The effects of hormones on gendered behaviour....again!

Girls have ‘girl’ toys shoved at them and boys have ‘boy’ toys shoved at them, pretty much from birth. We really have no idea which each sex would pick, given a completely free choice.

This is another time when I wish that BBC documentary was still available that explored how we almost subconsciously steer children towards the stereotypes. It was heartbreaking to watch how the girls and boys were sent off on their different paths, even by parents who were proudly saying they didn't adhere to the stereotypes. There are a few brief clips available, but the whole thing was fascinating, even speaking as a happily childfree old crone: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09202jz

For now, I'll use this clip which shows just the effect of clothing:

The video doesn't say what the words you bolded do. It says the exact opposite
I know - I was refuting the assertion in bold, not agreeing with it

Vegilante 👏👏👏

aggression

"Hormones in children come into effect at puberty."

Slightly before, AIR. Hormone levels start rising around 7 yo, and this is linked to increased.

Oh, come on! Part 5

In response to groundcontrol (Tue 13-Nov-18 04:39:23):

The link you provided is to a 3:25-long BBC clip called "Gender specific toys: do you stereotype children?" The video doesn't say what the words you bolded do. It says the exact opposite, in fact. It shows that adults determine what toys children play with, & how the children are spoken to & treated more generally, based on the sex-role stereotypes the adults project upon the children starting in infancy.

Activity interests and participation – from childhood toy preferences to adult hobbies and occupations – continue to be strongly linked to prenatal androgen exposure.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine-40936719/gender-specific-toys-do-you-stereotype-children

Had not expected this thread to contain anything interesting or informative. Thanks, Vegilante!

Vegilante
You are why I come here. Thanks so very much

Oh, come on! Part 4:

Unfortunately, the disease the authors base all their hypothetical & actual work on, CAH, is extremely rare, occurring in 1 out of every 16,000 births according to the CDC.

As a result, even if their work does yield real, measurable & replicable scientific findings about "how early hormones shape gender development" (whatever "gender" is), it's unlikely that such findings could be applied to the 99.999% of the population who don't have CAH. In that sense, it's a bit like all the research into rare intersex conditions that transgenderists constantly cite to promote such ideas as "sex isn't binary, it's a spectrum".

In fact, in late October Berenbaum herself along with fellow US transgenderist psychologist Kristina Olson co-authored an opinion piece that appeared on the Scientific American blog about the Trump admin's reported plans to define "sex" in US federal anti-discrimination laws as "biological sex" the way the term "sex" was meant when those laws were written & passed.

In this piece, the authors say, "insisting that it's a binary choice between male and female, determined at birth by genitalia goes against decades of research". Furthermore, they make the extraordinary claim that "none of these (biological) markers of sex" - be they genitals, gonads, internal reproductive organs or chromosomes - "is 'definitive proof of a person’s sex' and in fact, nothing is". According to the authors, the principal determinant of a person's sex is hormones, which fits with the theory that a full-grown adults who've lived decades as men and women can transition to the opposite sex simply by taking opposite-sex hormones.

blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-trump-administrations-proposed-redefinition-of-gender-is-scientifically-absurd/

Wow that looks like some really high impact not-science! Thanks for digging through Vegilante.

Oh, come on! Part 3:

Both authors of this paper, & the Berenbaum Lab generally, are heavily invested in promoting the concepts of gender, gender identity and gender development, and trying to find a biologic basis for them.

However, as far as I can tell from a quick but eagle-eyed search, the authors & their lab's work never clearly define what exactly gender, gender identity & gender development are. And their work is full of, and based on, frequent references to vague, undefined terms like "male-type activity interests and engagement" and "male-typed occupations" and "male-typical, higher-paying jobs".

Basically, this paper is an advertisement that seems to be aimed at funders & the press in order to garner attention for the authors' past but mostly proposed, upcoming research. As a result, it raves in excited prose about the hypothetical processes illustrated by the lone figure/chart the authors provide, despite the fact that "empirical evidence is needed to test most of the paths in the figure..."

