I've seen papers where behavioural differences are much larger than those implied in this article (see Del Giudice works about this). And if you take something like the nordic paradox, you not only see a pattern in many countries, but you see non-trivial, large differences in behaviour.
Sex essentialism is obviously a bs, more so when you try to force by law women to do or not do certain stuff, but as far as I'm aware, scientific studies show larger differences and the debate is not settled as "akshually it's 1% biology and 99% socialisation". On top of these, even without reading any study, the average person usually understands/feels that there absolutely are differences, that these differences are big (even if not absolute by any means), and they're very likely not only due to socialisation. And I think a lot of today's backlash comes from this fact.
I engaged with the Del Giudice paper in a footnote - specifically, their use of the Mahalanobis Distance stat to draw multivariate conclusions.
There are definitely studies that vary in their conclusions on gender (some are cited in the footnotes) and I'm not claiming that there are _zero_ biological distinctions. But my read of the literature is that these differences are continuous rather than taxonic, frequently minor, and the 'gender similarities hypothesis' is better supported than the 'gender differences hypothesis.'
I see it now, in the past I also saw the critiques that have been made to that work, I don't think they're fully convincing but I have to admit that maybe I'm not able to fully grasp this technicalities.
Surely I've seen other studies over time that show larger differences other than Del Giudice's work.
The Nordic paradox I cited is not a direct effect of differences in behaviour, but a manifestation of them, and the differences in those cases are quite large.
Another thing that I saw many times in the literature is that machine learning models are able to distinguish between male and female brains, as they're discussed in the article, and in general they are very much able to do this with great accuracy, even after adjusting for many variables.
I saw this paper from Stanford a while ago:
"Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization"
Showing that if you use t-SNE to cluster brains data embeddings of a NN model trained on fMRIs, from male and female subjects, you obtain two absolutely separated clusters, suggesting that there's more than a few percentage points of differences. Of course the base models were pretty performant too.
Thanks! That Stanford deep learning paper is really cool. Importantly, it's a resting state paper so it's really focused on functional rather than structural difference. I don't see a claim in the paper that brain structure shows sex dimorphism but they did find connectivity differences - I think primarily in the default mode? - which I agree is very interesting.
In terms of the Nordic paradox, are you talking about the occupational findings (showing that women select into more 'feminized' careers in more progressive places) or the rates of intimate partner violence?
Yeah mainly occupational differences, but also interests in university choices (that of course are highly correlated with future occupation), and I saw these things shown in difference "sauces" (change the variable by which you measure equality or the variable of interest), and they pretty much show that these differences persist or increase in more "egalitarian countries", compared to less free or egalitarian ones.
For the intimate partner violence, I tried to find some data across European countries, but definitions of what, for example, constitutes a femicide, are varied and often not perfectly comparable.
I can say, for example, that my European country of origin is very much not considered a "feminist-oriented egalitarian country", but from the not perfect data we have on women homicide rates by partners or ex-partners, that is lower than those of many nordic countries. The same seems to hold with other European countries that are not considered very egalitarian.
My read on the occupational "paradox" is that in countries with a stronger safety net, human services jobs are better jobs (more secure, better benefits) so people don't need to sort into STEM solely to get decent pay and job security. But that doesn't mean that these jobs are telling us about a fundamental sex differences in innate interests. It could be that women are drawn to jobs that are more compatible with having kids, for example. I just don't know if occupational choice reflects anything fundamental or biological. I might be misreading the importance of this paradox for understanding gender difference.
My understanding of the intimate partner violence paradox is just that there can be a backlash effect in places with very egalitarian gender norms and some males may harbor greater resentment. There also might be reporting differences in how comfortable women feel in going to the authorities.
Well, of course I don't have pays and salaries data for various Nordic countries vs other non-nordic countries. In general, STEM occupations pay much higher salaries compared to humanities, everywhere. Then you should explain why women are not attracted by higher salaries as much as men. Also, STEM occupations guarantee much more stable careers. At least where I live, a lot of people with degrees in literature or adjacent studies have much less stable careers and earn much less, in fact a lot of them switch sector and do a "normal" job after a while. Honestly I don't see the safety net being a factor, at least in my country you may be poor and your income low, but the state won't help you for that (there is a big safety net, but having a low salary and unstable job won't put you in the safety net). Many are poorer and have a non-stable job and they have no safety net, while STEM graduates, in general, just have better paid and much more stable jobs.
A part of those with a humanities degree tries to work in the public sector, and that's where a good chunk goes to work (after maybe 10-20 years of unstable jobs, and anyway the salaries are low-to-average).
I digressed a lot, just to say that it's not very convincing, imho. The fact is that even in my country the difference in the presence of males and females in humanities is wild (more females), and in STEM too, maybe even more (especially engineering degrees).
I bet this also explains a good chunk of the gender pay gap, at least here.
For the homicides rate, I'm familiar with the "backlash" explanation, but it sounds a bit post-hoc and ideological. For the reporting argument, honestly those who propose this line should show some convincing data.
I mean, isn’t it kind of silly to try to decide which of “similarities” and “differences” is better supported in general? Like, which is better supported of the US-Europe similarities vs differences hypothesis? It’s not even a meaningful question, let alone an answerable one.
Granted that some people are stupidly going around arguing for the differences hypothesis so you feel the need to hit back, but I think it’s more effective to focus on the actual objective questions of which differences there are, how big they are, and how much we care.
Her claim was that male and female brains were only 1% different in structure, not that all effect sizes were that small. In the meta analysis she linked the effect sizes were about 0.20. So there are real differences at the population level, but they’re still fairly small.
However, I think what Darby doesn’t acknowledge here is that small average differences can still have big impacts in the real world, for a variety of reasons. For one, small average differences are magnified at the tails. So maybe the average woman is only slightly less interested in engineering than the average man, but people who are *very* interested in engineering will be heavily male.
The other thing is that small differences specifically in dating and relationship contexts still mean that in a large majority of relationships, the man will have more masculine traits than the woman, and in a large minority of pairings the man will be *much* more masculine than the woman on some traits. For example, even if average libido differences aren’t super large, most men will have a higher libido than their partner, and there will be far more high libido men than high libido women. (I also think small average differences can really impact each gender’s experience of the dating market, for similar reasons.)
I used to have a nearly-black slate view of gender, but my experiences in dating and relationships have really changed my view on this. I’ve personally felt the differences in these contexts, and I’ve made mistakes in the past by assuming men and women are, or should be, the same. This is also consistent with how different dating norms are between lesbians and gay men.
I agree that small differences can translate into larger behavioral effects, but it's also important to acknowledge the interplay of culture and socialization here. Small biological and brain differences are magnified in certain cultural contexts where traditional gender norms are strongly enforced or incentivized, for example
A big part of the article is pointing out that what differences there are in personality seem to stem largely from socialization, not fundamental biology. It's really important to remember that when looking at any sort of real sex difference in communication style, interests, etc., etc. How much of this is biology and how much stems from socialization starting at the vary youngest ages? It's hard to tease apart but different gender norms in other societies and times suggest that socializtion continues to be a huge piece.
