Barring certain reproductive bits, men and women are basically the same. Discuss.

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

I know we've touched on this on other threads, but I was hoping to troublemake start a discussion on this specific issue. So often I've heard people say "of course wanting equality does not mean we think women and men are the same. We cherish and celebrate the differences between them" and the like.

Well, what are the differences then?

The more I think about it the more convinced I am that men and women are fundamentally pretty much the same, squashy bits aside.

What do you reckon?

oh I know, I was once given some award for 'women in IT' which I went along with at the time (was young and green!) but I did feel a bit patronised, like I was this special case or something.

But how to encourage women into science without making them a special case? Or how to encourage more men into caring roles?

Only skimmed this since people keep pulling me away to do things. Will read it properly later, but may be repeating stuff people have said.

Upfront I want to say that anyone should be able to apply to do anything at all and be judged on their ability. Not the average ability of their gender or according to any quota.

I don't think there is any doubt that there are biological differences between genders. The obvious one of men being 'on average' stronger. All the side effects in terms of aggressiveness (which can be a good thing in the right place and a liability in others) and a whole lots of others to do with certain kinds of mental ability like spatial awareness.

The 'on average' part is important. I'm a man and there will be loads of women who are stronger than me. We are not boy dolls and girl dolls. There will be a curve and women will tend to cluster one side and men the other.

Still this means that if you test the applicant (properly and without bias) for a job you should get a greater number of male suitable applicants for one kind of work and for another kind of work more of the female applicants will be suitable.

I gather some feminists find the idea of men/women's work offensive, but it needn't be. As long as you test the applicant and don't just reject them off hand for being the wrong gender. I see no harm in doing what nature made you inherently better at.

Just want to add this.

If the aim is to find out what counts as men's work and get as many women doing it as possible that seems to me to be backwards. Also it seems to imply that the 'men's work' was more important/worthy all along.

If a woman wants a job she should be able to go for it, but to go for it just because she wants to be the equal of a man is saying she isn't already and that her current role IS inferior.

you see onager I was with you there until the bit about "Still this means that if you test the applicant (properly and without bias) for a job you should get a greater number of male suitable applicants for one kind of work and for another kind of work more of the female applicants will be suitable."

I can hardly think of any jobs where strength is critical, and assume that you are talking about more things than just "strength". ie you are arguing that there are a many more things that the sexes are inherently better/worse at.

I am just not sure that that is true - at least not often enough for work to end up being classified as you have done "a greater number of male suitable applicants for one kind of work and for another kind of work more of the female applicants will be suitable".

Of course the problem is compounded by the fact that most "womens" work pays peanuts or even nothing while "mens" work is generally more lucrative and/or more well thought of.

To respond to your second point, in our society "womens" work is considered to be inferior. The pay is rubbish or non-existent and it attracts little kudos. Thus women want to break into "mens" work to earn some decent money and thus free themselves. They are unlikely to be able to do this while working minumum wage or nothing wiping peoples arses or cleaning all day.

To say that women should not try to compete with men out of principle, but instead be happy with their lot, knowing that it is important no matter what anyone might think/what the pay might be, seems to be not quite the right thing somehow. And would seem to encourage the status quo.

I don't see that there is mens work and womens work, but that there is simply work. And different people enjoy different things and thus should be able to pursue whatever interests them, and it would be great if society would see that better.

Classic bit of mansplanation there, onagar, well done

Elaborate, molesworth?

Onagar said:
"I don't think there is any doubt that there are biological differences between genders. The obvious one of men being 'on average' stronger. All the side effects in terms of aggressiveness (which can be a good thing in the right place and a liability in others) and a whole lots of others to do with certain kinds of mental ability like spatial awareness."

Well, that's what we're discussing on this thread, onagar. It's simply not good enough to proclaim that There Are Biological Differences. What are the biological differences? Which ones are valid and which are invalid? Where's the evidence? etc etc (fair enough, you said you hadn't read the thread properly, but looking at the title should tell you that this is the very subject under discussion and that you can't get away with making vague assertions).

Onagar said:
"The 'on average' part is important. I'm a man and there will be loads of women who are stronger than me. We are not boy dolls and girl dolls. There will be a curve and women will tend to cluster one side and men the other."

Well, apart from the patronising mansplanation of the phrase 'on average', what characteristic(s) is this 'curve' referring to? Physical strength? Spatial awareness? The ability to nurture? What?

Onagar said:
"Still this means that if you test the applicant (properly and without bias) for a job you should get a greater number of male suitable applicants for one kind of work and for another kind of work more of the female applicants will be suitable."

What kinds of work are you talking about? Hod carrying? Looking after small children? Being a doctor? What? You seem to imply that gender characteristics can be applied to any job at all.

Onagar said:
"I gather some feminists find the idea of men/women's work offensive, but it needn't be. As long as you test the applicant and don't just reject them off hand for being the wrong gender. I see no harm in doing what nature made you inherently better at."

No, feminists find gender inequality (i.e. women's oppression) offensive.

Onagar said:
"If the aim is to find out what counts as men's work and get as many women doing it as possible that seems to me to be backwards. Also it seems to imply that the 'men's work' was more important/worthy all along."

Er, no, that is not the aim.

