http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/11/25/15-minute-writing-exercise-closes-the-gender-gap-in-university-level-physics/

blogged by Ed Yong, that as a scientist, make me think very hard about the powerful environmental influences on the human mind; it’s a very complex subject with plenty still to be discovered and explored. As a scientist, at this point in the game and given the available data which is ever changing, I prefer not to say ” I believe that women differ psychologically on average because of biological factors” or “I do not believe that women differ psychologically on average because of biological factors.” I tend to say that it is a very complex issue, that of course there are biological differences between males and females, and it is really interesting to understand which gender-related biological factors have a strong influence on the mind (and thus, on psychology), which have a weak influence if at all, and which biological factors are mostly irrelevant due to overwhelming cultural and societal factors. I became a scientist because I love the concept of provisional truths and adjustment of our knowledge based on more data. I’m a geneticist by background and I make a living in cancer genomics, and every day I end up seeing some new data which only increases the complexity of it all. And genetics is supposed to be pretty straightforward! Add environmental factors to all of this, and it makes for beautiful complexity that is going to keep scientists happily busy for centuries (eons?) to come.

Cricket doesn’t qualify as extreme, but how about a lady fast bowler competing against men?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/11/21/3072342.htm

No, but normatively culturally they are probably on the extreme end of liberated/independent/self-assertive.

Think Germaine Greer. She was very influential in Australia.

It’s comments like this that keep this topic in the gutter and from rising the ranks to a real empirical discussion, when like Razib said there is tons of really interesting data available and deeper human connections to make. This should not be the first conclusion to hinge belief around, and it usually seems like at least the hidden cornerstone of discussion and it makes for a very stark us vs. them. People don’t want to have conversations like that, unless they want to argue. There have been plenty of geniuses throughout history (include modern) that have been very religious and pondered it actively, would we consider these people weak minded?

By the way, Razib, you know anything about if autistic or Asperger’s syndrome spectrum individuals are more likely to be atheist? If so, that’d help bolster the idea that agency detection might have to do with it.

Earlier this year, there was a Scientific American blog post that covered a study presented a psychology convention (couldn’t find the study itself in my very quick search). Here’s the part relevant to this discussion:

In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)

Obviously, this wasn’t what you were asking for (I’d be interested in such statistics myself), but it does lend credence to the agency detection connection.

A materialistic, scientific worldview (which does not accept any supernatural thing like karma or souls) must be a really small subset of atheists, and so if a question was asked “Do you believe that no supernatural forces exist” perhaps the gender gap would be even larger.

By the way, Razib, you know anything about if autistic or Asperger’s syndrome spectrum individuals are more likely to be atheist? If so, that’d help bolster the idea that agency detection might have to do with it.

First I think I found the source data (V187), so I guess I don’t need that question answered.

Also, let me apologize for calling “Adriana” “Angela”. I would like to emphasize that this was not retaliation for being referred to as “Ming”, but a rather strange inadvertent error on my part.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/07/the-girls-are-alright-they-accept-human-evolution/

1) genic variance

2) gene X enviro interactions

3) gene + enviro correlation

4) enviro variance

if you believe that men and women differ psychologically on average because of biology, and i do, and you believe that religious belief has a biological basis in part or ultimately, and i do, it isn’t too implausible to make the leap to the contention that one sex will be more predisposed to finding religious claims plausible or implausible. correlations aren’t necessarily transitive, so one needs to be careful jumping the gun.

@Angela
what I meant to say it that it does not seem likely at this point (though of course we would need real data) to attribute the majority of the gender difference in atheism levels to biological factors. Even if the gap was pretty much the same throughout history, it still does not imply biological factors because culture has always played a very big role in gender differences.

Nothing is implied here at all. At the moment, we are both speculating on factors that are very difficult to assess. Now, you say that culture has always played a very big role in culture differences. This is true, but that’s not a particularly precise characterization. In this case, it’s obvious that culture plays a large role as one’s religious beliefs are an element of culture.

However, given the very consistent…I will say surprisingly consistent…tendency for a greater proportion of men to be atheists than women across the globe with essentially a gap in percentage that centers around 50% of the percentage of atheists in a country, it seems like there is a “baseline” from which countries individually deviate. It seems to me that part of the ultimate reason that this baseline is near 50% and not 0% could be a result of the “psychic unity of mankind”, in which the propensities of men and women across cultures is shaped by the same basic psychological mechanisms. I would suspect that cultural variation would play a bigger role in accounting for the deviations. I say this with the caveat that separating biology and culture is not as easy as my last two sentences imply.

What I would like to know is why in countries like Australia, with ~50% of people being religious, the gap is <1%, is there something peculiar to the biology of Australian women?

Nope. At least nothing I’ve said has implied that this is the case. I’ve already said that cultural factors are doubtless a player. The reason I raise biological factors as potentially explanatory is the consistency with which the trend holds up. I’m raising it as a potential explanation for a constant background, not the variation that one does see between nations. I suspect that most if not all of the variation between nations (as opposed to between sexes) is a result of cultural differences.

Maybe there’s a selection effect where successful modern civilizations tend to have cultural institutions that just so happen to favor more male rejection of religion than female rejection. Maybe there is a selection effect resulting from how willing men and women are willing to profess their atheism.

What’s the reason for the gender gap in extreme sports? What’s the reason for the gender gap in engineering? What’s the reason for the gender gap in romance novel reading? I don’t think that the answer to any of these questions is simple or easy to elucidate. Furthermore, I don’t think the answer in the form of a binary “culture” vs. “biology” or even a percentage attributed to “culture” vs. a percentage attributed to “biology” would be a particularly satisfying answer. In fact, I think it’s difficult to disentangle the two because biology is the substrate upon which culture acts. The human mind is a ridiculously complex system and how many minds interact in the context of society compounds that problem to a dizzying degree.

And what about countries like India or Brazil, both huge countries that are very religious, where there are more atheist women than men?

I briefly touched on Brazil and India in my last comment. They are indeed large countries, but as you stated, they are very religious, and thus have very small numbers of atheists for their size and as you can see, it’s the countries where atheists are a small group that the results fan out. In fact, the general trend seems to converge as atheists form a larger and larger portion of the population. That is, in countries with few atheists, there are more outliers in terms of ratio…both up and down.

If i had to spend my hard earned grant money studying the reasons behind the gender gap in atheism, I would not focus on biology first.

Is that indeed what you are studying? What is it that you would focus on first?