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?

In some cases we do pretend the differences don’t exist. I work in STEM and am forced by my company to interview 50% females for any role. The candidates submitting CVs are ~80% male.

Do you let the women know that you are wasting their time, and they wouldn't have got an interview apart from this positive discrimination?

Your company would be better off looking at why they don't get many applications from women, and look at ways that they can improve that at source rather than waste everyone's time making you interview women who can't do the job.

@MangyInseam

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.

I know the study you are most likely referring to (this one, with these corrections). But are you aware that a response to that article argues that their findings are not robust, but depend on the way the measure women's presence in STEM fields and the gender equality index they chose?

This is the response to the study by Richardson and others which points out that the Stoat and Geary results are affected by the measure they chose for gender equality and also the new measure they created for measuring women's presence in STEM fields (which is really a weird one, to be honest).

You can read the summary of the latter critic here. It argues that the inverse correlation between women in STEM fields and country-level gender equality measures are not robust to the way these two variables are defined.

In particular, Stoat and Geary created a new (and somewhat odd) measure to reflect women's presence in STEM fields and used that with one of the measures of gender equality that are available.

When Richardson and others used the more normal measure of women's presence in STEM fields (percentage of female graduates among all tertiary level STEM graduates) and the other gender equality measure (developed by Stoat and Geary, incidentally), they found no correlation between a country's level of gender equality and the presence of women in STEM fields (see Section 4 here).

Richardson and others also point out that making assumptions about individual choices with aggregate data can lead us to the ecological fallacy.

So I don't think this particular study can be used as the foundation for what you state here:

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.

What we often describe as preferences at, say, eighteen have already been influenced by societal messages of all kinds (and, in particular, attitudes about which jobs are gendered male), so it's not quite correct to interpret someone's choices of occupation at that point as solely driven by interests which are somehow innate. Here this article matters.

Maybe they can do the job? There’s no evidence at all that the reason for less cvs from women is due to being innately less capable and lots and lots of reasons and evidence to conclude that it’s structural societal barriers dissuading women from stem and intentionally hiring more of them will provide impetus for more women to do stem. I did stem, went into finance and I’m now at the only company that had women in my management line as opposed to peripheral peer women brought in to interviews to be a female presence. We have amazing senior women and coincidentally targets on hiring women.

Your company would be better off looking at why they don't get many applications from women, and look at ways that they can improve that at source rather than waste everyone's time making you interview women who can't do the job.

The women might be just as well qualified as the men (or better). There seems to be some evidence that women won't apply for a job unless they meet all the criteria, whereas men are much more likely to apply as long as they meet some of them.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/men-apply-job-when-meet-only-60-qualifications-women-100-mei-ibrahim

DH and DS are engineers - the problems are almost always staff issues, getting the planning, design etc is the easy bit.

There isn't one study about that correlation - there are many and they are considered robust.

The question is why it is the case, not whether it is the case.

And yes, I understand that people make choices based on socialization, I'm not a complete idiot. But that i really not a response to the claim. Why would women in less egalitarian societies be less socialized to choose traditionally feminine careers? Why would women in more egalitarian societies, including ones which go out of their way to try and get women into fields like engineering, be socialized to choose traditionally feminine careers?

What's the supposed mechanism for that?

Saying "well, socialization happens early" isn't an answer, it's just fobbing off the question, and not very effectively because socilization isn't specific to the egalitarian societies applies to all. The paradox is that we'd expect socialization to have the opposite effect of what we are seeing if there were no innate differences on the population level between men's and women's preferences. Are you suggesting that more freedom in society for women, and more social support in terms of things like childcare or workplace protections, is correlated to stronger socialization to be "feminine"? Why would that be?

Girls being more ‘people’ focused and boys more interested in ‘things’ is not the only thing that plays into career.

It’s also how much boys/girls/couples want financial gain vs enjoying the job (do you want to be an accountant or professional dancer?). Whether they want to pour energy into climbing the career ladder or have a work-life balance. People may want to focus on different things in different phases of their life.

how to financially value female dominated low paid jobs against market forces is a big challenge.

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.

So this is sort of going back to my first point. Let's say, ignoring tons of evidence about what the many studies have actually shown, that this massive generalisation is actually the case.

If guesses whether someone is male or female are slightly, but barely, better than random (50/50). What do you do with this information? What action does it inform? OP started to answer this to some extent but then my posts and questions got ignored again - which makes me think there isn't really a point.

Do you adjust your inclinations at job interviews - sex now allows for a small percentage as a positive or negative trait to be weighed up against the other competencies?

I wasn't being serious in my response to @UsernameNowAvailable ..:. Perhaps that wasn't as obvious as I thought in retrospect.

so it's not quite correct to interpret someone's choices of occupation at that point as solely driven by interests which are somehow innate

And choices of occupation take into account loads of different factors! Where is this industry based? Do I have to live in London/ New York/ rural Wales?
Am I like to need to move around a lot? (Partly why I did not take up a profession that was otherwise very well suited to me.)
Do I know someone who had a really negative experience in that occupation who might disproportionately effect my perception of what it's like to do that job? (This happened to me, when young).
Is there a famous "person doing that role" in the media and what is the reaction to them? Will that be what people generally think of me?
Does this industry often make reasonable allowances for my health issues? Is this industry sexist? Even if I am excellently skilled at the work, does the working pattern suit me?
How competitive are jobs in this industry?

