Differences between women and men

[WastingMyYoungYears]

I think that there are differences between women and men. But it's difficult to know what these differences actually are because both females and males are socially conditioned to conform to genderised norms from birth. Nonetheless, if you think about any particular characteristic, the bell curves for women and men are highly likely to overlap significantly. It isn't helpful to say that men are more X characteristic and women are more Y characteristic though. Even positive gender stereotypes can have negative consequences, e.g. women are more organised / are better at multi-tasking - this results in the general acceptance that John, who by day heads a large multi-disciplinary international team, can't possibly be expected to sort out birthday cards for his side of the family, but his wife Jane, who may (or may not - that in itself being a separate discussion) have similar work demands, can.

Any thoughts? Be gentle, I'm just working through all of this in my head .

i was thinking of milking stools

Do I get extra brownie points for guessing, before I even read the article, that the question would be "how do you stop a 3-legged table wobbling?", the point being of course that they don't wobble? And am I alone in thinking that it is not irrelevant that the article appears in the Gulf Daily News, the "voice of Bahrain"? (I will freely admit that I may of course be being unduly prejudiced here in expecting it to be like the Daily Mail only with extra - if that were possible -sex prejudice).

Second the recommendation for Pink Brain, Blue Brain.

The wobbly leg thing completely overlooks that in general men are given more DIY experience than women are. It doesn't mean that men conceptualize and women don't.

You could try a question like, "you start to feel a contraction coming on, what do you do?" and women might well conceptualize, e.g. ask if it's Braxton Hicks, how long have you been having contractions, should you be pushing etc, but men might well just say, breath. It doesn't mean that women conceptualize and men don't, but that women have the relevant experience to draw on.

btw - how are we defining male/female? Genitalia is one way to define, hormone levels are another (and many, many people have discrepancies between hormone levels and genitalia, as well as those who have not so clear-cut genitalia), or the presence of X/Y chromosomes?

If the definition of male is that they have to meet all three areas of definition (genitalia, hormones and chromosomes) then actually there are a lot of 'men' around who would fall outside of that category. That's before you get into self-definition of identity, and discuss whether sexuality has any correlation to definition of sex.

fwiw, someone mentioned the accounts of transgendered people. Those shouldn't always be relied on, as many people have enormous pressure on them to fit a certain dialogue before they can get medical approval for their procedures. Therefore, they tend to tell the story that the medical world expects of them, rather than how they might truly feel, or they may even believe they feel a certain way, because they believe it's the only way to explain their situation.

I have a genuine Dorset milking stool as would have been used for actual milking of cows at some point in the 20th century. It's fairly rubbish as a piece of furniture, though to be fair was probably fine if you've got a nice warm cow to lean against as well. I've only once milked a cow by hand, and I was a child still, so it was a while back.

But anyway - a three-legged stool is designed that way. A four-legged stool/table doesn't have an equal balance of weight and while it will not wobble, if you put something heavy on the legless table, it might cause it to over-balance.

Not quite sure what my point is, though...

I know they have PCOS because I do and we've discussed it! I'm not making it up.

I always thought the Ikea Mammut stool has 3 legs but actually it has 4. This is irrelevant. Unless you are planning to buy a children's stool and want to know if it won't wobble but the child might fall flat on her/his face, or it might wobble but the child's bottom is more likely to stay on the stool.

A four-legged stool/table doesn't have an equal balance of weight and while it will not wobble, if you put something heavy on the legless table, it might cause it to over-balance.

Quite. If you cut a leg out of a four legged whatever, it will not only wobble, but eventually fall to the side without the leg. The same would happen if you put 3 legs evenly distributed in a square table. It would eventually fall if anyone put weight on the corners that don't have a leg.
So, having 3 legs works better with circles (or hexagons) rather than squares, and even less with rectangles.
But I suspect any 3 leg will be less stable than a four leg, even if the latter wobbles.

Has evolution given us a gene pool with men and women with general physiological differences or does mutation mean they can come back?

I thought men were seen to be more riskier than women (e.g studies of traders), but then again is that because women have been socially conditioned not to be??

Surely men can show 'womens beahviours' and women 'male behaviour' but its just social expectation/conditioning that we have gendered these behaviours?

But we're back to the nature/nurture thing, BreakingDad. Take riskier behaviour. Lise Elliot mentions an experiment done with (IIRC) 9 month old babies. You give them, dressed in neutral babygrows, to trained nursery staff, and put them in a room with differently inclined ramps. There is no statistically significant difference between the steepness of ramp a girl baby and a boy baby can tackle. Now put them back in the room with their mothers. The mothers of boys for the most part correctly estimate the steepest ramp their sons can tackle without intervention. The mothers of girls on average underestimate their abilities by about 5 degrees. Now repeat throughout childhood - at the end of it, are more boys going to take risks than girls? I'd say yes. Is it because it's hard-wired on the Y chromosome? Not unequivocally.

