Trigger warning to Ms Brooke Baldwin [1]. references to sexual anatomy ahead. Stop reading this post now.
These three people, Anna Wilson, Kate Wilson and David Low, are professors, or what passes for professors in Oz. They therefore must be smart, and must be heeded, listened to, no mocked, from Tes [2]:
Playful urination practices – from seeing how high you can pee to games such as Peeball (where men compete using their urine to destroy a ball placed in a urinal) – may give boys an advantage over girls when it comes to physics. And we believe there’s something we can do about it.
No doubt you have some questions, the first is probably: what could possibly lead us to believe this?
Well, for starters, our recent analysis of the kinds of physics questions females generally do worse at than males. Add to that strong evidence for the widespread nature of certain kinds of pee-based game-playing among young (and not-so-young) boys. Finally, throw in our observations on curriculum sequencing and the ways in which formal, mathematically codified physics is often introduced to children and young people.
Taking the professors at their word. God gave little boys penises, but not little girls. Men, once little boys, are better at physics than women, who were deprived of their penises by God. It is the lack of penises which is why women have less aptitude for and desire to master physics than men. Memo to mom, I must be a girl because I never understood physics. This the good professors inform us leads to gender gap in physics.
Aside, being endowed, by God and not by a surgeon with a penis, is not a function of a person’s real or imagined gender. It is a property of the person’s sex, to wit male or female.
Moreover, if I were inclined to argue from a evolutionary biology perspective, I would hold that solving practical trajectory problems in real time was a critical survival skill for our antecedents which hunted for survival. to wit the males, much more than the females.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, if having a penis while a boy is the cause of disparity between men and women in physics, it can not properly be called a gender gap. Rather it is a God gap. Obviously, if God had wanted young girls to grown up to be physicists, he would have given them penises. Now girls, and Professor Low as well, crawl back to your kitchen and bake some cookies.