To think men and women are actually programmed differently?

[Isittjustme]

I have spent many years believing a lot of men just don’t get on with things in the same way women do (ie ‘seeing’ the jobs to do in the house etc) because they are socially conditioned not to. But… since having ds and watching my partner really do his best but basically be far less good at parenting than me, I have started to wonder if men and women are actually just programmed differently.

DP really does try (at least I believe so). But he doesn’t get a good system going with ds when doing a nappy, just one example, he will often be flailing around or forget to wash his hands etc. He will forget to blow on the food every once in a while.. there’s so many more examples and they are small things I guess, but in contrast I rarely do these things. And I’m not saying I’m a perfect parent, I’m not. But I recognise this with my friends and the men in their lives too, it’s the same sort of thing.

DP has a good job and does it well. He’s quite a sincere man and I think he really does try his best. This makes me think perhaps some of it is innate for women and not for men?

Most of the differences are to do with sex

The ability to focus or concentrate, to be accurate, to do boring and repetitive tasks, to work well with others - these are skills as much needed for hunting as anything else

What do you think the end goal is of trying to assert that men being useless partners is “due to biology and evolution”

It absolutely becomes a way of excusing men from pulling their weight. That is how it is weaponised. For example in the book “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus” the messaging was clear “don’t expect X from men as they are not made that way.

Because if something is due to “biology” then suddenly we start to excuse people from doing it or worse, suggest they are applauding for mediocre efforts because “they are trying but just not made that way.”

In my view the best way to respond to that is to challenge the implication directly, not to try to reverse-engineer the science.

There is a long history of science being distorted or suppressed in service of social or moral goals, and mostly it turns out badly (including for the moral
claims that got build on shifting scientific sands).

So men are competent enough to do many jobs (in terms of employment) but they aren’t so good at childcare because that’s how they’re programmed? Yeah right 🫤

I'm a neuroscientist. Our brains are mostly blank slates that can be programmed to be good at whatever we want. It's called neuroplasticity and it is the key to our intelligence. Hence why taxi drivers develop huge areas to process geographical information etc. There are tribes in the world where the main caregivers to children are men, and they're very good at it. When you scan their brains, they have similarity to how you would expect a typical UK female brain to look.

Nurture trounces nature when it comes to the brain. The key to our success as a species is how quickly we adapt our brain to our environment.

Trying to work out what’s actually true is my end goal. That feels sufficient motivation to me.

I don’t support the idea that we should subordinate what’s true to what’s useful. Nor the idea that what is moral depends straightforwardly on what we take ‘natural’ to be. Historically those ideas have been tools of the powerful, and I think they still are.

We are biologically different. I'm reading Cat Bohannons Eve' right now that explains how there are differences even in hearing and sense of smell.

Well I certainly wouldn't blow on DC's food either. Its an ineffective way to cool food down and quite grim from a hygiene pov. Why risk passing viruses around for something unnecessary?
As far as washing hands after a nappy change goes, it just makes you wonder if he bothers after cleaning his own bum Let alone the other, and forgetting basic hygiene standards is just being grim in general really, you could apply that to any task - food prep etc. Bad examples maybe, but if you swallow the narrative that poor men can't cope with learning domestic tasks and basic parenting, because they are not built that way, then you just give them a free pass to be lazy. You don't hear about poor women, who are trying to be the breadwinner or provider but can't manage it, as thats a mans job. Nope, turns out women can work and earn just as well as men and vice versa is true. Anyone can pretend to be incompetent so another will take over. If he's inept, it just shows he needs more practice at it.

Ok well you do you.

I shall continue to call it out for what it is.

@Globusmedia that's a very confident statement to make!

@ChessorBuckaroo so interesting! I’d love to watch that. It also doesn’t surprise me.

I think there are 2 different debates here though. There is the obvious biological differences that have influenced things such as splitting men and women in sports because men are just that little bit faster or that little bit stronger naturally - it’s not to say that women cannot be - but the science is all there. We have very little control over these and they hardly influence our personalities.

But what a lot of people are arguing about on this thread are the masculine and feminine roles that we assign ourselves and how many of us end up confirming to gender norms and that being infair because women generally get the short straw.

I know men who are brothers and uncles and have had to step in for the childcare at a young age (someone pointed this out earlier) a I know females with zero maternal instinct. There’s a lot that we learn and things like cleaning and even cooking is all down to preference and “being bothered”.

But I guess the question is, what do those biological differences mean?

There are people on this thread (and others) that suggest those biological differences mean that men aren't capable of being as nurturing as women, that they aren't as capable parents and that buying thoughtful presents are beyond their capabilities.

I just don't buy into that.

There's a lot of research to back it up. Try Gina Rippon's The Gendered Brain for an overview.

