So what ARE these differences between men and women?

Is it true some red indian women were braves, equal to their male counterparts and only gave up the role if they married ?

I don't think I'm a man (at least, wasn't last time I checked), but I'm good at maths, spatial reasoning, reading maps, etc.

Googlyeyes - I'd recommend Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Elliot (who is a neuroscientist). In a nutshell, her thesis is this:

(1) It's very hard to get at children to measure stuff before social conditioning kicks in (psychology experiments videoing how adults interact with babies in pink and blue babygrows - they treat the babies they think are boys differently from the babies they think are girls - so there's no pre-nurture state to get a handle on).
(2) Insofar as you can find differences, early on these are tiny differences in the means of the two distributions compared to the standard deviations of the two distributions. Example - girls utter first 3 word sentence on average a bit before boys, but a significant number (about 40%-45%) of boys will still utter their first 3 word sentence before the average girl. (Hence all those threads where someone worries that DS hasn't uttered a single word yet and he's 2.5 - you get lots of well-meaning but ill informed people saying "it's ok, he's a boy" when they should be saying "2.5 - that's well into the tail of the distribution, get him checked out").
(3)The developing brain is very plastic - so you as a parent or teacher can choose to amplify initially small differences (oh Shirley can't catch 'cos she's a girl, no point buying her lego 'cos she won't be any good at it 'cos she doesn't have any spatial reasoning ability, Fred hits his brother 'cos he's a boy so of course he doesn't "get" empathy), or you can choose to try to bring up a well rounded individual (buy construction toys for your daughter, encourage your sons to play nurturing games, read to both sexes, play counting games with both sexes).

TheDoctrineOfSnatch

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

There isn't any formal evidence. The things that would indicate that have long since rotted away.

There's been observational research done on hunter-gatherer tribes, where there tends to be a split between men hunting and women gathering. And there are a few examples of classical authors writing about the behaviour of groups such as the Celts (eg Pliny). While classical authors don't dwell on gender, and they don't mention that the women hunted with the men. Doesn't mean they didn't, absence of evidence not being evidence of absence (or something).

I seem to remember that gathering was the most important food source Becuase it was more predictable.

Yes, that's right. Gathering is more predictable but hunting offers access to protein which is hard to obtain otherwise. An awful lot of hunting carried out in the more recent past (100,000 to 5,000 years ago) would not have been 'group of 8 men chase mammoth' but the setting of snares made from grass and twigs to catch small animals such as rabbits.

I also never understood why peripheral vision wouldn't be pretty handy for hunting too.

Your peripheral vision is blurry. It allows you to discern movement but our eyes offer the best focus when something is straight ahead. Being able to see directly ahead very accurately - and for the brain to translate that in to arm movement - is essential for thrown weapons such as slings and spears.

There's so much difference in how boys and girls are socialised from birth that there's no way to tell if there are in fact innate differences - which means anyone saying "of course there are innate differences" is talking bollocks.

Especially when any neuro research into differences in male and female brains produces a graph with a pair of curves that are around 95% overlapping - some men have significant differences in certain aspects from some women, but the vast majority are pretty similar. Used to be a neuroscientist and read the papers on gender differences (followed by the hysterical media versions...) for light relief.

Testosterone is an interesting hormone and only a tiny part of physical differences (let alone any others) - for example as men age they produce more testosterone but get mellower along with the receding hairline etc. -it's not simply an 'aggro hormone'. Think that's right anyway - it's certainly complicated!

I also never understood why peripheral vision wouldn't be pretty handy for hunting too.

I think I must be a man too. Oh dear.

And Hecate, anyone who thinks " Men can, erm, something. hit a buffalo from half a mile away or something" has clearly never played Doom3 with my DH.

I agree grimble - DH was pretty besotted from the word go and would have happily bf if he'd had the right bits! But bonding can't be separated from socialisation either - if you expect to bond cOs it's "what mums do", perhaps you will. Or as more mums than dads take extended leave, perhaps there is a sense of throwing yourself into the job.

Googly I'm not denying your own sense of bonding, just that it did take place within a social and not purely a biological construct.

I was never quite sure what to "do" with babies. Husband was a natural. I liked them once they could answer back (though not necessarily what they said )
I hate shopping with a passion.
I hate domesticity and love sport.
I like cars and speed (on a race track).
I can't stand celeb mags and gossip or talking with female friends about my partner (why do so many women air private stuff in public?)
If I cry I would only ever do it in private - never in public, at work etc.
As a kid, if a girl was bitchy I would be much more likely to thump her than bitch back or bitch behind her back.

Clearly I'm a man - but with the wrong 'bits'.

On the whole I'd say women find it easier to bond with their newborns, thanks to being flooded with hormones post-birth and during breastfeeding. DH, while no less loving, admitted it took him longer to bond with our babies as he had to get to know them first. It must be very different being 'presented' with a baby son or daughter compared to having felt the baby move inside you for months and then having given birth to it. In fact I can't even imagine what a vastly different experience it must be for a father at first, however devoted he is, and however closely he will bond with the child in due course.

I'd think the fact that oestrogen and testosterone provoke different behaviour is worth a mention.

maybenow, I don't agree women are by nature better at looking after infants than fathers and are gushing with affection for babies.

