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 arguments that we are usually countering are those that reject the idea of treating women and men as genuine equals due to women naturally being, essentially, inferior according to the patriarchal constructs that we are operating within. That's what tends to rankle straight off the bat. Especially when it's couched in an approach that pretends to be about wanting "true" or "genuine" equality.

Plus personally I get very tired of the idea that somehow I am some kind of unnatural or unusual woman due to my aptitudes and preferences. That I must somehow be male or masculinised, rather than a perfectly ordinary example of a woman.

@pastaandpesto - the interesting thing is that nowadays certain jobs like wfh tech or flexible data/risk analyst roles may actually give more scope for caring responsibilities for your own family. @Morred outlined how in the modern world you could see professions as ‘better’ suiting the opposite sex than has traditionally been the case.

caring as a profession is terribly underpaid, though a socially beneficial, useful job. Unfortunately I don’t think things will improve until there is a lack of supply (which I’m sure is coming).

personally I think we should encourage both boys and girls go value caring of old and young people.

Absolutely nobody is arguing on this thread that women and men shouldn't be treated equally. I believe we are all feminists here and this is a discussion about how we can best achieve equality. I think it's very important to stress this. I find it pretty disturbing that so many on this thread have automatically assumed that discussion of potential biological difference must be anti feminist and anti equality. I understand the suspicion but surely we have to believe it is possible to be treated differently but equally. The reality of our physical differences alone requires this to be the case, even if you don't subscribe to the idea of potential psychological differences.

I have traditionally masculine and feminine traits like every other person on the planet. This isn't about reinforcing gender stereotypes or putting people in boxes. Instead it's about truly understanding ourselves as a class and fighting for recognition and equal standing for those things that disproportionately affect us.

Using the physical as an example as I think we can all agree on obvious differences between the sexes there. So we know that 7% of the population suffer from autoimmune conditions and yet over three quarters of the sufferers are women. So although these conditions have a female bias most women won't experience them. However like most area of female health, these conditions lack research, funding and are largely misunderstood. Same goes more controversially for fibromyalgia which many health experts argue doesn't even exist. For me these conditions then become a feminist issue because they disproportionately impact women and are not being treated as equal to other conditions.

@Beowulfa
Are you quite sure our society values STEM over the arts? The only Prime Minister to have a science degree was Thatcher. "Engineer" is a protected title in some other countries.
In this country, due to the class system, those with a private education - which seems to favour the arts, have access to many senior posts in all walks of life. Also those privately educated who do study science go into finance where the money is. In my limited experience.

Also to respond to other posts regarding socialisation, it undoubtedly plays a huge role in determining how the two sexes behave but that doesn't mean that there aren't biological factors at play too. The obvious problem as PP have pointed out is that it is impossible to effectively prove or disprove this as nobody is raised without being subjected to some form of
socialisation.

I read an interesting study conducted with chimps that looked into why some chimps were more aggressive than others. They struggled to explain with biology why this could be for adult chimps but eventually hypothesised that the level of aggression exhibited by adult chimps was connected to the amount of aggressive encounters they had experienced in their formative years. Socialisation right? Except they were able to prove that some juvenile male chimps were biologically predisposed to being more aggressive and this behaviour were illiciting aggressive reactions from other chimps. They were therefore part of more aggressive encounters and thus went on to become more aggressive adult chimps. A true case where biology and socialisation have combined to create a complex sex based trend. I suspect human differences are a similar interplay between biology and socialisation.

Gina Rippon's the Gendered Brain tracks the historical attitudes to womens brains (assumed inferior) v the structural differences (v slight and linked to pituitary etc which drives / controls reproduction) v the social sexism via sex/gender stereotypes a culture has.

It also explores how plastic our brains are, that there's more difference to be seen between a London cab driver with the knowledge or those who speak 2nd languages than those who don't than can be seen between m and f brains.

I used to worry that arguing difference in bodily needs between men and women was working against equality for feminism but it's absolutely the opposite- as demonstrated well the day after RvW was over turned.

She also demonstrates the difficulty in making sweeping statements about the brain here:

sfonline.barnard.edu/neurogenderings/eight-things-you-need-to-know-about-sex-gender-brains-and-behavior-a-guide-for-academics-journalists-parents-gender-diversity-advocates-social-justice-warriors-tweeters-facebookers-and-ever/

Hum about chimps
Is it not possible that the exposure to violence affects thier brains to increase testosterone

To be honest, I don't have a major problem with the idea that there are general psychological differences between the sexes, and I say that as a very gender non-conforming adult.

