That doesn't follow at all; and is phrased in a completely insensitive way. If you want to have a civilized conversation, stop that.
Demanding that certain ideas be phrased in a politically correct way only serves the purpose of making it more difficult to express those ideas. If your goal is to suppress dissent that is valuable, but not if your goal is to find the truth. What is your goal?
If men are prone to stereotype threat in some area, then they too are inferior in that area. For example, if a "white men can't jump" stereotype prevents men from performing well in basketball, then men are indeed likely to be inferior basketball players. Similarly, in the non-scientific experiment you described, the brown-eyed children did appear to perform more poorly.
Obviously the inferiority only holds in a cultural context and in certain areas - mine referred to the modern American context, where apparently even marking [X] Female lowers women's performance on scientific topics. I probably should have expressed this more clearly in my original comment.
An interesting fact to realize is that the stereotype-threat based inferiority might be unavoidable. Suppose hypothetically that white men are shorter or worse jumpers (on average) than black men. In this case, the "white men can't jump" stereotype is true - but then knowledge of this true fact might cause them to also perform worse than their height would otherwise suggest due to stereotype threat. Human psychology might actually amplify innate differences in abilities.
If your goal were to find truth your arguments would be more well reasoned. I can't ascribe your phrasing to anything other than sloppiness or a desire to incite controversy.
To my knowledge we haven't found a single demographic group immune to stereotype threat. I suppose one could argue under your tortured semantics that they are all inferior to one another under different forms of discrimination, but what is the point?
...we haven't found a single demographic group immune to stereotype threat.
This is a straw man. I never claimed any group was immune to stereotype threat.
You claimed stereotype threat affects some groups more than others in some areas. Your specific example was women are affected by it in math. I pointed out that if this generalizes beyond the GRE, and if men and women's abilities are equal absent stereotype threat, the result is that women would be inferior to men in math-related jobs.
You can claim my arguments poorly reasoned all you want, but you still haven't pointed out any flaws in them. All you did was demand I not be "insensitive" and attack straw men.
To be as explicit as possible: poor functioning as a result of discriminatory stereotypes is no evidence of innate inferiority, be it in women or men or whomever. It is evidence of discriminatory stereotypes, that is all.
For everyone's sake, allow me to try to rephrase yummyfajitas's argument.
Consider several groups of equal ability and equal vulnerability to stereotype threat. On average, the groups that have more negative stereotypes directed toward them will perform worse. Given two people of equal ability, a purely rational actor trying to choose a member of their team will choose the one to which fewer negative stereotypes apply.
Yes, and as a special case of this, if what DaniFong says is true and generalizes beyond the math GRE", non-Asian women will exhibit inferior math performance in the contemporary US*. Similarly, if zasz's claims about athletic performance stereotypes are true, then non-black men will be inferior athletes.
Both of these predictions seem to concur with reality, so I'd suggest maybe Danifong's theory has something going for it.
A purely rational actor who is ignoring externalities. A purely rational actor taking a different set of factors into account may make a different decision. We generally call the first "a dick" and the second "a worthwhile human being".
Demanding that certain ideas be phrased in a politically correct way only serves the purpose of making it more difficult to express those ideas. If your goal is to suppress dissent that is valuable, but not if your goal is to find the truth. What is your goal?
If men are prone to stereotype threat in some area, then they too are inferior in that area. For example, if a "white men can't jump" stereotype prevents men from performing well in basketball, then men are indeed likely to be inferior basketball players. Similarly, in the non-scientific experiment you described, the brown-eyed children did appear to perform more poorly.
Obviously the inferiority only holds in a cultural context and in certain areas - mine referred to the modern American context, where apparently even marking [X] Female lowers women's performance on scientific topics. I probably should have expressed this more clearly in my original comment.
An interesting fact to realize is that the stereotype-threat based inferiority might be unavoidable. Suppose hypothetically that white men are shorter or worse jumpers (on average) than black men. In this case, the "white men can't jump" stereotype is true - but then knowledge of this true fact might cause them to also perform worse than their height would otherwise suggest due to stereotype threat. Human psychology might actually amplify innate differences in abilities.