Saloni Dattani, another brain researcher, points out there are strong measures of gender-based brain development and that Rippon (mentioned in OP article) appears ideologically biased to assert that the brain is "unisex." Dattani's podcast with Julia Galef on this is worth listening to: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-239-saloni-datt.... It is pretty meta and doesn't fall strongly on one side, but it does dissect the lack of objectivity in the greater discussion.
This review by Saloni Dattani tells exactly the issues I've had with Gina Rippons book, The gendered brain. The introduction goes into detail on how a lot of statistical analysis is prone to biases and massaging of data etc. It is fairly comprehensive. But after that, the section where the author makes her case, she puts forth a lot of studies without going into why these studies are robust compared to the other studies she criticised in the introduction. It's pretty hard to just take her word for it especially when you have been primed to look for issues in studies after finishing the introduction
1. Yes, although "large" should be reformulated. It does have an impact on aggressiveness it seems.
2. Yes.
Doesn't change the fact that most comportments and interests are mainly ruled by social environment and upbringing, and biology only have this little impact (and it is still probably less that my brain will attribute, but at least i'm self-aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
Unless you think poor people are biologically less interested in space, earth crust, plants, sailing, horseriding, i'd be pretty confident in saying that most differences between children are in fact solely based on culture. This might evolve later (puberty hit!), but considering childhood is the crux of so much of your later choices
I've been a youth camp counselor, and in my country, classes are not always segregated when going to those camps (they are more and more tbh), and with this experience i can say: you tell me your child hobbies and dreams, i can tell you your income quintile (or social class rather, as cultural inheritance is not always correlated to income), whether it's a boy or girl, and if his family emigrated recently. Only work if you're from my country, but i'm sure if you talk to any youth camp counselor in your country who cared and worked this job for six+ years, he'd be able to do the same.
I love how this manages to touch on class, race, and a whole bunch of issues, while also managing to derail the conversation to some sort of camp kid discussion.
> Doesn't change the fact that most comportments and interests are mainly ruled by social environment and upbringing, and biology only have this little impact (and it is still probably less that my brain will attribute, but at least i'm self-aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
Twin studies disprove this. Separated twins, in different parts of the country, end up doing the same sort of jobs and marrying the same kind of people.
We're willing to assume different dog breeds -- all the same species -- have different temperaments, why wouldn't this apply to people. Even Dobermans can be trained to be nice dogs, but that means the training is overcoming the urge to bite.
For myself, because I have raised children of my own. I have 5 kids, 2 boys and 3 girls. At 2 years old, kids do not give a flying fuck about social norms. They just want to play. And from the earliest ages you see children playing differently based on gender. You give a small child the choice between a doll and a stick, you can guess which will be picked by gender and be right most of the time. Give your daughter a dump truck and she will turn it into a stroller. Give your son a doll and he will be wrestling with it.
My brain is different because I'm bipolar, which some theories suggest is a chemical imbalance. We all know chemicals affect our mood and personality - caffeine being the most common example. It seems obvious to me that humans with higher levels of testosterone and low levels of estrogen would have traits different than those with the opposite condition, since both are known to affect mood.
Indeed, and what is strange to me is that people who claim to pursue an "egalitarian" society don't see that as the inevitable outcome.
A perfectly egalitarian society would eliminate all societal influence on decision-making, leaving people perfectly free to do whatever they want with their life, not pushed in any particular direction. What happens when you manage that? Well, the only thing that will be impacting decision-making becomes your innate characteristics. And what is arguably the biggest single variable you can change to guarantee large differences in innate characteristics? Sex. In terms of lived experience, an X man and a Y man (e.g. short and tall) will be closer together than an X man and an X woman. As such, your gender gaps will only get larger as you remove societal influence from the process, not smaller, because gender is the single biggest discriminator when comparing two people.
I've observed that in informal gatherings of Caucasian and African-American men and women, that the women sort themselves with women and the men sort themselves with men. Sex overrides race. I can't be sure I'm not experiencing a confirmation bias, so I put this forth only as a casual observation.
I can think of many attributes that are likely to affect people more than gender. Age, fitness level, education level, political affiliation, friendships, mental health, ethnicity, political status, etc. I'm not convinced that gender is the most important differentiator.
Has there been studies comparing the personality and/or brain structure of transgender individuals before and after x years of hormone therapy? It would also make sense to me that sex hormones affect personality to a large extent.
This may be an unconventional take, but I think society would benefit greatly if people stopped seeing sex/gender as something you are, and rather saw it as something you have. I.e., you happen to have an X or Y chromosome which lead to a certain anatomy and hormonal profile. Seeing it as some fundamental component leads to "othering" of the opposite sex and its predictable consequences.
