Biological determinism

We have better colour vision, too. Men tend to beat women on long-distance eyesight. That these differences have morphed into "Women like pretty things that smell nice, but can't plan ahead" tells you a lot more about societal interpretation than any true understanding of what it is to be female or male.

Exactly!
The article pp mentioned is great at unpicking such flawed conclusions

https://sfonline.barnard.edu/eight-things-you-need-to-know-about-sex-gender-brains-and-behavior-a-guide-for-academics-journalists-parents-gender-diversity-advocates-social-justice-warriors-tweeters-facebookers-and-ever/

I’m sorry @CastlesinSpain but both your theses are obviously & immediately flawed.

I suspect that women are just as capable as men at being violent to those weaker than themselves.
We know that women provide the supermajority of care for those humans weaker than themselves & have done since pre-history. Despite all those opportunities for violence, violent women remain rare. Moreover; male violence is not only directed at those weaker than themselves - it is fairly indiscriminate, from VAWG, DV, family annihilation & crimes of that stripe through some cultures’ tradition of “champions” bareknuckle boxing as a way to settle inter-family conflicts to boys’ bullying/school fights & men’s brawling in public.

As for grooming gangs… Women across the entirety of the UK have had access to safe & reliable contraception methods for decades; & now finally all have access to safe & legal abortion in our own countries after decades of unequal provision/access. These hypothetical women are in a position of power: literally making the rules for the children/young people they’re exploiting: “no sex without a condom” would be an obvious one, given other forms of contraception don’t protect against STIs; & doubling with an implant/the coil/the pill to protect against condom failure is an obvious step 🤷‍♀️ Lesbians also exist & wouldn’t need to worry about pregnancy; & depending on the age of the children/young people, relative size & strength wouldn’t be an issue either. Indeed with both sexes one should consider that when it comes to grooming physical control is by necessity minimal - & in theory women would be excellent at grooming teens because of our communication skills & ability to empathise. Again, however, while there absolutely ARE women who commit sex crimes; & certainly there are women who are never reported let alone anything else; sex crimes are overwhelmingly male crimes & were it related to the pregnancy burden as you suggest there would have been increases in female sex offenders each time a new form of contraception became freely available (not the case) & lesbians would approximate male patterns of criminality in this area (not even close).

I think it's much harder to understand how socialisation works when it comes to violence and aggression. It's definitely the case that women can be violent, but even so it seems much rarer among women. I remember reading that there was no society on earth where bands of women have gone and carried out raids on other tribes. Yet it is quite usual in many societies for men to do this.

I think this may be* due to physical *strength differences. I suspect that women are just as capable as men at being violent to those weaker than themselves.

Similarly, where is the female equivalent of the male grooming gangs? At least 95% of sex offenders are male. Can it all be down to socialisation?

Again strength, but also women bear the consequences of promiscuous sex, ie. pregnancy.

Have you read "The Power"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_(Alderman_novel)

I think there are broadly, not definitively sex-related behaviours. Some would be ultimately connected with female childbearing & breast-feeding; some with male fighting and (possibly) shagging. There might well be sex-related differences in mate-attracting behaviours: observation would suggest they exist, but we have no ungendered societies to study.

When we look at the respective effects of nature and nurture, I like to mention the olfactory bulb. It's one of the very few real brain differences between the sexes, but strangely the trans brigade never mention it. Depending on your source, women have up to twice as many olfactory cells and neurons. Our sense of smell is - on average - far more acute, therefore, and this is empirically demonstrated.

But who are the revered and highly-paid 'noses' of the fragrance industry? Men. These few males have, no doubt, an exceptionally acute sense of smell. Exceptional, that is, for a man. Are their olfactory neurons even more densely packed than a woman's? Nobody knows, because nobody cares. Sensitive noses are only valuable when they belong to men 🙄 Once again, an actual sex difference is overlooked by societies that see men as prototype humans and can't quite handle a female advantage.

We have better colour vision, too. Men tend to beat women on long-distance eyesight. That these differences have morphed into "Women like pretty things that smell nice, but can't plan ahead" tells you a lot more about societal interpretation than any true understanding of what it is to be female or male.

I don't think it's reasonable from what Cordelia Fine presents to come to the conclusion that socialization is more important. What would be justified is to say that she shows that it is difficult to unpick nature vs nurture, particularly from an experiment design POV, particularly with regards to brain structure. (That being said, who ever said brain structure is the only thing that counts as an inherent sex based biological difference? It may be the least important thing. More important, IMO, is the reality that mind and body are not separate and discrete - we are our bodies.)

I think the tendency for feminists to treat human beings differently than other animals, with regards to questions of biology, is difficult to defend, tbh. It's surprising in a way that women's studies historically has not had more cross-over with biology. Or maybe not surprising, but suggests that there may be a kind of ideological bias at work.

As far as countries like Iran - it has been known for a long time that in some male dominated countries, women who do go to university or undertake professional qualifications are more likely to go into areas that are historically highly regarded by men, and also which are often better paid. In more egalitarian countries, there tends to be more of a sex split in career choice, with women going into areas that are more people-focused.

Huge irony in it coming from the BBC, given how much GenderWoo they peddle; but in 2017 they did some stuff on gender stereotyping & babies’ play - including highlighting that “boys’ toys” aid in the development of things like spatial awareness 🤔

It's very difficult to know the answer to this as we can't carry out an experiment where we raise people without social influences.

But I know that when I was a kid there were a whole load of things that women were assumed to be "less good" at than men, such as science and engineering. Yet within my lifetime, I've seen subjects such as medicine and biology become dominated by women at higher education level. Not true of physics and engineering, of course, though mathematics now has a high proportion of women.

