So what ARE these differences between men and women?

What's more potentially dangerous, a false positive or a false negative?

It's a good question. Of course it depends on the feature or ability or inclination in question.

And just because something is not fixed at birth doesn't mean that you can, as an adult, change it.

I do feel that when it comes to differences between groups we (human beings) find it easy to say "these two groups are different" rather than "these two groups are similar", so I think we are more inclined to over report differences.

Trills,

"I consider that we do not know, and that acting as if some differences are innate is dangerous and potentially damaging if they are not."

Would you equally consider the opposite - that acting as if differences are NOT innate is dangerous and potentially damaging when they ARE?

"So it is best to treat everyone as an individual and not assume that they will be a certain way because of their sex."

Totally agree with that. But that's the only sensible way to approach anything to do with averages anyway. Even those most firmly on the nature side of this argument aren't claiming that it means there are things all men can't do that women can, or vice versa. If a particular population contains 2 people of one sex that are brilliant at something for every 1 person of the opposite sex, then it still follows from that that you need to acknowledge that any individual of either sex might be, and should be judged without prejudice.

Thanks Phyllis those are good points, yes. FWIW I agree that the differences are probably fairly minimal. Given that there are considerable differences between the brains of different individuals, of either sex, it could well be that any differences due to sex are dwarfed by other factors.

Yes, exactly.

-And in conclusion, we found no difference between men and women at all.
-Well that's not going to win you a Nobel, is it? Piss off and think of something that might be different so we can apply for a grant for it.

I agree with minipie. The differences really are pretty minimal - I'll talk about the language studies FastLoris mentioned, because they're all I can offer an informed opinion on.

Women have more connections between the two hemispheres of the brain.
It's been claimed that the corpus callosum, the white matter that connects the two hemispheres, is larger in women on average after you adjust for brain size. This would be the only sexual dimorphism in the anatomy of the brain after you adjust for average size. People have concluded from this that there might be differences between men and women in how the hemispheres communicate. However, there have been a series of more recent studies, some using different measuring techniques, that find either no evidence for a sex difference or only a very weak effect. So the evidence is inconclusive at best right now.

Womens' processing of language is more evenly shared between the two hemispheres.
This was a 1995 paper that claimed it found lateralization differences (ie differences in which hemisphere is used for processing) between men and women on language processing tasks - more strongly lateralized in men. BUT - they only found a difference (and a fairly weak one at that) for one of the processing tasks they tested. In the other tasks, and in studies other people have done, no effects were found. It also wasn't clear to me that they had adequately controlled for the fact that tasks were presented visually, so you have the processing associated with reading in the mix as well; and, I think worryingly, nobody on the research team was a linguist. The lead researchers were paediatric neurologists, and they published in Nature, which is not exactly known unto linguists as a top-ranking specialist psycholinguistics journal ... Again, no conclusive evidence.

There is some interesting data about stroke victims and the like where certain parts of one hemisphere are damaged. I can't remember exactly which syndrome it was, but one of the ones where a particular aspect of language is lost but the other aspects survive. They found that men lost this capacity far more gravely than women, because the original capacity was much more focused in one hemisphere, whereas the women could just use the other hemisphere to compensate.
It's not clear that these studies were comparing like with like - there is a dispute over this result within the field because the size of the brain lesions may not have been the same in the male and female groups. And the papers also showed that women were affected more by damage to certain parts of the left hemisphere (left anterior frontal cortex) than men were. So it is not as simple as "Man brain heavily lateralized, Woman brain super duper multitasking in both hemispheres".

My guess is that if/when effects are found for language, they will be pretty minimal. And it's vair difficult to tease out the effects of socialization if you are working with older subjects.

It's important to remember when you read anything about sex differences (or, well, about anything really) that there is both a publication bias - people are less likely to publish research that demonstrates a null hypothesis - and a reporting bias - because media outlets tend to pick up only on those stories which reinforce stereotypes or which are !ZOMGWackyBrainScience stories.

Minipie - but if we'd evolved like that we wouldn't really be us though would we

Actually, may have to correct that - think it's maybe bonobos I was thinking of. But the social behaviour is quite complex and certainly not of the "one stag who established dominance at rutting time, lots of hinds" vatiety: www.janegoodall.ca/about-chimp-behaviour-social-organization.php

Digerd, you do realise that chimps are matriarchal, don't you? So I guess the ones at the front were in fact the alpha females.

I agree with minipie.

Really bloody similar actually.