I'm personally hoping that radical advancements in sex reassignment technology, along with their acceptance, will eliminate most of the ideological battles concerning sex and gender.
Yet, with your caffeine example, the brain very quickly acclimates to regular doses of caffeine and returns to a baseline, so I'm not sure what that example really proves.
Of course hormones do have effects on the brain, but "chemical X affects our mood, therefore chemicals Y and Z must mean there are huge inherent differences between the genders" feels like a pretty weak argument to me.
I think the point was just that your personality is in large part a biological construct influenced by the soup of factors that is your physical body. If we could somehow transfer your "soul" (if there is such a thing) in someone else's body, your personality would likely change. How much? We don't know, but it would be non-zero. It's not just your brain, or your hormones, but also stuff like your guts biome.
Even if some of these are temporary and fluctuate, they'll still be part of "who you are".
But our general's health, socioeconomic context, influence of discrimination (or privilege), peer and society's pressures, etc, also impact our personalities in big ways, so it's pretty tough to separate one from the other. Heck, even what you eat can change it. If you google around, you'll find how people who eat a lot of trans fat were found to be generally more aggressive.
The trouble with these kinds of studies is that there is a global culture of male and female behavior in everything from movies to product design. Given the pervasive importance we put on gender, there is no supprise it would have a globally detectable effect on personality tests. The aim of course is to study the biological cognitive difference between sexes, not the cultural cognitive difference. But since there's no ethical double blind study we could run, there's no way to completely separate cultural differences from biology. If there was a way to do a personality study of the last uncontacted tribes we might be able to get somewhere, but even then the physical difference between the sexes is going to lead to a cultural difference between the sexes and therefore a psychological difference between the sexes.
So, sure there's a measurable difference, but it's probably impossible to learn exactly what creates the difference.
I'm not even sure how that makes sense. What is a truck to a monkey and how does it have anything to do with gender? How sensitive could this test be to the bias of the researchers? The abstract you posted says nothing about a difference in vision in day old children. At 13 weeks there's plenty of time for differences in environment to have already taken hold between males and females. I'm very unconvinced we could even measure such a cognitive difference divorced from environment.
> The aim of course is to study the biological cognitive difference between sexes, not the cultural cognitive difference.
I am not convinced that culture cognitive differences are even half as strong as biological cognitive difference
There is no way that societies collectively decided by comitee to be patriarchal and hierarchical, rather it is a much simpler explanation that biology played a much more important role in making the world so patriarchal
When the OCEAN model of personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) was developed, they used a statistical approach. Researchers asked hundreds or thousands of study participants hundreds of overlapping questions about personality, and from there they clustered correlations between responses into the 5 categories. (sorry, I don't have my source for this)
I wonder if they controlled for gender when this model was developed. Such a method would lead to the outcome quoted below.
>For instance, males and females on average don't differ much on extraversion. However, at the narrow level, you can see that males on average are more assertive (an aspect of extraversion) whereas females on average are more sociable and friendly (another aspect of extraversion). So what does the overall picture look like for males and females on average when going deeper than the broad level of personality
I’m struggling to think of a scenario where this analysis of would be more useful than just getting to know a person.
The author proposes two scenarios:
> Why do we have all these studies showing that male and female behaviors are so similar, yet people in everyday life continue to think as if males and females were very separable?
So basically intellectual curiosity. Fair enough, but I can see people using this information to reinforce and perpetuate biases instead of treating it like a factoid. I have a hard time thinking of an area where it’s useful to act on the idea of an “average man” or “average woman”.
> I am a strong believer that individual differences are more important than sex differences. Nevertheless, sex differences are also part of the picture, and may be particularly detrimental to a relationship if all partners go into the marriage thinking that they "should not exist", instead of coming to a healthy acceptance of sex differences, even laughing about them and attempting to understand differences in interests and motivations that fall along sex-related lines.
So, basically replacing one stereotype with a more accurate one. I agree with the author that the individual differences are more important, but they might be all that matters. It doesn’t matter if your partner is highly agreeable because of nature or nurture, does it? It just matters that you’re open to noticing your partner’s agreeableness. Plus, if we encourage people to understand these traits beyond the spectrum of sex, they can now understand agreeableness in any form, wether it’s at work, in the community, with kids or with a partner. That’s surely more valuable than only looking for agreeableness in women, no?
Well, a simple use case would be when deciding on policy that interfaces with gender. All else being equal you would expect that in each industry there would be a roughly equal division of men and women, and if it is not, you might conclude that there is a broad scale social problem. But if all else is not in fact equal then you can no longer support that conclusion, and a naive target of 50/50 representation no longer makes sense as a goal.
