(Cross Post) Sex Based Differences Between Male and Female Psychology - A Review of Studies I have Gathered.
So this is going to be a long one, which I hope you all enjoy. I have no idea if people will be interested. I've also linked a couple of studies here in the past that will be included as part of this essay. A few points before we begin:
- I by no means claim a monopoly on truth, I am just going from my understanding and personal perspectives.
- I am not, and will ever be a proponent of stereotyping any individual. These are a reflection of the potential differences based off of biological influences. They are not absolute but statistical averages and may in fact be due to socialisation, but I am of the opinion that this is too narrow to apply on an epistemological level. I will explore this later in the post.
- I think discrimination definitely exists and we should be mindful to call it out when it happens but discrepencies in outcomes may have other factors that are more significant than mere discrimination and I am not convinced you can use these to measure discrimination at face value. In fact, I believe it is potentially dangerous.
- Socialisation definitely has an impact, but this doesn't mean that biology doesn't and that's why I am focusing on this today. I think nurture can interrupt or counteract biology but I don't think this is an absolute and I think every individual is different as to what nurture cues they will react to positively or negatively.
- Let's begin...
The Great Nature vs Nurture Debate:
So many people who have followed this topic may be aware of this study by Gijsbert Stoet and David C. Geary, which seemingly measured how women in STEM decreased in countries with more gender equality. This is despite the fact that:
Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled.
The conclusions were as follows:
One of the main findings of this study is that, paradoxically, countries with lower levels of gender equality had relatively more women among STEM graduates than did more gender-equal countries. This is a paradox, because gender-equal countries are those that give girls and women more educational and empowerment opportunities and that generally promote girls’ and women’s engagement in STEM fields
This has recently been come under notable critique and subsequent defense of the study by the original authors:
Critique
The case of Algeria highlights a central point of contention. In Algeria, 53 percent of STEM graduates are women. Still, only 9 percent of women college graduates choose a degree in STEM, compared with 13 percent of men. Stoet and Geary had claimed that they were reporting the 53 percent number, but they were actually focusing on the statistic that men were receiving degrees in STEM at a higher rate.
In their revised paper, Stoet and Geary maintain that there is a gender paradox in STEM but clarify that it relates to their more obscure measure, which they termed the “propensity” of women and men to attain a higher degree in STEM.
Response
We agree that there are different ways to express the proportion of women who choose STEM degrees. In our view, it is important to control for differences in the overall number of women and men who attend college, which varies from nation to nation. Accordingly, in our original article (Stoet & Geary, 2018), we chose a calculation method that adjusts for this potential confound.
Algeria provides a good example of such a confound, where 53% of all STEM graduates are women. At face value, Algeria has established gender parity in STEM graduates. However, the absolute percentage does not tell us about the sex difference in the propensity to pursue STEM when we consider that 62.7% of all Algerian college students are women (Richardson et al., 2020). Of all Algerian women graduating from college, 8.9% pursued a degree in a STEM field, compared with 13.0% of men. Thus, absolute parity is achieved only because there are many more women than men in college. We are interested in the propensity of women and men to choose STEM and therefore use a calculation that provides the percentage of women among STEM graduates when the total numbers of women and men in college would be equal (8.9/(8.9 + 13) × 100 = 41%).
That said, our specific approach has no bearing on the conclusions. Even taking the absolute percentage of women STEM graduates among all STEM graduates (e.g., 53% in Algeria), we still find the same negative correlation between women in STEM and the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI; rs = –.42, p = .002 compared with rs = –.47, p < .001 in Stoet & Geary, 2018, p. 587)
The next critique is based off of the fact that Stoet and Geary have recently created a new metric for potentially measuring gender inequality (BIGI), introducing areas where men might fall behind women but aren't included as part of other scales (Global Gender Gap Index, GGGI) using new metrics that they consider relevant to all men and women in any society:
- Healthy Life Expectancy (years expected to live in good health)
- Basic education (literacy, and years of primary, and secondary education)
- Life satisfaction
So the critique is as follows:
Critique
In any case, all nation-level gender equality measures are highly imperfect for understanding the drivers of gender equality. Stoet and Geary naively adopt the GGGI as a social science measure of gender equality, but it was not designed for that purpose, and it should not be used as a measure of gender empowerment or attitudes about gender. For example, Rwanda ranked sixth in the world on the 2015 GGGI due to high representation of women in economic and political life. This outstanding representation stemmed from Rwanda’s post-genocide sex ratio imbalance, not a campaign to increase women’s empowerment. Similarly, a negative correlation between STEM degrees and GGGI rank in a particular country—say, Luxembourg—tells us nothing about whether gender equality is causally related to STEM achievement or a product of other factors such as coeducational opportunities on offer for higher education in STEM in that locality.
