Are there any innate differences between men and women?

[Annie11111]

I am talking about psychology, hormone influence, brain ''wiring'' and all that jazz... I don't believe there are and the rest is just pseudoscience .

You can't look at a brain and say if is male or female.

And you can't measure someone's height and say if they are male or female.

That doesn't mean that average differences don't exist, just that there is a lot of overlap.

Are we not talking about the neurological differences between the brains of males and females?

Obviously the actual size of the brain is different, but the size of the brain does not lead to any actual differences in function.

There is no average male brain or average female brain. There is such a thing as average male height and average female height.

Height is a thing that exists in one dimension.

"Brains" have many many dimensions, and are generally difficult to measure.

But the inability to immediately tell which group an item belongs to does not mean that there are no differences between the groups.

here is a detailed scientific review on the question.
www.careerpioneernetwork.org/wwwroot/userfiles/files/the_gender_similarities_hypothesis.pdf
www.academia.edu/download/30581130/hydescience06.pdf

from memory, the biggest differences are

• men can throw further
• men are more agressive
• men are marginally better at rotating imaginary lego blocks in their heads (real world relevance is not clear).

when it comes to maths / science / language / cognitive tasks etc, then the strong evidence favours gender similarity

All of that is the true.

It would indeed be possible, in theory, to measure multiple neurological functions of the brain A-Z, find what the average for each function was for male and females, match them to each other and call one the average female brain and the other the average male brain.

But we can't. Because none of the averages match up with each other. Somebody who has an average female brain part A is no more likely to have an average female brain part B, or C, or D and so on. And at any point, under the right conditions, the individual with average female brain part A can experience a life event which turn out that average female brain part into an extreme male brain part. Which part are we going to pick to define the brain as female? A, C, U, Z? None of them correlate to each other so you can't make an average of the different parts.

If an average female brain was like average female height, height would work like this:

There would be no correlation in an individual between the size of different body parts. It would be entirely normal and common to be five foot eight inches tall, but have size one feet, the world's smallest torso but an exceptionally long neck, while other people who were five foot eight would have size fifteen feet, tiny legs and an enormous torso. It would no longer be possible to calculate stature from leg length, or spine length, because nothing would be related to each other. Because no individual's body parts would match to any other body part. And also, people would routinely go to bed one night and wake up the next to find their legs had grown six inches in the night but their torso had shrunk two inches. They might never change back, or they might change back at some random point.

Who in that situation has masculine legs? Who has feminine legs? If no body part correlates to each other or to overall height? It just doesn't make any sense as a concept.

Particularly when we do use the words male and female to refer to things that match with each other 99% of the time, genes, gametes and gonads.

No neurological function has any great amount of accuracy in identifying sexual dimporhism and they don't match to each other.

Sorry, was answering Trills.

I don't disagree at all.

I use height as an example because it is a simple thing that people can understand, where there is much variation within groups and much overlap between groups.

We've both said that brains are multi-dimensional.

Just wondering - what's the situation with other species? Are male chimps more adept at learning how to stack boxes to reach bunches of bananas or putting different shaped pegs into the correct holes to earn a food reward? Are female chimps better at learning sign language to communicate their feelings? Or is there no difference. I suppose this isn't really relevant to a species which mostly hasn't hunted its food in packs since the dawn of agriculture and has evolved away from chimps a good bit, but still vaguely interesting.

LEM, please give us more information about what the differences are and what evidence there is that they make any significant difference at all.

"which includes all the messy human factors that may have influenced the plot. "

The Sainted Cordelia touched on a few of these, I think - especially wrt researchers interpreting the response of babies...

Edam I said there were differences. I didn't say they were significant .

Its been too long since ive studied and the only difference I can remember is the sdnpoa that I mentioned earlier so I'll guess you'll have to google it yourself.

I don't understand the big deal. Men and women are different. This is surely a good thing?

Surely thats the same thing buffy? Men and women are different. It doesn't mean one or other is better.

How about 'broadly similar' versus different?

Aren't some of these differences age / time based? It wasn't long ago that men and society at large thought women completly physically and mentally inferior.

Should we now be more similar than ever?

men have widgies and women have foo-foos

Fact

I answered the question, that is all that can be expected

The problem too us that the brain us very malleable.
So you take x brains from men, study, measure, analyse them. Then you take y brain ds from women and do the same.
You find that there are the same apart from this tiny difference in area A.

Now bearing in mind that studies have shown that the brain changes as people are meditating and that a specific area in the brain is getting bigger because of that, how to you if these difference are due to being a man/woman is genetic or if it's coming from having used that area more ie socialisation???

I agree with buffythat saying 'men and women are different' is opening the door to saying men are better than.

See how this is used. Anything that is found is to show that men are better than women at whereas women are better at .

And then you also have studies that shows that girls aren't as good at maths than boys because 'look at the results in Y7. They are already behind'. Which forgets that in other countries that aren't as misogyn girls are doing better than boys at maths.

So not just another frikkin' Annie, but a trolly one?

Sigh.

I hear Asian people are different from Native Americans too. And that heterosexual men are different to homosexual men. Is it remotely important or relevant to anything, or does it give us real insight into whether a given individual in any of those groups might be better/worse at a task their group is deemed "better" or "worse" at?

No.

So why ask the question in the first place?