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?

The other thing is you can argue the biological differences could result in a completely different set of “psychological” differences.

Because testosterone means men are more aggressive and likely to do more damage if they act on that aggression, they are better suited to non-competitive activities and roles, where their aggression is less likely to be triggered. Caring roles, and non-hierarchical organisations are best-suited for male workers. Their greater physical strength makes them better suited for jobs involving hard physical labour like cleaning
or caring. Men are not drawn to leadership positions because they become irrational when they feel threatened/attacked and that feeling of
being out of control is deeply unpleasant for them.

Women lack physical strength and reach, so they are more likely to be drawn to engineering so they can design and implement tools and adaptive technology. They’re also more likely to excel in theoretical subjects (philosophy, higher mathematics, etc) where there is no requirement for physical strength. Men are more likely to be attracted to “vocational” degrees like gardening, some types of medical roles (orderly, porter, HCA), and some sports (though not competitive ones because of the aggression trigger).

I read a fascinating article about changes to womens brains that last for two years during and after pregnancy. They physically change shape.

But similar things happened to men who took on very active caring roles (gay men who adopt/ use surrogates) including changes to testosterone levels. not quite to the same level as women but a significant change.

I'm then reminded of the tribe that is whipped out to "prove men breastfeed" (they don't) where they hold and carry their infants a huge amount - the men too. And it's a very matriarchal/ egalitarian / peaceful society.

And I think the reason that women, worldwide, have significantly more caring responsibilities (both in the home, and in employed roles) is because, at a population level, we are just bloody better at it. Of course it is impossible to say how much of this is socialisation (a very significant percentage, I'm sure) but I am certain that on the whole women are just better at tuning in to and prioritising the needs of others, and it is an innate ability that has been wired into us over tens of thousand of years of evolution.

I think I missed out

I believe that the physical differences also sometimes/often are one of the causes for something which looks like a purely psychological difference.

For instance, professions which allow someone to take a few years off and then return without suffering enormous losses of lifetime income are going to look more appealing to women than to men if the society they live in assumes that women stay at home when their children are small. History might be a field like that for teaching, engineering perhaps not, as the science changes more rapidly in the latter. Then you need to add to that the likelihood that women in engineering might face more gatekeeping (as outsiders barging into a very homogeneous occupation) which is an extra determinant for those who don't relish being slightly harassed etc.

The most interesting example of this just might be that early evolutionary psychology study which concluded that men like casual sex with strangers while women don't, and then interpreted this as an evolutionary adaptation.

The study had young men and women (judged good-looking by a panel) picked and trained to randomly pretend to propose instant sex to young opposite-sex strangers on a college campus in pure daylight. The answers showed a large sex difference: Hardly any women agreed to the proposition while some largish percentage of men did.

Perhaps because the creators of the study were men they never seemed to have thought what it means to a young woman to have a stranger accost her for sex in daylight and at a place which is not intended for mating behaviours. The risks of such hook-ups are far greater for women than for men, and certainly the risk of violence is, given the average strength difference. And there's also the risk of pregnancy.

In short, I think there might be fairly important material reasons for some of the differences we see in sexual behaviour between men and women, having to do with the body itself. This doesn't mean that I would preclude possible differences in libido or whatever, but the effects of the environment and of biology are almost impossible to tease apart as easily as we'd need it to be for us to make conclusive judgements here.

What is the point of all this discussion about the differences in capabilities/preferences/behaviour/altitude between women and men? What differences would people want to see in our society as a result of recognising that women are innately more caring than men, for example? Are those changes things that feminists currently don't support or argue against?

Actually you're the one that brought violence into the debate, and now (of course) trans issues.

I have no idea what the point in creating this thread might be, but traditionally this is the argument anti-feminists use to explain why women are not in STEM fields and why they can, instead, be found in certain female-dominated occupations, and it's these supposed innate cognitive and emotional differences which have always been used to keep women subjugated. They are also now embedded in the gender identity concept!

Feminists have certainly fought for greater appreciation of the kinds of work which women have traditionally done: the unpaid care work at home, and now the poorly paid care work in the labour force.

But appreciating such work more does not translate into higher pay. For that we need to understand how earnings are defined, if women are paid less because they are in certain occupations or if those occupations are paid less because most workers in them are women, or if perhaps both can be true, to varying degrees (which is my current view).

It's also necessary to go back into asking what the determinants are which direct young people's occupational choices. To what extent do young women think of the earnings a job offers as something that might one day have to support not only themselves but also a child or two? And are we discussing this enough with girls?

For me, it would mean recognising that while there are some innate differences at a population level, the impact of these differences is rendered unimportant by the much larger influences of culture and socialisation. Therefore it serves as absolutely no basis whatsoever for expecting women to fulfil caring roles, or to accept male aggression as inevitable.