And don't get me started on engineering. I work in A & E and have seen so many female colleagues get shunted into marketing because 'it's just a better fit', or get shunted onto the ONLY majority female group in the company even though they have a different specialization, only to have the company decide to downsize that group a few years later, as well as colleagues who hit the glass ceiling HARD because the old male principals at the firm got squigged out by having a mother in a management role (for some reason a the thought of a father in management didn't give them any pause at all). And these are all women who made it into professional engineering jobs in the first place, after running the gantlet of college professors who thought they might do better in planning, etc. We are not anywhere near a societal condition that would let us assess how much interest women & men inherently have in engineering.
I’m skeptical of the strong version of this claim. I’d be surprised if there weren’t at least somewhat bimodal distributions for many personality-type traits that track sex, based on more than just socialization. But it also seems clear that there is a lot of overlap. That overlap has always kept me from really grokking the idea of being trans and, even more so, of being non-binary.
If male and female traits were strongly dimorphic, this would make a lot more sense to me. In that world, if someone with XY chromosomes had overwhelmingly “female” personality or cognitive traits, it would be straightforward to say that person is really a woman. And if their traits were roughly evenly split between “male” and “female,” it would be easy to say they were really (and quite literally) non-binary.
But if we start from what seems like the correct premise—that these traits are at most weakly bimodal—then I have a hard time understanding what people even mean when they say they are trans or non-binary. Are they saying that they happen to have a lot of personality or cognitive traits more associated with the other sex? If so, that feels almost universal; most of us have some mix of traits that cut across stereotypical gender lines.
This isn’t meant as an objection to people identifying as trans or non-binary. Some people are clearly more comfortable, for whatever combination of reasons, identifying as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, or as no gender at all, and I think we should try to accommodate that where we reasonably can. I just haven’t been able to make sense of the underlying metaphysical claim. I’ve also always found it odd that the strongest supporters of trans and non-binary gender theories so often also endorse a near–blank-slate view of gender; those two positions seem to be in real tension with each other.
I think there are two very different types of view that uneasily coexist because they both are used to justify acceptance of trans identity. One view says that people have strong gender identities and that some people have gender identities that are different from the one usually associated with certain aspects of their biology, and we should be accommodating to those people living with the gender that fits their strong identity. The other view says that gender identity is no stronger than any other sort of social identity like “nerd” or “goth” or “jock”, and we should just let people live with whichever set of identities they want. I suspect that each of these views describes what’s going on with some people, but the weak identity view seems to me to get at the normative core - why not let people live whichever way they want?
That was probably a rhetorical question, but the negative answer, if anything, would be that we don’t necessarily let people live in ways that are bad for them. Even in the rather libertarian US where we now let people live even as homeless drug addicts if they wish, we at least don’t let people freely choose, say, suicide. So there’s still some object level argument that has to be made on trans identity.
Yeah, I was starting to think about that as I was writing that. I've definitely been thinking a lot lately about the "platform temperance" idea (https://maxread.substack.com/p/platform-temperance), where I want to help people protect themselves from unwanted addictions and distractions, whether it's gambling or social media or drugs. But I think in all these cases, I probably only want society to enforce things that the person has decided for themself will be bad for them. If a person decides they want to be banned from TikTok or banned from gambling or banned from living with a different gender identity, then we should enforce that for them, but if they decide the way to be allowed to waste as much time as they want on TikTok or allowed to enjoy the excitement and the losses of gambling or allowed to live with a different gender identity, then we should allow that - though to make the enforcement real, they would only be allowed to turn on this sort of allowance with a one-month waiting period or something (so that even if they give in in a moment of temptation, they still have a month to change their mind before the temptation is actually there in front of them).
I would love human nature to be such that people can reliably figure out for themselves what’s good for them, i.e. fundamentalist liberalism. Of course even in that world people aren’t free to live in a society that frees them from the need to figure all these things out for themselves. Your idea is nice even though it only helps in the easier cases, to be sure.
Where do you want to draw the line on what decisions people get to make for themselves vs not? Do we toss out cosmetic surgery? Tattooing? Unnatural hair color? Contraception?
There’s a lot of distance between “choosing homeless drug addiction” and “choosing to express trans identity” and it’s not at all obvious to me that they belong on the same list for policy purposes.
I think an important point to make here is while male and female minds are very similar, male and female bodies genuinely have strong dimorphism, and the way that society treats people based on perceived gender is also quite different. If you would like to have a woman's body and have the world treat you like a woman on sight, you can't do that by being a man with a femme personality. The world will still treat you like a man.
I think it's useful to recognize that many trans people suffer from gender dysphoria, a perception that they are the wrong sex, which can cause significant distress. (In many instances, this is similar to the more general condition of body dysmorphia.) They transition (whether socially or through surgery) in order to alleviate this distress. The philosophy comes later.
In terms of the philosophy, there are a number of possibilities, including:
1) Reject the conclusions of this article and argue for innate gender differences.
2) Accept those conclusions and embrace the socially-derived gender differences that exist.
3) Accept those conclusions and attempt to create a new category of gender that is divorced from both sex and gender stereotypes.
I think plenty of trans and cis people take each of these approaches – #3 is increasingly popular. And it's perfectly possible for a trans person to agree with this article, dislike both 2 and 3, and say "sorry, my brain is being bad, therefore I am a man, whatever that means". (This is just like people with OCD will wash their hands for the 20th time "to remove the germs" even though they understand intellectually that their hands are clean.)
(Actually, I recommend reading the entire piece, because it is a fantastic analysis of the purpose of words and categorization, and everyone should read it.)
CBT is not (anything close to) a panacea. Sometimes you just have to give people the solution that works, even if it's not the solution you would like.
Yup. I think this challenge is really hard for many of us. We want to protect and support people who are struggling but cannot understand the nature of what they describe. Coexistence seems pretty achievable but what does annoy me is the insistence that gender identity is something innate and distinct from sex without any coherent explanation of what that means nor a willingness to admit that many of these attempted narratives do undermine the premises of second wave feminism as they were presented to those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s.
The philosophical grounding of transness is incredibly absent, because people who write philosophy that aims to be clear and convincing are almost disjoint from people who write philosophy around modern gender issues. An analytic philosopher of trans identity would be very valuable; I’m not sure whether a plausible candidate already exists.
Yes, many trans people will even brandish neuroscientific studies purporting to show that trans women have womanlike brains and vice versa. It’s quite strictly inconsistent with the position, which a very similar group of people asserts in other contexts, that there’s no such thing as a womanlike brain. Now, you *can* detect sex quite accurately on a brain scan, so the latter position is clearly the weaker one in this case.
What I understand you to say is: 1. Many non-specialists believe that gender essentialism is both empirically true and silenced in the academy. 2. Actually, specialists freely debate this, and most believe the weight of the evidence is on the non-essentialist side. Reading you and others, I believe you’re probably right.
But the part that you’re not taking into account is that there have been prominent cases of academics claiming that it is a settled question to which essentialist or biologistic statements are either anti-scientific (“merchants of doubt”) or ethically wrong (“harmful”). These include the constructive firing of Carole Hooven and moralized attacks on many others. The discourse has calmed down a lot on the academic side, and most scientists were nuanced and tolerant of disagreement all along. Only a few individuals were ever victimized for good-faith essentialist beliefs. BUT, very few scientists ever spoke out loudly in defense of those individuals, or against the extreme voices raised against them. This, I believe, has done lasting damage to scientists’ credibility for a lot of thoughtful non-scientists. I’m curious what you think.