Onagar said:
"If a woman wants a job she should be able to go for it, but to go for it just because she wants to be the equal of a man is saying she isn't already and that her current role IS inferior. "

ISNT already responded to this point.

Thank you molesworth

I thought this might be interesting to people:

foragers.wikidot.com/sexual-division-of-labor

It gives a general overview of what men and women do in hunter-gatherer societies.

The general point being that in some groups men stay at the settlement to work and women go out to do work away from it, while in other groups the women stay home to work. Who acquires what food types is also highly variable.

So there isn't some 'natural' way in which some work is male and other work female.

Nice link, I like it that the environment, and the resources it offers, is emphasised as having a key role to play in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

This bit:

"Although this group [of Mahopa] is also
!Kung, their sexual division of labor is drastically different from the !Kung of /Du/da. Here, women are mostly homebound and make their contributions by doing domestic chores. Men are away most of the time and are able to achieve higher status through storage and wealth"

I guess the reasons why the 'men are away most of the time' is because they are searching for (hard to catch) meat, leaving the women with the children and eldery.

So is this always inevitable? Wouldn't it be fascinating instead if a group of hunter gatherers, newly accustomed to sedentism, were discovered where the men remained on the homestead doing the caring bit whilst the women were 'away most of the time'!

It seemed that there weren't any societies though where the women did all the hunting - unless I have misread? That some it's the men and some it's shared/either do it.

I assume that if it's hunting wild dangerous large animals, the reason the men often do it is because men are more expendable? rather than necessariy to do with strength?

As a lot of the work done by women in these societies - digging up roots, hacking down saplings, skinning seals and so in is pretty bloody hard physical work.

When you see pictures of people in these societies the men and women look physically very similar - small, slender, wiry and tough.

yes, it's the body in its natural state - lots of muscle, negligible surplus fat.

I don't think there are societies where women do all of the hunting, but I think that it is important that the majority of food is not likely to come from hunting, unless you live in the arctic. So a group's diet will be from both hunted and foraged food. Also a lot of hunting will not be big game hunting. Trapping rabbits or fish can be done by people with little strength, such as children, and collecting shell fish to eat can be done by children walking on a beach. So there is not that much of human food acquiring that involves a lot of risk.

It is just the weird myth that we have that men go out and do the work of getting food while women sit at home, but of course most food is not hunted, and women and children are responsible for a huge amount of food acquisition.

I think it is true that in our Western society (in fact most societies) "womens work" is used as a derogatory term and that if men go into traditional "womens" roles they are somehow lowering themselves and for women, getting paid employment and doing a man's role is a big step up and something she should aim for. So there is the underlying assumption that womens work is less worthy, when in fact, the work that women do, unpaid, is vital for society to function.

China, right now, is experiencing a "woman shortage" they don't have enough women to do the traditional roles and society can't afford to pay for all that work to be done by the "spare" men. I assume China will end up allowing men to marry non China born women just so they can get women in to do all that "women's work".

In "primitive" cultures, just gathering food and washing clothes is bloody hard work. Women in Africa walk miles every day to fetch water for instance.

Sadly, most societies don't value any of the unpaid work women do.

yes, second the women in Africa working, working, working and carrying, carrying, carrying huge loads...often uphill whilst accompanied by a young guy carrying.....say, a radio

So this "men are stronger and that's why the work is divided as it is" thing is cobblers then.

It's all down to being pregnant isn't it? Women get taken out of circulation when pregnant or they have a young baby, and that gets extended to all women and girls must stay behind in the huts and do hutty things while the men go out and get the glory for jobs which are probably less hard work but a touch more dangerous.

maybe?

Likes 'hutty things'

I have to say, the bearing of offspring does seem to be a bit of smoking gun.

Yes it does look that way doesn't it.

But women don't sit in huts all day. They are out collecting food and water and doing essential jobs.

I'm afraid I just don't see the relevance of how men and women live in totally different societies to how men and women should live now. I also suspect it is a bit of an extrapolation to say that because we can find groups that live what we think of as primitive lives that is how our own far ancestors lived.

I would say it is relevant because as a species, we are (apparently) not genetically distinct now from how we were when we migrated out of Africa 50,000yrs ago, whereas our environment has changed beyond comparison to back in the (savannah) day. Hunter-gatherers provide a window into how our remote ancestors may have also lived.

There are apparently no female dominated hunter-gatherer societies so what does this suggest?

millyr "hutty things" covered the range of hard graft that the women are doing while the men go off to do their important things.

As for the relevance - well it's not relevant in the way that you put it - but it is relevant to this thread because the people who argue for modern people living lives determined by their gender often stems from statements like:

"well in primitive societies men are strong poweerful dominant hunters and are very important, and women stay in huts doing hutty things, usually with children. thus men and women have clearly defined roles in nature, and this must be the natural order of things. plus it almost certainly means that the women are incapable of doing the mae things because their brains are all wrong anf they're weak. ergo modern men should work in banks earning lots of money and women should stay at home and look after children. it is the way that nature intends" et cetc etc etc

sorry the second bit was in response to nooka

i am probably stating the obvious though

Ah well I'm afraid I'd just tell said person they were an idiot and that we don't live in a primitive society any more, nor have done so for many hundreds of years. Possibly I might tell them that they are personally welcome to go and live in a cave and live off the land