OK, here I am again, and so soon!

I think the one thing we all seem to forget about when we discuss issues of nature or nurture are the hormones. They're so different in men and women, and there's really no one I can think of, man or woman, who hasn't obviously behaved in a way which has been predestined by their hormones. Some minor exceptions would be those with gender identification issues, which research has suggested might be due a hormonal imbalance in utero.

Yeah, plenty of men and women are not slaves to their hormones in that they pick a fight with any man who looks at him sideways or become a blithering mess once a month, but that doesn't mean they aren't affected. They've just found a way to control those urges. To my mind, that doesn't mean they're any less of a man or woman, but they're definitely different, and can be fairly confidently predicted to behave in certain manners in certain situations. The only difference is the extremity of those behaviours.

About the child thing, I think most kids aren't really boys or girls till those hormones kick in. Till then, it's about the parents influence one way or another. We try very hard in our house not to influence the kids into any type of gender stereotype, but the boys have still turned out to be much like boys, and the girl is somewhat undecided. lol She's just a little ratbag atm really. You could dress her in anything and not know her gender by her behaviours.

I agree with foot on this one. I think it's a little from column A, and a little from column B as far as the how of us becoming masculine or feminine in our behaviours, but physiologically, it's pretty hard to beat nature.

Both. A complex stew of factors including the initial set of cards dealt through the brain, the learning experiences that brain goes through, the hormonal landscape, genetic inheritance etc etc etc.

My problem with the male brain/female brain idea is that it gives too great a role to the differences between genders instead of the much greater distinctions between individuals. And it assumes a much greater impact from those differences in terms of behaviour, talents and proclivities than they actually seem to have, judging by much of the current research in this area.

The human brain and the way it develops is significantly more elastic and responsive than that model would suggest.

Nurture necessarily plays a large part. Or more accurately, experience and learning interact with other factors to shape the brain. The notion that women are less spatially aware than men, for example, may be purely down to our assumptions that that is the case. Girls who are expected to develop spatial awareness skills and treated from an early age as if that is the case are likely to be spatially aware (or so it appears from recent studies in learning and development in children).

As human beings we are highly advanced in a number of areas: we are endowed from the start with the capacity and will to learn. Big skulls, helpless babes, we get the starter software, the thing that allows us to reach conclusions about ourselves and our world without having to have a wide range of instinctive behaviours and responses programmed in from the start. And we are sophisticated social creatures. Not only do we instinctively learn, but we instinctively learn about where we sit in and how to interact within our group.

That includes gender roles.



From our forebears. From their forebears. From their forebears. from ourselves and from each other. Because they are, on the whole, useful to us.

I agree, broadly with much of that. The difficulty though is what behaviours and talents we put under the 'nature' tab. To my mind, way too much of it is bundled in there, along with a general air of 'that makes sense what with our hunter gatherer past and all'.

So much of what we see as just the way men and women are because of what they are, has changed and shifted in different contexts, in different places and at different points in history.

I think the biggest problem we have as human beings is the fact that although groups of us display similar characteristics, we're all individuals, so we don't all fit into neat categories. In fact, I'd say none of us are completely one way or another.

When we stop searching for absolutes and become content to let things be as they are, and feel free of judgement and prejudice, life will be much simpler.

In my mind, I see it as a scale from 1 to 100, uber-feminine to uber-masculine. 99% of women fall within the 1 to 75 range, while 99% of men fall within the 25 to 100 range. The 1% of each who are outside their birth range are most likely to identify as transgender. That leaves 2/3 of men and 2/3 of women in the "overlap" range, between 25 and 75.

Statistically, the loading at each end is significant: women on average can accurately be expected to skew towards the uber-feminine end, and men on average can accurately be expected to skew towards the uber-masculine side. Generalizations are indeed helpful when trying to make predictions, at least in the absence of any additional information. But the odds are not so great that I'd ever put money on an individual woman being to the left of an individual male. 50 women versus 50 men, yes. But not one on one.

*nods* yeah. That seems to be very much in line with what the current research shows.

It has always seemed to me that, in the case of sexual orientation, both view points are right, in this argument. I kind of see gender confusion... or disharmony, if that comes off better, as the underlying cause of homosexuality.

In some people, nature makes enough of a difference in their orientation to "make them" what they are, so they end up orienting opposite to the norm. I've seen enough obviously gay kids to believe it.

I also believe that upbringing can have enough to do with a child's orientation. Pretty sure I've seen that too.

So, yes. The answer is Yes.

A few thoughts:

Yes, there are some differences between male and female brains and experiences. But: they are not as fundamental or as innate as is often suggested.

This is the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus myth. And it is a dangerous and unhelpful myth. It says we are so different as to represent almost different species. It reduces the common ground we share and emphasizes the gap that divides us.

To go back to Undertoad's point about genetic difference being greater between human males and human females than exists between male humans and male chimpanzees: really? That's where we're at now is it? Are we really saying that we have more in common with a chimpanzee of our own gender than a human being of another gender?

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The male brain, the female brain. Innate, uncompromising, untranslatable difference.

It flies in the face of almost everything we know (admittedly not very much) about how our brains work, how we process information, how we develop cognitive skills and functions. But it fits with the lived experience of enough people to carry weight far beyond what the evidence tells us.