Response
Further, we agree with Richardson and colleagues that our recently published Basic Index of Gender Inequality (BIGI; Stoet & Geary, 2019) does not correlate with the STEM graduation gap (unlike the GGGI). The BIGI provides a simplified measure of sex differences in well-being but does not focus on women’s empowerment (e.g., participation in politics or the labor force). We believe that there is no theoretical reason to expect a relation between BIGI scores and the propensity of women to pursue STEM degrees...
With respect to the issue of how much an international indicator such as the GGGI can tell us about sex differences, we note that the GGGI is frequently used in the psychological and social sciences and that it is the only annually reported independent gender-gap index
This is all very much a back and forth, and by itself doesn't tell us anything. There is one more critique, not included in the document I sourced but I found it too interesting to exclude (as part of a debate on reddit):
In developing countries, entering a STEM field is far more lucrative for a woman than for a woman in the developed world. Perhaps as gender equality increases, non-STEM fields become more of a viable option for women, so it is not necessarily based on preferences, but rather on economic incentive.
To which I replied:
But the removal of economic incentive could give women more freedom to decide their futures based on their preferences? So when other fields become more viable, they choose to go into the fields most suited to their preferences? I just don't think your point inherently contradicts the points others have made.
And will also raise the final point by Stoet and Geary in their defense:
Moreover, the gender-equality paradox is consistent with a much broader literature, in which sex differences for many traits are larger in more egalitarian countries.
So why is this argument happening? And what does the broader literature say. What is the limit of this broader literature? I'll attempt to explore all of this. Stay tuned.
The Broader Literature (and the Limits)
So what is this literature, there's certainly some referenced in the response but I would be more inclined to include my own at this point. I haven't checked if there's any overlap with the literature in the document and this is going to be more of a source dump so consider yourself warned. I'm trying to stay within the character limit afterall...
BRAAAIIINS:
So let's start with the biological studies. Do men and women have different brains on average and what could this mean? Well, there's a few studies that say no:
For instance, Joel et al came to this conclusion:
These findings are corroborated by a similar analysis of personality traits, attitudes, interests, and behaviors of more than 5,500 individuals, which reveals that internal consistency is extremely rare. Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.
But there is a magnitude of studies that suggest otherwise, and I don't think this is an exhaustive list:
The current study compared sex differences in the brain examining gray matter volume in two independent cohorts. We found a high reproducibility of effects between cohorts and therefore pooled the data for a unified analysis
As expected, our results demonstrate that sexual dimorphism in brain structure is highly apparent among incarcerated samples, and the multivariate methods used to quantify gray matter allowed greater than 93% accuracy in classifying individuals as male or female.
And sexual differences in brain sturcture highly correlate with Transexualism, as referenced by Krujver et al:
Differences among the groups were statistically significant by the nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis multiple comparison test
And as linked the other day, this extensive study by Wierenega et al:
The present study included a large lifespan sample and robustly confirmed previous findings of greater male variance in brain structure in humans.
Even if we took the intial data by Joel et al, other experts have come to wildly different conclusions. Like Chekroud et al for instance:
Despite the absence of dimorphic differences and lack of internal consistency observed by Joel et al. Multivariate analyses of whole-brain patterns in brain morphometry can reliably discriminate sex. These two results are not mutually inconsistent. We wholly agree that a strict dichotomy between male/female brains does not exist, but this does not diminish or negate the importance of considering statistical differences between the sexes (e.g., including sex as a covariate in morphometric analyses).
