Physical Vs psychological difference between the sexes

[Bumpitybumper]

So Mumsnet seems a very gender critical place when it comes to physical sex based differences. The majority don't support men competing in the female category in sporting competitions or men being allowed in single sex wards or changing rooms. The reason being men and women are so fundamentally biologically different that an ideology can't just erase these difference.

However I have noticed that the majority do not support the assertion that male and females may be psychologically different and as a class have different inclinations, behaviour and desires. Many reject the idea that girls may be drawn to different toys, subjects or types of play than boys. They reject the idea that women may naturally have predisposition as a class towards certain occupations and hobbies. They simply cannot accept that women have different desires when it comes to having children and also raising them and the role they play in providing care.

I feel like the insistence that men and women want the same things and behave in the same way is because traditional feminine occupations and interests have been so undermined, undervalued and used to repress us in a patriarchal society. Rather than explore the idea of what women have a natural biological propensity towards and seeking equal value for these things, it is easier to suggest our feminine preferences are all a result of socialisation and conditioning and actually our underlying psychology is the same as men's. This seems very dangerous to me and almost playing into the patriarchy's hands.

Am I alone is seeing this distinction in how physical and psychological differences between the sexes are viewed?

So, as a woman, you are struggling to understand what the changes in a woman's brain during pregnancy might mean/are for? Okay. If you hold on there a minute I'll call my 8 year old. She might be able to explain it better.

And you do know safety is a quintessential part of nurture right?

On that note I'll say goodnight ladies(?). This discussion has certainly been an eye-opener.

Absolutely.
I found the language OP used highly loaded.

What is wrong with the language I used? I suspect it was more that you found the concept dangerous from an ideological basis. Science cannot be ruled by ideology. How we respond to science as a society is the most important thing.

@Namenic responding to your post about the value to society of women being able to pursue any other potential leaning that might not necessarily be in line with capitalist efficiency.

Of course I understand your point and can see how it relates to how we as a society treat any groups with difference. If we think about how we treat the disabled, we can see that society has limits as to how far it is willing to adapt in order to facilitate and support difference. Even those with health conditions will sometimes be denied potentially life saving treatment because it costs too much and would therefore mean that there is less money to fund health treatment for the rest of the population. It is always a balance between the benefits to the individual and the cost to society.

However, this doesn't mean that we are unable to make any adaptations to support difference or that the most economically efficient option is always the best. For example, there are plenty of cases where the combination of women sometimes paying little/no tax and accessing additional benefits such as extra free childcare hours etc means that it would actually cost the taxpayer to support that woman to work. Even when the children are older, if a SAHP is home educating multiple children then it is easy to see how they could effectively save public funds which could be used elsewhere. I would never argue though these low paid women with multiple children should be encouraged to stay at home and homeschool because it saves the tax payer money even if it was proven that over their entire lifetime this was indeed the case. Why? Because societal 'value' has to be about more than just money. This cuts both ways though...

@Link3 no, I'm saying that the scientists who did the research did not make any claims about what the specific changes meant! You are apparently confident that both you and your 8 year old can do what those scientists did not, maybe you should contact them. If we're supposed to be all about the science and what important conclusions it means for women in society, perhaps we should actually be clear what is being concluded, scientifically. Rather than leaping to our own personal interpretation.

Science is conducted by human beings who have their own political and ideological leanings, as do the people and organisations which provide the funding. It can never be the pure, utopian ideal that you seem to think it is.

From the decision of which aspects of science to study, through to the conclusions and their consequences, politics and ideology are always there. Science is not value free. It's not just how society responds to science which is important, but also how science is shaped by society. It's not a pure pursuit which exists in a vacuum entirely detached from the world around it.

You accuse others of finding "the concept dangerous from an ideological basis", but you fail to see your own ideological bias which leads you to believe that such a concept is important or worthy of investigation.

If you really believe that science should not be ruled by ideology, you should realise that this extends to your ideology as well as that of others.

@OldCrone
If you really believe that science should not be ruled by ideology, you should realise that this extends to your ideology as well as that of others
Except I'm not the one trying to censor debate on the issue and suggest that people should for example completely discount the impact of socialisation despite their being a body of evidence to suggest that it could be important. I don't necessarily even have a strong ideology other than being open to exploring biological differences between the sexes expanding beyond the merely physical. I am in pursuit of the truth and you obviously can't prove or disprove a theory without testing it. Many on this thread are opposed to even contemplating the chance that biology could be involved, not because the theory has been proven incorrect (as it absolute hasn't ) but because it might open an ideological can of worms that they fear will be used to repress women. They literally just don't want to ask the question for fear of getting the 'wrong' answer that would make a certain form of equality harder to achieve.