I think this is probably correct. There should have been a louder outcry about some of those “cancellations” when they happened. I also think you’re right that most scientists were pretty nuanced all along.
I don't know. Finding yourself defending an academic paper as vapid as that "Theorizing Mankeeping" paper--that's the "academic article" that this piece criticizes Jesse Singal for criticizing--should give one pause, I think.
I mean, I think if someone uses a source A to make claim B. And then source A does not actually prove claim B, that does not mean you are "defending" the entirety of source A.
This is probably a longer conversation that no one wants to have here (or ever with me, since I'm just an internet rando with a joke name), but: as I read it, the whole point of this article is to defend a blank slatist, culture-over-biology approach to understanding gendered differences. Not in an absolute sense, for sure; the author admits right up front that biology does have at least some role to play. But in the sense that the vast majority of the time (I guess?) gendered differences will have cultural rather than biological causes. And this is so obviously true (again, I guess) that an article which characterizes pure blank slatism as "radical" needs itself to be rejected. Which I think, whether the author likes it or not, does necessarily bleed into a defense of pure blank slatist papers like "Theorizing Mankeeping," since it cedes so much foundational ground to that paper's analytic framework.
"the vast majority of the time (I guess?) gendered differences will have cultural rather than biological causes." -- yes this is a correct summary of my overall point
I think it's possible to dispute a specific point about the acknowledgment of biological differences within academia without accepting all the conclusions of academic papers in this domain! I mean, if I were writing a piece arguing the opposite claim - that biological sex differences are important and under-acknowledged - that wouldn't be tantamount to me accepting all the 1890s papers in neuroscience that called women 'gorillas' because of their smaller brains.
I think it's fair to criticize her rhetorical move there, given that she does a drive-by dismissal of the entire idea of anti-gender-essentialist overreach in academia, based solely on Singal's allegedly unfair treatment of a paper she hasn't read.
In arguing his point, I’m dealing directly with Singal’s own example. He could have provided a different example of academic thinking on gender and I would have engaged with that!
He has, though? He's written a lot more than one article on this, mostly in the context of debunking the many recent papers in which social scientists try to debunk gender differences in sports to justify their political priors.
You seem to be broadening the scope of the argument being made here. He argued in his essay that academics refuse to acknowledge the reality of biological sex difference, and provided as an example a "radical claim" that biology does not explain male bonding differences. My point is that actually, the "radical claim" looks quite reasonable if you look at the evidence. There may be more absurd claims out there but I wanted to engage with the specific example he gave in the piece I was discussing in my essay.
To be clear, I'm not defending the substance of that article - I haven't read it - just the specific claim about biology vs culture that Singal pulled out and labelled as "radical."
But right after criticizing the Singal piece, and laying out some evidence for close male friend groups, you say this:
It is indeed quite likely that “biological gender differences” do not explain male bonding difficulties in industrialized societies, but rather that these are products of culture and socialization. Generally, if a factor is well-explained by biology, it’s conserved across different cultural and historical contexts and not contingent on where you’re measuring it.
In the context of your article, this sure sounds like a defense of that "mankeeping" paper. Singal criticized the paper's blank slatism as "radical;" you reject his criticism, because you think the evidence bears out blank slatism, at least in the context of male friendship. That might be a misread on my part, but I don't think it's a crazy one.
My piece is really not about the mankeeping paper. It's about the strength of the evidence for biological sex differences. Singal states that biological sex differences are a forbidden topic within academia, and cites the mankeeping paper as an example of a paper that refuses to acknowledge biology. I'm critiquing his specific argument there.
Was filled with dread seeing the article title but pleasantly surprised to see such a great essay on the anti-anti-gender essentialism moment we’re seeing! That being said, I don’t know if the comments will like this one….
The solution they have to this problem is they get to say gay as a slur again and people who don’t conform aren’t real men. (See Richard Hanania for some of the most explicit forms of this)
I feel like this exclusion happens to women too and it’s not as explicit but my wife could detail its forms.
Even though I recognize we’re not blank slates the whole thing feels like so much of a five alarm fire that it’s worth maintaining it as a polite fiction.
That’s your five alarm fire for giving up any commitment to honesty about some of the deepest facts about humanity? You know people notice when you’re lying to them about obvious facts right? And they really don’t like it?
Why would it not be a five alarm fire? The belief that there’s a right way to be a man is a belief that’s usually been followed with fists.
The return of sex determinism to polite society is really fucking scary as a man who benefits from the norms of neutrality. People are out here saying I should be fired from my job and have my foster kid taken away because of my sex. Exaggerating about how normal outliers are seems quaint by comparison.
“I’m going to intentionally lie in obvious ways to avoid people misusing power against me” is just not a strategy that has ever one time worked, and I have no idea how you can possibly imagine it would. An appropriate level of five-alarm fire for trying this kind of intentional sociological gaslighting would be more like…uh…I can’t really think of a plausible case, because as the challenges get more severe the downside risk of lying does too.
My sincerest sympathy for your challenges. But the response to people who say that, say, men shouldn’t be childcare workers is clearly that we judge people individually, not collectively, in this country, not making up lies about how men are actually basically exactly as interested in childcare and as likely to commit sexual abuses as women are. That is only going to hurt your cause.
I don’t exactly know what the difference is between judge people individually and believe a polite fiction of a blank slate.
To me these are different ways of saying the same thing. Each time you meet any individual you treat them as a blank slate and the statistical facts you know as irrelevant. You should know the facts that boys are more prone to this or that but to express it in a way that could be hurtful to An individual should be deeply taboo.
What we are now faced with is the return of individual judgment for statistical averages. Which is a five alarm fire.
The difference, obviously, is in what happens when you find yourself talking about populations of people, rather than making a decision about an individual. And, in any case, very obviously, you don’t actually always treat every individual you meet as a blank slate. If you’re a woman passing a man on a dark sidewalk, you very correctly are more worried than if he were another woman, with any more information than that he’s a man. This is fine and good (not good that men are more dangerous, but good for people to recognize this, within reason, given that it’s true! It can be *dangerous* to people if they’re actually so naive as to believe your polite fiction!): we want people to work very hard against such judgments in cases like employment and college admissions, but by no means in all life situations.
Anyway, you could argue that it’s polite to avoid talking about populations of people at all, but it’s never polite to lie on purpose about scientific fact in the middle of a scientific discussion, which is the style of this article.
The fact that you can bear to claim to think we had a period where individuals were *not* being judged based on statistical averages for their groups is truly bewildering.
I feel like you should be free to know these facts but feelings management is more important than getting to freely say them in almost all cases. I don’t resent the woman who feels threat just the way we’ve become willing to say them for no reason. It was better to lie to ourselves and not believe it.
Like you’re advocating for beatings and rape and all manner of things when you assert there are truths about men the way it’s true that lions are predators.
They’re not out here saying you should know it for some sort of fact. They’re saying it to hurt people and then going on to use gay as a slur and vice signaling and they should be stopped. Not by believing men and women are the same but by believing that you should not speak the differences just to hurt people.
Let me throw out the thought that one way to look at it is that men and women (in general) want the same things in different order of priority. If men value sex more than women and women value romance more than men, it hardly means that women are uninterested in sex or women are uninterested in romance.
