Nurture Affects Gender Differences in Spatial Abilities - Essay Example

In the actual society, women's representation in fields such as science, engineering, technology workforce is on a low compared to that of men, a gap that had been argued to be due to spatial differences between them. The roles of nature and nurture are among the most believed causes underlying the achievement of equality of spatial abilities levels, hence subsequent uniform representation for both genders. But the comparison of the relationship between gender and spatial abilities levels and their correlation with nurture has been tenuous.

This is because it's a hard task to linearly compare these gender spatial abilities differences among unsimilarly nurtured but biologically similar groups. In this study, a large group (of 1279) of participants was selected in a local area of north-eastern India, which is the matrilineal Khasi tribe and patrilineal Karbi tribe. The tribe representative was thought to ha little or no experience in a test experiment of solving a four-piece jigsaw puzzle. The group also was believed to have a similar genetic background and their occupational being subsistence rice farming created a uniform distribution of wealth and diet giving it suitability for the study.

In Khasi matrilineal tribe men were not allowed to own property (or land) and the youngest daughter inherited property. On the other hand, the Khabi illegalized property ownership by women, and the eldest son inherited property. After carrying out the experiment of solving the puzzle, the results obtained indicated that the gender gap in spatial abilities diminishes as one moves across from the patrilineal to a matrilineal society, despite a third of the underlying force behind this gender gap being education.

It is important for education policymakers to use the studies in closing the gender gap, as education is a significant mechanism to generate the correlation of spatial abilities and gender in societies. That is, men averagely solved the puzzle in Khasi by 32.1 seconds as compared to 35.4 seconds for women, but the Karbi men did an average of 45.3 seconds to 57.2 seconds for women which was about 36% faster. These results indicated that the gender gap in cognitive abilities has an underlined role of nurture in this cross-cultural research.

There is no bias of privileged participants as eldest sons of Karbi and youngest daughters of Khasi were not significantly faster than their group members. Null and alternate hypotheses were," although culture greatly influences the duration for puzzle solving it can not explain the gender gap" and "gender gap is less pronounced in matrilineal society" respectively. Since women are generally less competitive, this factor is used as control but ideally, from initial studies, there is no relationship between competitiveness and time to solve the puzzle.

In conclusion, the experimental studies carried out are contradictory and do not clearly show the relationship between gender and spatial abilities. Spatial abilities are skills that can be improved by relevant training, but women having generally inferior levels of this than men, this may lead to their decreased performances. As modern societies are becoming more gender-sensitive, levels of gender differences and spatial abilities do not show a corresponding linear decline,  showing a lack of direct evidence of a correlation between nurture and spatial abilities.