So practically, I don't think it should change anything.

I think people often don't account for the differences being the averages of a wide range. I work with data and see it all the time.

I'm sure there is data that shows women and men as classes have different statistics in physical and psychological/ social characteristics. Some innate, some socialised. Sometimes there isn't a difference.

But that doesn't mean ALL women are, for example, nurturing focused and NO men are. There is lots of crossover and outliers. And a different spread in different characteristics. The bell curves overlap.

We are so quick to make generalisations and put people in boxes, real life and real people are complex and diverse.

@pastaandpesto - though lions, monkeys, birds may also have socialisation. In that - they may copy from those around them (nurture). I think someone observed that primates had to learn from others how to breastfeed well (psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2011-15660-003.pdf - the Smith 2005 reference).

@Morred - interesting. I think changes in environment/technology may have influenced the jobs men and women do (eg 500 years ago, without contraception many women of child-bearing age may have frequently got pregnant which would have made some jobs v difficult. machines make it easier for women to access some roles where brute force was necessary in the past). But yes - I wonder how tech/societal changes may alter male/female preferences.

Not directly related to the topic here, but yesterday I observed two bird parents teach their teenage children how to take a bath in my bird bath in the garden. It was quite clear that this was a lesson: the parent went in and did an exaggerated bathe and then flew into the nearby tree to shake its feathers. The teens then followed suit while the parents stood guard.

So yes, other animals also have socialisation, and I have read that good mothering seems to be at least partly learned in some primate species.

@Namenic , if animals learn their sex-based roles through socialisation, how do they know which sex they are supposed to be copying?! I'm not being argumentative, genuinely interested! It would suggest that such animals have an innate sense of their own sex I guess? But is that yet more evidence for male / female brain differences?

But just think about how long and how much women were trapped by ideas of what they were like psychologically etc.
I was working in A&E last night. It was run, completely, utterly, entirely by women. All the docs were women. All the nurses were women. All the HCAs, the cleaners. Women entirely without men kept everyone safe under difficult circumstances through a mixture of care/training/communication/scientific knowledge/practical procedures/emotional resilience etc.
Think about how laughable that idea was to men (and some other women) not that long ago. Look up the Edinburgh Seven and how they were treated.
I do believe there is fMRI evidence for women's brains changing during pregnancy etc, to prepare for meeting the needs of infant. I don't think that makes women more suited to caring roles on a population level. It makes pregnant women suited to caring for an infant, it doesn't change their entire personality.
I think the issue is what about men? Like I said, think about medicine. Originally entirely male in the western world, now predominantly female at student level. Where are all the examples for men breaking barriers in the caring/feminine professions? I think anyone restricting ability on sex (whether male or female) is probably way further off the mark than they think. Men could be entirely different to how they are now I believe, if the expectations and socialisation of them changed. Women and men are far far far more similar than they are different.
Any psychological differences I just don't think are that relevant when we are far more complex as individuals than our sex.
If you are looking for a trait that the vast majority of women have that men don't for example, look at 'sexually attracted to males'. Vast majority of women have that trait, minority of men do. Vice versa with 'attraction to females'. Does it say anything about the sex of the people that have that trait? Does it reflect anything else about them such as propensity to care/mathematical ability etc?
I think it's good to keep an open mind and I do think sometimes pendulums can swing too far in one direction, but I think here we're probably far far far more wrong and restrictive in what we attribute to men and women than what their potential is.

It seems there are some women here who believe that despite anatomy (including brain anatomy) and hormones being significantly different in males and females, that there are no innate average differences in behaviour.

I'm not arguing the averages are different. I'm saying the standard deviation is so large as to be irrelevant.
And again, no-one has specified which traits we are talking about and how we would measure them - apart from violence/aggression.

Like I said, if a characteristic could tell you, in a double-blind test somehow, whether the person doing it was male or female to a high level of accuracy, yes that would be useful and I would accept they are strongly linked.

Saying 'most nurses are female' tells us that anything affecting that profession will disproportionately affect female people and this should be considered/mitigated.
Saying 'females are naturally nursey' doesn't really give us anything.

Think about how recently women were able to choose whether or not to have babies. (Fertility issues excepted). Evolutionarily, and culturally, it's a fraction of a blink of an eye.

Before that, women have basically had to have whatever babies they were blessed with, and the men had to go and provide, because the women would have spent a great deal of their life being pregnant/breastfeeding/having young children to look after. I'm not saying no woman had a choice but we have a far greater choice (over lots more of our lives) now and it's easy to forget how different life would've been for a fertile woman even 100 years ago.