There are some correct points in here but I find myself mostly unconvinced. I believe your account that male-female differences are continuous rather than taxonic variables, but seems like the wrong way to characterize differences. Outside of a few bimodal characteristics (eg number of ovaries), everything is continuous and the question is how many standard deviations they are apart, and how that effect size compares to other things (income, education, national origin, or political party are some I'd consider). Claiming that sex differences are continuous thus seems like a weak claim that can refute the admittedly very wrong ideas from the 19th century, but not much else.
You also seem very dismissive of the possibility of group effects of something like a r=0.2 difference at the individual level (a small, continuous difference). I don't know how much those would percolate up into the overall culture, but it's something I could see being significant in aggregate and would want data on before I dismiss it by recalling individual examples of care oriented men and justice oriented women.
The Hyde 2005 study that was linked is something I've seen discussed before and it was described as finding "moderate or large gender differences in (and here I’m paraphrasing very scientific-sounding constructs into more understandable terms) aggressiveness, horniness, language abilities, mechanical abilities, visuospatial skills, mechanical ability, tendermindness, assertiveness, comfort with body, various physical abilities, and computer skills." (It doesn't look like it's public so I can't see more than the abstract myself.) That's a very different vibe than what was in your piece.
I should have clarified the taxonic argument a bit more in the piece. It's not _only_ saying that differences aren't bimodal, but also that they don't cluster together in the sense that you can't predict one trait very well from the existence of another trait. I responded to another comment on here about apples vs oranges - if you're trying to tell the fruits apart and you know that one has orange skin, you can be very confident that it is also high in juice. In contrast, many of the traits alleged to be very gendered don't map on to each other neatly - the correlations between spatial abilities, justice vs care orientation, and sociosexuality are quite weak, for example. This leads to the takeaway that knowing someone's gender will not give us a huge amount of predictive accuracy when it comes to assessing their level of a particular trait.
The Hyde study actually comes down quite hard in favor of "gender similarities." Here's the abstract:
The gender similarities hypothesis
Janet Shibley Hyde 1
Affiliations Expand
PMID: 16173891 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581
Abstract
The differences model, which argues that males and females are vastly different psychologically, dominates the popular media. Here, the author advances a very different view, the gender similarities hypothesis, which holds that males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. Results from a review of 46 meta-analyses support the gender similarities hypothesis. Gender differences can vary substantially in magnitude at different ages and depend on the context in which measurement occurs. Overinflated claims of gender differences carry substantial costs in areas such as the workplace and relationships.
As a history guy growing up in Japan, I think it is discussed the men aloofness in modern Japan is the byproduct of Meiji era norm, which is more or less influenced by Christianity and very (modern) military centric culture in that era.
And iirc, shudo (gay sex) remained more or less normalized well into Edo period - like male prostitutes were common and situations like “Shogun fucked that guy and he was promoted” def exists
And also as someone worked in Japan, I can attest it is male dominated but highly contextual and I really struggled to fit in even if I grew up there and am very conflicted averse and not direct…
This is a tricky subject. Though I think many of you are making good points, I would suggest that some of the confusion also comes from the rhetorical nature vs. nurture framing, which is actively misleading (I'm not blaming anyone here for this- it's a broader problem). I think a better framing is nature+nurture vs. individual idiosyncrasies. I agree that sex differences are often small (in my research on aggression in undergrad samples, a difference of r=0.15 was typical). I hypothesize, though, that cultures are not equally likely to push the sexes in either direction. Specifically, they seem to mostly push even further in the same direction as sex-based predispositions. Only individual variance (both genetic and environmental) which, for a smaller number pushes in the other direction, actually opposes the nature+nurture tandem. And differences often look quite different at the tails of the distribution (e.g., violent felons are likely filtered out of undergrad samples).
That's how, despite seeing sex differences in aggression of r=0.15 in undergrad samples, you also see men commit around 90% of homicides. Men also account for 90+% of accidental workplace deaths. Those are obviously huge differences in very consequential outcomes. If my nature+nurture tandem hypothesis is true, the biological differences are very important, despite being observed as statistically small in some contexts because of how nature and nurture are entangled. In a hypothetical world where woman were the ones genetically predisposed to physical aggression and risk taking, culture would have developed differently, pushing women in that direction and those 90% outcomes would flip in the other direction.
Great point. So it sounds like you're saying that biological differences are almost always _magnified_ by culture, rather than buffered or diminished by culture? So you get additive or interactive effects of biology + culture working together which make the biological differences meaningful, even when they're actually small.
I think this makes sense, although perhaps one could come up with opposing examples. So for example, let's say women might be slightly less likely than men to argue and be combative. But if, as a teenager, a woman goes to a very competitive school that emphasizes debate, perhaps she becomes more argumentative as a result of that socialization?
Thanks. Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I suspect you are right that some contexts go in the other direction. I expect it’s not so much as an ironclad rule that nature and nurture push in the same direction, so much as a strong tendency.
I was reading the Substack of psychologist, Dr. Todd Kashdan, a while ago and he shared a note that the only consistent finding on biological differences were that men are (on average) larger than women.
I know many people make the case that arguments such as yours support a “blank slate” theory of human nature due to arguing for the primacy of culture. I wondered if you have any thoughts on that?
I'm not quite a blank slate-ist. I think there are meaningful biological differences, but I also think they are often small and variable, and I think popular media tends to overstate their import.
I’m not super convinced by this argument. For one thing, it seems to be conflating the Helen Andrews piece, which is bonkers, with the general possibility that there are sex differences. And this feels weasely and straw manish to me.
I’m open to the idea that mental sex differences are minuscule, but if that’s the case, I’d like to see an engagement with ALL of the literature on the subject, à la Scott Alexander. What about Pinker? What about the claims in the book “T”? What I get instead is a reference to a single paper and then a victory lap, and whenever I see something like that, my bullshit alarm goes off.
That's a fair critique, but for the record, I did not reference a single paper - I cited these papers (all linked in the piece) which I'll pull out here so you can take a look if interested:
What exactly is this "gender similarities hypothesis" that's compatible with 1-in-5 studied traits showing significantly bimodal distributions? It sure sounds like it's just the "gender differences hypothesis" with some added throat clearing.
Nobody sane thinks women and men are more different than we are similar. But you don't actually deny Singal's point that, in large segments of academia, acknowledging any gender differences at all is verboten. And you clearly acknowledge that many gender differences are real and significant. So I just do not get the point of this article.
I think it's clear that biology plays a material role in average sex differences, but doesn't say anything about any particular individual.
On average men are taller, but there are women that are taller than men. On average men are hornier, but there are women that are hornier than men etc
And while culture certainly influences us, quite as clearly biology plays a really important role (again on average). And those differences are a LOT more than 1%
I've seen papers where behavioural differences are much larger than those implied in this article (see Del Giudice works about this). And if you take something like the nordic paradox, you not only see a pattern in many countries, but you see non-trivial, large differences in behaviour.
Sex essentialism is obviously a bs, more so when you try to force by law women to do or not do certain stuff, but as far as I'm aware, scientific studies show larger differences and the debate is not settled as "akshually it's 1% biology and 99% socialisation". On top of these, even without reading any study, the average person usually understands/feels that there absolutely are differences, that these differences are big (even if not absolute by any means), and they're very likely not only due to socialisation. And I think a lot of today's backlash comes from this fact.
