Do male personalities vary more than female personalities?

[Mijin]

@Hector_St_Clare

Individuals can improve their tricep strength through practice as well. Does that mean that the bench press isn’t an accurte test of upper body strength?

Is obviously a very glib response. The size of a guy’s tricep is largely a function of how much he’s worked out. Intelligence is supposed to be – or at least supposed to be for the conclusions many want to make – essentially fixed. You can’t at the same time say IQ test results tell us innate differences between populations and at the same time handwave that those differences are far from static by saying IQ is like a tricep.

Anyway, we know that 1) for a great many cognitive and personality traits, a very rough rule of thumb is that about 30-70% of variation is due to genetic variation, and 2) within genders, prenatal androgen exposure influences a wide variety of personality traits, so the combination of those two things is enough to convince me that most of the male vs. female personality differences we observe are innate, rather than culturally determined.

How do “we” know that?

[md2000]

@Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus

According to the Wiki article, women have a much greater incidence of personality disorders, though I suspect, that given traditional gender roles and expectations, males with such disorders may suffer the more. Or superficially so, at least.

That was the opposite of my question. When you read about someone suffering from, say, schizophrenia - most of the time it is a man. Is that because female sufferers are less common, or that the actions they take while suffering are less wild?

[Nava]

Schizophrenia isn’t considered a personality disorder, therefore stats about personality disorders do not include it. Different branches of psychiatry.

[Richard_Parker]

Myers-Briggs is no longer regarded as validly measuring the things it claims to measure or even reliably measuring them in the same person. So evidence based on Myers-Briggs is highly suspect.

[md2000]

Well, Freud and the like got their start treating “hysteria”. I have to wonder how meaningful any personality disorder diagnosis would be, considering it’s a list compiled by people paid to treat personality disorders.

[LC_Strawhouse]

@Maggie_the_Ocelot

Huh. Since we’re speaking in generalities, I tend to think of menfolk as more bland, with less individual variation in personality, than womenfolk. I think this is mostly because men are taught to repress the full range of their emotions and interests, and the ones that they’re traditionally “allowed” to have aren’t interesting to me, so they often seem monolithic and boring.

This recording artist agrees with you