DIFFERENCES ACROSS CULTURES:
It is hard to measure the impact of these differences however, just as we know that testosterone influences behaviour (but not necessarily in ways we expect) and it is not the only thing that determines behaviour. So it is with average brain differences and their impact on men and women. Who's to say?
If we go by Hydes hypothesis, she concluded:
It is time to consider the costs of overinflated claims of gender differences. Arguably, they cause harm in numerous realms, including women’s opportunities in the workplace, couple conflict and communication, and analyses of selfesteem problems among adolescents. Most important, these claims are not consistent with the scientific data.
There are some indications to the contrary though. For instance, this study by Osmo Kontula, conducted across 10 european countries found:
Differences in sexual desire and values came out in many ways also in the sexual experiences that men and women had had. Even though differences in the number of sexual partners had declined, men continued to report a greater number of sex partners in their lifetime as well as more partners within the last several years, compared with women. Men were also more likely to enter into parallel relationships alongside their current relationship, and had had more such relationships than women.
Or this study by Giudice et al, in direct contradiction to Hyde's conclusion:
The idea that there are only minor differences between the personality profiles of males and females should be rejected as based on inadequate methodology.
Found:
The results were striking: the effect size for global sex differences in personality was D = 2.71, an extremely large effect by any psychological standard, corresponding to a 10% overlap between the male and female distributions (assuming normality). Even removing the variable with the largest univariate effect size (Sensitivity), the multivariate effect was D = 1.71 (24% overlap assuming normality). These effect sizes firmly place personality in the same category of other psychological constructs showing large, robust sex differences, such as aggression and vocational
interests.
Sex differences in personality are larger in more gender equal countries. This surprising finding has consistently been found in research examining cross‐country differences in personality
Even so, important gender differences in personality exist that likely stem, at least in part, from evolved psychological adaptations. Some of these adaptations generate culturally-universal gender differences, and many are further designed to be sensitive to local socioecological contexts in ways that facultatively generate varying sizes of gender differences across cultures.
The present results extend to a wider range of cultures and a broader selection of personality traits conclusions reached by Feingold in his 1994 review of gender differences in personality. In brief, gender differences are modest in magnitude, consistent with gender stereotypes, and replicable across cultures
Weisberg et al suggesting sex differences, although as previously mentioned these can not be assessd on an individual level. In terms of societal trends, who knows:
Replicating previous findings, women reported higher Big Five Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism scores than men. However, more extensive gender differences were found at the level of the aspects
My favourite study along these line, by Lee Ellis is one that takes Hydes findings and comes to a new hypothesis known as The evolutionary neuroandrogenic theory:
While Hyde’s concept can be applied to most sex differences, it should not obscure the fact that several effect sizes have been shown to far exceed 0.35. These include 0.66 for mental rotation 0.96 for throwing accuracy), 0.81 for toleration of casual sex (Oliver & Hyde, 1993), 0.87 for desired number of sex partners, 0.98 for mechanical reasoning, and 0.93 for interest in objects versus people. The extreme specificity of ENA theory makes it highly vulnerable to disproof. Sex hormones (especially testosterone) must be affecting brain functioning in at least two ways, one involving suboptimal arousal in and around the reticular formation, and the other having to do with the functional balance between the two hemispheres. One or both of these two brain functioning patterns should be responsible for most of the average universal sex difference in cognition and behavior that are documented. All the remaining universal sex differences should be attributable to evolutionary/genetic factors or some combination of neurohormonal and evolutionary/genetic factors. Culturally based learning should never be powerful enough to completely suppress these biological forces.