I engaged with the Del Giudice paper in a footnote - specifically, their use of the Mahalanobis Distance stat to draw multivariate conclusions.
There are definitely studies that vary in their conclusions on gender (some are cited in the footnotes) and I'm not claiming that there are _zero_ biological distinctions. But my read of the literature is that these differences are continuous rather than taxonic, frequently minor, and the 'gender similarities hypothesis' is better supported than the 'gender differences hypothesis.'
I see it now, in the past I also saw the critiques that have been made to that work, I don't think they're fully convincing but I have to admit that maybe I'm not able to fully grasp this technicalities.
Surely I've seen other studies over time that show larger differences other than Del Giudice's work.
The Nordic paradox I cited is not a direct effect of differences in behaviour, but a manifestation of them, and the differences in those cases are quite large.
Another thing that I saw many times in the literature is that machine learning models are able to distinguish between male and female brains, as they're discussed in the article, and in general they are very much able to do this with great accuracy, even after adjusting for many variables.
I saw this paper from Stanford a while ago:
"Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization"
Showing that if you use t-SNE to cluster brains data embeddings of a NN model trained on fMRIs, from male and female subjects, you obtain two absolutely separated clusters, suggesting that there's more than a few percentage points of differences. Of course the base models were pretty performant too.
Thanks! That Stanford deep learning paper is really cool. Importantly, it's a resting state paper so it's really focused on functional rather than structural difference. I don't see a claim in the paper that brain structure shows sex dimorphism but they did find connectivity differences - I think primarily in the default mode? - which I agree is very interesting.
In terms of the Nordic paradox, are you talking about the occupational findings (showing that women select into more 'feminized' careers in more progressive places) or the rates of intimate partner violence?
Yeah mainly occupational differences, but also interests in university choices (that of course are highly correlated with future occupation), and I saw these things shown in difference "sauces" (change the variable by which you measure equality or the variable of interest), and they pretty much show that these differences persist or increase in more "egalitarian countries", compared to less free or egalitarian ones.
For the intimate partner violence, I tried to find some data across European countries, but definitions of what, for example, constitutes a femicide, are varied and often not perfectly comparable.
I can say, for example, that my European country of origin is very much not considered a "feminist-oriented egalitarian country", but from the not perfect data we have on women homicide rates by partners or ex-partners, that is lower than those of many nordic countries. The same seems to hold with other European countries that are not considered very egalitarian.
My read on the occupational "paradox" is that in countries with a stronger safety net, human services jobs are better jobs (more secure, better benefits) so people don't need to sort into STEM solely to get decent pay and job security. But that doesn't mean that these jobs are telling us about a fundamental sex differences in innate interests. It could be that women are drawn to jobs that are more compatible with having kids, for example. I just don't know if occupational choice reflects anything fundamental or biological. I might be misreading the importance of this paradox for understanding gender difference.
My understanding of the intimate partner violence paradox is just that there can be a backlash effect in places with very egalitarian gender norms and some males may harbor greater resentment. There also might be reporting differences in how comfortable women feel in going to the authorities.
Well, of course I don't have pays and salaries data for various Nordic countries vs other non-nordic countries. In general, STEM occupations pay much higher salaries compared to humanities, everywhere. Then you should explain why women are not attracted by higher salaries as much as men. Also, STEM occupations guarantee much more stable careers. At least where I live, a lot of people with degrees in literature or adjacent studies have much less stable careers and earn much less, in fact a lot of them switch sector and do a "normal" job after a while. Honestly I don't see the safety net being a factor, at least in my country you may be poor and your income low, but the state won't help you for that (there is a big safety net, but having a low salary and unstable job won't put you in the safety net). Many are poorer and have a non-stable job and they have no safety net, while STEM graduates, in general, just have better paid and much more stable jobs.
A part of those with a humanities degree tries to work in the public sector, and that's where a good chunk goes to work (after maybe 10-20 years of unstable jobs, and anyway the salaries are low-to-average).
I digressed a lot, just to say that it's not very convincing, imho. The fact is that even in my country the difference in the presence of males and females in humanities is wild (more females), and in STEM too, maybe even more (especially engineering degrees).
I bet this also explains a good chunk of the gender pay gap, at least here.
For the homicides rate, I'm familiar with the "backlash" explanation, but it sounds a bit post-hoc and ideological. For the reporting argument, honestly those who propose this line should show some convincing data.
I mean, isn’t it kind of silly to try to decide which of “similarities” and “differences” is better supported in general? Like, which is better supported of the US-Europe similarities vs differences hypothesis? It’s not even a meaningful question, let alone an answerable one.
Granted that some people are stupidly going around arguing for the differences hypothesis so you feel the need to hit back, but I think it’s more effective to focus on the actual objective questions of which differences there are, how big they are, and how much we care.
Her claim was that male and female brains were only 1% different in structure, not that all effect sizes were that small. In the meta analysis she linked the effect sizes were about 0.20. So there are real differences at the population level, but they’re still fairly small.
However, I think what Darby doesn’t acknowledge here is that small average differences can still have big impacts in the real world, for a variety of reasons. For one, small average differences are magnified at the tails. So maybe the average woman is only slightly less interested in engineering than the average man, but people who are *very* interested in engineering will be heavily male.
The other thing is that small differences specifically in dating and relationship contexts still mean that in a large majority of relationships, the man will have more masculine traits than the woman, and in a large minority of pairings the man will be *much* more masculine than the woman on some traits. For example, even if average libido differences aren’t super large, most men will have a higher libido than their partner, and there will be far more high libido men than high libido women. (I also think small average differences can really impact each gender’s experience of the dating market, for similar reasons.)
I used to have a nearly-black slate view of gender, but my experiences in dating and relationships have really changed my view on this. I’ve personally felt the differences in these contexts, and I’ve made mistakes in the past by assuming men and women are, or should be, the same. This is also consistent with how different dating norms are between lesbians and gay men.
I agree that small differences can translate into larger behavioral effects, but it's also important to acknowledge the interplay of culture and socialization here. Small biological and brain differences are magnified in certain cultural contexts where traditional gender norms are strongly enforced or incentivized, for example
A big part of the article is pointing out that what differences there are in personality seem to stem largely from socialization, not fundamental biology. It's really important to remember that when looking at any sort of real sex difference in communication style, interests, etc., etc. How much of this is biology and how much stems from socialization starting at the vary youngest ages? It's hard to tease apart but different gender norms in other societies and times suggest that socializtion continues to be a huge piece.
And don't get me started on engineering. I work in A & E and have seen so many female colleagues get shunted into marketing because 'it's just a better fit', or get shunted onto the ONLY majority female group in the company even though they have a different specialization, only to have the company decide to downsize that group a few years later, as well as colleagues who hit the glass ceiling HARD because the old male principals at the firm got squigged out by having a mother in a management role (for some reason a the thought of a father in management didn't give them any pause at all). And these are all women who made it into professional engineering jobs in the first place, after running the gantlet of college professors who thought they might do better in planning, etc. We are not anywhere near a societal condition that would let us assess how much interest women & men inherently have in engineering.
Exactly!
I’m skeptical of the strong version of this claim. I’d be surprised if there weren’t at least somewhat bimodal distributions for many personality-type traits that track sex, based on more than just socialization. But it also seems clear that there is a lot of overlap. That overlap has always kept me from really grokking the idea of being trans and, even more so, of being non-binary.
