Women and Men - Equally Creative?

TipRoast

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Are men & women equally creative?

A prima facie analysis would say no. Let's consider the evidence:

Arts
  • Literature - verse/theater/prose (novels/novellas/short-stores, children's books)
    • There are giants here among the men with respect to the "classics": Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Melville, Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss).
    • There are a few women that have made their mark with international reputations: Dickenson, Alcott, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Madeline L'Engle. Not nearly as many women as there are men.
    • However, if you consider more recent times and look at the best seller lists, you'll find that women authors are listed at least as often as their male counterparts.
  • Visual - painting/drawing/sculpture/photography/film/commercial art/hybrid (comics & comic books)
    • Lots of men here: Michelangelo, DaVinci, Renoir, Monet, Ansel Adams, Stanley Kubrick. It's an almost endless list.
    • A few women of repute: Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Cassatt, Annie Liebovitz.
    • I'm probably leaving off some well-known female visual artists that I'll be embarrassed to have overlooked when someone mentions them in a reply to this thread.
  • Music - classical/opera/folk/jazz/rock&roll/country&western/rap/hip-hop/world
    • The discussion here focuses on composers/songwriters, not performers.
    • The classical ranks are dominated by the men: Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Verdi. The same is true, I think, for most of the other genres.
    • There have been some classical women composers of note: Clara Shumann (wife of Robert) and Fanny Mendelssohn (sister of Felix).
    • In the folk and rock&roll fields, there have been some women who rank among the top men: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and several others.
  • Artisanry- knitting&crotchet/quilting/weaving/mosaics/stained glass/glassblowing/woodworking/metalworking/jewelry making/fashion/cooking/leatherwork/ikebana/formal gardens/musical instrument building
    • I can only provide a few well-known names here: Christofori (inventor of the piano) and Amati and Stradivari (violin makers).
    • I have seen some elegant work done both both sexes at numerous craft fairs, and in my opinion this kind of creation is every bit as worthy and as enjoyable to experience as anything in the three fields listed above this one.

STEM, etc.
  • Science: physics/chemistry/biology/computer science/others
    • Some really well-known males here: Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Darwin, von Neumann.
    • There are a few women of note here, including Mileva Marić, Einsten's first wife. Also Dr. Rosalind Franklin, who likely would have shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA, if not for her untimely passing at age 37.
    • If we look at more recent times, more and more women are becoming professors and researchers in the STEM fields, and I expect that as time passes we'll see that the creativity in these fields will be coming in equal measure from both sexes.
  • Technology: transportation/communications/lots of other fields
    • Some really beautiful designs for cars and motorcycles and boats have been developed over the centuries. And in the communications field, we have the Internet (a group effort) and the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee).
  • Engineering: electrical/chemical/mechanical/civil/marine
    • While the design of an electrical or chemical plant or aircraft carrier may not be considered beautiful, there's little doubt in my mind that it takes an act of creation to come up with a good one.
  • Math: too many branches to even consider a list
    • Euclid, Gauss, Euler, LaPlace (and many, many others, including Ingrid Daubechies, who I have previously mentioned in the STEM thread). But until recently a field very much dominated by men.
  • Architecture
    • A marvelous field requiring a mastery of both engineering and design.
    • The most famous architects to the layperson (such as me) are men: Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry. But there are some women who are very accomplished and well-known (to other architects). And this too is a field where I think there be a leveling out as time passes.
So I think the record to date is that men have a lot more to point at in the fields where creativity is needed, but I don't think it's necessarily because men are more creative than women. It's likely due mostly to social position, and the fact that for many years and in many cultures women were not afforded eduction and opportunity. When the playing field is even, both sexes have been shown to be capable of creating works of wonder.

And I'm sure I've left off some fields of human endeavor (e.g. choreography, the social sciences) that rank equally with the ones I've mentioned - please let me know where I've fallen short (and TL;DR is also a valid response, but if you've gotten this far it's probably not one you'll use :beer:).
 
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Are men & women equally creative?

A prima facie analysis would say no. Let's consider the evidence:

