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?

ThingyBob, at the risk of repeating myself, which traits, and how have they been measured, and what was the outcome?

So we accept that there are essential psychological differences between women and men that are significant enough to need to be addressed by society. What are these differences and what needs to change as a result? What does feminism need to do to address these essential differences in ways it hasn't to date?

Empathising and Systemising are the obvious two.

Sorry I'm not smart enough to give citations and a full arguement but that's why I directed you to SBC. Do have a look at the debate on Youtube

I think one example would be an acknowledgement that many women actually don't want to retun to work while their children are still young. Its great that there is now shared parental leave and our maternity rights are better than many other countries. But I would like to see more proactive provision for women wishing to return to the workplace after 5, 8 or 10 years. Free courses on industry changes, staggered return to work programmes where you gradually build to full time workload, fast-track opportunities which prioritise returning mothers above graduates. The current system focuses on getting women back to work as soon as possible, but those who dont return within a year or so have then missed the boat. And I say this as someone who took two 8 month maternity leaves.

I’m always pretty suspicious of SBC being held up as a source for this. In my twenties I was a research participant in some of his “systematising/empathising” “male/female brain” studies (why? The lab paid penniless grad students a small cash token to participate, so you could rack up a few extra quid by being a participant in their research studies).

The questions to establish whether you had a “male/female brain” always were just about whether you had preferred playing with dolls or Lego as a child and so on. Not only did they not take any socialisation into account, they relied on your memory twenty years later of what you remembered doing aged about three.

I was not impressed by either the research methodology, or the idea of what constituted an innate male or female trait. The study designs were all full of circular logic. Did you like playing with dolls as a child? Then you have a female brain and were therefore drawn to playing with dolls, QED. That was often the full sum of it!

SBC is primarily an autism researcher who has ended up the poster boy for a lot of ideas on sex traits, when if my experience was anything to go by, many of the studies he conducted were very reductive and did not take any account of huge amounts of prior research in the area.

As the brain is a part of the body, I am open minded towards this. I think we are all nervous that allowing the possibility gets us into the genderist view of pink brains and blue brains. However, crucially, there is no evidence whatsoever that those who identify as trans behave more like the opposite sex. In fact, we often see the opposite. Aggressive TWs on Twitter, vs the most "beta" males I know having no interest whatsoever in their image, "identity", extreme ideologies etc. TRAs themselves cling to the argument that it's simply a sense of being male or female, rather than a predisposition to domesticity/warfare.

There are personality trait differences between men and women which can be measured using reliable tests which consistently find difference.

Men tend to score more highly on disagreeableness, women are more agreeable - meaning more concerned with the feelings and emotions of others.

Women tend to score more highly on neuroticism - which means they experience more negative emotion, are more sensitive.

On other traits within the big 5 construct there is no difference if I recall correctly. (I'm not going to respond to demands for citations, I'm posting casually from memory, Google if you want.)

The differences though are small and the differences are bigger within the group than between the group so provide no predictive validity at an individual level. But at a population level even these small differences will lead to some general observable differing outcomes.

The areas of difference can be understood from an evolutionary psychology perspective as would be adaptive to the differing reproductive roles.

I think the idea that we are blank slates for socialisation, where are reproductive roles have no influence on our behavioural and psychological traits does not stand up, and just seems ridiculously unlikely.
Look at mammal behaviour sex differences.

I think feminists don't like to discuss these ideas because there is a fear the broad generalisations of difference will be used to limit women, and that people will not comprehend that small differences cannot be seen at individual level but can at the population level.
They have some justified concern on both these counts given the history of women.

I think it would be good for women if we could find ways to talk about it though, as I think the insistence that there are no differences actually damages women as much as claiming we are all stuck in fixed roles.

It's a nuanced discussion to have but I think it's better to discuss reality and understand that than avoid a difficult topic.

Sorry that you feel I have overlooked your question, it wasn't intentional.

For starters I would suggest that women have a different approach to sex and reproduction to men. This study: www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/males-and-females-are-programmed-differently-terms-sex looked into how this might be due to evolutionary biological factors that create differences in the way males and females behave. Obviously the study wasn't conducted on humans but I would argue that such a study couldn't really be completed with human subjects due to the potential argument that socialisation as influenced the way people are behaving

. If men and women are biologically programmed to approach sex and reproduction in very different ways then this obviously has big implications for how we as a society manage this and how both sets of needs and imperatives are balanced. The pressure for women to behave sexually like men should lessen if we understood that women aren't necessarily evolved to do this and that liberating women sexually isn't necessarily solving women's struggles in this area.

Someone earlier picked up my point about biological determinism/essentialism, and said the concept was basically trite because we are all biologically determined in some ways. That is not what it's about. Biological determinism is the idea that due to female anatomy, women are biologically destined to behave and think in certain ways that are different from men. So BECAUSE women are female, they have an innate tendency to love children, be kind, empathetic, be more emotional etc. I'm simply stating that this principle has been rejected by feminists for centuries.

As for the idea that feminism is ideological, and the idea that vast innate psychological differences between the sexes is simply cold hard science. Meh. They're both ideology. SBC in particular goes to quite funny lengths to get the results he wants. In one study, he concluded that male newborns loved complex pieces of machinery and female newborns loved faces. The reason for this conclusion was the male newborns fixated more on a strange looking mechanical puppet, and female newborns chose to fixate more on a face. The boys spent more time looking at the machines so have an innate draw to machinery.

Except the problem with this study, is others have shown that male and female babies have an equally strong preference to watch faces. Other theories could be that the male baby was freaked out or frightened by the machine, and so watched it out of trepidation. There is simply not enough evidence to conclude from this study that the male babies were wee engineers in the making and that is why they elected to spend a few more seconds looking at this object.

What I find amusing is that in my ripe old middle age I am still censured for not conforming to feminine stereotypes and often by the same people who bleat on about so called difference being ‘natural ‘.

@nightwakingmoon, maybe not dismiss SBC so easily and read some of his stuff? I didn't just dismiss the feminist poster girl, Gina Rippon. I read her stuff decided she wasn't completely disagreeing that there may be innate differences but seems to think that any differences are irrelevant anyway.

Btw my experience tells me that early 'cross sex' toy choice is a very good indicator of someone that will still be gender non conforming as an adult, and often a same sex attracted adult.

Who claimed vast innate psychological difference @WeeBisom ??

SBC doesn't.
I don't think anyone does.

MalagaNIghts:
SBC literally has a book called "the essential difference: men, women and the extreme male brain'. Here's a blurb from the review of the book: "the theory claims the female brain is predominantly hard wired for empathy, and the male brain is predominantly hard wired for understanding and building systems." I don't think it's an unfair stretch to say that that theory champions the idea of innate (in built, not due to nurture) psychological differences. SBC is hardly claiming we have vastly different brains 'hard wired' for different tasks but end up being psychologically the same is he?

SBC thinks that males and females have differently brain types, either an empathising brain or a systems brain, and this is not due to socialisation. This is why he does studies on newborn infants, to prove his point that they have innate psychological differences before socialisation has even taken effect.

I'm pretty confused now. If SBC isn't advocating for innate psychological differences between the sexes, then what do you take him to be arguing for?What am I missing?

So we accept that there are essential psychological differences between women and men that are significant enough to need to be addressed by society. What are these differences and what needs to change as a result? What does feminism need to do to address these essential differences in ways it hasn't to date?

Im in agreement with the reply from justgotosleepffs above

When I was a younger woman 30 to 40 years ago I didn't think feminism represented me at all. In fact I was very anti feminist.

I saw feminism as focusing on getting more women in the workplace facilitated by free/subsided childcare. As a young mother who felt I was the best person to look after my own babies and toddlers that is not what I wanted but market forces meant as more women worked it soon became a necessity to have two incomes to survive.

I still see the same among my younger colleagues. They would love to be at home with their children but they feel forced to access nursery education in order for them to work part time in jobs they do not enjoy.

Your use of the word 'vast'.

The differences exist but are not vast.

Feminism 30 to 40 years ago or more was about removing the structural barriers to women who wanted to return to the workforce after having children. Rather than be forced or heavily pressurised into staying at home. It was about addressing the open sexism in the workplace, the restrictions some industries put on women. It was about fighting for better maternity rights and pay, for getting even 3 days paternity leave for men.

But we operate within a capitalist and still patriarchal society, so of course the labour of women in the workplace is there to be exploited and for there to be the expectation that women should return to work asap. That's not a goal of feminism or an outcome that would be desirable.

It's always been part of feminism, for me, to want to radically change the structure of society so that family was prioritised more - but not at the expense of women being required to give up work and other opportunities. Society could be structured in ways that keep opportunities open for women regardless of them having children.

MalagaNights: Sorry, I thought you were disputing that the differences were ostensibly 'innate'. It's a little bit pedantic to quibble with my use of the word 'vast', but oh well. SBC is on record saying 'there are big differences between male and female brains', so I didn't think I was overegging it too much.

Funnily enough, in the Guardian interview where he talks about the 'big brain differences', Cohen says that one way we know women are more empathetic than men is because "women are more likely to go to the magazine rack featuring fashion, beautify, intimacy, agony aunts, counselling, and parenting. Men are more likely to go to the magazine rack featuring computers, cars, boats, photography,...guns tools." He then says, "men are likely to open hours engaged in car maintenance, light aircraft piloting, sailing, bird or transporting, computer games and programming. women are more likely to spend hours engaged in coffee mornings, or pot luck suppers, advising friends on relationship problems, or caring for friends or neighbours." . And the evidence this is due to the differences in the brains? Among other things, he brings up the bloody mechanical mobile study again.

I just have to laugh, because it's such stereotypical shite.

I’m an academic myself, so I have read his stuff. When I say I wasn’t impressed with the research methodology, I mean he really didn’t attempt to control for any socialisation or preference falsification.at all.The whole study designs seemed extremely ideologically motivated, especially given that there is much better data out there from better designed behavioural science studies of children’s actual play under controlled conditions.

On cross sex toy choice, you’re completely conflating “gender non conforming” with “same sex attracted”. This is a huge category error. There are plenty of gay women and men who are not “gender non conforming” at all. I’m lesbian and my self presentation is entirely “gender conforming”, for example — a daft phrase anyway, as in 2022 you might think my appearance is “gender non conforming” but my personality is not; but it would have been completely the other way around in 1922.

What is considered “gender conforming” or not changes pretty radically every few decades with great regularity and is anyway subject to many social norms.

On a final point - parents choose toys, not babies. Preschoolers don’t generally have credit cards and an Argos catalogue. Their toy choices are so overdetermined by others that you could draw almost no conclusions about their innate preferences because of that. Boy likes to play with dolls at nursery? Maybe they’re interesting because he’s not allowed them at home. How are you going to tell anyway from what he thinks he remembers playing with at 23, when most children have no significant memories of their lives before the age of three?

Another great quote from Cohen: "people with the female brain make the most wonderful primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, or mediators." Whereas people with male brains make "the most wonderful scientists, engineers, technicians, musicians, bankers, architects, electricians, programmers, or lawyers." It's funny how we're all just naturally suited to different things but men get paid so much more for things they are naturally good at!

In response to accusations of sexism, Cohen is quick to say that women can have male brains too and so a female musician or female lawyer is just as good at her job as a man because she has a male brain. And a male carer is just as good at his job because he has a female brain. It's a wee bit insulting, however.

@WeeBisom exactly. One of the studies I was a subject for involved matching your university first degree subject to whether you recalled playing with either dolls or trucks as a preschooler. Oh look, people who studied humanities (heavily socially coded as feminine in the school system) remembered playing with dolls (heavily coded as feminine toys) and those people are, shock horror, actually female! It amounted to nothing more than saying girls do stereotypical girl things, who knew?!

And if you’d done the same study fifty or 75 years earlier when women weren’t let in to most of the university to do university degrees at all the results would have been completely different. Totally unsurprisingly.

The autism researchers in his lab were a lot better than that. But IMO, now subsequent research has shown pretty conclusively that his “girls don’t tend to have autism because it’s an extreme of the male brain type” thesis is not actually true, I don’t see why we need entertain his male brain / female brain stuff much either - it’s based on identical circular logic.

nightwakingmoon I know not all same sex attracted people are gender non conforming but wouldn't you agree a significant proportion are?

My non academic reasoning linking early years toy choice to same sex attraction in adulthood is...

Toy choice is a diagnostic predictor of childhood gender dysphoria and studies have shown that left alone most of those children will grow up to be same sex attracted.

As to how free that toy choice is, surely sensible parents have always provided both 'boy' and 'girl' toys for their children?

I accept that my 'expertise' in this comes from a completely different angle to yours. I've watched dozens of children grow up and there have always been the odd child who sticks out like a sore thumb at only 2 or 3 years old for having su.ch a strong preference for the stereotypical toys and interests associated with the opposite sex. Everyone of those I have personally known has come out as gay as an adult.

However I do know my antidotal evidence is not science so I wish I had a few citations up my sleeve. Sadly even when I do read things I never remember where it was.

This pretty much goes right along with the available research, which says that in less egalitarian societies, women and men will make more similar choices. This isn't a controversial finding, it's one of the most well established in the social sciences.

So in these societies where women have less power/status, you see women who have the chance to do things like choose careers will choose what are more traditionally "male" types of jobs, ones that often bring higher status and money.

In societies that are more egalitarian, and where "female" coded jobs have something closer to similar status and pay, you find that men and women tend to make choices that are less alike. That is, when it's easier for women to choose what they prefer without status and money pushing them strongly in one direction, they make different choices, on a population level, than men.

It's nothing to do with being better or worse at maths.

There are people who argue that this is caused by some underlying sexism, which does not manage to manifest in the same way in the less egalitarian societies. But that seems like a more strained interpretation and there's no evidence for it.

It's not really a matter of what you would want to see so much as looking at outcomes.

Lets say you are looking at disparities in the workforce. If you think they all must be due to socialization, then you would think that by changing socialization you can erase the disparities.

But lets say you are wrong, and in a particular instance the disparity is about innate preferences. Mechanical engineering, say. So you try and make recruitment appeal to women, you make it a welcoming workplace, but still there is a disparity. If you believe it must be socialization you may end up putting in place policies that try to rectify that, maybe quotas, or creating significant advantages like signing bonuses or free education for women. And maybe they would work to some extent, because preferences aren't the only thing people consider when choosing a career.

The effect ultimately may be that you have a lot of ongoing effort and cost to bring people into that career when they would really have been happier doing something else. And the flip side being some men who might have liked that career would not have been able to find a position.

I read the book and also the tests he used to determine 'systematising' and 'empathising' differences, and there are significant problems with his arguments.

For one thing, his research with infants has not been replicated by anyone (at least up to 2019 or so) even though there have been attempts, for another thing the statements about systematising and empathising introduce activities which are male-coded for the questions on systematising in ways which would induce men to agree with the statements and women not to agree with them.

Examples might help:

One statement says something like: "Whenever I see a nice armchair, I wonder how it is constructed." There is no statement like this one: "Whenever I see a nice dress, I wonder how it is constructed."

Another statement on systematising: "I like to collect coins or stamps." There is no statement like this one: "I like to collect vintage jewelry or teapots."

And so on. In other words, he introduces male-coded examples which will then steer the answers in a particular direction.

Also, the coding of the answers doesn't appear to allow for someone to be high on both systematising and empathising or low on both, yet those are reasonable alternatives in reality.

Despite all this, the average scores he came up with are not incredibly different.

The main observed difference between men and women across cultures is interest in other people. Women are more socially oriented than men.

There is lots of overlap but that doesn't mean that it only has a small effect. Small differences across a population can add up to large differences in how things look materially.