Feminism and natural sex differences

[WriterofDreams]

I am a woman, but I know very little about feminism, so this question is posed out of curiosity more than anything. Where do feminists generally stand on genetic/biological differences between men and women? By that I mean would a lot of feminists believe that they don't exist, or would they believe that they do exist but are irrelevant?

Just to give my current thinking on it (am open to having my mind changed) I do believe there are certain stable sex differences between females and males. This has been borne out by research into the way that girls and boys develop. I realise culture has a large role to play in these differences but I also believe it is not entirely the source of them.

Would like to hear other views.

I may be off the mark here but there is/was a biological reason why caveman went out hunting while cavewoman looked after the baboies and picked berries. That wasn't a cultural choice or conditioning.

Also if it's US women remember that their set-up is different to ours. I think that they get very little mat leave - or at least it's not paid or something - so women in high-powered careers are back at work sharpish after having children, which many of them must find stressful.

Also if they were looking at traditional high powered male jobs, something you will find there is a long-hours culture as standard. Fine when you don't have children or have a wife at home dealing with all of that, so that you can just work, but not fine when the bulk of the physical and emotional childrearing work is falling to you. And don't underestimate the guilt that many full-time working women feel, which men in teh same position are completely free of.

it all adds up, doesn't it.

It's just not an even playing field.

claig as far as i can see studies which set out to find differences often find none. So that's fine by me

OMDB someone on here knows an awful lot about how ancient societies lived (hopefully they will come on this thread) and apparently the male hunter while women huddled indoors idea is just an idea, and there are many different ideas as to how early societies operated in terms of division of labour. Certainly it would make sense for the strong people to do the physical work - but the strongest people wouldn't always be male IYSWIM.

Agree with ISNT's last post.

I tihnk differences between the sexes are physical ones mainly. We cannot argue with the fact that men have more muscle mass, for example.

But why do women feel guilt when men don't? Is it purely due to cultural differences or are women more biologically attached to children and more motivated to care about their upbringing? In all species one sex invests more in childrearing than the other (sometimes this is the male, as in penguins). This is due to biology rather than culture.

damn ISNT you post too much

I meat I agreed with the post before your last post.

I bet that is true about ancient societies though, that the strongest people did the hardest work, regardless of gender. My point was just that the only natural differences between the sexes are the physical and biological ones.

From a very interesting review in the NYT of Pinker's book:

'In her zeal, Pinker veers to the onesided. She doesn?t acknowledge that some of the research cited in her footnotes is either highly questionable as social science (Louise Story?s 2005 article in The New York Times, for instance, about her survey of Ivy League women?s aspirations) or has never been replicated ? like the findings from Simon Baron-Cohen?s laboratory that newborn girls showed more interest in looking at human faces, while newborn boys preferred mechanical mobiles. Pinker omits the work of scientists who have shown that sex-based brain differences pale in comparison to similarities. We shouldn?t wish the role of sex differences away because they?re at odds with feminist dogma. But that doesn?t mean we should settle for the reductionist version of the relevant science, even if the complexity doesn?t make for as neat a package between hard covers.'
www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/books/review/Bazelon-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
Well worth reading the review in full.

Niecie, can't access Cohen's review of the Cordelia Fine book. It is a shame, because it would be interesting to hear his views.

I think we;re getting away from the point, which is that the idea that there are gender differences on average = not really a huge problem, I don't think they've proved much one way or the other though.

When inconclusive findings about average differences are held up as triumphant proof that men and women are different and therefore the world is exactly as it should be = bad.

Like the book that WoD mentions. It seems to suggest that women aren't up to the type of work that brings them success and money. That women are not interested in these things, and are much happier when engaged in low prestige low pay work. I mean, seriously???

Then of course people can use it to explain why women earn less "oh well women aren't really interested in money, they're above all that you know".

How that fits in with the other beloved stereotype of the gold-digger / women being turned on by rich successful men even if they're ugly as sin etc is beyond me.

I agree with WriterofDreams. I think there are big differences between women and men, and I think they are biological.

I'm pretty sure that WriterofDreams doesn't think that claig.

Checked out Susan Pinker references in Delusions of Gender (I do love a good index!) and it seems she has fallen for the bad science in the same way that many others have. A crying shame.

I agree ISNT, I don't think sex differences should be used to justify inequality at all. My concern is that in a capitalist society like ours (I'm not a communist by the way) value and worth tend to be equated with money. It seems to me that feminism, to a certain extent, has bought into the idea that women should want what men want (ie high powered, business or technology oriented jobs). I would rather that it was acknowledged that women are more drawn to more people-oriented jobs such as medicine and teaching and that's not a bad thing. It would be better IMO to fight for better pay for these jobs so women do have the potential to earn the same as men whether they choose male-oriented jobs or not.

That;s not my experience of feminism though. It's about choice, free choice.

But are they WoD? Medicine used to be a male discipline (science, innit), ditto teaching used to be a high-prestige "male" role.

Anyway loads of men work in "caring" roles and love it, many would love to have more time looking after their children.