This article was written with two goals in mind: The first was to document that there are many sex differences in cognition and behavior that now appear to be universal. Second, the article identifies three theoretical explanations that have been offered so far for universal sex differences: the founder effect theory of FaustoSterling (1992), the social structuralist theory of Eagly and Wood (1999, 2003), and the evolutionary theory of Buss and Schmitt (1993); Geary (2010), and Okami and Shackelford (2001). None of these theories seem to explain most of the 65 AUSDs herein identified. ENA theory offers a new explanation for universal sex differences primarily by adding specific proximate elements to a few evolutionary-genetic assumptions. In the broadest terms, ENA theory has two evolutionary-genetic components and two neurological–endocrinological components
My final thought on this would be that we probably don't have enough information to reliably discern nurture from nature, although there are consistent indications across the world. While similarities are greater than the differences that doesn't mean our differences don't have an impact on the general shaping of gendered trends across society. The way I would frame it is this... Men and women are mainly the same, we all have skin, we have two eyes and olfactory sensors. Our bodies have more similarites than differences but the differences make a difference. Men and women have different skin, which could influence why women are more interested in skin care products or how women have better senses of smell which could influence why boys tend to be more smelly, or how men have vision better suited for motion tracking and women for distinguishing colours. Or the elephant in the room, woman's ability to get pregnant. Again, these aren't applicable to any one individual sex (apart the pregnancy) but the general trends are still there. I see brain differences in much the same way, and think it's only logical that they would be different.
Foetal Development:
Differences in foetal development (which makes culture even less likely) Wheelock et al:
We discovered both within and between network FC-GA associations that varied with sex. Specifically, associations between GA and posterior cingulate-temporal pole and fronto-cerebellar FC were observed in females only, whereas the association between GA and increased intracerebellar FC was stronger in males. These observations confirm that sexual dimorphism in functional brain systems emerges during human gestation.
And by Baron-Cohen et al (two studies) [1][2]
In conclusion, we report the first direct evidence that steroidogenic activity is elevated in fetal development of those who later receive diagnoses on the autism spectrum. These results raise new questions for understanding a wide array of other observations about the early development of autism, through their interactions with early fetal steroidogenic abnormalities and provide initial support for the importance of fetal steroid hormones as important epigenetic fetal programming mechanisms for autism.
And by Melissa Hines:
Convergent data from studies of individuals with genetic disorders, such as CAH or CAIS, offspring of pregnancies where women were treated with medications that influence testosterone, and studies relating normal variability in prenatal testosterone to postnatal behaviour, all suggest that levels of prenatal testosterone predict levels of sex-typed postnatal childhood play behaviour.
And Cohen-Bendahan et al (while this study didn't replicate findings of other studies, it does demonstrate differences in aggression linked to prenatal testosterone - and was done on twins. So prenatal testosterone is not the only influence of gendered behaviour. Though I think with the other studies we have some pretty robust findings):
Testosterone was higher in boys than girls, but similar in OS and SS twin girls. Testosterone was not in any way systematically related to the different personality traits. However, a sex difference in aggression proneness was observed, and OS girls showed a more masculine pattern of aggression proneness than the SS girls. It is argued that it is unlikely that this difference is due to social factors, such as a gender-specific upbringing.
In Tribal Communities:
It's hard to find relevant studies on this, as this is more exploring the "tribal societies weren't like this argument but there is evidence to suggest that women wanting a provider has historical context before the currently theorised "patriarchal" society developed:
Nature is a harsh taskmaster, but so, it seems, is human culture. Although the popular notion is that farming and settlement cushioned people against "survival of the fittest," this study shows that's not true. Something cultural happened 8,000 years ago that's marked us even today.
While hunter-gatherer tribes are more egaltarian, tasks are still seperated between gendered lines, so suggest research by Coren et al:
While we find no sex difference in willingness to compete in the female-centric task, we find that men are more likely to compete in the male-centric task. While further work is needed, this study lends some support to the idea of a sex difference in willingness to compete among hunter-gatherers, but it also highlights the importance of the task type. The observation that a sizable proportion of male Hadza choose to compete in each of the tasks is discussed in light of the fact that hunter-gatherers are largely egalitarian and non-hierarchical.
Upper body strength predicts reproductive success Coren et al:
These findings suggest that selection for hunting ability may have acted on men's upper-bodies. Nevertheless, the importance of effort on strength and hunting success cannot be dismissed. This is also discussed.