Of course science can be biased but this why we have peer reviews and other checks and balances to mitigate against this. Science is imperfect but it is the only effective way we have of testing ideas, concepts and truly understanding ourselves and the world around us. Your post reads almost as if you are generally anti-science but I have a feeling you are only anti science when it is undertaken by people or organisations you don't like looking into areas you don't agree with.

Science has limited resources available and many key questions to be answered

When we review an idea for further detailed research we focus on stuff that will be beneficial to humankind

Not mankind . Humankind

You cherry pick , misinterpret and expect to be taken seriously?

Yes you're right, I do expect to be taken seriously! I don't agree that I have cherry picked but obviously can't reply to everything as there simply isn't time. You may feel I have misinterpreted others, I feel I have been misinterpreted. It's the nature of having a discussion like this on a forum.

The range of responses on this thread and studies linked show that actually lots of people and scientists have deemed this a worthwhile area to explore. Articles and books have been written each testing different hypothesise. I suppose though according to you these people are all wasting their time and resources as there are much more 'important' things to look into. Luckily you don't get to dictate what is and isn't worthy... Neither do I.

Why would exploring the differences between men and women only benefit men? Nobody has suggested that biological difference means inferiority on this thread except for posters like you. I believe that understanding ourselves and our biology is extremely beneficial to humankind. Knowledge is power and the first step in agitating change.

@Bumpitybumper
I don't necessarily even have a strong ideology other than being open to exploring biological differences between the sexes expanding beyond the merely physical. I am in pursuit of the truth and you obviously can't prove or disprove a theory without testing it. Many on this thread are opposed to even contemplating the chance that biology could be involved, not because the theory has been proven incorrect (as it absolute hasn't ) but because it might open an ideological can of worms that they fear will be used to repress women. They literally just don't want to ask the question for fear of getting the 'wrong' answer that would make a certain form of equality harder to achieve.

Your arguments here remind me of the controversy around the book The Bell Curve in the 90s. This book made the argument that statistics which showed that black people scored lower in IQ tests than white people was 'evidence' that black people were less intelligent than white people, and that this difference was genetic. It's not hard to see how this could be used to avoid addressing any disparities in access to education for black people, or their under-representation in various professions, or even to argue that they are genetically inferior to white people. These efforts to 'prove' that black people were intellectually inferior to white people was quite rightly seen as racist.

There is a direct analogy here in your efforts to find an innate and universal biological imperative in women which means that they are biologically best suited to spend their lives bearing and raising children.

Of course science can be biased but this why we have peer reviews and other checks and balances to mitigate against this. Science is imperfect but it is the only effective way we have of testing ideas, concepts and truly understanding ourselves and the world around us. Your post reads almost as if you are generally anti-science but I have a feeling you are only anti science when it is undertaken by people or organisations you don't like looking into areas you don't agree with.

It appears from your post that you are not a scientist. To people who look at science from the outside, it can look as you seem to see it, full of pure, unbiased people, honestly searching for the truth from their ivory towers. The reality is quite different. Many of them are searching for glory as much as truth, and as I mentioned in my earlier post, scientists are only human, and have their own politics and ideology which is not always kept separate from their work.

Work-related issues are trick:

Employers prefer, other things the same, workers who they predict will not take much time off in the future. That's because maternity leaves, for instance, means that they have to find a replacement for that time period and also train the replacement which causes inconvenience and costs them something. And this is the case when the employer doesn't actually pay any fraction of the leave-taking woman's maternity pay, so the disincentive to hire young women can be much higher.

From that angle young women look to them more costly than otherwise equally qualified young men. This doesn't apply only to those women who will use maternity leave in the near future; just being in that demographic group signals something to employers, because they can't tell from outside which young men are planning to have children and which are not.

If parental leave was more equally shared between men and women, this negative incentive for employers would be reduced. If maternity leave payments were shared between the firm which employs the woman taking the leave and the firm which employs her partner (the impregnating parent, in woke-speech), that negative incentive would be further reduced.

@nepeta - I suppose a balance as some work facilities and patterns make it v difficult to pump and store milk - so those who wish to breast feed longer than 6 months may find that difficult. Also, those with birth injury or premature delivery may find they need more time than 6 months to recover and support their baby. So the policy you suggest of 6 months between 2 partners can have a beneficial effect on discrimination and a negative effect on other situations (though it could be tweaked perhaps to mitigate some of these). there is no 1 right way and people will have different opinions.

I do agree with @OldCrone that it is similar. In some ways to the argument about different races having different strengths at a population level. I could see that as biologically plausible - after all some physical features (eg height, disease likelihood) have associations with race. My guess is that the differences would be less than for men/women (as race is not binary and is likely associated with many genes) and also heavily modified by other factors.