I think that until we are in a totally gender-neutral society (is that a term?) we have no way of telling what people really want to do, and whether if people were really free, there would be a gender divide in what they did, or not.

And even if there was a difference on average, individuals would still be good at/want to do the "other". A girl who is brilliant at science and has ambitions of working for NASA should not be given the message that actually that sort of thing is for boys, and even if she's clever enough women have the wrong temperament for that sort of job, and she won't enjoy it. Should she?

I totally agree with "women's work" being undervalued and underpaid and that needs a lot of attention.

I don't think doctors are underpaid though (although I have heard that since women started going into medicine in large numbers, salaries have dropped in real terms - don't know if that is true or not).

Huge apologies for not reading entire thread.

As someone with a turbulent hormone profile and severe clinial depression (both of which I know plenty about), I'd like to stress that hormonal balance does alter moods: moods being transient things by definition. It also affects 'personality'. It is not, however, connected with cognitive abilites; neither is it responsible for depression. We still know very little about neural biology, so almost all currernt theories & treatments are based on guesses and extrapolations. One thing that does seem certain is the way prolonged stress causes a domino effect throughout the nervous system. Thus, depression tends to be the result of a build-up of reactions, not a single reaction in itself.

In fact, we have different words for depressions triggered by a single event: grief, shock, trauma, etc. When I was a kid, depression used to be called 'nervous exhaustion' which now seems to be the more accurate term.

I have to wonder about the confidence we place on assertions that things like depression are caused by hormone imbalances while in the same breath saying depression is caused by traumatic events. That sounds contradictory to me. I would agree more with the idea that depression and hormone imbalances are linked but no causal inferences can be made.

MrsR, it's true enough to say that depression is 'caused by hormonal imbalances', bearing in mind that hormones are neurotransmitters and depression is an expression of malfunctioning neurones. I should have said "sex hormones" above - I made the mistake that leads to common confusion about hormones. Neurotransmitters can begin to fail as a result of prolonged stress (adrenal overload) or in reaction to a single event - as well as many physical conditions.

Unfortunately, depression is a woolly word. It seems quite likely that a woman's body may produce depression symptoms as her hormones readjust after birth. That would go away once her system had re-balanced. The fact that it so often doesn't re-balance spontaneously suggests that she's not getting enough downtime - which seems pretty likely in today's world! Perhaps nature meant her to cwtch up with baby for several weeks, being waited on by friends & family while her system reconfigures itself. Perhaps PND is the body's attempt to force sufficient downtime?

Lenin - that is what I meant by 'free choice'. If choice were free then there would be no need to take self-defeating choices.

It isn't solely caused by hormonal imbalances though, there is usually an external trigger to depression. Depression can be seen in hormone imbalances but still, you can't say they alone cause it.

Lots of interesting posts and mini-thread here, so apologies for only repsonding to the OP.

As I (on the outside) see it many feminists wouold reject much of the science on those differences, and all would consider them overplayed, and belonging on a spectrum rather than a rigid male/female divide. I'd agree, but lots of posts already on this.

But, to return to your point, even if you accept sex difference, the question most feminists would pose is the generalisation. My partner gave birth to and breast fed our children for example, and felt physical sickness when DS2 went to nursery, which she linked to the experience of birth, and regret that he weaned so soon afterwards. I felt similar violent physical sickness after DS1 left my care to go to nursery, but put it down to context (missing caring for him full time). Her experience is rooted in her body and mine isn't, and it would be foolish to deny this. But she wouldn't claim this was natural to all women. So there is, I would suggest, room to accept individual narratives of difference without accepting them as general.

But the real worry is that we simply have too few genes, and too little time, for most differences to be explicable genetically given the cliched roles. If you accept difference, it still doesn't explain those roles. So, to take examples whose conclusions I wouldn't share, if men are better at spatial awareness why aren't they typically stacking small cupboards with weekly shops? If women are better at interpreting simultaneous complex visual signals (empathy from faces is this, unless you belive in telepathy) why aren't they typically air traffic controllers and football managers? And if they are better at 'nurturing' why not Army trainibng instructors? Or, if they have lower boredom thresholds (S B-C uses this to explain housework) why are so many traditional male jobs in hevay industry repetitive and boring (much more so than housework)? It's these questions that often aren't asked becasue it's dangerous to accept the difference, but there is room for syaing 'OK, that's a difference', but does that really exaplin, are there really no 'male' or 'female' roles which display that too?

Simon baron-cohen says that women have higher boredom thresholds and this is - what - why they are better at housework/don't mind it as much as men/what does he say?

Never heard this one before. Have fingers poised to type outraged rant

Agree with your post.

It's interesting though, that things that I would think that most people would understand as common sense and self-evident (just because some people are a certain way doesn't mean that everyone who shares a trait with them gender/race/religion/hair colour/whatever is automatically the same way).

I think there are genetic differences between men and women. For example men are physically stronger than women in general. Women are better communicators. Its the fact that people think that because men are stronger they are superior that annoys me. Just because we are different it doesnt mean we arent equal.