez, a Democratic Party adviser.

Alicia Menendez is the former co-director of “The Vagina Monologues,” an episodic feminist play comprised of soliloquies read by women dealing with matters including sex, love, rape, menstruation, female genital mutilation, masturbation, birth, orgasm, the various common names for the vagina, or simply as a physical aspect of the body. She is a former Harvard gender studies major who is a host on “Huffpost Live” and a frequent guest on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Known for her outspokenness, even on matters involving her own prominent family, she once wrote that her “gringa” mother claimed to be Dominican in a past life.
Alicia Menendez’s mother, the former Jane Jacobsen, teaches sex education in the Union City school district. She and her former husband were divorced in 2005. The divorce documents are sealed.
Alicia Menendez came to fame for being a feminist. It was her 2005 senior thesis on gender studies that got her media attention; The New York Times and U.S. News and World Report gave her work mentions. The 87-page thesis, “To Whom Many Doors are Still Locked: Gender, Space, and Power, in Harvard Final Clubs,” decried a culture of male domination at the Ivy League school.
“Establishing yourself as a big man on campus is pretty formulaic, but there’s no such woman at Harvard who has done that to a positive capacity [sic],” Menendez told the student newspaper.
“The Harvard campus can be a very lonely place,” she explained. “And meeting beautiful, smart, socially adept women here is not an easy task.”
She was especially critical of Harvard’s men’s clubs, which she says relegated women to being “perpetually guests” on the campus social scene.
The thesis, obtained by WND through Harvard’s library, is focused on the injustice that the women’s clubs don’t have their own building.
“Tired of discussing the inequalities of ownership of space in private forums, it became my objective to examine the role of final club buildings and their implications for the men and women who are a part of the final club community,” she wrote in the introduction to her “ethnographic study.”
She added: “As a woman, as a feminist, as an ethnic minority … I recognize that I am not supposed to be a part of this supposed elitism, but I am,” she wrote.
As for her topic on “gendered power and social space,” she writes, “I did not choose this subject; it chose me.”
The feminist screed about the clubs includes buzzwords and phrases such as “male role models,” “homosocial legacies,” “male privilege,” “single-sex group identification,” “objectification,” and “Lolita fetishism.”
Alicia Menendez continued to write on gender issues after she graduated, ever quick to write on the latest political sex scandal. In 2008 she was fascinated by the prostitution story of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
“As the updates streamed in, I got a good look at how the story was shaping,” she wrote at the time. “Eliot Spitzer did something very wrong but fairly ordinary: he hired a prostitute. It’s only so extraordinary because of who Eliot Spitzer is and what Eliot Spitzer purports to stand for.”
She remained fascinated by Spitzer’s sex scandal and others, even going so far as to write whimsical online advice for politicians going through them, titled “What to Do When Scandals Hit”:
“Admitting that you’ve done something wrong is the first step. If you’re there, that’s half the battle,” she wrote. After trying to find a true friend, she enumerated a few dos and don’ts. “Don’t give yourself room to lie (any more than you already have). Don’t rely on half truths. And please, please don’t over share.”
That post (and others like it) have been scrubbed from the website that she co-founded. Perhaps she’s trying to follow her own advice offered as a candidate’s daughter in 2008: “The cardinal rule for candidates’ children, whether they choose to hit the campaign trail or not, is the same: Don’t do anything stupid.”

Repeated attempts to reach Alicia Menendez by email and Twitter were unsuccessful.(MORE)