Would it help to do research into this area? Well people are right to be cautious that the results could be used against minorities or women. Would it change much? Not sure.

I would find it far more useful to try and test the benefit to society of various different policies. Eg does giving use-it-or-lose it paternity leave increase uptake? Does it help equalise workload at home or change men’s attitudes? Does it reduce employer discrimination? studies on universal basic income. Does extended mat +/- pat leave improve outcomes for mother and child in cases of prematurity, significant medical/developmental disability or adoption?

don’t think there was anything wrong with the language opp used so its likely to be the content people don’t like but it’s not really disputable, just complex and misunderstood.

Just to untangle a few of the things being discussed if anyone isnt quite following;
Men & women are more the same than they are different. There is significant overlap in many personality traits between sexes. For example men & women are roughly the same in terms of their aggressiveness. It’s slightly higher for men the ratio is 60:40, so if you were to guess out of 10 people who the most aggressive and you chose the man, you’d be right 6 times out of 10.
However, while certain traits will overlap amongst the averages, things begin to change at the extreme. If you were to take the 5 most aggressive people out of a group of 100 you could rightly predict that it would nearly always be made up of ONLY men.

This is important because society is often played out at the extremes. This is why men outnumber women in prisons by about 99 to 1 as these are the MOST aggressive people in our society.
This factors into occupational choices too. One of the biggest differences between men & women is the difference in interest in ‘people’ and ‘things’. So those who want to be engineers are the people who are most interested in things, that’s why its nearly made up of all men. On the flip side you don’t go into a nursing or care profession if you only care a bit for people it’s those who care to the extreme that want to enter into that as a profession, which is why they tend to be nearly all women.

While many feminists would have you believe that some man is sitting up there dictating what jobs each sex will do, the reality is very much different and when seen from a perspective of pay, unfortunately it really is us women who decide to enter the lower paid professions out of nothing but personal choice.

One of the biggest differences between men & women is the difference in interest in ‘people’ and ‘things’. So those who want to be engineers are the people who are most interested in things, that’s why its nearly made up of all men.

Is there really any evidence for this? And if so, is there evidence that this is entirely due to biology rather than socialisation?

While many feminists would have you believe that some man is sitting up there dictating what jobs each sex will do,

If you really believe this, I think you have completely misunderstood feminism.

the reality is very much different and when seen from a perspective of pay, unfortunately it really is us women who decide to enter the lower paid professions out of nothing but personal choice.

Do you really think it is 'nothing but personal choice' that women often take the jobs that fit in best with their other role of caring for their children? Is it their choice that the jobs available to them are low paid and low status?

This is so fucking offensive to those of us who DO work in STEM careers and deal with outmoded shit about what women are "just naturally drawn to" in our day to day lives.

Trust me, we are not held back because we are struggling against a natural desire to be at home with kids. We are held back because we are undervalued because we don't fit the techbro mould or walk with the techbro swagger.

When no woman can say "I want to progress in a traditionally male career and my abilities are at least equal to my male colleagues but my sex is influencing the opportunities I get and the credibility my colleagues give me" then maybe, maybe, we can conclude that whatever that sex balance is, whether it's 50/50, 60/40, 20/80, is a "natural" result of sex differences, but until that happens it's social.

It's not complicated, just listen to women instead of theorising about them!

@Adelishious

One of the biggest differences between men & women is the difference in interest in ‘people’ and ‘things’. So those who want to be engineers are the people who are most interested in things, that’s why its nearly made up of all men. On the flip side you don’t go into a nursing or care profession if you only care a bit for people it’s those who care to the extreme that want to enter into that as a profession, which is why they tend to be nearly all women.

The percentage of engineers who are female varies by country, and so does the percentage of nurses who are male. Most countries show increases over time in the percentage of women in engineering and in the percentage of men in nursing.

There are many theoretically possible reasons for the dominance of men in engineering and the dominance of women in nursing.

Some that you didn't mention are pay differences, and gender stereotypes about profession as well as about the role of men and women in the wider culture (e.g. if men are expected to be the breadwinners and women are expected to do most of childcare, then men will seek higher paying jobs and women will seek jobs which allow flexibility, even if they pay less).

Then there's the hostile workplace climate women in STEM fields in general may experience, which seems not to happen for men who enter nursing. Indeed, male nurses tend to earn more than female nurses.

I would argue that even this difference needs much more analysis and requires multivariate modeling.

It's also interesting that some people-centered professions are very male-dominated. Politics, for instance, and also most clergy/religious leadership (though here women are also often excluded altogether).

And almost all jobs, in reality, have a mixed job definition involving both dealing with people and dealing with things, though the percentages differ. The military, medicine on the whole, and many service occupations where concrete services are provided for individuals to me seem to have both aspects.

