Derivative

Think, for a moment. How many girls/women/females/XX in your life prefer to sit quietly [not necessarily alone] in a room full of people? There are a few, but not many, right?

Think about how many boys/men/males/XY in your life who do the same. A few more, right?

Which seems more out of place?

When I was growing up I got used to the idea girls were good at talking and boys weren’t, I was told that both genders had ‘word quotas’ for each day, women talked more than men and there may be a few anomalies.

But that’s just it. These so called anomalies aren’t anomalies at all. I think that of all the positive views we have about women being good at communication and social is having negative affects on a good portion of women. Everyone exists on a continuum extroverts on one end and introverts on the other. Standard deviation puts 68.2% in the middle and 27.2% just outside in the upper and lower first quarters.

https://files.pbworks.com/download/k1gco7UGLK/globotrends/14809586/Standard_deviation_diagram.png

This does not divide people – both men and women – into good and bad a socializing. Introvert can socials just as well. Rather. Introverts don’t crave social activity the way Extroverts do.

So, with this in mind, doesn’t it seems slightly odd that we assume all women to be in the upper half of this distribution, with a curve more like this?

http://onlinestatbook.com/chapter1/graphics/neg_skew.gif

Likewise, the strong silent type is often depicted as male. You definitely get more quiet weird males. Nerds, geeks, etc. While more Extroverted males are ...