Time and again, initial studies will come out, get a mass reading in the press and become accepted as incontrovertible proof of absolute difference, and a bestseller book is born (for instance the recent: The Female Brain, followed shortly after by The Male Brain). And so the notion that women are genetically more competant with language, multi-tasking and emotional interaction, whilst men have evolved super computer, highly focused math and map reading brains takes root. It fits our existing prejudices (or rather our own lived experiences) and seems to make sense when set against our hunter gatherer past (about which, by the way, we all assume a certain set of gender roles which may well have been very different). And it comforts us, because it confirms our own sense of what it is to be male or female. Then the book gets revised (as with The Female Brain) and the headline fact about male and female language use and development that got everybody so excited gets removed because further study changes or even reverses the findings. But that gets a lot less press.

There is a comradeship in gender. When we laugh at the comedian who jokes about typical male or typical female behaviour, we include ourselves in that bigger picture, we fit a stereotype we want to to fit. And our partner fits a stereotype we want him/her to fit.

It is the ultimate confirmation bias.

But Men aren't from Mars, and I am not from Venus. And Undertoad does not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with me.

The war of the sexes hurts both sides. Why do we accept and embrace this perpetual conflict? The logic of a male brain / female brain model is deeply flawed. It is neat and tidy and simple. We have different brains, we think differently, we are different. And that difference is an unbridgeable gulf. It's not just a myth it is a dangerous myth.

In countries where there is a commonly held perception that males are naturally more suited to mathematics and science than are females, girls do badly in maths and science subjects and are largely missing from the higher levels of those fields. In countries where that is not a commonly held view, girls and women are well-represented in those fields. It isn't a case of girls not being allowed in (except for a few places), but rather they do badly. They are not good at maths and science.

In one study (which I can't recall the details of now, but will try to find it at some point) two groups of high performing maths students, of mixed gender, were given a maths test. One group were given information that showed boys to be naturally better at maths than girls. The other group was not given this information. In the group that was told boys are better at maths, the girls performed worse than the boys. In the group which was not told this, the girls did as well as the boys.

But this isn't just about the impact on girls. Think about what we tell our boys. That they are less emotionally intelligent than their sisters. That they are socially clumsy, and linguistically challenged. Whilst their sisters (they are told) share themselves and experience femaleness as some sort of warm and fuzzy love club, they're to be thrust out into the world, with their emotions battened down, never showing weakness, silently carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

There are differences between our brains and our experiences which stem from whether we are male or female (or where we are on that spectrum). But there are also differences between our brains that stem from your specific genetic heritage and lived experiences and my specific genetic heritage and lived experience. Why do we put so very much into the thing that divides us a little?

Men: you do not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with your wives and sisters.

Wow. Someone has a lot of free time.


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Someone has a chapter on interpersonal violence between soldiers, to write :p


I really, really have to stop getting distracted with this stuff

This is the point that you have already debunked, I admit, and so I wish you had not used it as your jumping-off point, center point, and end point.

From before:

Turtles all the way down?

Where did the ideas/practices begin, and why do they exist across cultures?

Well dang! Here comes another one, from last month:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1202161935.htm

I don't think you should ignore that, and I don't believe you could debunk this one if you worked it full-time with the facilities and colleagues of the University of Pennsylvania.

This post is getting long, so let me address my next point in another one.

Yes. I read about that. I also read a lot of the criticisms of that study and the implications that were drawn from it.

Here's one that rounds up some of the criticism:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health...e_imaging.html

If you read the whole article, you'll find lots of links for those assertions and criticisms.

This has some interesting stuff to say about it as well:

http://www.jpehs.co.uk/2013/12/03/br...female-brains/

There are also some really good academic responses, but I can't access them from home (the library license is only from on campus).

This has been fun :) but I'm stepping out of this discussion. I am spending way too much time thinking about this, and not nearly enough time thinking about my thesis :P

We tell them that they should be sitting quietly at a desk for eight hours at a time. When they find they can't easily do that, we tell them they are defective and give them drugs to help them accomplish it. Then, at the end of their secondary education, they go to college at a lower rate than the girls.

This is where we are now. I dunno if it's similar in Yorkshire.

It's weird this insistence on equality of outcome. From my experience it has been a mixed bag.

I graduated three decades ago with a comp sci degree, and over 1/3rds of comp sci majors were women. At that time, in education, there was deep concern that women weren't entering STEM fields. So girls were urged to enter those fields. Today 30 years later, 1/4 of comp sci majors are women.

Right. It went down. In an era when more women go to college, fewer of them go for comp sci. In an era when the M/F ratio in MED school is about 52/48, the ratio in comp sci dropped. In a huge way.

I believe this is a true M/F brain difference; I think it goes across cultures. It's not that girls can't do programming as well as boys. It's that they have preferences, and like many other preferences, they are established before birth. Before society even has a chance to get to them.

If there are brain differences, the worst thing we could do to boys and girls is tell them there are not. The best thing we could do is show that these differences exist and then to educate them about prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping, so that any judging that happens works on an individual basis.

The WORST thing we could do is shoehorn people into professions they don't actually enjoy because we have decided that equality is the only thing that matters.

"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." - Aristotle

Y'know, I could write an essay in response to that. The comp science bit especially. But I really, really don;t have time. I'd like to. But I have to be a bit strict with myself.

So I'll just say this:

I'm not saying there aren't differences. But here's the thing: are those differences because one has a boy brain and the other has a girl brain; or is that one has a type A brain and the other has a type C brain, and girls are more likely than boys to have a type C brain, and boys are more likely than girls to have a type A brain?

Because both those paths might lead to a broadly similar outcome, but they have very different implications.