But, hormones at puberty may well change things. It is very difficult to know how much is due to those hormones or nurture.

My DS is not a risk taker, btw.

My response to the three-legged stool question was exactly the same as Buffy's! Followed by, stick something under it, followed by actually, it probably doesn't wobble. So basically I covered all bases in the few seconds I thought about it before reading on. Such is my life and what I do on a daily basis at work. That probably had more to do with my reaction than my sex.

And yy Lurcio, our expectations of what the sexes can do starts in the womb. It cannot fail to have a significant influence.

Quite possibly, Lweji, though again, I'd suspect it was more complicated than a simple "more testosterone = more risk taking" analysis. I used to do a lot of rock and ice climbing when younger, and my attitude to risk varied through my menstrual cycle - I was definitely more risk averse when pre-menstrual (probably a good thing, as I was also usually much clumsier when pre-menstrual). Now of course that's anecdotal, but once you realise that the single biggest risk the average woman takes (in terms of death or morbidity) is getting pregnant, and that there are studies which suggest that women's receptiveness to potential partners they've just met varies with menstrual cycle... well, I don't think it's just testosterone.

It's going to be a complicated mix of nurture, hormones, cultural expectation (risk-taking I think varies cross-culturally - at an ethnographic level, men in warrior cultures traditionally feuding with their neighbours are going to engage in more risky behaviour than men in hunter gatherer cultures - and presumably, they don't have genetically determined different levels of testosterone, though there may be some sort of behavioural feedback whereby engaging in risk can itself alter testosterone levels).

And remember the take-home message at the start of Lise Elliot's book: always look at the d value (difference in means divided by difference in standard deviation). Most of the supposed behavioural differences the Daily Mail and its ilk give column inches to (whether the result of nature, nurture, culture or a complex mix of all three) have tiny d values - i.e. the two bell curves are only just distinguishable from one another.

No, not just testosterone, that's why I said hormones. There are several at balance during puberty.

Has evolution given us a gene pool with men and women with general physiological differences or does mutation mean they can come back?

Not sure what you mean. The difference between men and women is that we have two X chromosomes (but one is silenced) and men have an Y, which seems to possess 1 gene (I think more have possibly been identified, but not sure).
The gene pool is exactly the same. How genes are expressed may vary, though.

Lweji

Sorry I'm poorly putting it into words, I was thinking wether males and females way back in the past e.g pre hunter gatherer were quite similar?

With certain male physicality/behavioral traits i'm assuming would be rewarded through mates then over time there would a majority of males displaying a certain traits and the same for women.

Though over time has/will this lessen as we have mutation and changing society such that no specific traits will necessarily give you an advantage?

Sorry this is just ending up with a lot of questions rather than answering as such, is kinda all running around in my head.

A majority of males displaying certain behavioural traits tells us nothing about whether those traits are biologically programmed though. And what's viewed as desirable varies wildly - you could make a good argument that it's culturally programmed rather than biologically so.

I was thinking wether males and females way back in the past e.g pre hunter gatherer were quite similar?

Not necessarily.
Fossils show marked differences between males and females regarding size.
If we look at our close relatives, gorillas and orangutangs do show marked sexual dimorphism, but chimps not so much. Orangutangs tend to have a dominant male and groups of females and gorillas tend to live in groups led by one male. Chimps are more relaxed about coupling are more promiscuous. Chimps on the other hand have larger testicles, so it's their sperm cells that compete with those from other males. They just shag a lot.
Females tend to care a lot more for the young, partly because they have the food to give them (but evolution could have made males lactate too), but probably mostly because they have already invested months of their lives hosting those babies, whereas males can impregnate females at random. To leave the female holding the baby is commonly seen in animals, not just human populations. The reverse can also be seen if fertilization is external, however. The males (some fish and amphibians) are left with the eggs they have just fertilized while the females take off.

Lurcio I was asked the question at least 20 years ago. Long, long before that article.

The wobbly leg thing completely overlooks that in general men are given more DIY experience than women are. It doesn't mean that men conceptualize and women don't.

Bit of a generalisation there. My utterly inept husband got it right, I didn't. When we were asked there was only the 3 legged question so no hint it was a trick question.

Bearhug you're missing the point that the female responses went further and considered stability and level surfaces. In doing so they failed to spot it was a trick question. The table could be stable and level.

The human brain is the single most beautifully complex thing known in the universe. That said we are all in possession of a quite frankly awesome and powerful piece of kit.

Placing limits on individual potential is like setting the limiter on a Ferrari to 10mph, when we all know it can go a fuck of a lot faster.

Linked with the complexity is how little we know about the brain. There is still a huge amount we do not know, so limiting people is lunacy to my eyes.

Let's turn off the limiter for whatever reason (wether gender, racially or economically motivated), and see figuratively how fast the human race can really go...

What was the difference between the answers given by blue eyed people and brown eyed people to the stool question?

My eyes are mostly blue, but with a golden-brown ring round the iris.