I have noticed a couple of books and websites claiming that there is such a
thing as a “male brain” and a “female brain”.
Supposedly, the male brain is better at systemizing, navigation, mechanical
skill, mathematics, narrowly focusing on one task, and being competitive.
The female brain is said to be good at empathizing, verbal/language skills,
thinking about more than one thing at a time, and cooperating.
What differences, if any, do you notice between men and women in general?
If so, do you think that some women think like men, and vice-versa? I would
greatly appreciate a response.
A few years ago I read a really interesting book called Brain Sex that discusses the supposed differences between the sexes.
I don’t recall the specifics of the conclusions of the book.
If there are women who think like men and men who think like women, I would think that it would be only in a transgendered way – males born in female bodies and females born in male bodies.
If the information you posted were correct, a highly competitive female with an obsession for mechanical engineering would not be “thinking like a man.” She would just not fit under the generality.
And where would the world be without an empathizing Gandhi? Or without the poetry of Yeats, Whitman, Neruda and Tagore?
My most nurturing parent was my father. Is that really so unusual?
There are some general physiological differences. I don’t recall the details, but one is more connections between certain parts of the brain in females.
I do believe that men and women (or, boys and girls) differ, but that the differences are average tendencies, not all-or-nothing distinctions (the way that men are taller than women on the average, but you can find some very tall women and some very short men).
Hey, it’s good that women think differently than men.
If women thought like men, we’d all still be living in the stone ages because we’d all be too busy fucking all the time to get anything done.
So thanks Ladies!
Here’s a recent thread on whether emotional, mental or behavioural differences between genders are inherent or cultural. There’s a link there to an article on the brain structure differences that have been mentioned here.
Myself, I think that culture starts influencing us so early that it is difficult bordering on impossible to determine which, if any, of those differences are inherent. (In the other thread there were some claims of gender differences in infant behaviour which would, if true, mean I have to rethink my stance, but I’m still waiting for cites.)
Bunch of disclaimers:
I think these differences are based in culture, not biology.
They are based on what I, personally have noticed, and are thus subjective and probably/certainly influenced by my personal bias and the people I know.
I do not think that all, or neccessarily even most, women/men act/think/feel this way.
Men are more likely to have an unrealistically high self confidence, women unrealisticially low. If a man says “I’m certain I can do (whatever)” and a woman says “I might perhaps be able to do (whatever)”, odds are they are equally likely to succeed at (whatever).
Women are more likely than men to feel that they should be dieting. If you offer a man and a woman a chocolate, the woman is more likely to make some sort of “I really shouldn’t eat this” noises. The man is more likely to emulate Yoda ("Eat, or eat not. There is no “I really shouldn’t, but…” ")
I play live roleplaying occasionally (bunch of people dressing up in costumes and playing “let’s pretend”), and women seem to be less interested than men in playing soldiers/guards/fighters. I haven’t noticed any clear gender differences in other kinds of roles, like leaders, mystic magicians, pretty/flirting dilletantes, salt-of-the-earth peasants etc.
thinking *
There’s probably lots more, but those are the ones at the top of my head. Personally, I think I fit the first stereotype, but not the second and third.
Yes, absolutely. No doubt about it. Except I wouldn’t use the “like men” phrase. The way I see it, some ways of thinking/feeling/acting are more ususal among men, and some are more usual among women, but there’s nothing in the emotional/mental/behavioural area that’s restricted to only women, or only men. And obviously, what is typical male/female behaviour will vary between different cultures.
Females have totally different obstacles to overcome biologically therefore, we can assume that they have to employ different strategies in life to overcome them, therefore certain attitudes, behavior patters, reasoning levels, etc…all that mental stuff…would have been selected for in nature. So I think it’s almost definite that women and men differ mentally. On a very related note, I read a book recently called the Evolution of Desire. It was an incredible read and it mentions and elaborates on some vast differences between men and women. The most basic is that men’s main biological need is for sexual availability from females. Females main biological needs are access to resources and protection. These needs put huge selective pressures on the other sex. There were many interesting topics in the book to elaborate on this basic premise, but one of the most interesting is the evolution of coalitions or groups amongst males. Whereas females never evolved the sophisticated coalition forming. Men who form bonds with other men to share in resource gathering and protection of one another and one anothers assets have a substantial advantage over antisocial men or men who don’t form these bonds with other men. The men who pool their resources and aid in protection have access to more women and are less likely to have that access to those women be taken away by another man. Men who don’t do this, or are greedy, deceitful to other men, or generally “bad friends” tended to get less quality and quantity of sexual access due to dying to another coalition, dying to people within their coalition, or not being able to keep up with the joneses in terms of resource providing and protection. To keep it going, they conclude that much of the resource control of the world by men is a product of this male coalition forming. Which is a product of trying to compete for sexual access to women. Which is a product of women wanting security and protection. This led to selection for risk taking behaviors in the acquiring of resources, innovation and intelligence, and confidence. For females, they needed to be more attuned to males intentions, be better communicators to ensure their needs were expressed properly, and be more conservative.
