So what ARE these differences between men and women?

[Lottapianos]

Yes yes, I'm aware of several obvious differences for those of you sniggering at the back!

On several threads recently I have seen posters talk about how men and women are different but equal and lots of reference to the 'inherent' or 'inbuilt' differences between men and women. I'm a bit mystified because as far as I'm aware, the only inherent
differences between men and women relate to anatomy, physical skills (speed and strength), getting pregnant, giving birth and breastfeeding.

What else do you consider an inbuilt, innate difference between men and women? Or feel free to agree with me that the only differences are biological and all other differences are socially constructed

MsAnneTeak, that's a horrifying and really extreme example but I agree with you that mothers are not necessarily more loving than fathers. Again, there is huge variation within the sexes - some women absolutely love children, as do some men. Equally, some women have no interest whatsoever in children, ditto for some men. And every shade of grey in between!

I feel very strongly that the only things a mother can do for a child that a father cannot is carry it for 9 months, give birth and breast feed it. I think suggesting that mothers are innately more loving does a huge disservice to men, and is a total disaster from a feminist point of view, because it suggests that women doing the vast majority of the childcare is somehow the 'natural order' of things.

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

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 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'.

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

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!

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.

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).

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

For those interested I've just found article www.eva.mpg.de/primat/staff/boesch/pdf/behav_brain_scien_sex_diff.pdf which shows a division of behaviour in food attainment amongst chimpanzees.

The paper points out that hunting is primarily a male activity amongst chimpanzees.

Link that works

Thanks flat pack.

You might also be interested to learn (or you might not) that gathering is by far the most efficient source of protein in one specific location - the foreshore. It's possible to gather enough protein and food for a day in less than an hour's work - oysters, whelks, razorshells, bird eggs, etc.

In Brittany (and many other places) there are huge middens - heaps of shells - made up entirely of oyster shells. By huge, I mean a 100m long and 20m wide and 5m high, even after 5,000 years of erosion. The middens contain exclusively oyster shells, even though a huge variety of other molluscs can be found in the area, which has led some people to conclude that there was some sort of ritual element to it.

women have higher pain thresholds like for endurance pain, mainly for child birth.

Men have a tendency to be able to switch from one relationship to another. One ends and they get over it by beginning another. Women have more of a tendency to lick their wounds as it were before getting out there again. Not scientific, just what I have observed during my X long years on this planet.

We don't all fall into stereotype - some men like shopping for clothes, some women hate it. What is food shopping but the modern equivalent of going after the mammoth (so there's been a bit of role reversal there, then)? Some men love being at home, some women like me would rather be out there chopping wood.

Googly, will read that Deborah Blum book, sounds interesting.

What is clear is that men and women played equally vital roles in primitive societies. Hunting obviously provided large quantities of food, especially protein, when animals were plentiful. However, gathering fruits, nuts, fungi, roots provided a more constant and sustained food supply through the year when migrating herds moved away.

The hunter gather communities were sustainable only because men and women specialised in roles that were suited to their physique and the need to bear and rear children.

However, men very likely looked after children and also gathered fruit, nuts, seeds when animals were in short supply. Women very likley also particiapted in hunting smaller game, fishing and so either with or without men.

An awful lot of people on MN seem to think that mothers and fathers care for their children equally.
At birth I had so much more invested in my baby than DH, so we had different starting points. This difference is psychological. I think there are huge psychological differences between mothers and fathers, more so than men and women who aren't parents, but there are still general differences.

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

There's no evidence from our own past because it's too long ago. But there's plenty of evidence from societies as primitive as Europe was several thousand years ago.

Another major issue is that men fight, sometimes a lot. And it may be that continuous war means that women end up doing most of the useful work because a lot of the men are dead, and those who survive are spending all their time making weapons or out raiding, or on guard against raids by the next tribe over.

Think of Otzi the Iceman, left in the snow after being killed by an arrow in the back (and he was found with arrows of his own, which carried the blood of several individual humans). And Kennewick Man in America, whose skull had been broken in the way a club would land, and who had a stone point embedded in his hip, though neither wound had killed him. Life could be nasty and brutish, and sometimes surprisingly long.

I've always thought that the personality is very much like the body; nature gives us a basic frame, but our environment will heavily influence the manner in which we develop.

In terms of the differences between men and women, I am certain that there is an average male and an average female and that there are differences between the two. Three things are often forgotten, however:

• the huge variance; many people are not at all average!
• the distance between the average man and average woman is not remotely so large as the distance between the extremes of each.
• there is a large overlap; some men are more female in character than the average woman and some women are more male in character than the average man...

Just my thoughts!

Precisely, BadDancingDad. That's a lovely, straightforward explanation of what statisticians call the D value (difference of the means of the two populations divided by the product of the standard deviations). It's small for most differences in human beings - we're not a strongly sexually dimorphic species.

There's a small Delta between the two bell curves?

• Sorry, I shuddered when you mentioned statistics. Bad memories of trying to understand! :o)

Much like baddancingdad says - I think there probably are some differences between the average man and the average woman.

To take an example - the average man may be better at maths than the average woman.

However

1. these differences apply only to the average man and woman. So, there are plenty of individual women who are good at maths, and plenty of individual men who are crap at it.

2. many of these differences are only there, or at least are exaggerated, because of nurture and societal expectations. They are not fully inherent. So, boys may be encouraged more towards maths at school than girls are.

3. the differences kick in far more at post puberty rather than in children.

4. non gender related differences (such as the difference between extroverts and introverts, or between scientific minds and artistic minds) are far far greater in number, and hence have a greater impact on a person's character, than the gender related differences.

Exactly minipie (mmm, pie). It's always strange to me that we get so wrapped around the axle on physical diversity when character diversity is so much more relevant to just about EVERYTHING!