I'm not trying to say that there are no problems, just trying to point out that there is utility in a frank conversation about stuff like this.
I hear you, but in the past some bad science about race that was used to justify inequality. And the author admits it’s not clear how much of these reported differences are a factor of nature or nurture:
> All of the findings I've presented up to this point are merely descriptive; they don't prescribe any particular course of action, and they do not say anything about the complex interplay of genetic and cultural influences that may cause these differences to arise in the first place.
So I don’t understand why people are interested in this correlation when the causation is still up for debate.
I agree, the solution to sexism, racism, and so on, is to ignore those categories and respond to everyone as individuals.
But this analysis is useful pushing back against policies that have as their basis the assumption that gender-based differences in personality do not exist, and set measures accordingly. Those are anti-individualist by nature.
In other words, there are many policies and some laws in place that care only about crude statistics about aggregate groups, and the idea that there could be real biological reasons that more women prefer (plucking something out of the air) teaching early education than higher education breaks those assumptions. Those policies are working against the real choice of the individual.
It seems pretty conclusive that there are differences between the distribution of men and the distribution of women. It seems incredibly inconclusive where these differences come from. Especially when human behaviors are changing so much decade to decade. I'm suspicious of anyone who takes the uncertainty in the causal question and decides that it's definitely one cause or the other.
Kinda like certain arguments about climate change or early covid (yeah let's make this even more politically charged), in a state of so much uncertainty, it's useful to look at the potential harms of being wrong one way or the other. The potential harms are asymmetric, so I think it's wise to default to treating people the same in terms of potential. Empirically, it seems like most of history has defaulted the opposite direction ("science says we're different and X is natural") causing a lot of harm to various groups.
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Saloni Dattani, another brain researcher, points out there are strong measures of gender-based brain development and that Rippon (mentioned in OP article) appears ideologically biased to assert that the brain is "unisex." Dattani's podcast with Julia Galef on this is worth listening to: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-239-saloni-datt.... It is pretty meta and doesn't fall strongly on one side, but it does dissect the lack of objectivity in the greater discussion.
This review by Saloni Dattani tells exactly the issues I've had with Gina Rippons book, The gendered brain. The introduction goes into detail on how a lot of statistical analysis is prone to biases and massaging of data etc. It is fairly comprehensive. But after that, the section where the author makes her case, she puts forth a lot of studies without going into why these studies are robust compared to the other studies she criticised in the introduction. It's pretty hard to just take her word for it especially when you have been primed to look for issues in studies after finishing the introduction
1. Do you believe that hormones like testosterone have large impacts on a person's behavior?
2. Do you believe that men have roughly 20x more testosterone in their blood serum than women?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Testosterone_levels_i...
2. Yes.
Doesn't change the fact that most comportments and interests are mainly ruled by social environment and upbringing, and biology only have this little impact (and it is still probably less that my brain will attribute, but at least i'm self-aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
Unless you think poor people are biologically less interested in space, earth crust, plants, sailing, horseriding, i'd be pretty confident in saying that most differences between children are in fact solely based on culture. This might evolve later (puberty hit!), but considering childhood is the crux of so much of your later choices
I've been a youth camp counselor, and in my country, classes are not always segregated when going to those camps (they are more and more tbh), and with this experience i can say: you tell me your child hobbies and dreams, i can tell you your income quintile (or social class rather, as cultural inheritance is not always correlated to income), whether it's a boy or girl, and if his family emigrated recently. Only work if you're from my country, but i'm sure if you talk to any youth camp counselor in your country who cared and worked this job for six+ years, he'd be able to do the same.
> Doesn't change the fact that most comportments and interests are mainly ruled by social environment and upbringing, and biology only have this little impact (and it is still probably less that my brain will attribute, but at least i'm self-aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
Twin studies disprove this. Separated twins, in different parts of the country, end up doing the same sort of jobs and marrying the same kind of people.
We're willing to assume different dog breeds -- all the same species -- have different temperaments, why wouldn't this apply to people. Even Dobermans can be trained to be nice dogs, but that means the training is overcoming the urge to bite.
Asserting that there are sex-based personality differences is not incompatible with gendered behavior being mostly social or learned.
Dead Comment
A perfectly egalitarian society would eliminate all societal influence on decision-making, leaving people perfectly free to do whatever they want with their life, not pushed in any particular direction. What happens when you manage that? Well, the only thing that will be impacting decision-making becomes your innate characteristics. And what is arguably the biggest single variable you can change to guarantee large differences in innate characteristics? Sex. In terms of lived experience, an X man and a Y man (e.g. short and tall) will be closer together than an X man and an X woman. As such, your gender gaps will only get larger as you remove societal influence from the process, not smaller, because gender is the single biggest discriminator when comparing two people.
