Feminism and natural sex differences

'if men are better at spatial awareness why aren't they typically stacking small cupboards with weekly shops?'

because people do things if they get enjoyment or perceive that they will get rewards from doing them. Just because someone has good spatial awareness doesn't mean that they will want to stack cupboards. If they have a choice, they may not like doing that.

'If women are better at interpreting simultaneous complex visual signals (empathy from faces is this, unless you belive in telepathy) why aren't they typically air traffic controllers and football managers?'

I think women are better at reading human emotions and interpreting body language and facial gestures. This is not the same as looking at blips on a screen. The difference is the complex understanding of human nature and emotion. There is probably no advanatge for either sex in reading blips on a screen. We don't live in a neat world where the best person for a job is the person that does the job. There are other factors such as whether people want to do that job, whether there are barriers which prevent them entering that profession etc. Being a football manager is about more than reading people's emotions. It involves having a deep understanding of football tactics and understanding and empathising with the players and being able to gain their respect in order to manage them.

'And if they are better at 'nurturing' why not Army training instructors?'
I doubt that army training instructors are about nurturing.

'if they have lower boredom thresholds (S B-C uses this to explain housework) why are so many traditional male jobs in hevay industry repetitive and boring (much more so than housework)'

because these men don't have much choice in the type of work that they do. They have to take what is on offer. They can't afford to turn the jobs down just because they are boring.

'A man walking towards you raising his fist and shouting incoherently because drunk is communictaing as effectively as a woman mediating-both are letting others know what they feel.'

but the drunk raising his fist is not the type of communication that is required for business. To influence people, manage staff and win customers, a much more understanding human empathetic communication is required, and women on the whole are better at that.

'to go back to my first post-why then are newsreaders or PR execs not predominantly female?'

With newsreaders teh TV companies usually like to try to create a balance. A lot of women do work in PR. But again jobs don't necessarily go to the best candidates, there are other factors involved.

'And why, given modern politics is about election and communication, are politicians not predominantly female?'
because politics is essentially about power, and men are often attracted to these roles. Politics is about much more than communication and spin.

These men's right activists - they get mentioned sometimes on this topic. Is it fathers for justice types? I don't really know anything about it.

I would say that bar very few professions (tries to think of some), there are no such things as "men's jobs" and "women's jobs".

Jobs which required a lot of physical strength used to be beyond a lot of women physically (they didn't really have female bus drivers before buses had power steering for example) although even then there would have been some women who had the strength.

But in modern Britain, I can't think that there are many jobs at all that fundamentally require a male or female to do them.

So I think that giving jobs "genders" is a false thing to do in the first place. The way they are divided "traditionally" is high profile/salary/power jobs reserved for men, low status, monotonous, caring roles reserved for women.

The whole thing needs to be opened up so that people can have a genuine open choice as to what field they work in. The current situation where basically men just don't do preschool and even primary school childcare/teaching, and women hold hardly any positions of status power & wealth needs to change. We are failing to tap the talents of a great many people in society, and those people are miserable as a result.

We also need to have some kind of anti-capitalist revolution and reassess the whole way our society functions but that is definitely another thread

Practically, because jobs and population are finite.

But less calously, because women would have greater freedom genuinely to choose roles if more roles were not gendered-if childcrae were not considered a woman's role, if WOHD's were getting whipped by the Daily Mail, more women could make genuine choices.

But, the world being the world, what actually happens is that men's jobs remain closed while men's rights activists attack the few areas dominated by women.

"Would feminists here agree that one of the aims of feminism should not be just to get women into the same jobs as men but also to ensure that the jobs women tend to choose (for whatever reason) gain as much status and attract as much pay as traditionally male jobs?"

Of course! That's huge part of feminism. And I would also add get men into 'women's jobs' too.

TRIGGER ALERT FOR VICTIMS OF MALE VIOLENCE

MrsClown

Points like that coincide with where I think the OP is coming from, as are the sort of responses I raised earlier, which would be:

(a) A man walking towards you raising his fist and shouting incoherently because drunk is communictaing as effectively as a woman mediating-both are letting others know what they feel.

(b) to go back to my first post-why then are newsreaders or PR execs not predominantly female? And why, given modern politics is about election and communication, are politicians not predominantly female? Has modern society simply buggered up biology?

And, to go back to the OP, that's the reason so many (feminists and non-feminists) are sceptical about difference-not just because evidence for it is so slight-but because 'different but equal' comes to focus on women as subordinate, to use 'communication' to justify some roles but not others.

About the 'fact' that men are physically stronger than women. Think about the kind of ways we expect and encourage little boys and girls to play and behave. Could this have anything to do with it? Anything at all?

'Women are better communicators'

That's not true.

Do those genetic differences mean that women are happiest at home doing housework and caring for their children and husbands, while men are better off forging ahead in the world outside the home, with all that it offers, due to their higher ambition and low boredom thresholds

Silly, innit.

Am going to google to see if I found out what this baron-cohen said so that I can blow a fuse.

I think there are genetic differences between men and women. For example men are physically stronger than women in general. Women are better communicators. Its the fact that people think that because men are stronger they are superior that annoys me. Just because we are different it doesnt mean we arent equal.