Arts
  • Literature - verse/theater/prose (novels/novellas/short-stores, children's books)
    • There are giants here among the men with respect to the "classics": Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Melville, Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss).
    • There are a few women that have made their mark with international reputations: Dickenson, Alcott, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Madeline L'Engle. Not nearly as many women as there are men.
    • However, if you consider more recent times and look at the best seller lists, you'll find that women authors are listed at least as often as their male counterparts.
  • Visual - painting/drawing/sculpture/photography/film/commercial art/hybrid (comics & comic books)
    • Lots of men here: Michelangelo, DaVinci, Renoir, Monet, Ansel Adams, Stanley Kubrick. It's an almost endless list.
    • A few women of repute: Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Cassatt, Annie Liebovitz.
    • I'm probably leaving off some well-known female visual artists that I'll be embarrassed to have overlooked when someone mentions them in a reply to this thread.
  • Music - classical/opera/folk/jazz/rock&roll/country&western/rap/hip-hop/world
    • The discussion here focuses on composers/songwriters, not performers.
    • The classical ranks are dominated by the men: Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Verdi. The same is true, I think, for most of the other genres.
    • There have been some classical women composers of note: Clara Shumann (wife of Robert) and Fanny Mendelssohn (sister of Felix).
    • In the folk and rock&roll fields, there have been some women who rank among the top men: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and several others.
  • Artisanry- knitting&crotchet/quilting/weaving/mosaics/stained glass/glassblowing/woodworking/metalworking/jewelry making/fashion/cooking/leatherwork/ikebana/formal gardens/musical instrument building
    • I can only provide a few well-known names here: Christofori (inventor of the piano) and Amati and Stradivari (violin makers).
    • I have seen some elegant work done both both sexes at numerous craft fairs, and in my opinion this kind of creation is every bit as worthy and as enjoyable to experience as anything in the three fields listed above this one.

STEM, etc.
  • Science: physics/chemistry/biology/computer science/others
    • Some really well-known males here: Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Darwin, von Neumann.
    • There are a few women of note here, including Mileva Marić, Einsten's first wife. Also Dr. Rosalind Franklin, who likely would have shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA, if not for her untimely passing at age 37.
    • If we look at more recent times, more and more women are becoming professors and researchers in the STEM fields, and I expect that as time passes we'll see that the creativity in these fields will be coming in equal measure from both sexes.
  • Technology: transportation/communications/lots of other fields
    • Some really beautiful designs for cars and motorcycles and boats have been developed over the centuries. And in the communications field, we have the Internet (a group effort) and the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee).
  • Engineering: electrical/chemical/mechanical/civil/marine
    • While the design of an electrical or chemical plant or aircraft carrier may not be considered beautiful, there's little doubt in my mind that it takes an act of creation to come up with a good one.
  • Math: too many branches to even consider a list
    • Euclid, Gauss, Euler, LaPlace (and many, many others, including Ingrid Daubechies, who I have previously mentioned in the STEM thread). But until recently a field very much dominated by men.
  • Architecture
    • A marvelous field requiring a mastery of both engineering and design.
    • The most famous architects to the layperson (such as me) are men: Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry. But there are some women who are very accomplished and well-known (to other architects). And this too is a field where I think there be a leveling out as time passes.
So I think the record to date is that men have a lot more to point at in the fields where creativity is needed, but I don't think it's necessarily because men are more creative than women. It's likely due mostly to social position, and the fact that for many years and in many cultures women were not afforded eduction and opportunity. When the playing field is even, both sexes have been shown to be capable of creating works of wonder.

And I'm sure I've left off some fields of human endeavor (e.g. choreography, the social sciences) that rank equally with the ones I've mentioned - please let me know where I've fallen short (and TL;DR is also a valid response, but if you've gotten this far it's probably not one you'll use :beer:).
  • There are a few women that have made their mark with international reputations: Dickenson, Alcott, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Madeline L'Engle. Not nearly as many women as there are men.
-1 points for you. Where's my beloved Jane Austen. :harumph:

Cheers, :toast:
 
Women are much better than men at cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, ironing, and taking care of children. These are not unimportant and takes a lot of creativity. Then there is knitting, sewing, and crocheting.. I couldn't do that.
Is this what we are talking about?
 
Women are much better than men at cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, ironing, and taking care of children. These are not unimportant and takes a lot of creativity. Then there is knitting, sewing, and crocheting.. I couldn't do that.
Is this what we are talking about?
sure. my turn. men are much better serial killers . 😄
i either hate or suck at all your examples...😄
 
Men and women are different. On average, they are biologically different in their interests, aptitudes, soft/hard skills, etc. There are few things where when measured correctly you'd find men and women are equal (on average).

And that's fine. They are complimentary, which is kind of why men typically seek women and women typically seek men.
 
Two big reasons for this discrepancy, just off the top of my head.

The first one is opportunity - until relatively recently more males engaged in pretty much every field, while women's roles largely revolved around the home and community. Related closely to this is encouragement/belief: women constantly got the message that X was a man's field, which gets broadly absorbed. It's tempting to throw this out the there and call it a day. But it's not interesting. More importantly, it excludes a likely important contributing factor, possibly even the driving factor.

Second is actually an inherent observable difference, which may be genetic/biological, though there is likely a social component as well: on nearly every measure, the distribution of skill/performance/ability of males has a broader distribution (longer and/or fatter "tails") compared to women. That is to say, a distribution of women's measurable levels of skill/performance/ability is more tightly clustered around the average (higher kurtosis), and thus we consistently find that even in areas where women have significantly higher average performance, the extreme elite performers tend to be disproportionately male. In our modern world of specialization, the impact of this becomes massively outsized, even as the impact of opportunity and related social factors noted above drops.