Yes there have been loads! There’s a great one where the adults perception of the toys the children are playing with changes according to the sex they think they are (spoiler alert, they dressed the girls as boys and the boys as girls). It’s fascinating. I highly recommend you check it out and all the other studies!!

Didn’t the behaviour of the adult change too? Such as being more gentle with a baby dressed like a girl and more rough and tumble with a baby dressed like a boy?

@NoBinturongsHereMate I thought that the argument in the book was that there is no evidence of difference (or otherwise). Ie it is inconclusive

Yes, and they encouraged the 'boy' to play with cars and handed dolls and teddies to the 'girl'.

I thought that the argument in the book was that there is no evidence of difference (or otherwise). Ie it is inconclusive

No convincing evidence of innate difference, absolutely heaps of evidence for plasticity - which was the claim made above.

So...I have a husband who is a gem. He did all the childcare stuff I did. We are all awkward at first. My husband actually outdid me in the kid department. He was better at giving baths, equal in nappies, better at being patient and playing Legos, etc. It's not a gender thing. It's a practice thing. Most likely you were given dolls and maybe even child care duties as a young girl, and he wasn't. My husband had a younger brother and cousins he cared for. I was an only child who saw my cousins only occasionally.

Yes! It was fascinating! I know I have subconsciously done this and it really changed my perspective on things. The one thing for me though is that I would buy a daughter any of the ‘boy’ clothes, but wouldn’t buy a boy any ‘girl’ clothes, like a dress etc. Dresses don’t give any benefit for toddlers or young children, it’s just a longer jumper in effect. You still need something underneath. I wouldn’t buy a dress for either, but I wouldn’t put them in a dress unless they asked for one (which a baby can’t do). So when do we differentiate, it’s not the child’s choice initially, it’s the parents. When my son asked for nail varnish, I said yes as he’s seen me do it. If he asked me if he could wear a dress, I would think about it, and say yes, but I’d have to think, where I wouldn’t have to think for a girl. It seems a big deal to put a boy in a dress and that the parents are making a statement, but surely they are doing that for girls at that age too?

So I know things are definitely social pressure and conformity and I am feeding into it. Back in the day men wore skirts. Now, they don’t. It’s not nature, it’s nurture.

I think that if you drew graphs of the innate traits of males and females, you would get lots of overlapping bell curves. Some don't overlap that much, such as sexual aggression. For the ones that do have a large overlap, or where it's unclear whether the difference is innate or learned, such as being nurturing, exaggerating differences between the two populations almost always disadvantages women. In general, the "male" end is valued and the "female" end is not. Look at the value placed on paid caring roles vs construction work. Look at who did computer programming when it was seen as a job related to typing, and how being a bank clerk became much more lowly paid when it became a job done by women.

Darwin’s natural selection doesn’t apply to the raising of progeny, it applies only to whether or not young animals reach adulthood to successfully reproduce. So once mum has given birth to a live baby, she is done as far as natural selection is concerned. She has successfully reproduced. The raising doesn’t matter as that is a learned behaviour, not force of nature causing selection for or against certain genes. This is especially true for social species where orphans are raised by other adults.

A mum that dies in a childbirth is the worst mum by your measure because she does 0% of childrearing. However, the baby doesn’t die, the baby is then raised by other humans in the family, clan or tribe. The baby’s aptitude for raising their own children is fully 100% learned. Which also means that the genes of the mum who did 0% of child rearing still get passed on.

There is no innate nature for child rearing.

I don’t think that’s correct. The important thing is whether a trait tends to lead to more or fewer descendants. Being seriously bad at child-rearing clearly tends to lead to having fewer descendants.

Natural selection only applies to natural traits up to the point of childbirth for females. Because other humans will raise the baby.

You only need to be live long enough to carry a baby to term as a woman or long enough to impregnate a woman as a man to have successfully passed your genes on to descendents. For humans, the better you are at child rearing, the fewer children you have…sorry but it’s true, the woman with eight kids isn’t as good as a mum with two kids. The man who is a serial rapist or sperm donor isn’t a good dad.

Good child rearing skills are a) not natural so cannot be a trait of natural selection and b) provide no advantage towards generating more descendants

@LoremIpsumCici

Your idea that a capable and caring parent, essentially, adds nothing for the survival chances of its offspring (because others will always pick up the slack) is bizarre to me. Is that something you have read?

Also the idea that child-raising is 100% learned behaviour and 0% instinct. Is that what you observe in non-human animals? (Eg does a mother cat have an instinct for caring for her kittens?). Who are those cats learning from? If your ideas is that the mother has remembered it all from when she herself was a tiny kitten, how plausible do you think that is? How much do you remember of your own babyhood?

If you see it in non-human animals, why do you think humans are completely different? Do you agree we are the product of evolution just as they are?