Some very people-centered jobs were almost entirely male in the past (psychotherapists), so it's possible that nursing, for instance, will keep changing towards more equal numbers of men and women.

The Bell Curve is an interesting comparison, because yes, the author was widely reviled and accused of racism. There was also a tendency to simplify his conclusions and make them look worse than they were.

Does that make it bad science though, that we don't like where the information might lead? I think that's a very dangerous road to take and could easily come back to hurt women.

And on the other hand, what happens if we engage with that kind of research? I think that ultimately we are better off, rather than trying to suppress it and call people bigots. If we really think that, for example, there is no racial component to intelligence, we should be able to make that argument, show that data, as well as those people who might want to say the opposite.

Glen Loury did a really interesting interview about the Bell Curve for that very reason - he believes you need to engage with ideas you disagree with.

I think I agree with everything the OP has written.

I saw a psychologist say that if you get people to blindly guess whether someone is a male or a female based on their traits, you would be right 60% of the time. So it’s not like there’s a huge divide, but the differences in the averages are significant.

Some of this will be down to socialisation, but
surely it would be a weird coincidence if innately, males and females had exactly the same average points in all personality traits, given how different they are physically.

Even if the differences are ALL down to socialisation, everyone over the age of 7(?) has already been socialised and their personality is pretty much set.

So we are stuck with the personality differences that exist in the current working population, and should perhaps deal with the differences rather than pretend they don’t exist.

Can you clarify who is pretending differences don't exist on an aggregate level between men and women, currently?

Can you describe what not pretending differences exist would look like for you? What would you think needs changing in society as a result?

There has been a fair bit of analysis about this. Women going into what we think of as masculine professions like engineering correlates with the degree to which the society is egalitarian. The less egalitarian the society, the more women who do get an education and enter a profession are likely to enter into male dominated professions. Whereas as the society becomes more egalitarian and values men and women, and their work, more equally, they are more likely women are to choose more people oriented types of careers.

Which seems to be the opposite of financial and values based pressures driving women away from engineering into nursing.

Which maybe should be kind of obvious. In egalitarian societies women now dominate a number of formerly male dominated jobs, like general practice doctors. At one time some people argued, just like with engineering, that women were unsuited to. Yet we know that women are in fact quite capable of being both engineers and GPs. We know that culture has changes to expect women GPs pretty much without comment. They haven't made the same inroads into engineering despite the women where there is less egalitarianism doing fine in those jobs.

And we know there is data that suggests the preference for people over things is a consistent moderate difference between females and male across cultures.

It's really difficult to see why women making choices about career preferences wouldn't be a very strong contender for the most likely explanation for all of this.

It' also the case that socialization can happen in response to biological things.

So girls have a somewhat different developmental arc than boys, boys in adolescence suddenly become stronger and their sex drive ramps up in a different way, girls deal with menstruation and physical changes that are different from boys in quality, women become mothers.

Of course socialization happens both at individual and group level in reference to these things. The only way to wipe that out would be to make men and women the same.

We don't pretend they don't exist

What we would like is for people to not assume that a small difference in a population has any relevance at all on the individual level

Because it's then self perpetuating

Ah women make better nurses so girls think they should be nurses not doctors so any minor differences are amplified and fed back into thw system

Making life hellish for approx 50% of the female population who don't fit the mould

I agree with you OP re tendencies. But there is also a large overlap where males and females have a common ground. And also, as pps have pointed out, a lot of societal reinforcement.

I also agree with you that it would be better if “female” roles were valued more highly, rather than females only being properly valued (financially at least) if they do “male” roles.

Men and women are not always equal - eg in strength, speed, childbearing capabilities - but they MATTER equally. I think that’s often the heart of the problem.

I’m in a STEM career by the way.

This is not scientific at all but I remember seeing a programme about a man in the 19th century setting about building a lighthouse on a rock in a treacherous part of the sea, and refusing to give up no matter what the setbacks, and thinking a woman wouldn’t do that. The same with huge impossible bridges. Not that woman are not mentally capable of the engineering required but just that they aren’t so egotistical (?), or perhaps it would be better to say so full of self belief, as to pit themselves against huge forces of nature and devote their lives to an enterprise like that.

The other thing I think that cannot be just socialisation is the difference between the large amount of information a woman can get from a few minutes of chatting to a stranger compared to the very little a man will glean. This is in spite of how gregarious and friendly some men are.

Men also seem generally to prefer machines to accomplish works. They don’t want to do it inch by inch. They seem to identify with the power of machinery. Women use machines of course, but I believe they are more willing to use slower more hand-done approaches more often and be in less of a hurry.

As I said there is no science behind these opinions.