Men and women aren't opposites. They are actually really really similar, compared with how we could have evolved.

In some species the differences are much bigger. For example some kinds of spider where the female is many times the size of the male. Or some kinds of birds (peacocks, pheasants), where the male gets beautiful plumage and the female is brown. Or bees, where the females are workers and the males just fertilise the queen and then get kicked out when food is short.

Compared to all those, it's amazing how similar men and women are.

"I agree that men and women are the opposites of each other , in order to best preserve the species., that is the way nature intended us to be, 2 different halves that make the whole. It is also common sense. "

This makes nature sound like some kind of Hallmark greetings card. When I read things like this I sympathise with why people adopt the opposite view. But unfortunately its wrong too.

-Evolution isn't common sense. Otherwise someone else would have figured it out before Darwin.
-Nature doesn't work to preserve the species. It just doesn't work that way.
-Yes maleness and femaleness are coevolved states and there are differences associated with that, but it doesn't make "men and women opposites" - look at height for a non controversial example - in general across the population men are taller than women, but there is a lot of overlap. Knowing someone's height doesn't tell you their sex - men and women are not at opposite ends of the height spectrum.

Of course, parallels with the rest of mammal-kind has it's limitations. We're not all identical. But across all species with some kind of physical sexual differentiation, we find males/females have different roles and behaviours. It seems obvious to me humans would not be an exception to this.

It also seems obvious to me that social stereotyping, sadly, serves to reinforce these differences or to create differences where none really exist e.g. women are seen the less physical sex so are expected to drive badly and thus do so (also seen as less risk-taking so are thus safer drivers). I wonder where the pressure comes from to conform? In many rl experiences I can think of, it's other women that are the biggest regulator on womens' behaviour. It's only other women in my family that want me to wear make-up and shave my pits , men incl DH really don't care (they actively dislike the war paint).

Triils
I will say that men living together are more compatible than male and female

OneMoreChap

You make me laugh!!! But your SADLY, made me say Ahhhhhhh.

OOH, there are more male idiots and male geniuses than with females. Mmmmm. So, there are more "normal" females, I think that may be so.

I am still not convinced with the men being "gatherers", and not sure what that means. I also watch many animal documentaries, and the behaviour of the males and females in almost all of species, is typical of their roles.

However, one particulary sticks in my mind as hilariously shocking.
2 different groups of chimpanzees in a wonderfful sanctuary, were attempted to be integrated. Both groups were introduced through a mesh tunnel, and lo and behold, on the front line of attack were the FEMALES, with each ALPHA MALE pushing them on at the BACK !!!!!!!!!!!

digerd
I mentioned a survey to a man that " men think of sex every 20 minutes" and he said he reckoned it was more often than that. Sadly...

PS

Of, course now it is not essential for men to tackle the wild boar etc, carry it home. I mentioned a survey to a man that " men think of sex every 20 minutes" and he said he reckoned it was more often than that. SO, how can he now focus on anything ( other than sex) for longer than 20 minutes, which worries me.

"Common sense" is often used as a way of saying "I have no way of backing this up, I just know it".

Googlyeyes
I agree that men and women are the opposites of each other , in order to best preserve the species., that is the way nature intended us to be, 2 different halves that make the whole. It is also common sense. Men have the big muscles and strength to fight off the dangers of intruders that can harm their family, defend their territory, and fight the wild animals to take home for food. Their role destiny is in their genes, hormones and chromosomes, and compel them to be totally focussed on the task in hand as is so dangerous and cannot be distracted by anything else as is a matter of life and death. Common sense really.

InSPsFanjoNoOneHearsYouScream
We get hairier as we get older, they lose hair

... on their heads, perhaps. Everywhere else gets hairier.

You obviously have/have had younger men.

I was a long haired, beardless, smooth chested youth.
I'm now a bald, hairy-eared(yuk), hairy-backed, heavily whiskered old bloke.

Hmm. To be honest if you saw the amount of learned bollocks neuroscientists, psychologists and science reporters have written about my field (linguistics) then you'd be as sceptical as I am whenever I hear someone say "I read about a neuroscience study that said men and women are different in ways xyz ... ".

Has does the fact that men weren't manipulated in the study as women were negate the findings of the study for women?

Firstly, it reflects RL more closely because it is women not men who are fed this message of being inferior in Maths. The point being that when this message was taken away women's performance improved.

Secondly, telling the men prior to the exam that men did worse might not have had the same effect as it would not be backed up by weight of society. So the two are not equal.