Women tend to be verbal learners; men tend to be visual.

Speaking as a woman who not only excelled in math and science in high school, but also went on to study computer science in college, I can tell you something true: Men predominate sciences. In my opnion, this begets itself.

Let me explain: How are math and science taught? I'll give you a hint, it isn't verbal. Ahh, you say, but that's the nature of math and science...but is it? I've seen studies done in which women are taught separately from men in math...and you know what happens...they begin to excel! These studies are soon squashed because idiot women think it's sexist, but just enough information has poked through that I have hope, and I wish the idiots would shut up and go away so we can see more evidence.

Math and science can be taught in les visual ways...they just are't. These courses are taught by men for men. And a combination of societal and peer pressures keep women from even esriously considering these fields.

I, for one, am a very verbal learner. I literally went to a friend of mine after a math class one time and told him just to tell me in words what the teacher had shown us in pictures that day, and then I got it! I struggled to interpret the textbook, and only made it through sheer force of will and determination. Also, because I'm stubborn as heck and if someone tells me I can't do something I'm ten times as likely to do it!

I studied CS at a university (Warwick) which attracts a large percentage of far-eastern and african students, so I got to see a lot of interesting things about different cultures

The gender split was very interesting; of about 70 european students in my year, there was only 1 woman. African, the split was a little less exaggerated, I think it was probably 20 - 3 or something like that; far-eastern was even less remarkable. 40-15 or so.

But there is a problem with segregated schooling...it implies that you need segregated workplaces too. Of course, this makes perfect sense, I think that it is silly we insist on trying to get men and women to work together.

Rather than separating people, which is only going to perpetuate prejudice in the long run, I think we'd do better to focus on making information accessible in a variety of ways. Almost everyone does better interacting with material in more than one modality.

People with different learning styles could be taught separately, but that also raises difficulties. I think the best way to handle it would be to educate teachers more fully about learning styles (and also learning disabilities--you'd never believe how ignorant most teachers are!). Of course, that demands a more ideal system of education--most teachers are also already terribly overworked.

As far as the issue of men and women not working together, I think of a Saudi student who was in my sociology of ed class in grad school. When asked about gender roles, he mentioned some of the different careers men and women pursued in his country. When asked about the possibility of a female mechanic, he said, "But where would she work? With men?" It effectively closes off a lot of options for anyone with non-stereotypical interests.

1) Would one or more of the women here explain to me what you personally believe "verbal learner" means?

There is also the issue of writing convincing characters of different cultures and both sexes.

Anyway, verbal is spoken. Now, there is also a verbal/visual which involves the written word, and it is related, but studies have shown that combining verbal and verbal/visual modalities does not work. Basically, if you ask someone to read and listen to those words being spoken at the same time it doesn't add anything and they sort of interfere with each other. What does work, is to combine spoken words with pictures, to catch the learning styles of many people and to help make the words more meaningful. Also, in this way students are using both their occipital and temporal lobes to bring in the information, processing it in two different ways.

You can describe the same attributes of a character in a way that would "peak" the interest of the typical western male reader, but bore the typical western female reader. certainly there is a happy medium, which i think may be found in slightly more vague writting..

so, there really is a point to all of this..

On the subject of writing: my perception is that most readers and writers of comic books and graphic novels are male. I had previously assumed the reason was related to the subject matter, but now find myself wondering if the medium itself is more appealing to the male brain than the female. Interesting.

On learning: my experience is that most girls who begin an engineering program finish it. They are able to learn the material and succeed. The problem is attracting them to the field in the first place. That is the purpose of my Engineering Summer Camp for Girls.

In my camp, I don't care if the girls learn anything or not. My goal is to help them enjoy engineering through the same sorts of hands-on activities that boys experience: they build and program robots using Legos.

I do talk to them about engineering concepts like force, torque, tension, power, friction, etc. I do this to help them realize that they are employing these concepts in the robots they design and build. Perhaps I should enhance these discussions, relying more on conversation and less on diagrams. Hmmm...

FYI in the past I have done the same class for both boys and girls. I tell them about an engineering concept (e.g. friction) and assign them a challenge (e.g. build a machine that can drive up a steep hill without sliding backwards) and give them a Lego "cookbook" of sample robot designs.

As a rule, the boys are much more creative. They will dive right in and come up with all sorts of outlandish contraptions. About 80% of the boys ignore the cookbook and come up with their own "Rube Goldberg" designs, even though a few don't work. They would rather fail than follow a recipe. I don't know why.

In contrast, the girls always follow the cookbook, and I do mean always. They never even try to invent their own designs. I don't know why.

When it comes to competition time, the girls' cookbook designs usually look and perform almost identically, the race to the top of the hill is always very close. 100% of the girls robots make it to the top, and they do it in about 60 seconds.

The boys' Rube Goldberg designs always look very different from each other, and their performance is all over the map. The bad ones fall apart or get lost halfway up the hill, and the good ones are so fast I can barely time them. Only 20% of the boys robots make it to the top, but the ones that succeed get there in 15 seconds.

I assume the difference in their approaches comes from motivation, a subject strongly related to writing, but I could not explain it. Can any of you explain it?

As long as it doesn't turn into a flame war, I am willing to let this discussion go on.

As Survivor said, writers are teachers in a way.

Even more important, consider the fact that characterization is crucial to good story telling, and anything that can help writers of one sex better understand people of the opposite sex is worth exploring. After all, roughly half the people in the world are of the opposite sex. The better you understand them, how they learn, how they think, the better you may be able to communicate with them in your writing, and the better you may be able to characterize them in your stories.

A biologically successful male human could potentially sire tens of thousands of children, a moderately unsuccessful male might sire none at all (a totally usuccessful male will manage to kill off his entire genomic clan in the process of being totally unsuccessful).

With females, on the other hand, the most biologically successful can't bear much more than twenty children, no matter what, and the least successful are fairly likely to bear at least a couple.

Of course, this is an extreme way of looking at the problem (and as such is inherently flawed in a number of important ways), but it does shed light on the issue of creativity v. certainty in male and female behavior. Human males have a reproductive strategy that is inherently more like that of insects or viruses (no moral comparison intended, insects are very good and viruses...well, I'm sure they do something or other). Females follow what we think of as the typical mammalian pattern, few offspring carefully nurtured. From a biological standpoint, males stand to benefit from huge payoffs by being creative. Females don't stand to gain as much from their own creativity (though they can gain considerable ground through their sons).

In point of fact, females not only stand to gain very little from their own creativity, they stand to lose a great deal if their daughters are too creative...which brings up something quite interesting.

Men and women are both biologically programmed to encourage their grandsons to push the limits while discouraging their granddaughters from stepping off the established path. But I've gone over this before.

Over the long term, there is absolutely nothing to be done about this tendency. You can fight it using cultural tools, but the fact remains that women that behave like men don't reproduce all that well...and neither do men that accept such behavior in their mates. Even if you don't accept that the genetics matter, the nurturing does, the grandparents that didn't encourage boys to be boys and girls to be girls will have few grandchildren to continue their value system.

Additionally, I would say that reproductive strategies probably should not have a large impact on fields and subjects that didn't exist a thousand years ago, and part of the woman's role is culturally determined rather than genetically. (Eg, in India, people who fight for environmental justice are almost entirely female, while here we see a split. In France the top chefs are male, and respected for it.)

Has anyone else here read Sherri S. Tepper's _The Gate to Women's County_?