From: fujimoto@carson.u.washington.edu (Bryant Fujimoto)
Subject: Re: why no women composers (was Re: FINAL FINAL THOUGHTS !!
Organization: University of Washington
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 09:13:32 GMT

ted@dgbt.doc.ca (Ted Grusec) writes:

>There is no shortage at all of women pursuing careers in music.  And
>everyone should pursue whatever career they are drawn too.  The
>original question was something like, "why are there so few women
>composers".  It doesn't mean there aren't any, only that there are
>few.  A potential explanation is there may be something biologically
>gender-linked here.  I have no vested political motives that lead me
>to believe that this is true or that this is untrue.  I do think that
>I would like to know where the truth is, however.  And I do not see
>that posing potentially investigable hypotheses does anyone a
>disservice nor that it is insensitive nor unthoughtful.  For your
>interest, I have a daughter who is very actively pursuing a career in
>music.  She composes too.  But that neither establishes nor
>contraindicates a possible gender-linked explanation for why there are
>relatively few women composer.  Those who are predisposed, for
>whatever reasons, to look to enculturation for the answer should also
>being pursuing good evidence. So far, it seems to be a matter of
>political correctness, rather than of evidence and reason. The
>evidence, as I understand, is pretty good at this point for a
>gender-linked mathematical and spatial ability.  That too is not
>finally proven, but it has been actively pursued by good researchers,
>many of whom have been women.
>-- 
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>Ted Grusec - Communications Research Centre, Ottawa, Ont., Canada

My own impression of the evidence, which is admittedly not very
thorough and ends around 1980, is that the evidence for gender-linked
math and spatial ability studies was very weak.  
Since a good part of this debate is about the relative importance of
genetics and enviroment IMHO any useful experiments must control one
factor and vary the other.  Studies on identical twins, separated
at birth and raised apart from each other hold the genetic component
constant, and vary the enviroment.  However, such twins are rare, and 
in any event offer no information on gender-linked differences. 
The other class of experiment where you vary the genetics and control 
the enviroment is, IMHO, extremely difficult with humans.  Boys
and girls are raised differently, therefore even though they may
live side by side, they are in different enviroments.  For example,
in one study it was found that teachers spent more time teaching
girls reading than they spent teaching boys, and the situation was
reversed for math.  
Since you have the opposite impression about the state of research
on gender-linked math abilities, I was curious if the research you
referred to is more recent than any I have heard about, and how
the researchers managed to eliminate the effect of the enviroment
on the men and women (or boys and girls) which they studied.
Thanks for any insight you can offer on this.

Regards

Bryant Fujimoto
fujimoto@denali.chem.washington.edu
These opinions are my own and not necessarily anyone elses.
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical