Biological determinism

[spookehtooth]

So many threads here seem to be GC/GI related, I thought I'd try something different. No idea where this is going, I'm intending to mostly just read rather than join in if people respond

To what extent do you feel biological determinism accounts for differences in behaviour and treatment of women compared to men?

Kind of related, have exaggerated/false arguments based on it affected you personally in your life?

Cordelia Fine has two great books on this "Delusions of gender" and "testosterone rex" (neither is about trans people fyi) that go into how much more than we expect of our behaviour that we assume is gendered is actually caused by social factors

It's psychologically shown that when you tell people they're going to do worse on a task they will actually perform worse, and society has been telling women to expect less of themselves for centuries

It’s an interesting question, OP, but the reality is that nobody knows.

It does amaze me though, as someone who works with animals, how many people (and in particular feminists) believe that the differences are all down to socialisation and none of it is innate. It’s obvious to me that in most mammals there are differences between average male behaviour and average female behaviour, which most likely is a result of different hormones working on the brain.

A year after I took up position as a computer science teacher, equal numbers of girls and boys chose computer science as a gcse option. This was the first time in seven years of it being offered that the numbers had come even close to being even, having had only males teaching the subject previously. The number of boys remained constant, the number of girls rose to match them.

I am sympathetic to Prions position, especially regarding sex based behaviour and aggression, but it’s very hard to unpick higher level choices and the effect of things like a lack of representation on those choices.

What about the effect of exogenous testosterone on women?

Though, again, there's more to unpick: athletes already demonstrate competitiveness and transmen already believe they will be more confident on testosterone.

I think this is probably the case:

• there are some differences between the behaviours of women and men that are innate, or the result of biological factors (hormones, chromosomes)
• there are some differences in behaviour that are completely about socialization (girls choose pink, boys choose blue)
• but I suspect there are probably loads of differences in behaviour that have a biological root but are heavily amplified by socialization

So what I think is happening is that there are different personality traits that are distributed unevenly across the sexes, so that you might say :on a very broad scale women on average have a greater tendency to display trait X than men". But that then gets transformed to "all women display trait X more than all men" and then "we expect a woman to show trait X". And that's where you arrive at gender in the way feminists used to use the term, to mean expectations about the way women and men do behave and should behave.

In humans, learning & socialisation is by far the biggest thing affecting our day-to-day behaviour. Humans are born with less instincts than other animals (baby deer walk within a few hours of birth etc) but have a much bigger capacity to learn and adapt to the environment.

So, following Cordelina Fine, I think that learning / socialization should be the default explanation for differences in behaviour, and innate factors should only be considered when that is ruled out.

the one exception is aggression, which has been strongly shown to be linked to testosterone and to men.

Gina Rippon "the gendered brain" also looks at similar ideas to Fine from a neuroscience perspective.

Fine and Rippon collaborated on this too

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/

The thing is that it's not particularly one or the other (nature or nurture.)

Personality and behaviour is a a complex mix of nature, nurture and accident.

Humans are extremely social creatures. I've just been reading this random vox pop article that I found linked to articles on genetics about social contagion: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jan/24/the-five-emotional-contagion?CMP=

The research linked within it seems to be very much centred on being used to help reduce inner city violence and violence in Schools, mostly male dominated

Copying is one way we learn: The language of the group, after all, is “contagious” to developing babies. The behaviors that are most contagious are those that are the most emotionally engaging as well as the ones carried out by the people who are most relevant to you. Salience is key when it comes to the copying response.

The second mechanism of emotional contagion is the brain’s dopaminee* system, which works in anticipation of a reward. “Activation of that system puts you down a pathway toward what is important socially and for survival,” he says. If you anticipate that you will be rewarded for responding to someone with anger or violence, you are more likely to get on that behavioral track.

If you veer off or are shut out from getting a reward, Slutkin says, the brain’s pain centers are activated. “A sense of I can’t stand it lights up in the context of disapproval.” That’s the third part of this intricate biological system that keeps you on a path of emulating peers. In the case of the inner-city violence (and even school and other mass shootingss*) that Slutkin works to reduce, the path might be paved by a group that is thought to expect you to shoot someone who insults or betrays you and rewards you for doing so. If you don’t, you’ll be excluded.

We only need to spend a short time looking at toys and clothing for children to see how the "rewards" for behaviour is aggressively marketed to children from a young age, even if not within the family home.

My youngest likes the odd Lego magazine. Ninjago is all action and heroism. There are female characters but most are male.

A Lego friends magazine he got recently (Lego friends is marketed 'for girls') had an awful lot about tidying up your bedroom and being very kind. Which riled me somewhat - there's never any of that in ninjago! There are some male characters in Lego Friends but it's all very stereotypically female.

Lego city is more neutral thankfully, but he's never as keen on that.