All this is a big cycle. Say I have a nomadic group with 7 strong men which would probably have been pretty big for early man. We come across a smaller tribe with only 3 strong men…but they have 4 young women, guess the outcome. Either they are able to barter with us and offer to be absorbed into the coalition or be killed and their women taken. Same scenario but instead of having women, they are camping in an area with an abundance of game…same outcome…And so on all through history. All war, stryfe, peace, progress, trade, and pretty much everything can be put in these terms (at least for early man). Today we are just living in the aftermath of it all (and probably to a large extent still involved in it).
Regarding the differences in grey matter and white matter, does anyone know whether those are present at birth or not until adulthood? (I ask because the brain seems to be pretty good at adapting and it seems plausible that structural differences could arise over time.)
I’ve heard that the bell-curve of intelligence (as measured by IQ??) for women is slightly to the right of that for men, and that more men fall on the extreme ends of the bell-curve than women. That means that the average woman you meet is probably more intelligent than the average man, but that there are statistically more male geniuses and morons than women. Don’t know if that’s true, though.
1Ninja, did that book explain why prehistoric women wouldn’t also need “sophisticated coalition forming”? It seems to me that you might as well say “Women who form bonds with other women to share in resource gathering and protection of one another and one anothers assets have a substantial advantage over antisocial women or women who don’t form these bonds with other women.” Or just replace “men”/“women” with “people” and be done with it. Do you know of any known hunter/gatherer-societies, or for that matter primate species, where women cooperate significantly less with other individuals than men do?
I’ve heard other, somewhat more plausible ideas about different evolutionary pressure on men and women, but the huge gaping hole in these hypotheses is that they treat men and women as separate species who evolve independently of each other. Let’s suppose that in most prehistoric societies, men did most of the hunting and women most of the gathering. Let’s say that a man who was good at single-minded concentration would be a good hunter, would bring back a lot of food, get high status, get laid with the women of his choice, make sure his children didn’t starve to death – and thus his genes would get a better chance of dominating the future gene pool. While a woman who was good at noticing the juicy fat larvae while looking for berries, and remembering that this kind of mushroom is good, while that one is deadly, would bring back a lot of food, get high status, get laid with the men of her choice, make sure her children didn’t starve to death – and thus her genes would get a better chance of dominating the future gene pool. But all their children would have an equal chance of inheriting their parents’ traits. Both sons and daughters would be equally likely to inherit dad’s talent for single-minded concentration, and/or mom’s talent for multitasking and eye for detail.
If you want to explain gender differences with evolutionary pressure in prehistoric times, you need some mechanism which makes daughters more likely to inherit from their mothers, and sons from their fathers. You need to find that genes for whatever trait you’re looking at are linked specifically to having a Y-chromosome or to having two X-chromosomes. That might be possible for all I know, I’m no geneticist, and would be interested in hearing from those who know more about this. But that’s where you need to start – in the chromosomes, not out in the bush looking at our forefathers and foremothers as if they were two different species.
Of course, when this subject comes up the old idea of men as hunters and women as gatherers comes up. Last spring, I took a course to become a volunteer naturalist. It was a class of 10 which consisted of 8 women and 2 men. The other man was taking it with his wife. There were 10 day classes and each had several hours in the field. For each field trip we were to find 20 new species of plant. We men would tag along and let the women find the plants and when we had our 20 plants we’d lose interest (probably that happened sooner). The women however would not quit until time was completely up. Now I know this is not scientific and perhaps our actions were influenced by our upbringing, but it sure fit the mold. Also before the first class the main instructor said she was glad I had decided to take the course, since such classes seemed to be dominated by women.
I will add that as to the question of bonding, the women were very good at bonding with each other, but in a different manner than men would. For instance, there was no “grab assing”, which is a natural part of the way men bond. You may feel free to say that this is to the women’s credit.