Women would've defaulted to the caring roles, and as pp have pointed out, manual labour would've been much (physically) harder for both sexes.

In my opinion so much of the 'traditional' role is handed down from previous generations.

And even with all that going on, women still fought tooth and nail for education, the vote, equality.

From what I learned at uni, the evidence says that the only reliable difference between men and women is that men are more aggressive than women. Several studies have come to this conclusion.

Masculine and feminine behaviours:
I remember one study which grouped character traits into stereotypically male (masculine) and stereotypically female (feminine) and then grouped subjects into these groups. They found that there were four groups of people:

• those behaving in "masculine" ways


• those behaving in "feminine" ways


• those behaving in masculine and feminine ways


• those who displayed no strong masculine or feminine behaviours

The men and women taking part in the study were evenly distributed over those four categories. Only at the very extreme ends of male and feminine behaviour were fewer women or men respectively. However, those were tiny percentages. Overall, the differences in behaviours within sex groups was much bigger than the difference in behaviours between the sexes and there was a huge overlap.

Well, the idea that female biology results in women having a different psychology and different behaviours from men is biological determinism, and feminists have objected to THAT idea since Mary Wollstonecraft in the 18th century. I don't think there is evidence that women have vastly different psychologies to men because of their biology. 'Female nature' is entirely a social construct, ingrained in us from the first day we are born. Just look at how what is considered 'feminine' and 'masculine' behaviour has changed over the years.

In the medieval ages, women were considered to be sex mad, promiscuous, cheaters who couldn't control themselves. Men were the chaste, pure sex, who were able to deploy reason. Read all the literature of the times - women are gagging for it, whereas men can keep it in their pants. Now, (presumably because having the myth the other way around is beneficial to men), women are chaste and frigid and men are sex mad. Did innate female psychology really change in a few hundred years?

In the Enlightenment, it was believed that men were capable of incredibly deep feelings and romance. They would take long walks in nature, sobbing and weeping at the beauty. They would write long treatises on the perfection of male on male friendship. Women weren't capable of achieving deep or higher emotions at all. Women, in fact, were characterised as dull drudges. Nowadays, a few hundred years later, our men are all stoic and don't cry or hug each other and women are characterised as the overly emotional sex. (And the modern male personality, incidentally, is very new only arising after the World Wars.)

So while I can believe that there are differences in personalities between the sexes, I cannot accept there is anything biological or innate about it.

Also, look at careers. Coding is seen as a macho male pursuit...computing and coding was invented by women. Cooking is seen as a male job, but most cooks in the world are female. The gender lines in jobs don't break down in ways you would expect if the sexes had innately different personalities. Instead, weirdly enough, women seem to gather in poorly paid, shit jobs and men take all the prestige.

@pastaandpesto - dunno. Probably different for different animals? Most animals can probably tell one sex from another (otherwise they would mate with the 2 sexes equally) - though not sure if they would need to know their own sex.

with breastfeeding - I guess they don’t need to know their own sex - they just need to copy the other monkeys who have a baby…

The electricians missed me out I think

The electricians missed me out I think
Must've been one of those female ones....

I am certain that on the whole women are just TOLD TO BE better at tuning in to and prioritising the needs of others....

'Be kind' is literally a clothing slogan even now in 2022.

Laughing priest: right, if women were naturally kind we wouldn't need bloody mantras on our clothing to remind us what to do! Women on the whole are remarkably resistant to their ''natural state of being'.

Yep. I mean how dumb do you have to be to fall for this. “Yes you get to wipe all the bums for nothing because you’re so good at it.” Fuck that.

While I wouldn't say it ubiquitous, I would say there are an above average number of people here who tend to strongly resist the possibility that there may be psychological or emotional or cognitive differences between the sexes that can have significant effects.

I don't really think the data supports that view and even without data I would think that it would be unlikely that there would be no differences of that kind. But what's more concerning to me is that from my perspective, often the reason people reject that idea is most often values driven - they don't like the potential arguments they think people could make if it were true. I think preferring a proposition for reasons like that is putting yourself in danger because you end up building your arguments on something which may turn out to be quite untrue.

It's much better to be able to say, yes there are or may be differences, but they don't invalidate my essential claims.

Well, the idea that female biology results in women having a different psychology and different behaviours from men is biological determinism,

You could say that having different different strength or capacities for physical labour is biological determinism too. People do make that argument.

We are determined in many ways by our biology, we can't run as fast as a horse, we can't breath under water. Women become pregnant, they menstruate, they are likely to be slower than men.

All of these things can impact our lives significantly, and if it's that easy to be a determanist I don't think you will find many people who aren't.