It's sexist (or racist or ageist or pickyourist) to treat statistical differences as absolutes to be applied to every individual.

There are lots and lots of "tendencies" in the world -- but when the become absolute assumptions or rules you run into the problem of pre-judging individuals.

And individuals ALL deviate from some "norm".

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003530.html

This article goes through the claims made in The Female Brain and checks the references, finding a dearth of support.

I recommend a book that I finished recently: Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier. It's a survey of the most recent science concerning the functioning of the female body. Angier contends that the role of hormones in the body is very complicated and not well understood; they all do more than one thing-- also that hormones don't directly cause any particular behaviors, rather they may cause a tendency to act in one way or another. Human beings are fundamentally free, that is, not controlled by instinct, which is the reason that we can adapt to any environment and many different circumstances. We are also born long before we can survive alone, so socialization has a much larger impact on our behavior than instinct. We have to be taught how to do the things that kittens (who hunt instinctively) can manage on their own at 6 weeks.

I enjoyed your contributions to this thread very much. It should be obvious that I am no scientist but I am curious about some of the more popular notions of gender in male and female behavior. One book that I read recently was really panned on NPR as having bad science. The book was called "The Female Brain." I found it fascinating but did not know how much to credit what I was reading. The author wrote about hormones and their affects upon men and women. For instance, she said that little girls around 2 or 3 received this big rush of estrogen to their brains which caused them to behavior differently -- for instance to make more social connections -- than little boys of the same age.

Do either of you have any comment upon that idea or upon the book itself (if you are familiar with it)?

They are good in scrambled eggs as well with homemade buttermilk biscuits and maybe a little ham with red eye gravy on the side . . .

Think of elderberry jam on those biscuits. Yum! I better quit reading this thread. I am about to have some sort of food binge.

Yep. Texans are carnivores generally.

In virtually all respects, women's traits and men's traits overlap. The average may differ (or may not) and the extremes may differ (or may not) depending on the trait, but individuals almost always overlap. For example, some men are physically stronger than any woman, and men on average are stronger than women on average, but an individual woman may very well be stronger than an individual man.

"Stratification" by its very definition assumes that one gender starts where the other ends. And, in virtually every case, that's just not true. Some women cook well, some women don't, some men cook well, some men don't. You can quibble about the averages and extremes, but the overlap is obviously huge.

Once you accept the lie which is stratification, you effectively deny men the right to do things that women are better at and vice-versa, no matter what their individual inclinations or talents may be.

Perhaps I should save this explanation so that I can reprint it as needed in the future, wishing that I didn't have to explain it even now...

Anyway.

Here is why feminists continue to challenge any attempt to make distinctions between people based exclusively on their genders (i.e.-- distinctions that are based on the roles that members of different sexes are expected to play, such as nurturer/ breadwinner type distinctions, instead of differences between the sexes, such as pregnancy vs. sperm production):

First of all, most scientific studies which have addressed the matter find more variation within each gender than they find between genders. That is, if you design a study to measure nurturing behaviors in adults, for example, and you are careful not to allow people's prejudices to interfere with their collection or interpretation of data, you will find that the most nurturing and least nurturing men are more different than the average man and the average woman. Some men will be better nurturers than some women. That is, the study won't prove anything about gender differences.

Also, dear mom whose children follow the stereotypes, I'm sorry, but you were likely a contributor to the development of this difference, however subconsciously. Studies show that when toddlers are dressed and coiffed in non-distinctive ways, observers cannot tell which are girls and which are boys by observing their play, despite the claims of many parents to be able to detect these differences in their own children. We read the differences in; they do not occur naturally.

If you don't believe me, do some research here on the net-- don't go by your own experiences with your family and friends. This bias is several millennia old, and you can't get rid of it overnight. But it is not a result of biology. Period. It arises through socialization. This is scientific fact. The biological differences which exist between men and women do not cause different abilities or behaviors, beyond the obvious ones which are directly linked to those differences (as above, or, e.g., women cannot urinate through a penis).

Now, the second, and perhaps more important point is this: Every time people believe that they have found a biologically based difference between men and women, it will be harnessed to the job of suppressing women, keeping them in their historic place. If we did discover, for example, that female chefs were more likely to provide nutritious food while male chefs were more artistic, before long the jobs in which nutritious cooking is valued would have less prestige and lower pay, and those requiring artistry would be celebrated and elevated. Even fewer women would grace the pages of Art Culinaire and other prestigious culinary industry publications, and they would find it even more difficult to get into the top culinary schools. (In a way, this divide in prestige is already apparent: the hospital chef is far less celebrated than the caterer, but insofar as most chefs jobs are still held by men, the pay scales don't follow the divide.) The drive to oppress women is so indelibly built into our cultural practices that we find ourselves behaving in unfair ways even when we are very well-educated and conscientious about these issues (yet most people are neither). This is why the issues have to be brought repeatedly into the public consciousness and into the courts-- only an energetic and thorough and long-lived campaign can possibly change these behaviors which were supported for so very long.

And, yes, there has been a tendency in the cultural representations of the past 10 or 20 years to deprecate men's traditional abilities beside those of women, but you will not find a parallel to that trend in real matters of equality. I've just run a very quick Google search to find an example, and the first to come up was in Psychiatry: "After adjustment for workload, provider characteristics, and practice characteristics, the mean annual income for women was $140,615, or $31,962 (19%) lower than that of men". This was a study of pay rates for white M.D.'s between 1992 and 2001. Inequality is still the norm.

Perhaps a Broadsheet 101 or FAQ would help the readers get past their stumbling over these basic feminist axioms.