Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Indeed, group membership often offers little if any added value once traditional measures of human individuality are taken into account

From Work Preferences, Life Values, and Personal Views of Top Math/Science Graduate Students and the Profoundly Gifted: Developmental Changes and Gender Differences During Emerging Adulthood and Parenthood by Kimberley Ferriman, David Lubinski, and Camilla P. Benbow.
We have observed among these cohorts of highly talented participants a finding well known in the study of individual differences: The differences observed between the genders pale in comparison to the individual differences observed within the genders for both parents and nonparents, as can be observed in the means and standard deviations that we provide for all of our items. While it is appropriate to aggregate individual difference variables to understand over- and underrepresentation and differential group trajectories (Lubinski & Humphreys, 1996), the maximization of human capital and predictions about individuals require individual, and not group, appraisals (Gottfredson, 2002; Lubinski, 1996,2000). Indeed, group membership often offers little if any added value once traditional measures of human individuality are taken into account (Hakim, 2007; Lubinski & Humphreys, 1997; Webb et al., 2002).
The whole paper is interesting, though leaden. All sorts of hedging and jargon but what it comes down to is that even among the most elite STEM stars, there is some commonality of life goals early on, that there is divergence that occurs via lived experience, the divergence widens even further based on familial life choices (whether to have children and caregiving role). Outcomes have much more to do with the cummulative consequence of individual choices rather than with gender. Despite the fairly divergent decisions and choices across the spectrum of participants, all were pretty happy with their choices and the consequences of those choices.

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