And it contains paragraphs like this, from a section near the end called "Ongoing Work & Future Directions":

This is an exciting time to study how hormones shape gender development. The field is poised for some significant advances, and we highlight topics that represent opportunities based on animal studies, tantalizing recent findings noted above, and related trends in other areas of science.

And like this, which is the entire final section called "Conclusions":

Work on hormonal influences on gender development provides a nice model for understanding psychological development in general. Identifying mechanisms by which sex and gender matter can tell us about the ways that the prenatal environment primes us to elicit and respond to our social worlds, and how our biology and experiences transact across development to shape brain structure and function that guide behavior.

Oh, come on! Part 2:

The paper does summarize past research by this lab that's led to them to the proposed research, which the lab's website describes as follows:

The main work in our lab concerns psychological development in people with CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia), a genetic disease that results in exposure to high levels of androgens during early development. This work has two aims:

(1) to understand how hormones influence psychological development, and
(2) to take the information we learn to help people with CAH and their families.

Under the heading, "How do children come to identify with their biological sex?" the website also says:

This is a topic of great interest and controversy. Much remains to be learned, but the evidence to date shows that gender identity is related more to socialization than to biology. For example, studies of girls with CAH have consistently shown that an overwhelming majority identify as female. In these studies, feelings of discontent with one’s gender or a desire to be another gender do not correlate with how masculinized their genitalia are or their level of exposure to prenatal androgens. Therefore, early hormones do not seem to play as large a role in gender identity as does socialization (Berenbaum & Bailey, 2003; Dessens, Slijper, & Drop, 2005; Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2004, Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 1996; Zucker et al., 1996).

Obviously, what hard-science evidence they've discovered to support their theory of How Early Hormones Shape Gender Development only shows that "early hormones do not seem to play as large a role in gender identity as does socialization".

Oh, come on! Part 1:

This paper, published in 2016 in an open-access journal called "Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences" under the title How Early Hormones Shape Gender Development, does not document new findings or discoveries in the hard-sciences. It's an essay giving a broad overview of proposed research & hypotheses that are of interest to, & are (perhaps) to be investigated by, two American academics with PhDs in psychology at "The Berenbaum Lab" at Penn State University.

Though they are bona fide academics with excellent credentials, the authors or their editors chose a misleading title - How Early Hormones Shape Gender Development - probably deliberately because it would make it sound sexy, ultra-timely & newsworthy.

The first paragraph of the paper states:

Ongoing and planned work is focused on understanding the ways in which hormones act jointly with the social environment across time to produce varying trajectories of gender development, and clarifying mechanisms by which androgens affect behaviors. Such work will be facilitated by applying lessons from other species, and by expanding methodology.

The second paragraph, in its entirety, reads:

Why are the sexes different? How does the prenatal environment set the stage for postnatal development? How does behavior result from transactions between the brain and the social world? All three questions are the focus of contemporary work in the behavioral sciences, and they converge in questions regarding prenatal sex hormone effects on gender development, which includes characteristics that show sex differences and that relate to being female or male.

The author of the article has been very, very busy.
An extraordinary number of published works.

Her CV can be found on the web page below
www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/s/a/sab31/people.html

Activities are linked to hormone exposure?

But which activities are ‘male’ and which are ‘female’ is location specific.

In the US boys don’t play soccer very much, whereas they do in the UK. In Russia there are far more female engineers and doctors than in the UK.

So how does that work? How do you define a ‘male’ activity?

Androgen effects on interest and engagement in male-typed occupations was seen to have economic consequences: women with exposure to high levels of prenatal androgens due to congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) were more likely than controls to have income in the top 20th percentile, reflecting employment in male-typical, higher-paying jobs (despite having lower education, and more psychosocial problems).
Hasn't it been shown that the pay gap has a lot to do with choosing pregnancy/mothering? And aren't CAH women infertile? Correct me if I'm wrong?