If male and female traits were strongly dimorphic, this would make a lot more sense to me. In that world, if someone with XY chromosomes had overwhelmingly “female” personality or cognitive traits, it would be straightforward to say that person is really a woman. And if their traits were roughly evenly split between “male” and “female,” it would be easy to say they were really (and quite literally) non-binary.
But if we start from what seems like the correct premise—that these traits are at most weakly bimodal—then I have a hard time understanding what people even mean when they say they are trans or non-binary. Are they saying that they happen to have a lot of personality or cognitive traits more associated with the other sex? If so, that feels almost universal; most of us have some mix of traits that cut across stereotypical gender lines.
This isn’t meant as an objection to people identifying as trans or non-binary. Some people are clearly more comfortable, for whatever combination of reasons, identifying as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, or as no gender at all, and I think we should try to accommodate that where we reasonably can. I just haven’t been able to make sense of the underlying metaphysical claim. I’ve also always found it odd that the strongest supporters of trans and non-binary gender theories so often also endorse a near–blank-slate view of gender; those two positions seem to be in real tension with each other.
I think there are two very different types of view that uneasily coexist because they both are used to justify acceptance of trans identity. One view says that people have strong gender identities and that some people have gender identities that are different from the one usually associated with certain aspects of their biology, and we should be accommodating to those people living with the gender that fits their strong identity. The other view says that gender identity is no stronger than any other sort of social identity like “nerd” or “goth” or “jock”, and we should just let people live with whichever set of identities they want. I suspect that each of these views describes what’s going on with some people, but the weak identity view seems to me to get at the normative core - why not let people live whichever way they want?
That was probably a rhetorical question, but the negative answer, if anything, would be that we don’t necessarily let people live in ways that are bad for them. Even in the rather libertarian US where we now let people live even as homeless drug addicts if they wish, we at least don’t let people freely choose, say, suicide. So there’s still some object level argument that has to be made on trans identity.
Yeah, I was starting to think about that as I was writing that. I've definitely been thinking a lot lately about the "platform temperance" idea (https://maxread.substack.com/p/platform-temperance), where I want to help people protect themselves from unwanted addictions and distractions, whether it's gambling or social media or drugs. But I think in all these cases, I probably only want society to enforce things that the person has decided for themself will be bad for them. If a person decides they want to be banned from TikTok or banned from gambling or banned from living with a different gender identity, then we should enforce that for them, but if they decide the way to be allowed to waste as much time as they want on TikTok or allowed to enjoy the excitement and the losses of gambling or allowed to live with a different gender identity, then we should allow that - though to make the enforcement real, they would only be allowed to turn on this sort of allowance with a one-month waiting period or something (so that even if they give in in a moment of temptation, they still have a month to change their mind before the temptation is actually there in front of them).
I would love human nature to be such that people can reliably figure out for themselves what’s good for them, i.e. fundamentalist liberalism. Of course even in that world people aren’t free to live in a society that frees them from the need to figure all these things out for themselves. Your idea is nice even though it only helps in the easier cases, to be sure.
Where do you want to draw the line on what decisions people get to make for themselves vs not? Do we toss out cosmetic surgery? Tattooing? Unnatural hair color? Contraception?
There’s a lot of distance between “choosing homeless drug addiction” and “choosing to express trans identity” and it’s not at all obvious to me that they belong on the same list for policy purposes.
I think an important point to make here is while male and female minds are very similar, male and female bodies genuinely have strong dimorphism, and the way that society treats people based on perceived gender is also quite different. If you would like to have a woman's body and have the world treat you like a woman on sight, you can't do that by being a man with a femme personality. The world will still treat you like a man.
I think it's useful to recognize that many trans people suffer from gender dysphoria, a perception that they are the wrong sex, which can cause significant distress. (In many instances, this is similar to the more general condition of body dysmorphia.) They transition (whether socially or through surgery) in order to alleviate this distress. The philosophy comes later.
In terms of the philosophy, there are a number of possibilities, including:
1) Reject the conclusions of this article and argue for innate gender differences.
2) Accept those conclusions and embrace the socially-derived gender differences that exist.
3) Accept those conclusions and attempt to create a new category of gender that is divorced from both sex and gender stereotypes.
I think plenty of trans and cis people take each of these approaches – #3 is increasingly popular. And it's perfectly possible for a trans person to agree with this article, dislike both 2 and 3, and say "sorry, my brain is being bad, therefore I am a man, whatever that means". (This is just like people with OCD will wash their hands for the 20th time "to remove the germs" even though they understand intellectually that their hands are clean.)
The last attempted solution is awfully shaky; when OCD people act that way we give them CBT to try to help them stop!
I recommend reading part V ("The Hair Dryer Incident") here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
(Actually, I recommend reading the entire piece, because it is a fantastic analysis of the purpose of words and categorization, and everyone should read it.)
CBT is not (anything close to) a panacea. Sometimes you just have to give people the solution that works, even if it's not the solution you would like.
do you think that hasn’t been tried?
Did I say anything that would suggest anything of the kind?
Yup. I think this challenge is really hard for many of us. We want to protect and support people who are struggling but cannot understand the nature of what they describe. Coexistence seems pretty achievable but what does annoy me is the insistence that gender identity is something innate and distinct from sex without any coherent explanation of what that means nor a willingness to admit that many of these attempted narratives do undermine the premises of second wave feminism as they were presented to those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s.
The philosophical grounding of transness is incredibly absent, because people who write philosophy that aims to be clear and convincing are almost disjoint from people who write philosophy around modern gender issues. An analytic philosopher of trans identity would be very valuable; I’m not sure whether a plausible candidate already exists.
Yes, many trans people will even brandish neuroscientific studies purporting to show that trans women have womanlike brains and vice versa. It’s quite strictly inconsistent with the position, which a very similar group of people asserts in other contexts, that there’s no such thing as a womanlike brain. Now, you *can* detect sex quite accurately on a brain scan, so the latter position is clearly the weaker one in this case.
What I understand you to say is: 1. Many non-specialists believe that gender essentialism is both empirically true and silenced in the academy. 2. Actually, specialists freely debate this, and most believe the weight of the evidence is on the non-essentialist side. Reading you and others, I believe you’re probably right.
But the part that you’re not taking into account is that there have been prominent cases of academics claiming that it is a settled question to which essentialist or biologistic statements are either anti-scientific (“merchants of doubt”) or ethically wrong (“harmful”). These include the constructive firing of Carole Hooven and moralized attacks on many others. The discourse has calmed down a lot on the academic side, and most scientists were nuanced and tolerant of disagreement all along. Only a few individuals were ever victimized for good-faith essentialist beliefs. BUT, very few scientists ever spoke out loudly in defense of those individuals, or against the extreme voices raised against them. This, I believe, has done lasting damage to scientists’ credibility for a lot of thoughtful non-scientists. I’m curious what you think.
I think this is probably correct. There should have been a louder outcry about some of those “cancellations” when they happened. I also think you’re right that most scientists were pretty nuanced all along.
I don't know. Finding yourself defending an academic paper as vapid as that "Theorizing Mankeeping" paper--that's the "academic article" that this piece criticizes Jesse Singal for criticizing--should give one pause, I think.