Simon baron-cohen says that women have higher boredom thresholds and this is - what - why they are better at housework/don't mind it as much as men/what does he say?

Never heard this one before. Have fingers poised to type outraged rant

Agree with your post.

It's interesting though, that things that I would think that most people would understand as common sense and self-evident (just because some people are a certain way doesn't mean that everyone who shares a trait with them gender/race/religion/hair colour/whatever is automatically the same way).

Lots of interesting posts and mini-thread here, so apologies for only repsonding to the OP.

As I (on the outside) see it many feminists wouold reject much of the science on those differences, and all would consider them overplayed, and belonging on a spectrum rather than a rigid male/female divide. I'd agree, but lots of posts already on this.

But, to return to your point, even if you accept sex difference, the question most feminists would pose is the generalisation. My partner gave birth to and breast fed our children for example, and felt physical sickness when DS2 went to nursery, which she linked to the experience of birth, and regret that he weaned so soon afterwards. I felt similar violent physical sickness after DS1 left my care to go to nursery, but put it down to context (missing caring for him full time). Her experience is rooted in her body and mine isn't, and it would be foolish to deny this. But she wouldn't claim this was natural to all women. So there is, I would suggest, room to accept individual narratives of difference without accepting them as general.

But the real worry is that we simply have too few genes, and too little time, for most differences to be explicable genetically given the cliched roles. If you accept difference, it still doesn't explain those roles. So, to take examples whose conclusions I wouldn't share, if men are better at spatial awareness why aren't they typically stacking small cupboards with weekly shops? If women are better at interpreting simultaneous complex visual signals (empathy from faces is this, unless you belive in telepathy) why aren't they typically air traffic controllers and football managers? And if they are better at 'nurturing' why not Army trainibng instructors? Or, if they have lower boredom thresholds (S B-C uses this to explain housework) why are so many traditional male jobs in hevay industry repetitive and boring (much more so than housework)? It's these questions that often aren't asked becasue it's dangerous to accept the difference, but there is room for syaing 'OK, that's a difference', but does that really exaplin, are there really no 'male' or 'female' roles which display that too?

It isn't solely caused by hormonal imbalances though, there is usually an external trigger to depression. Depression can be seen in hormone imbalances but still, you can't say they alone cause it.

Lenin - that is what I meant by 'free choice'. If choice were free then there would be no need to take self-defeating choices.

MrsR, it's true enough to say that depression is 'caused by hormonal imbalances', bearing in mind that hormones are neurotransmitters and depression is an expression of malfunctioning neurones. I should have said "sex hormones" above - I made the mistake that leads to common confusion about hormones. Neurotransmitters can begin to fail as a result of prolonged stress (adrenal overload) or in reaction to a single event - as well as many physical conditions.

Unfortunately, depression is a woolly word. It seems quite likely that a woman's body may produce depression symptoms as her hormones readjust after birth. That would go away once her system had re-balanced. The fact that it so often doesn't re-balance spontaneously suggests that she's not getting enough downtime - which seems pretty likely in today's world! Perhaps nature meant her to cwtch up with baby for several weeks, being waited on by friends & family while her system reconfigures itself. Perhaps PND is the body's attempt to force sufficient downtime?

I have to wonder about the confidence we place on assertions that things like depression are caused by hormone imbalances while in the same breath saying depression is caused by traumatic events. That sounds contradictory to me. I would agree more with the idea that depression and hormone imbalances are linked but no causal inferences can be made.

Huge apologies for not reading entire thread.

As someone with a turbulent hormone profile and severe clinial depression (both of which I know plenty about), I'd like to stress that hormonal balance does alter moods: moods being transient things by definition. It also affects 'personality'. It is not, however, connected with cognitive abilites; neither is it responsible for depression. We still know very little about neural biology, so almost all currernt theories & treatments are based on guesses and extrapolations. One thing that does seem certain is the way prolonged stress causes a domino effect throughout the nervous system. Thus, depression tends to be the result of a build-up of reactions, not a single reaction in itself.

In fact, we have different words for depressions triggered by a single event: grief, shock, trauma, etc. When I was a kid, depression used to be called 'nervous exhaustion' which now seems to be the more accurate term.

I totally agree with "women's work" being undervalued and underpaid and that needs a lot of attention.

I don't think doctors are underpaid though (although I have heard that since women started going into medicine in large numbers, salaries have dropped in real terms - don't know if that is true or not).

But are they WoD? Medicine used to be a male discipline (science, innit), ditto teaching used to be a high-prestige "male" role.

Anyway loads of men work in "caring" roles and love it, many would love to have more time looking after their children.

I think that until we are in a totally gender-neutral society (is that a term?) we have no way of telling what people really want to do, and whether if people were really free, there would be a gender divide in what they did, or not.

And even if there was a difference on average, individuals would still be good at/want to do the "other". A girl who is brilliant at science and has ambitions of working for NASA should not be given the message that actually that sort of thing is for boys, and even if she's clever enough women have the wrong temperament for that sort of job, and she won't enjoy it. Should she?

That;s not my experience of feminism though. It's about choice, free choice.