This may be an unconventional take, but I think society would benefit greatly if people stopped seeing sex/gender as something you are, and rather saw it as something you have. I.e., you happen to have an X or Y chromosome which lead to a certain anatomy and hormonal profile. Seeing it as some fundamental component leads to "othering" of the opposite sex and its predictable consequences.
I'm personally hoping that radical advancements in sex reassignment technology, along with their acceptance, will eliminate most of the ideological battles concerning sex and gender.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d9KKqP9IHa5ZxU84a_Jf...
Deleted Comment
Of course hormones do have effects on the brain, but "chemical X affects our mood, therefore chemicals Y and Z must mean there are huge inherent differences between the genders" feels like a pretty weak argument to me.
Even if some of these are temporary and fluctuate, they'll still be part of "who you are".
But our general's health, socioeconomic context, influence of discrimination (or privilege), peer and society's pressures, etc, also impact our personalities in big ways, so it's pretty tough to separate one from the other. Heck, even what you eat can change it. If you google around, you'll find how people who eat a lot of trans fat were found to be generally more aggressive.
Deleted Comment
So, sure there's a measurable difference, but it's probably impossible to learn exactly what creates the difference.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:SERS.0000011068....
Also other primate infants show the same toy preferences as human infants (i.e. male monkey infants prefering trucks, females prefering dolls, etc.)
I am not convinced that culture cognitive differences are even half as strong as biological cognitive difference
There is no way that societies collectively decided by comitee to be patriarchal and hierarchical, rather it is a much simpler explanation that biology played a much more important role in making the world so patriarchal
Cultural-constructivism is way out there
I wonder if they controlled for gender when this model was developed. Such a method would lead to the outcome quoted below.
>For instance, males and females on average don't differ much on extraversion. However, at the narrow level, you can see that males on average are more assertive (an aspect of extraversion) whereas females on average are more sociable and friendly (another aspect of extraversion). So what does the overall picture look like for males and females on average when going deeper than the broad level of personality
The author proposes two scenarios:
> Why do we have all these studies showing that male and female behaviors are so similar, yet people in everyday life continue to think as if males and females were very separable?
So basically intellectual curiosity. Fair enough, but I can see people using this information to reinforce and perpetuate biases instead of treating it like a factoid. I have a hard time thinking of an area where it’s useful to act on the idea of an “average man” or “average woman”.
> I am a strong believer that individual differences are more important than sex differences. Nevertheless, sex differences are also part of the picture, and may be particularly detrimental to a relationship if all partners go into the marriage thinking that they "should not exist", instead of coming to a healthy acceptance of sex differences, even laughing about them and attempting to understand differences in interests and motivations that fall along sex-related lines.
So, basically replacing one stereotype with a more accurate one. I agree with the author that the individual differences are more important, but they might be all that matters. It doesn’t matter if your partner is highly agreeable because of nature or nurture, does it? It just matters that you’re open to noticing your partner’s agreeableness. Plus, if we encourage people to understand these traits beyond the spectrum of sex, they can now understand agreeableness in any form, wether it’s at work, in the community, with kids or with a partner. That’s surely more valuable than only looking for agreeableness in women, no?
I'm not trying to say that there are no problems, just trying to point out that there is utility in a frank conversation about stuff like this.
> All of the findings I've presented up to this point are merely descriptive; they don't prescribe any particular course of action, and they do not say anything about the complex interplay of genetic and cultural influences that may cause these differences to arise in the first place.
So I don’t understand why people are interested in this correlation when the causation is still up for debate.
But this analysis is useful pushing back against policies that have as their basis the assumption that gender-based differences in personality do not exist, and set measures accordingly. Those are anti-individualist by nature.
In other words, there are many policies and some laws in place that care only about crude statistics about aggregate groups, and the idea that there could be real biological reasons that more women prefer (plucking something out of the air) teaching early education than higher education breaks those assumptions. Those policies are working against the real choice of the individual.
The only place I can think of is that it might tell you the probability of finding what you're looking for when dating.
Kinda like certain arguments about climate change or early covid (yeah let's make this even more politically charged), in a state of so much uncertainty, it's useful to look at the potential harms of being wrong one way or the other. The potential harms are asymmetric, so I think it's wise to default to treating people the same in terms of potential. Empirically, it seems like most of history has defaulted the opposite direction ("science says we're different and X is natural") causing a lot of harm to various groups.