So what ARE these differences between men and women?

I've just googled this subject and found this interesting article www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/10/gender-gap-myth-cordelia-fine. The heading on the article is "Gender gap a scientific myth" but when you read the article even Cordelia Fine doesn't seem to claim that. The article quotes psychologist Susan Pinker as saying there are observable differences immediately after conception and the studies that have found this have been published in peer reviewed journals.

I have to say I agree with Susan Pinker's rather than Cordelia Fine's conclusions. Having said all that I can see why feminists would rather play down the science. The obvious reason being that as others have pointed out their is an overlap in the difference between the sexes. You can't say for instance that because there is an observable difference in map reading skills between the sexes that every woman must be crap at it and every man good. We should treat people as individuals and not prejudge them based on sex or anything else for that matter.

Hmm I suppose it depends on how different the cultures are. If you have any specific study in mind I'd love to read about it/them.

Not easily, but things like cross cultural studies can help - if there is difference which is observable in European and Asian countries then it is more likely to be nature. If it is only a measurable difference in one place and not in another then it is more likely to be cultural.

But Himalaya, on a population difference for a given attribute, say spatial reasoning, I don't think it would be possible to distinguish innate factors from social factors, would it?

What everyone else said about overlapping bell curves.
It is a mistake to think that there are no differences at a population level.
It is a mistake to think that these differences define individual men and women as more different than similar.

I saw a moderately scientific programme on TV about fathers, which said that men's testosterone levels are the lowest in their adult lives in the week or so after the birth of their children. They said this was to aid bonding, suggesting pre-historic man was very much involved with child rearing.

I don't know if this means men are less nurturing than women (other than with their children), but then women have major hormonal changes when they give birth too, so maybe not.

Don't be sorry, he's delicious

His particular interests are trains and cars, and he will happily spend hours on youtube watching clips (self-selected) of cars crashing, racing and being fixed by mechanics. Similarly with trains. In his particular case, I would say that his autism DOES present as a case of (stereotypical) extreme male brain (lack of desire to communicate anything but practicalities, obsessive interest in narrow subjects, desire to collect and order things, attention to detail etc), but I can only speak for him.

What I can say is that he has no desire or ability to imitate and and so very definitely follows his own path in life, determined by his own innate interests. If anything, we, and the therapists who worked with him at home before he started school tried to direct him towards more 'girly' toys such as dolls, teddies and tea sets, using them to role play various situations that would be helpful for his learning and communication skills.

On the other hand my dd and ds are each an intriguing mix so I don't know what the hell to think half the time. DD adores everything pink and glittery (SO unlike me) but is also an adrenaline junkie who has buckets of energy and is incredibly physical. DS2 would play with various vehicles all day long, and wants to grow up to be a superhero but his favourite programme is 'Chloe's Closet', and he is soft, gentle, and scared of speed/ heights/ boisterous play to quite an alarming degree!

TheDoctrine...that's a very interesting point re girls with severe autism. There are a couple at my son's (very small) school and as far as I know they do love dolls/ babies/ glitter and are also much more keen to communicate and verbalise. But I don't know them or their families well

Googly I am sorry to hear about your son. I wonder, do you know any girls who are similarly autistic, are they stereotypically female? What are your son's particular interests?

I think the issue is that there isn't an experiment or test that is possible to do to isolate nature from nuture. But we can see powerful effects of psychological experiments such as telling a group their gender (either gender) does badly on a type of test that indicate a lifetime effect of gender expectations will be strong.

It is interesting what you say googleyes about your autistic son. More girls are now being diagnosed as autistic. Why? Because in the past it was thought that autism was almost always a male condition i.e. it was stereotyped as male.
So, girls were missed because the stereotypers could not get their heads round the fact that girls can be autistic too. Thankfully, we now know better.

googleyes: I don't think the fact that I and others said we didn't like shopping, gossiping etc. was meant to be evidence that men and women aren't different. It was more to express irritation at the assumption that women do like shopping, gossiping, shoes etc. - the general lazy stereotyping about about how men and women act and what they are like.

Thus my tongue in cheek remark that I must be a man with the wrong bits i.e. because I like stuff that the stereotypers say men should like I must be a man.

I am sure we are all a mixture of nature and nurture although I hold firm to the view that there are more differences between individuals of the same sex than there are between the sexes generally.

I've read Lise Eliot, thanks. Am all for balance

I believe absolutely that social conditioning is incredibly powerful. And i know that the developing brain is very plastic. I just can't get away from the feeling that it's wrong to assume that there is nothing BUT social conditioning at play. To me that's a step too far, and possibly wishful thinking.

And I also can't get my head round the fact that I'm asked to provide proof that male and female brains are different but then people can say things like 'well I'm a woman and I don't like shopping/ gossiping/ shoes' and this is taken as evidence in itself that men and women AREN'T different!!!