I categoeically don't think there are male brains and female brains, or male talents and female talents. But I think hormones cast a long shadow.

You might have a male child and a female child. Both are equally intelligent with natural aptitude for Maths. Both are naturally introverted and get nervous in unfamiliar situations. But the way that those talents and characteristics interact with estrogen will be different than the way they interact with testosterone so you get some difference.

Similarly you might have two female children where one girl hs a talent for sport and the other for languages. So they will have different talents and interests but both will be impacted by the estrogen in their body, and this will mean they develop and act differently than if the estrogen were replaced with testosterone.

Add to that the fact that within both sexes there are varying levels of both estrogen and testosterone and you get the wonderful variety of humans where anyone can be anything but there tend to be trends.

My own personal observation (admittedly not at all scientific) is that women are more likely than men to want children, and more likely than men to prefer monogamous relationships. And while men and women are both equally capable of wiping someone else's bum, women seem to be better at knowing when the bums actually need wiping. Obviously there are outliers, but there is still a trend.

I think the OPs point was that we should give higher esteem to things that women are more likely to be naturally drawn to, rather than encouraging women into more traditionally male domains. So give better pay and higher esteem to early years childcare practitioners rather than encouraging them to be engineers. I don't really see a problem with this.

When I look at crappy 3rd wave feminism, I see women being led to believe that sexual equality and freedom means adopting sexual behaviors and attitudes that tend to be naturally perferred by, and advantageous to men. So this strikes me as comparable to the point the OP is making.

@justgotosleepffs yes, that's exactly my take on things. Thank you for articulating it better than I can. I don't mind people disagreeing, but it is quite painful to read that people think I'm some kind of troll hell-bent on taking women back to the dark ages.

@justgotosleepffs - agree mostly. Though - a larger male can be helpful in care work as there is a lot of lifting and rolling - so a complement of male and female would be ideal.

There is a lot of push for diversity in my workplace. I’m not a woke person but I think they have a good point: many teams would be stronger with both males and females for 2 reasons:1) males and females can both display both traditionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits. 2) in many occupations having a mixture of stereotypically masculine and feminine traits is usually beneficial.

There are plenty of people who believe in fundamental brain differences between men and women - those I have met in real life have without fail been arrogant misogynistic rather nasty people - the responses you get may be affected by conditioning in action

I do also agree with PP - it seems any innate differences ( beyond testosterone) are not significant at the population level , so therefore it would not be a difference that should be acted upon

So what is the point of mulling over a question the answer to which

1: any innate difference we know are not significant so should not change behaviours- rather we should understand why society imposed differences
2: often assumed true by the worst members of our society

@onlywhenidream

1. Because we don't understand so much of our biology and psychology. There is a lot of disagreement regarding what we do know so it isn't as definitive as you suggest.
2. They assume we are different and therefore inferior. This isn't what is being discussed here.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "innate differences at population level"? But if you are referring to the "trend differences" in men and women then I would disagree with the assertion that these are not significant.

If you look at our current battlegrounds - women's sport, spaces and prisons - it is actually the secondary characteristics and "trends" that are the most significant thing. So the problem with males in women's prisons is not primarily that males have penises (because a post-op TM with a "penis" would pose less threat than a post-op TW whose penis has been removed.) The main problem is the increased size and strength (secondary sexual characteristics), the increased aggression (testosterone) and the increased entitlement (socialisation). All of these exist on a spectrum in both men and women, which has led a number of well-meaning wokey idiots to suggest that males should be allowed into our spaces. Our entire argument that they shouldn't is based on a acknowledgement of the trend - we exclude penis-people because they are more likely to be bigger/stronger/more violent than vagina-people, not because every penis-person is bigger/stronger/more violent than every vagina-person. And if we hold that these trends are entirely due to socialisation then there will be people who try to minimise those differences and force us to accept "nicely socialised men" into our spaces.

So you think there are significant albeit as yet unobserved innate differences? And you wonder that people find this hypothetical question unpleasant?

I have spent my whole life fighting to be seen as a good scientist - I am leading in my field but I had to spend years overcoming the prejudice against women

It's blatant , even men can see it - eg " you are sitting in a room with the world export , why won't you address your questions to her?"