I can imagine biological/evolutionary reasons for this (which I won't get into beyond noting one, that it's much easier to exclude the DNA of "underqualified" males than females from passing down their genes) but it's clearly a thing. How much social/nurture plays into this is debatable. I'd argue that the more explicitly competitive & hierarchical social interactions among males probably results in some of this, with discouragement pushing poor performers further down and vice versa: if you believe you suck at something, not only are you unlikely to practice and improve, but your absolute performance suffers.

Additionally, tied to opportunity above, males have historically focused more heavily (and earlier) on their specialized productive activities than women, as even women who were among the elite in their field typically made their contributions alongside their duties around the home and family. Worth noting, however, is that this would account for longer/fatter "right-tails" (extreme high-end performance) but should not impact the left tails. Since we tend to see largely symmetrical differences (vs the distributions for women and vs relative normality) on the high and low end, that calls the impact of this effect into question.

Anyway...it's an interesting point, and one which is, for obvious reasons, essentially radioactive in the current cultural climate.
 
sure. my turn. men are much better serial killers . 😄
i either hate or suck at all your examples...😄
So, you're saying that I might have misunderstood the point of the thread and that it would have been better had I not responded at all?
You are right about serial killers, men do a much better job.
 
going back to the Dawn of Man, Man was certainly more creative regarding hunting to sustain life

Woman, OTOH, were certainly more creative regarding motivating Man to go out hunting to sustain life

I give you Rae Dawn Chong creatively motivating her Man in Quest For Fire

quest-for-fire-248702529.jpg


 
Victory lap. No idea if what I said was right or even valid, but I got three thumbs-up reactions very quickly, and each from one of the Planet's esteemed memberless members. :cool:
 
Victory lap. No idea if what I said was right or even valid, but I got three thumbs-up reactions very quickly, and each from one of the Planet's esteemed memberless members. :cool:
It was more of you took the time to think and write this out.

























But also, you were brave to post it.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
 
Was about to go to town on this entire thread until the end when you put it all together to say....
"don't think it's necessarily because men are more creative than women. It's likely due mostly to social position, and the fact that for many years and in many cultures women were not afforded education and opportunity. "

Yes, it is just as simple as this.

100 years ago women in the US did not have the right to vote or even own property or bank accounts. Most did not have the chance to go to college. That pretty much explains all of it. We are only 4-5 generations away from those times.

And the same thing can be said beyond gender as well, with respect to crazy statements/beliefs spouted by white supremacists.
 
The problem with this statistically is the time frame.

Since were looking back to a period (really prior to say the 1960's) where women were rarely educated or developed professionally in most areas, there are going to be a disproportionate share of men.

If you were to look at say socio-economic status, you'd find few "creative" people of any type who were not born into some level of comfortable wealth prior to the last 50 years or so. My own grandfather was a talented painter, but it was never more than a hobby because it didn't put food on the table.

The opportunity has to be available for one to make a mark.
 
The problem with this statistically is the time frame.

Since were looking back to a period (really prior to say the 1960's) where women were rarely educated or developed professionally in most areas, there are going to be a disproportionate share of men.

If you were to look at say socio-economic status, you'd find few "creative" people of any type who were not born into some level of comfortable wealth prior to the last 50 years or so. My own grandfather was a talented painter, but it was never more than a hobby because it didn't put food on the table.

The opportunity has to be available for one to make a mark.

This is true historically if we're measuring based on accomplishments of specific people.

But there are plenty of recent studies that demonstrate very clear differences in the way men and women naturally think and approach problems, decisions, etc. There are clear differences in typical personality traits, preferences (in many things), skills (soft and hard), etc. that have little to do with generational access to education. Physiological differences also play an important role.

I'm not saying the gap can't or won't close in some areas, nor am I suggesting either gender is "better". But the weird pursuit by feminist radicals to eradicate femininity by erasing the differences between men and women (ironically by measuring based on male preferences, behaviors, accomplishments, etc.) is silly. Some inequality is not natural since it's a byproduct of specific decisions that artificially create a gap (ex. women not being able to vote), but the majority of "inequalities" are biologically driven. Similar to how male and female mammals of many species are not equal in all ways.

Men and women are not bioligically equal in almost any way, meaning in a perfectly "fair" society you'd see significant inequalities (some for men, some for women). This was even observed in a few studies, in Sweden for example.

This is a good thing. Where we went wrong was deciding that male advantages / female disadvantages were all bad and needed to be artificially eliminated. Embrace the amazing, unique attributes of both genders - as God intended.
 
My thanks to everyone that has responded so far.

In addition to the discussion about creativity and gender roles, I was also hoping to fill in some blanks on areas where creativity is displayed that I didn't think to mention in my original post. Surely I wasn't comprehensive.
 
My thanks to everyone that has responded so far.

In addition to the discussion about creativity and gender roles, I was also hoping to fill in some blanks on areas where creativity is displayed that I didn't think to mention in my original post. Surely I wasn't comprehensive.
I will reread what you wrote
 
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