This subject is particularly interesting to me as I have 2 NT (neurotypical) children, a boy and a girl, and then I also have a son who is severely autistic. I would defy anyone who knows him and his level of disability to claim that he has been socially conditioned in any way. And yet he is stereotypically male in most of his behaviour and interests.

Exactly minipie (mmm, pie). It's always strange to me that we get so wrapped around the axle on physical diversity when character diversity is so much more relevant to just about EVERYTHING!

Much like baddancingdad says - I think there probably are some differences between the average man and the average woman.

To take an example - the average man may be better at maths than the average woman.

However

1. these differences apply only to the average man and woman. So, there are plenty of individual women who are good at maths, and plenty of individual men who are crap at it.

2. many of these differences are only there, or at least are exaggerated, because of nurture and societal expectations. They are not fully inherent. So, boys may be encouraged more towards maths at school than girls are.

3. the differences kick in far more at post puberty rather than in children.

4. non gender related differences (such as the difference between extroverts and introverts, or between scientific minds and artistic minds) are far far greater in number, and hence have a greater impact on a person's character, than the gender related differences.

There's a small Delta between the two bell curves?

• Sorry, I shuddered when you mentioned statistics. Bad memories of trying to understand! :o)

Precisely, BadDancingDad. That's a lovely, straightforward explanation of what statisticians call the D value (difference of the means of the two populations divided by the product of the standard deviations). It's small for most differences in human beings - we're not a strongly sexually dimorphic species.

I've always thought that the personality is very much like the body; nature gives us a basic frame, but our environment will heavily influence the manner in which we develop.

In terms of the differences between men and women, I am certain that there is an average male and an average female and that there are differences between the two. Three things are often forgotten, however:

• the huge variance; many people are not at all average!
• the distance between the average man and average woman is not remotely so large as the distance between the extremes of each.
• there is a large overlap; some men are more female in character than the average woman and some women are more male in character than the average man...

Just my thoughts!

What evidence is there that men hunted and women gathered, rather than mixed groups doing both?

There's no evidence from our own past because it's too long ago. But there's plenty of evidence from societies as primitive as Europe was several thousand years ago.

Another major issue is that men fight, sometimes a lot. And it may be that continuous war means that women end up doing most of the useful work because a lot of the men are dead, and those who survive are spending all their time making weapons or out raiding, or on guard against raids by the next tribe over.

Think of Otzi the Iceman, left in the snow after being killed by an arrow in the back (and he was found with arrows of his own, which carried the blood of several individual humans). And Kennewick Man in America, whose skull had been broken in the way a club would land, and who had a stone point embedded in his hip, though neither wound had killed him. Life could be nasty and brutish, and sometimes surprisingly long.

An awful lot of people on MN seem to think that mothers and fathers care for their children equally.
At birth I had so much more invested in my baby than DH, so we had different starting points. This difference is psychological. I think there are huge psychological differences between mothers and fathers, more so than men and women who aren't parents, but there are still general differences.

What is clear is that men and women played equally vital roles in primitive societies. Hunting obviously provided large quantities of food, especially protein, when animals were plentiful. However, gathering fruits, nuts, fungi, roots provided a more constant and sustained food supply through the year when migrating herds moved away.

The hunter gather communities were sustainable only because men and women specialised in roles that were suited to their physique and the need to bear and rear children.

However, men very likely looked after children and also gathered fruit, nuts, seeds when animals were in short supply. Women very likley also particiapted in hunting smaller game, fishing and so either with or without men.

Men have a tendency to be able to switch from one relationship to another. One ends and they get over it by beginning another. Women have more of a tendency to lick their wounds as it were before getting out there again. Not scientific, just what I have observed during my X long years on this planet.

We don't all fall into stereotype - some men like shopping for clothes, some women hate it. What is food shopping but the modern equivalent of going after the mammoth (so there's been a bit of role reversal there, then)? Some men love being at home, some women like me would rather be out there chopping wood.

Googly, will read that Deborah Blum book, sounds interesting.

women have higher pain thresholds like for endurance pain, mainly for child birth.

You might also be interested to learn (or you might not) that gathering is by far the most efficient source of protein in one specific location - the foreshore. It's possible to gather enough protein and food for a day in less than an hour's work - oysters, whelks, razorshells, bird eggs, etc.

In Brittany (and many other places) there are huge middens - heaps of shells - made up entirely of oyster shells. By huge, I mean a 100m long and 20m wide and 5m high, even after 5,000 years of erosion. The middens contain exclusively oyster shells, even though a huge variety of other molluscs can be found in the area, which has led some people to conclude that there was some sort of ritual element to it.

Thanks flat pack.

Link that works

For those interested I've just found article www.eva.mpg.de/primat/staff/boesch/pdf/behav_brain_scien_sex_diff.pdf which shows a division of behaviour in food attainment amongst chimpanzees.

The paper points out that hunting is primarily a male activity amongst chimpanzees.