Gurven et al found that the most prestigious hunters gave the best food to their families:
Many studies report biased distributions, preferential shares to acquirers and their families, or more frequent sharing to close kin outside the nuclear family
There are multiple books which support this as well (full disclosue, I have only read excerpts and second hand critiques):
Schmitt, D.P. (2015). The evolution of culturally-variable sex differences: Men and women are not always different, but when they are…it appears not to result from patriarchy or sex role socialization. In Weekes-Shackelford, V.A., & Shackelford, T.K. (Eds.), The evolution of sexuality(pp. 221-256). New York: Springer.
Verweij, K. J., Burri, A. V., & Zietsch, B. P. (2012). Evidence for genetic variation in human mate preferences for sexually dimorphic physical traits. PloS one, 7(11), e49294.
Lukaszewski, A. W., & Roney, J. R. (2009). Estimated hormones predict women’s mate preferences for dominant personality traits. Personality and Individual Differences, 47, 191-196.
Low, B.S. (1993). Ecological demography: A synthetic focus in evolutionary anthropology. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 1, 177-187.
Zentner, M., & Mitura, K. (2012). Stepping out of the caveman’s shadow: Nations’ gender gap predicts degree of sex differentiation in mate preferences. Psychological Science, 23, 1176-1185.
Conclusion (and the great debate)
This would usually be the moment where someone would ascribe some sort of percentage, or state whether nature or nurture influences behaviour more. My tentative answer is, bugger off with these lines of reasoning. Our knowledge is limited and as a layperson on the internet, who may well be an expert ( I am not), my opinion is... both. The combination of nature and nurture that makes up our personalities are so interlinked that they can not (with our current knowledge) be adequately distinguished. I think that whether nature or nurture has more of an impact would depend fully on the individual (and maybe even individual traits will be influenced to different degress by both). Some people may well be more biologically predisposed to react to sociological factors. With some individual traits possibly being more likely to do with nature, but that doesn't mean these same traits can't develop through nurture as well. Nature and nurture can both have an influence on how the brain develops. We are floundering about in the dark looking for answers that don't really exist. Staing both is not only fair but the least controversial stance to take, robust evidence exists for both conclusions. However, this does likely mean that a one size fits all to socialisation will not succeed and throws a wrench into the flawed concept of social construction theory, we can not ignore the potential impacts of biology just as we can not ignore the potential impacts of socialisation. If only for the reason that we are all likely wrong in our assertions in some ways. A top down control, seems like a bad idea.
I come to a point where I ask the question, with an already predermined answer, why is this such a controversial subject? My tentative answer comes to a couple of factors. For one, biological arguments have been used to restrict people in the past. It's difficult to broach this subject without some accusation of biological determinism. I don't believe this is the same thing but I can see why other's might. My argument is not to arbitarily block people, and not to be used to prescribe attributes to any one individual. My argument is descriptive. It is to say that even if we removed all barriers to success along gendered lines we would still likely see disparate outcomes. I don't know if this can be changed, which would make efforts at parity useless at best and dangeours at worst. This may be hyperbolic but I don't think so. I'm not sure arguing social determinism is any better than arguing biological determinism but there's the rub. We have a theory, dominant in certain fields of academia that is hard to get away from. I will conclude with the words of a social scientist working in the field. Heather Metcalf:
The context of much STEM workforce research is its reliance on a flawed linear model that views students and workers as passive flows through leaky pipes and its focus on numeric diversity at best. Overall, the STEM workforce studies reviewed highlight the complicated and often problematic ways in which discourse and survey research meet. They speak to the limitations of survey definitions, particularly those used to measure identity characteristics, family, STEM fields and degrees, and educational and career pathways and success. These studies also illustrate the importance of appropriately balancing disaggregating data by gender, race, class, nationality, citizenship status, field, and sector while considering interactions among these measures. This review indicates the need to critically consider claims, both in the popular and scientific press, about workforce shortages and desired demographics and the pervasive influences these claims have on workforce studies and policies.
So that's one idiot's opinion, what do y'all think?
(wasn't sure what flair to use, so I went with feminism as it flies in the face of popular academy feminist theory)
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