I mean, I think if someone uses a source A to make claim B. And then source A does not actually prove claim B, that does not mean you are "defending" the entirety of source A.
This is probably a longer conversation that no one wants to have here (or ever with me, since I'm just an internet rando with a joke name), but: as I read it, the whole point of this article is to defend a blank slatist, culture-over-biology approach to understanding gendered differences. Not in an absolute sense, for sure; the author admits right up front that biology does have at least some role to play. But in the sense that the vast majority of the time (I guess?) gendered differences will have cultural rather than biological causes. And this is so obviously true (again, I guess) that an article which characterizes pure blank slatism as "radical" needs itself to be rejected. Which I think, whether the author likes it or not, does necessarily bleed into a defense of pure blank slatist papers like "Theorizing Mankeeping," since it cedes so much foundational ground to that paper's analytic framework.
"the vast majority of the time (I guess?) gendered differences will have cultural rather than biological causes." -- yes this is a correct summary of my overall point
I think it's possible to dispute a specific point about the acknowledgment of biological differences within academia without accepting all the conclusions of academic papers in this domain! I mean, if I were writing a piece arguing the opposite claim - that biological sex differences are important and under-acknowledged - that wouldn't be tantamount to me accepting all the 1890s papers in neuroscience that called women 'gorillas' because of their smaller brains.
I think it's fair to criticize her rhetorical move there, given that she does a drive-by dismissal of the entire idea of anti-gender-essentialist overreach in academia, based solely on Singal's allegedly unfair treatment of a paper she hasn't read.
In arguing his point, I’m dealing directly with Singal’s own example. He could have provided a different example of academic thinking on gender and I would have engaged with that!
He has, though? He's written a lot more than one article on this, mostly in the context of debunking the many recent papers in which social scientists try to debunk gender differences in sports to justify their political priors.
You seem to be broadening the scope of the argument being made here. He argued in his essay that academics refuse to acknowledge the reality of biological sex difference, and provided as an example a "radical claim" that biology does not explain male bonding differences. My point is that actually, the "radical claim" looks quite reasonable if you look at the evidence. There may be more absurd claims out there but I wanted to engage with the specific example he gave in the piece I was discussing in my essay.
To be clear, I'm not defending the substance of that article - I haven't read it - just the specific claim about biology vs culture that Singal pulled out and labelled as "radical."
But right after criticizing the Singal piece, and laying out some evidence for close male friend groups, you say this:
It is indeed quite likely that “biological gender differences” do not explain male bonding difficulties in industrialized societies, but rather that these are products of culture and socialization. Generally, if a factor is well-explained by biology, it’s conserved across different cultural and historical contexts and not contingent on where you’re measuring it.
In the context of your article, this sure sounds like a defense of that "mankeeping" paper. Singal criticized the paper's blank slatism as "radical;" you reject his criticism, because you think the evidence bears out blank slatism, at least in the context of male friendship. That might be a misread on my part, but I don't think it's a crazy one.
My piece is really not about the mankeeping paper. It's about the strength of the evidence for biological sex differences. Singal states that biological sex differences are a forbidden topic within academia, and cites the mankeeping paper as an example of a paper that refuses to acknowledge biology. I'm critiquing his specific argument there.
Isn't this almost literally judging a book by it's cover?
Was filled with dread seeing the article title but pleasantly surprised to see such a great essay on the anti-anti-gender essentialism moment we’re seeing! That being said, I don’t know if the comments will like this one….
The solution they have to this problem is they get to say gay as a slur again and people who don’t conform aren’t real men. (See Richard Hanania for some of the most explicit forms of this)
I feel like this exclusion happens to women too and it’s not as explicit but my wife could detail its forms.
Even though I recognize we’re not blank slates the whole thing feels like so much of a five alarm fire that it’s worth maintaining it as a polite fiction.
That’s your five alarm fire for giving up any commitment to honesty about some of the deepest facts about humanity? You know people notice when you’re lying to them about obvious facts right? And they really don’t like it?
Why would it not be a five alarm fire? The belief that there’s a right way to be a man is a belief that’s usually been followed with fists.
The return of sex determinism to polite society is really fucking scary as a man who benefits from the norms of neutrality. People are out here saying I should be fired from my job and have my foster kid taken away because of my sex. Exaggerating about how normal outliers are seems quaint by comparison.
“I’m going to intentionally lie in obvious ways to avoid people misusing power against me” is just not a strategy that has ever one time worked, and I have no idea how you can possibly imagine it would. An appropriate level of five-alarm fire for trying this kind of intentional sociological gaslighting would be more like…uh…I can’t really think of a plausible case, because as the challenges get more severe the downside risk of lying does too.
My sincerest sympathy for your challenges. But the response to people who say that, say, men shouldn’t be childcare workers is clearly that we judge people individually, not collectively, in this country, not making up lies about how men are actually basically exactly as interested in childcare and as likely to commit sexual abuses as women are. That is only going to hurt your cause.
I don’t exactly know what the difference is between judge people individually and believe a polite fiction of a blank slate.
To me these are different ways of saying the same thing. Each time you meet any individual you treat them as a blank slate and the statistical facts you know as irrelevant. You should know the facts that boys are more prone to this or that but to express it in a way that could be hurtful to An individual should be deeply taboo.
What we are now faced with is the return of individual judgment for statistical averages. Which is a five alarm fire.
The difference, obviously, is in what happens when you find yourself talking about populations of people, rather than making a decision about an individual. And, in any case, very obviously, you don’t actually always treat every individual you meet as a blank slate. If you’re a woman passing a man on a dark sidewalk, you very correctly are more worried than if he were another woman, with any more information than that he’s a man. This is fine and good (not good that men are more dangerous, but good for people to recognize this, within reason, given that it’s true! It can be *dangerous* to people if they’re actually so naive as to believe your polite fiction!): we want people to work very hard against such judgments in cases like employment and college admissions, but by no means in all life situations.
Anyway, you could argue that it’s polite to avoid talking about populations of people at all, but it’s never polite to lie on purpose about scientific fact in the middle of a scientific discussion, which is the style of this article.
The fact that you can bear to claim to think we had a period where individuals were *not* being judged based on statistical averages for their groups is truly bewildering.
I feel like you should be free to know these facts but feelings management is more important than getting to freely say them in almost all cases. I don’t resent the woman who feels threat just the way we’ve become willing to say them for no reason. It was better to lie to ourselves and not believe it.
Like you’re advocating for beatings and rape and all manner of things when you assert there are truths about men the way it’s true that lions are predators.
They’re not out here saying you should know it for some sort of fact. They’re saying it to hurt people and then going on to use gay as a slur and vice signaling and they should be stopped. Not by believing men and women are the same but by believing that you should not speak the differences just to hurt people.
Let me throw out the thought that one way to look at it is that men and women (in general) want the same things in different order of priority. If men value sex more than women and women value romance more than men, it hardly means that women are uninterested in sex or women are uninterested in romance.
There are some correct points in here but I find myself mostly unconvinced. I believe your account that male-female differences are continuous rather than taxonic variables, but seems like the wrong way to characterize differences. Outside of a few bimodal characteristics (eg number of ovaries), everything is continuous and the question is how many standard deviations they are apart, and how that effect size compares to other things (income, education, national origin, or political party are some I'd consider). Claiming that sex differences are continuous thus seems like a weak claim that can refute the admittedly very wrong ideas from the 19th century, but not much else.