As I asked earlier, it seems to be predated on the incredibly simplistic notion that there is a job with a skillset to match with every person, regardless of the practicalities or attractiveness of that job.

There isn't one study about that correlation - there are many and they are considered robust.

Can you point me the way to those other studies which show the same? I have only come across this one, from 2018, though it was, of course, widely popularised at that time and for a few years after. But I don't know of any other studies on this specific question so I would be glad to see references to them.

So my opinion is that there are broadly three facets of what people call "gender".

The first is sex, which is set at conception, is immutable, and is likely to remain immutable for at least the lifespan of everyone alive today and their grandchildren. It means that women are always and unavoidably saddled with childbearing and men are almost always bigger and stronger than women, all things (training, experience, etc.) being equal.

The second is gendered behaviour, things like the "people/things preference" distribution etc., which seems to be somewhat inherent and driven by our evolutionary past, and distributes such that females are more likely to have "feminine" behaviours and males more likely to have "masculine" behaviours. But men and women are far more alike than they are different, and the most "masculine" (according to behaviours) person in a given space could easily be female, and the most "feminine" could easily be male. And there is absolutely nothing wrong or even surprising about that. The best person I ever worked with when I worked in elderly care many years ago was male, and the best mechanic I know and trust is female.

The third is gendered social expectations, which are entirely constructed, are usually a bastardisation of observations on gendered behaviours, and are almost always harmful to, if not the majority, then a very sizeable minority of people. I also think these are increasingly set by the influence of large corporations and driven by corporate interests (eg: "let's make pink Legos so little Anna can't inherit her big brother's set").

Gender ideology is especially dangerous because it uses the third thing (socially constructed gender expectations) to foster insecurity in young people about the second thing (a completely normal distribution of masculine/feminine traits across both sexes) and suggests that this may mean that the first thing (immutable sex) is wrong. Couple that with the monetary interests of clinicians who can make lifelong patients out of young people and the political interest of those who see gender "queering" as a way to break down the current order of society, mix in a little "toxic masculinity" rhetoric with feminine and sensitive young boys, a spoonful of abjectly pornified, instagram-filtered femininity with bookish, masculine young women, a dash of internalised homophobia, and you have a recipe for absolute disaster.

That's my take on the whole thing, anyway.

I don't want men to have access to women's single-sex spaces. I also don't want feminine young men or masculine young women to feel like there is something "wrong" with them, even if they want to buck socially constructed expectations about appearance.

My own mother's answer to me hating dresses, long hair, and dolls was to put me in dungarees, cut my hair off, buy me toy cars and magazines about bugs and let me roll in the mud.

I think she was onto something.

I have a sister that has been in STEM for years & has progressed far in this position. I know she would strongly disagree that there is anything holding women back in the STEM and would never feel like she should be considered as disadvantaged because of her sex.

She hasn't experienced any barriers due to sexism in 20 years, so before assuming sexism is the reason women arnt moving ahead it would probably be best to begin looking at things that arnt the responsibility of someone else to solve.

FireFlyBoogaloo · Yesterday 23:30

I think you put that wonderfully and I agree completely with all you said there.

If your sister is in a stem career she will no doubt be able to explain to you, Adelishious, that anecdote /= data. One persons individual experience does not negate research into the barriers faced by women in STEM.

Seconded. Except maybe the 'saddled' with childbearing.

That's fair, and you're probably right that "saddled" is the wrong word. I'm more talking about the fact that women carry a burden and risk in childbearing that men really don't. I didn't mean to minimise motherhood at all. I am a mother, and of all the things I am, it's hands down my favourite one.

I think there is a biological propensity, although plenty of people deviate from the norm. What has this got to do with trans however?

Also, she'll be affected by opinions she likely will never hear stated aloud. If someone, as pp in this thread do, really believes that women are scientifically proven to be better at looking after children than analysing data, they are probably smart enough not to say that out loud, but find other reasons to not give her that promotion/ recommend her for that research team/ give her xyz opportunity.

Not at all saying that this will have happened - in my own recent jobs I don't feel as though being female counted against me, but one's career involves a lot of external factors and you can't ever know for sure the rationalities behind all decision-making.

I am not deviant from any norm thank you

Did you actually read what you wrote and not see it as offensive?

And taking about the norm on something that is really so broad and diverse ...

What is so offensive about the norm? Or about deviating from it?

Calling people deviants isn't offensive ?!?

Or according to one definition it not an insult just means someone who does something others will disapprove of

can you see anything about being interested in stem that warrants disapproval ?

Ot may be personal but that feels like the bullying from other girls because I refused to conform to arbitrary rules for which there is no justification despite this threads efforts to suggest otherwise

Arbitrary rules that mean girls in England can't do physics and boys in Bermuda can't do physics because clearly ability and interest in physics is biologically determined

I’m sorry if you were bullied but it wasn’t because you were interested in Stem subjects. Lots of girls are.

“Deviating from the norm” is not an insult. It is a mathematical term (you said you were interested in Stem subjects?).

That said, I do know what you mean about not fitting the mould and being ostracised because of that.