Recently found an article which included Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy and a study done in the UK on parents presenting infants to A&E with a variety of symptoms.

"In November 1997, the Journal of
Pediatrics published the results of a terrifying
experiment; doctors at several hospitals
in Great Britain had decided to covertly videotape
39 parents?most of them mothers?
whom medical personnel had begun to suspect
were deliberately bringing their young
children to the brink of death (Southall et
al., 1997).
In 30 of the 39 cases, the parents
were observed intentionally suffocating their
children; in two they were seen attempting
to poison a child; in a third, the mother
under surveillance deliberately broke her
3-month-old daughter?s arm. Many of the
parents seemed as methodical and as brazen,
as scoured of fear or conscience, as any serial
killer. ?Abuse was inflicted without provocation
and with premeditation, and in some
instances, involved elaborate and plausible
lies to explain consequences? (Southall et
al., 1997). For example, one mother claimed
that she had suffocated her son because of
stress related to his crying and continually
waking her from sleep. However, under
surveillance, the mother was seen, with premeditated
planning, to suffocate her infant
when he was deeply asleep.
The majority of other cases showed attempted
suffocation when the child was
asleep or lying passively on the bed. The disturbing
feature was that these were women
(and a few men) who masqueraded as good
parents, the sort who rushed their children to
the emergency room when they had trouble
breathing, and stood by them with fortitude
and devotion while the doctors puzzled out
what was wrong. They were conning; they
could give the appearance of the concerned
mom the minute a doctor or nurse walked
in the room, enjoy the social prestige of a
mysterious disease, the proximity to powerful
medical professionals, they liked the attention
and the drama?the wail of the sirens,
the adrenalin rush of the emergency room
(Brown, n.d.). With further investigation, it
turned out that the 39 patients under surveillance,
ages 1 month to nearly 3 years old,
had 41 siblings, and that 12 of those siblings
had died suddenly and unexpectedly.

www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com/support-files/female-psychopathic-killers.pdf

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

I seem to remember that gathering was the most important food source Becuase it was more predictable.

How about 'Pulitzer Prize-winning Deborah Blum, 'Sex on the Brain: the biological differences between men and women'. Interesting read whatever your views!

I don't believe we are born with any differences except the basic biology, I think that hormones cause some differences after puberty - testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone all have different effects on mood and emotion.

And I think pregnancy and childbirth has a bigger effect on women than just them being incubators. While it is possible to give birth and then bottle-feed and not be primary-carer, I think that hormones related to birth and breast feeding (oxytocin for example) have a big effect on the way women care for infants in a way that a man don't have to the same extent.

And sorry but just one more (very genuine) question. What is the evidence that men and women AREN'T inherently different, short of anecdotal evidence that some girls like cars and trains etc and some boys aren't sporty and like pink? On, and Cordelia Fine of course...

i would respectfully disagree morebeta

i come from a country which has animals people hunt to eat, animals which will eat you, and berries (it's fantastic )

they are all sort of mixed up together - you might go out all browsy browsy for berries, but there is no reason why you wouldn't also encounter the animals which will eat you. they don't self segregate.

having said that i read a v interesting book once which suggested that early humans weren't so much hunters as scavengers at the kills of larger prey animals

Well, I hate shopping and always go alone, MoreBeta :)

Honestly, googlyeyes, it is really hard to discuss this in more detail without seeing some proper scientific references. So many of these popular beliefs are just 'folk science', ie not science at all.

Speaking for myself (which is all I can do), I am attracted to people by a combination of looks and character, and find stereotypically masculine characteristics an utter turn-off. I'm not sure that means anything, really!

A lot of these differences are based on very dubious science and in the case of the cavemen thing, that is all based on evolutionary psychology theory which is about the same as explaining thunder by saying it's a God riding his chariot across the sky.

There is even a biological issue with determining gender - the biological markers are not obvious - and there is a huge variance so there is a "range" of maleness and femaleness biologically. Hence people with dual sex hormones and characteristics and hermaphrodite conditions. At birth there are issues with identifying sex organs protruding from the body as male even though the person then becomes female in puberty.

Then you get nature vv nurture where genes are shown to contribute a maximum of 50% of personality, so as your genes determine whether you are male or female that leaves at least 50 % to be determined by nurture and upbringing so it is likely there is a huge over lap between male and female here as well - except you then need to factor in societal treatment of male vv female children.

Brain scanning currently is inconclusive as there again appears to be a range and quite a large overlap of the sexes.

My view is that there are really more similarities than differences but society seems obsessed with generating differences - and also there is the male issue with defining themselves as "not girls" which starts at school with the whole "girls subjects" stuff.

I can't offer specific references right now but at university we were definitely shown X-rays of male and female brains and they were noticeably different.

Different strengths such as men having better spatial
awareness, being much better able to focus on one task at a time to the exclusion of other things and women being better able to communicate and multi-task. Just as some examples off the top of my head. I know they sound like cliches but it's clear that these different strengths, yin and yang, if you like, have served society pretty well since caveman days.

How about the studies showing that even as newborns (ie before social conditioning can get them) male and female babies have differences in their sharpness of hearing and sight?

Can I throw a question back at you? Do you feel people are
attracted to either sex simply because of their physiology?

That said, I like shopping and routinely get lost in my own town.