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Hi all,

Sorry for missing class last week. I was there in spirit. Just from reading the articles and the online discussion, I believe I have gleaned the topics of discussion that were covered in class. I'm going to circumvent the binary-spectrum debate for a moment, and re-visit a question that Alex posed, specifically if assigning these intrinisc qualities to "man" and "woman" will reinforce social stereotypes. I would argue that this already happens, for example, just look to the gender dichotomy between a random sampling of english vs. engineering or computer science departments at a university level. I think, and I could be wrong, that english departments would be significantly more mixed gender, while engineering and computer science would be weighted heavily towards men. In cases like these, is it underlying social stereotyping pressures that lead to self-selection, or is it due to intrinisc differences that cause difference in performance?

Also, Andrea brings an excellent point that in terms of neuropathology. If men and women have fundamental differences, how do we know that treatment is equally effective for both? If women and men experience a disorder differently, should there treatment be different. In the case of panic disorder with agorophobia, a recent (2006) study shows that there were little in the way of gender differences in PDA.

http://lib.bioinfo.pl/auth:Latas,M