Reply to comment

Hey guys, thanks for all the comments both in class and here on the forum.  I think the range of how people feel about treating sex as a binary vs. a continuous variable is really interesting to see.  I was wondering in addition how people feel about sexuality as a continuous variable vs. one with set categories (i.e. heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, etc.).  Obviously, like we talked about, current research already does at times recognize sexuality as a spectrum by asking people to place themselves on a scale from straight to gay.  Honestly to me sexuality is easier to fully conceptualize as a spectrum than sex/gender, but is there a reason for that?  What do other people think?  Also (as I think was mentioned in class), if we have people place themselves on a continuous scale, say a scale from 1-10, does that really just mean that we’re creating 10 discrete categories instead of 2, 3, etc., or do you think it would serve its purpose?

Also, like Jenna brought up, I’m still curious to know if people think that this research is worthwhile in terms of having some sort of applicable purpose.  If we can say that males seem to be better at spatial tasks than females, and are able to map that to an area of the brain/hormones, what does that really tell us?  It may mean that males overall are better at these tasks than females, but (especially considering the idea of sex as a spectrum) some females are bound to be better than males – so how might data like that be used in a helpful way?  Or, like Jenna said, will this just end up being used to cement social stereotypes (i.e. women are bad drivers)?

Just some things to think about…