It does seem to vary a bit from country to country - in India, it's much more commonplace for women to do engineering and computing than it is over here.

Another widely-held view was that women didn't make very good comedians. This seems extraordinary now, but it was often repeated as an agreed truth well into the 1990s and beyond.

I think it's much harder to understand how socialisation works when it comes to violence and aggression. It's definitely the case that women can be violent, but even so it seems much rarer among women. I remember reading that there was no society on earth where bands of women have gone and carried out raids on other tribes. Yet it is quite usual in many societies for men to do this. Similarly, where is the female equivalent of the male grooming gangs? At least 95% of sex offenders are male. Can it all be down to socialisation?

I think we have broken an important part of this, which is that like other apes, we are meant to birth but then be in a supported group with the baby. You aren't really meant to go home in your couple with the baby and be an isolated unit, but have the wider group who will pass on knowledge and support you with rearing the infant, particularly where we have very, very underdeveloped infants who will need 2-5 years of intensive rearing. So don't worry. You're also meant to feel a rush of love and with my first I just thought, 'thank fuck that's stopped hurting!' Took me months to love her (massively lucky though that my mum lived 5 mins away and supported me).

If someone doesn't have that, are they not female? My instincts with my first born were crap...

Thanks for this link @WarriorN - very useful deconstruction of dodgy stats - I work in a different field but this is applicable as so many people use stats to show differences that just aren't real. Cohen's D here I come!

Computing was originally female, being seen as essentially secretarial- and then mid-late '60s, men realised there was money in it, and despite Grace Hopper being awarded the first "man of the year" award by the American Data Prcessing Managers Assoc, it ended up being seen as a male thing, at least in the Western world; it is not so everywhere.

Typing was originally a male pursuit.

So was wearing pink.

I wonder what male crime rates would look like if men were actually deterred and punished.

Rates of violence vary, but males are always more violent (on average) than females. Which suggests a biological difference between the sexes.

I think this is also true of many animal species.

That's interesting about Iran. I found this paper about this (there's a link to a pdf of the whole paper from this link):

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article/2109/1/050020/602832/Iranian-female-faculties-in-physics

among approximately 3,5000 physics students in public and private universities, about 55.8%, 60%, and 59% of BSc, MSc, and PhD students are women, respectively [1]. Although higher education has been dominated by women in all academic fields except engineering, it has not enabled women to enter the work force in comparable numbers.

Teaching is the main job area for graduated female students. Now all physics teachers in female high schools are women; this is a good situation for encouraging girls into physics, but as university faculty their percentage is about
19%, mainly in lower academic ranks

This is what @Nellodee observed as a computer science teacher, that female teachers encourage more girls to take up that subject. But they also observe that it still hasn't impacted male domination of senior positions in academia, even after 20 years of women being more than 50% of physics undergraduates.

The rise in numbers has only happened since 1990, 50-60% of students are female, and academic positions in universities are still over 80% male, so it's a bit misleading to say that "physics is a girls' subject" there. What seems to have happened is some sort of cultural/social/political shift which has made physics more acceptable/attractive to girls and women. An interesting phenomenon in a country where women don't have the rights and freedoms that they do here.

It would also be interesting to look at the levels of reported violent crime against women compared to women's level of participation in society. For example, reported rape in fundamentalist religious societies is historically low. The male leaders of those societies would tell you this is because God keeps you on the path of good or something similar. Women in those societies would tell you that reporting a rape will get you executed for being a whore.

Physics for girls

My original source was the institute of physics so we are going back between 10 and 20 years ( hence not at my fingertips !) ( perhaps on a back up disc somewhere )

Violence is not reversed anywhere I believe but the rates of male violence vary tremendously around the world which still suggests a huge society / nurture influence

Are those countries where the violent crime figures are reversed or where physics is a "girls' subject" @aswarmofmidges ?

I would put into the instinctive category the way that a woman reacts to her young baby. I had an almost psychic link to mine when they were very young. I often woke up a few seconds before they woke up in the night for a breast feed (co-slept with both) and I could differentiate their cry from other babies. There is s 'spidey sense' in those early months. We are mammals and other female mammals also display very deep rooted attachments to their young, that ate instinctive and not learned.

I need to read that Cordelia Fine book. From my general reading and experience, there are not really any aspects of personality etc that tend to exist mainly only in men or only in women - violence and criminality being the glaring exception. We treat male criminality as the norm in some ways, but imagine what the world would look like if males offended at the level of females?

Even that is only a higher risk factor, no-one says all males are going to be violent or commit crimes. But even a small proportion in a population of millions means thousands at least.

We've had tons of threads on what people imagine are differences between men and women. Interestingly what could be the same behaviour can be described differently in boys or girls - eg being a bossy diva or an ambitious leader.

Quick google brings up Iran and suggests other Muslim countries also

From memory start in the Caribbean ( sorry having a brain freeze!)

there are countries where physics is a girls subject

Are there? Which countries?

look how varied violence rates are around the world

In the UK about 90% of violent crimes and 99% of sexual crimes are committed by men. Are there any countries where women are the main perpetrators of violent crimes?

There are things where the assumed sex Varys across cultures- there are countries where physics is a girls subject - so many of our assumptions are pure society

And as a pp said I think, There may be tendancies caused by hormones but even there the culture impact is huge - look how varied violence rates are around the world

But aggression and testosterone levels (and other hormones) are themselves the result of differentiated evolved sex differences — hormones and the endocrine system are the RESULT of evolution, not a byproduct — not things that can be brushed off as merely cultural. I am in general agreement with Fine but acknowledge there also are tendencies. If secondary school students truly understood Tinbergen’s Four Questions and acknowledged a more Popperian framework we’d be in a much better place.