On C-span’s Book TV there was a professor from Virginia that said that the difference between men and women varied. Some women have more male qualities than others and some men have more female qualities than other men. He claimed this had to do with the amount of testestarone a female had compared to other females and the amount males had compared to other males.
I have no idea how he felt about those that “are trapped in the wrong body”.
While there is certainly something underneath there somewhere (or else transgendered folks would report a very different experience) I think most of our ideas of male a femaleness are cultural.
For example, in our culture women are considered to be fairly disinterested in sex and marriage is considered a way to domestic the male’s infinite sex drive. But it plenty of other cultures- like many Muslim cultures- the woman is considered to have an infinite sex drive (women can, after all, have orgasms all day long, whereas a man has a limit somewhere) and marriage is considered a way for males to domesticate the “wild” females.
Although gender dawinism/biological determinism seems like a neat and tidy explaination for everything in modern culture, it is really no more than a few explainations made up to fit an existing condition- if conditions were different (say, men were considered to be more monogomous) we’d simply get a different set of explainations.
And “evidence” from “primitive” socities is not really all that useful. For example, your average person would say that menstral seclusion is a way that men assert power blah blah blah. But in actually menstral seclusion is usually done because the woman is thought to have such a huge amount of mojo and power during that time that it’d disrupt everyday life. And we never see menstral tents or huts being portrayed as a place that men are exluded from- only as a place that women are banished to.
The point is that we have such huge cultural blinders on when it comes to getting down to what it really means to be a man or a woman that we can’t really make many meaningful conclusions. Most of our ideas come from Victorian England, where industrialization broke up the usually fairly evenly divided gender roles on farms.
A few comments : In chimps, females do not cooperate or form alliances as much as the males; they need to spread out, as they are competing with gorllas for edible plants; the gorllas stomp any large groups of chimps they see competing with them. In bonobos, however, females cooperate and ally at least as much as males, and they are matriacrhal. Coincidence ? I think not.
Besides, human females simply don’t form alliances as naturally as males. Where are the female street gangs, for example ? Why aren’t rapists mobbed by women and beaten or killed, like bonobos do ? Women can ally, but I believe it is a learned tactic; not instinctive.
Second, to a large degree, males and females do evolve seperately. Women have 2 X and no Y chromosomes, a major conflict right there. In fact, that’s believed to be why the Y is small; it’s outnumbered, and constantly under pressure from the 3 ( 2 maternal, 1 paternal ) X’s. We live in seperation social/biological environments, which produces different pressures.
Third, genes are expressed differently,depending on the gender of the parent. Different body parts receive their inheritance from different genders. The muscles are largely male derived; the emotional areas of the brain female, the intellectual male, and so forth. This is because of the difference investment levels in offspring.
A male in genetically invested in a particular child; he can’t know that woman will ever produce another for him. Therefore, his contributions are more “egotistical”; they favor the individual child, like muscles and intelligence.
Females of course “know” that all of their children will be theirs; they have more interest in seeing all of them survive. Their genetic contribution is therefore more social, like emotions and social skills.
This last is a good example of what I mean. Some women are born with only one X chromosome. The effects depend if it’s a maternal or paternal chromosome. If she gets it from Dad, her social skills are inferior; about the same level as boys. If it’s from Mom, she has the same level as any other woman.
Reminds me of a line from Cowboy Bebop :
Man : “Women find betrayal easy, but men live by an iron code of honor.”
Woman, sneeringly : “Oh, please ! You can’t really believe that, can you ?”
Man : “I’m trying real hard.”
I was recently thumbing through a book at B&N that had a lot to say about how men and women were organized differently on a brain-scan level, how much brain power was assigned to certain tasks, and how each performed on certain tests.
I think the book was called Why Men Don’t Ask for Directions and Why Women Can’t Read Maps. Or maybe the other way around. I don’t remember who it was by, except that it was a man-woman author team.
It seemed to suggest that a woman had superior hearing, superior peripheral vision, and more of her brain was naturally devoted to language processing than a man’s, though she had a smaller vocabulary center than he. The men rated highly on 3-D auditory placement: they were far more accurate, when hearing a sound, at being able to place precisely where they heard it from; and a very large part of the man’s brain was devoted to spatial processing and 3-D compositing.
I’ll have to try to get a copy of the book now. I’m curious what else it had to say.