You also seem very dismissive of the possibility of group effects of something like a r=0.2 difference at the individual level (a small, continuous difference). I don't know how much those would percolate up into the overall culture, but it's something I could see being significant in aggregate and would want data on before I dismiss it by recalling individual examples of care oriented men and justice oriented women.
The Hyde 2005 study that was linked is something I've seen discussed before and it was described as finding "moderate or large gender differences in (and here I’m paraphrasing very scientific-sounding constructs into more understandable terms) aggressiveness, horniness, language abilities, mechanical abilities, visuospatial skills, mechanical ability, tendermindness, assertiveness, comfort with body, various physical abilities, and computer skills." (It doesn't look like it's public so I can't see more than the abstract myself.) That's a very different vibe than what was in your piece.
Quote on the Hyde study is from:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
I should have clarified the taxonic argument a bit more in the piece. It's not _only_ saying that differences aren't bimodal, but also that they don't cluster together in the sense that you can't predict one trait very well from the existence of another trait. I responded to another comment on here about apples vs oranges - if you're trying to tell the fruits apart and you know that one has orange skin, you can be very confident that it is also high in juice. In contrast, many of the traits alleged to be very gendered don't map on to each other neatly - the correlations between spatial abilities, justice vs care orientation, and sociosexuality are quite weak, for example. This leads to the takeaway that knowing someone's gender will not give us a huge amount of predictive accuracy when it comes to assessing their level of a particular trait.
The Hyde study actually comes down quite hard in favor of "gender similarities." Here's the abstract:
The gender similarities hypothesis
Janet Shibley Hyde 1
Affiliations Expand
PMID: 16173891 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581
Abstract
The differences model, which argues that males and females are vastly different psychologically, dominates the popular media. Here, the author advances a very different view, the gender similarities hypothesis, which holds that males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. Results from a review of 46 meta-analyses support the gender similarities hypothesis. Gender differences can vary substantially in magnitude at different ages and depend on the context in which measurement occurs. Overinflated claims of gender differences carry substantial costs in areas such as the workplace and relationships.
That paper title by Jacobi goes incredibly hard, as the kids say.
As a history guy growing up in Japan, I think it is discussed the men aloofness in modern Japan is the byproduct of Meiji era norm, which is more or less influenced by Christianity and very (modern) military centric culture in that era.
And iirc, shudo (gay sex) remained more or less normalized well into Edo period - like male prostitutes were common and situations like “Shogun fucked that guy and he was promoted” def exists
And also as someone worked in Japan, I can attest it is male dominated but highly contextual and I really struggled to fit in even if I grew up there and am very conflicted averse and not direct…
This is a tricky subject. Though I think many of you are making good points, I would suggest that some of the confusion also comes from the rhetorical nature vs. nurture framing, which is actively misleading (I'm not blaming anyone here for this- it's a broader problem). I think a better framing is nature+nurture vs. individual idiosyncrasies. I agree that sex differences are often small (in my research on aggression in undergrad samples, a difference of r=0.15 was typical). I hypothesize, though, that cultures are not equally likely to push the sexes in either direction. Specifically, they seem to mostly push even further in the same direction as sex-based predispositions. Only individual variance (both genetic and environmental) which, for a smaller number pushes in the other direction, actually opposes the nature+nurture tandem. And differences often look quite different at the tails of the distribution (e.g., violent felons are likely filtered out of undergrad samples).
That's how, despite seeing sex differences in aggression of r=0.15 in undergrad samples, you also see men commit around 90% of homicides. Men also account for 90+% of accidental workplace deaths. Those are obviously huge differences in very consequential outcomes. If my nature+nurture tandem hypothesis is true, the biological differences are very important, despite being observed as statistically small in some contexts because of how nature and nurture are entangled. In a hypothetical world where woman were the ones genetically predisposed to physical aggression and risk taking, culture would have developed differently, pushing women in that direction and those 90% outcomes would flip in the other direction.
Great point. So it sounds like you're saying that biological differences are almost always _magnified_ by culture, rather than buffered or diminished by culture? So you get additive or interactive effects of biology + culture working together which make the biological differences meaningful, even when they're actually small.
I think this makes sense, although perhaps one could come up with opposing examples. So for example, let's say women might be slightly less likely than men to argue and be combative. But if, as a teenager, a woman goes to a very competitive school that emphasizes debate, perhaps she becomes more argumentative as a result of that socialization?
Thanks. Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I suspect you are right that some contexts go in the other direction. I expect it’s not so much as an ironclad rule that nature and nurture push in the same direction, so much as a strong tendency.
Great piece, Darby!
I was reading the Substack of psychologist, Dr. Todd Kashdan, a while ago and he shared a note that the only consistent finding on biological differences were that men are (on average) larger than women.
I know many people make the case that arguments such as yours support a “blank slate” theory of human nature due to arguing for the primacy of culture. I wondered if you have any thoughts on that?
Thanks!
I'm not quite a blank slate-ist. I think there are meaningful biological differences, but I also think they are often small and variable, and I think popular media tends to overstate their import.
I’m not super convinced by this argument. For one thing, it seems to be conflating the Helen Andrews piece, which is bonkers, with the general possibility that there are sex differences. And this feels weasely and straw manish to me.
I’m open to the idea that mental sex differences are minuscule, but if that’s the case, I’d like to see an engagement with ALL of the literature on the subject, à la Scott Alexander. What about Pinker? What about the claims in the book “T”? What I get instead is a reference to a single paper and then a victory lap, and whenever I see something like that, my bullshit alarm goes off.
That's a fair critique, but for the record, I did not reference a single paper - I cited these papers (all linked in the piece) which I'll pull out here so you can take a look if interested:
https://www.sas.rochester.edu/psy/people/faculty/reis_harry/assets/pdf/CarothersReis_2012.pdf
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16173891/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Zlatan-Krizan/publication/282650852_Global_Gender_Differences_Can_Be_Operationalized_and_Tested/links/562156b608ae93a5c927dee8/Global-Gender-Differences-Can-Be-Operationalized-and-Tested.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804
https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/news/2988-women-aren%27t-better-multitaskers-than-men-%E2%80%93-they%27re-just-doing-more-work#:~:text=But%20a%20new%20study%2C%20published%20today%20in,at%20either%20of%20these%20activities%20than%20men's.
What exactly is this "gender similarities hypothesis" that's compatible with 1-in-5 studied traits showing significantly bimodal distributions? It sure sounds like it's just the "gender differences hypothesis" with some added throat clearing.
Nobody sane thinks women and men are more different than we are similar. But you don't actually deny Singal's point that, in large segments of academia, acknowledging any gender differences at all is verboten. And you clearly acknowledge that many gender differences are real and significant. So I just do not get the point of this article.
I do apologize for this, but simply can't resist:
Q: Why does it take 1 million sperm to fertilize 1 egg?
A: Because not one of them will stop and ask for directions.
I think it's clear that biology plays a material role in average sex differences, but doesn't say anything about any particular individual.
On average men are taller, but there are women that are taller than men. On average men are hornier, but there are women that are hornier than men etc
And while culture certainly influences us, quite as clearly biology plays a really important role (again on average). And those differences are a LOT more than 1%