So yes I find the very question offensive and misogynistic

Maybes in a few hundred years when women are no longer seen as inferior due to their lady brain we can come back to this

At the moment it's rather like asking if there are in fact cognitive differences between races - you would not dare ask that even hypothetically , yet women are fair game

it's not physical differences here, it's cognitive

It's not the effect of testosterone either

Maybes in a few hundred years when women are no longer seen as inferior due to their lady brain we can come back to this

Yeah, that's my take as well. Maybe there are innate differences but they are vastly overshadowed by the cultural inequalities. So let's focus on sorting out those cultural inequalities first.

When no woman feels she is perceived or treated in a way that reduces her agency to best use her natural abilities, whatever they are, or to make choices she wants to make for her life, simply because she is a woman; when women's choices are genuinely equal to men's without the invisible hand of culture weighting the scales; well, that's when we'll have a clear view of what, if any, innate differences there may be.

But long as individual women know, from data and their own experiences, that society's assumptions about what is "natural" for a woman are not true for them and that those assumptions are unfairly limiting what they can achieve in life, challenging those assumptions that limit women because they are women is where our focus still needs to be.

So OP, it's not that I think there cannot be differences, it's that I think that's the wrong (as in, not very useful) question right now.

OP, so so far you have specified medical conditions and aggression as differentiated by sex. I agree.

I asked in my first post which traits you would posit as different, and how you would measure that. Do you have any other traits other than those? It looked like you were talking about being "caring" and a wider range of characteristics.

Obviously there are outliers, but there is still a trend.

People keep tossing this in as some sort of disclaimer, but it's incredibly important. How many outliers do you have before you call the trend too weak to be useful? Again, if it has a 95% link with sex, that's useful.
If the % of women demonstrating that trait is 55%, that's still a majority, but tells us nothing. Everyone seems reluctant to get into specifics. What would we test, how, and what would our findings tell us?

That's how we discover things, not "I think women are better at wiping bums because of what I've observed and I've tried really hard to imagine there weren't huge socialisation influences".

How many outliers do you have before you call the trend too weak to be useful?

The spectrum of violence and agression across both sexes means that it is impossible to predict whether an individual will be violent and agressive based simply on their sex, and therefore you could argue that there is no benefit in acknowledging any trend. However, if you look at entire prison populations the difference is stark: every male prison has more violent incidents per inmate than every female prison. I find it very useful to acknowledge this trend, and indeed dangerous not to.

And psychological differences does not mean the same thing as cognitive differences. I agree it is sexist and regressive to suggest that there is a female and male way of thinking or approaching intellectual questions. My position would be that estrogen/testosterone which are sex-based intersect with intellect, personality and interests which are not sex-based.

justgo in case it wasn't clear from my posts, i totally accept that violence is a very strongly linked to being male. I posted about how the whole of society would be completely different if males offended at the rate of females. I think the male/ violence link is a good example of a strong trait. I was hoping we could talk about any others as the argument seems to be that there are many similar sex linked traits.

And it's a very good point about population level vs individual level. I've posted loads about that in the past (different usernames) as it's really common for people to recognise the difference ("oh so you are saying all men are violent are you, well you're wrong because my dad wouldn't hurt a fly" etc).

Sorry if incoherent- phone type pad still being rubbish.

^ for people NOT to recognise the difference!

Would you dare ask if genetics would lead to population level differences between different races ?

Why is it ok to ask this about women ?

I think different races do have different risks of various medical/biological issues. I think you'd be on extremely dodgy ground scientifically to say any racial differences in behaviour etc were genetic particularly given how MASSIVE the social/political etc influences are and how ingrained everywhere.

I was sort of musing the same thing, but I do think that race and sex are different things, scientifically, although obviously both affected by genetics. People of different sexes are physically different in ways that people of different races aren't. Race can be mixed in a person whereas sex can't.

Therefore I think it's a valid question to ask. (I'd just appreciate if the question would be more specific!)

risk appetite may be affected by testosterone. But probably sex shouldn’t be used as a proxy for risk appetite in the professions where it is relevant (eg volatile stock trading, fighter pilot, motorbike racer). It’d be much better to look at a CV and ask questions to probe or do a trial flight/race.

I never quite get why so many feminists deny what is the bloody obvious to me that there are inbuilt phycological differences between the sexes.

Sorry but I think all the arguments against are not based on science but are ideologically driven. I've read what Gina Rippon has written, at the suggestion of posters on here, and don't believe it supports there being no phycological difference between the sexes despite so many on here insisting it does.

I suggest they read The Essential Difference by Simon Baron Cohen. There's also a debate on YouTube between Gina Rippon and SBC which is worth watching.