Both my boys had cottoned on to basic gendered stereotypes from around the age of 2. By 3 we were having arguments about what colours boys and girls could like, despite all my attempts to be neutral.

let toys be toys and clothes be clothes have done lots of research on commercial gender stereotyping (both originated from mumsnet)

But aggression and testosterone levels (and other hormones) are themselves the result of differentiated evolved sex differences — hormones and the endocrine system are the RESULT of evolution, not a byproduct — not things that can be brushed off as merely cultural. I am in general agreement with Fine but acknowledge there also are tendencies. If secondary school students truly understood Tinbergen’s Four Questions and acknowledged a more Popperian framework we’d be in a much better place.

There are things where the assumed sex Varys across cultures- there are countries where physics is a girls subject - so many of our assumptions are pure society

And as a pp said I think, There may be tendancies caused by hormones but even there the culture impact is huge - look how varied violence rates are around the world

there are countries where physics is a girls subject

Are there? Which countries?

look how varied violence rates are around the world

In the UK about 90% of violent crimes and 99% of sexual crimes are committed by men. Are there any countries where women are the main perpetrators of violent crimes?

From memory start in the Caribbean ( sorry having a brain freeze!)

Quick google brings up Iran and suggests other Muslim countries also

I need to read that Cordelia Fine book. From my general reading and experience, there are not really any aspects of personality etc that tend to exist mainly only in men or only in women - violence and criminality being the glaring exception. We treat male criminality as the norm in some ways, but imagine what the world would look like if males offended at the level of females?

Even that is only a higher risk factor, no-one says all males are going to be violent or commit crimes. But even a small proportion in a population of millions means thousands at least.

We've had tons of threads on what people imagine are differences between men and women. Interestingly what could be the same behaviour can be described differently in boys or girls - eg being a bossy diva or an ambitious leader.

I would put into the instinctive category the way that a woman reacts to her young baby. I had an almost psychic link to mine when they were very young. I often woke up a few seconds before they woke up in the night for a breast feed (co-slept with both) and I could differentiate their cry from other babies. There is s 'spidey sense' in those early months. We are mammals and other female mammals also display very deep rooted attachments to their young, that ate instinctive and not learned.

Are those countries where the violent crime figures are reversed or where physics is a "girls' subject" @aswarmofmidges ?

Physics for girls

My original source was the institute of physics so we are going back between 10 and 20 years ( hence not at my fingertips !) ( perhaps on a back up disc somewhere )

Violence is not reversed anywhere I believe but the rates of male violence vary tremendously around the world which still suggests a huge society / nurture influence

It would also be interesting to look at the levels of reported violent crime against women compared to women's level of participation in society. For example, reported rape in fundamentalist religious societies is historically low. The male leaders of those societies would tell you this is because God keeps you on the path of good or something similar. Women in those societies would tell you that reporting a rape will get you executed for being a whore.

That's interesting about Iran. I found this paper about this (there's a link to a pdf of the whole paper from this link):

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article/2109/1/050020/602832/Iranian-female-faculties-in-physics

among approximately 3,5000 physics students in public and private universities, about 55.8%, 60%, and 59% of BSc, MSc, and PhD students are women, respectively [1]. Although higher education has been dominated by women in all academic fields except engineering, it has not enabled women to enter the work force in comparable numbers.

Teaching is the main job area for graduated female students. Now all physics teachers in female high schools are women; this is a good situation for encouraging girls into physics, but as university faculty their percentage is about
19%, mainly in lower academic ranks

This is what @Nellodee observed as a computer science teacher, that female teachers encourage more girls to take up that subject. But they also observe that it still hasn't impacted male domination of senior positions in academia, even after 20 years of women being more than 50% of physics undergraduates.

The rise in numbers has only happened since 1990, 50-60% of students are female, and academic positions in universities are still over 80% male, so it's a bit misleading to say that "physics is a girls' subject" there. What seems to have happened is some sort of cultural/social/political shift which has made physics more acceptable/attractive to girls and women. An interesting phenomenon in a country where women don't have the rights and freedoms that they do here.

Rates of violence vary, but males are always more violent (on average) than females. Which suggests a biological difference between the sexes.

I think this is also true of many animal species.

Typing was originally a male pursuit.

So was wearing pink.

I wonder what male crime rates would look like if men were actually deterred and punished.

Computing was originally female, being seen as essentially secretarial- and then mid-late '60s, men realised there was money in it, and despite Grace Hopper being awarded the first "man of the year" award by the American Data Prcessing Managers Assoc, it ended up being seen as a male thing, at least in the Western world; it is not so everywhere.

Thanks for this link @WarriorN - very useful deconstruction of dodgy stats - I work in a different field but this is applicable as so many people use stats to show differences that just aren't real. Cohen's D here I come!

If someone doesn't have that, are they not female? My instincts with my first born were crap...

I think we have broken an important part of this, which is that like other apes, we are meant to birth but then be in a supported group with the baby. You aren't really meant to go home in your couple with the baby and be an isolated unit, but have the wider group who will pass on knowledge and support you with rearing the infant, particularly where we have very, very underdeveloped infants who will need 2-5 years of intensive rearing. So don't worry. You're also meant to feel a rush of love and with my first I just thought, 'thank fuck that's stopped hurting!' Took me months to love her (massively lucky though that my mum lived 5 mins away and supported me).