Seriously? I handle mice at work every single day. So does every other woman in my lab. We outnumber the men, too.
People who work in a lab are probably not representative of the general population…
Every difference people note could have a cultural influence. Young women now are very different here than they were when I was a lad, and so much of it is obviously the way society has changed. Girls interested in sports in the past were labelled as Tomboys and rarely had the support of their fathers. There are now incredible female athletes who have grown up involved in sports and physical activities without having to fight cultural stereotypes. And boys growing up today don’t have to measure themselves according to athletic ability anymore either. Where there are tendencies to differ between the sexes it’s a much narrower gap than before and who knows what we’ll see in the future.
Is this like the thing where women complain to their husbands, or whoever, because they “just want to share,” and the men try to offer solutions to the problem, then inexplicably get yelled at for trying to help?
Because that, like, totally never happens to me. 
Not that mice are furry people, but when I run an experiment, I almost exclusively use female mice unless there is a compelling reason to use males (like, I’m looking at what happens in the testicles, for instance). We can house five female mice to every cage. A decent sized study of 100 mice is 20 cages. If I try to house five male mice to a cage, I end up with four injured mice. If I remove the trouble making mouse (the uninjured one), I end up with three injured mice as a new mouse steps up his game. This happens pretty much every time with male mice, and pretty much never with female mice. Any male mouse study requires individual cages.
Male mice are definitely more violent than female mice.
Based off studies I’ve seen over the years:
Paraphilias are a male phenomenon.
Men are aggressive risk takers. They love to argue, fight, gamble, take drugs, crash cars, kill others, kill themselves, rape, go to war, perform crazy stunts, go on an adventure in a strange town, and so on.
For IQ, women are more clustered around the average. Geniuses and those with very low IQs are more likely to be male.
Sexually frustrated women rarely turn into Islamic terrorists, white supremacists, or mass shooters.
Certain sorts of mental and personality disorders are more common in one sex than the other.
I can’t remember the exact phenomenon, but I remember an interesting one where it turned out in some situations women punish transgressors much more harshly than men. Anyone know what I’m thinking of?
**
Based off my fallible life experience:**
Men are libertarians, women are socialists. Not literally, but in their outlook on life.
Men struggle to empathize with women. Instead, they ask how they would feel if someone was their wife, sister, or daughter.
Men are obsessed with sex to a comical and sometimes terrifying degree. A society where male desire was expressed like women’s would seem puritan in comparison to the West’s open debauchery. Porn, prostitution, strip clubs, sex traffickers, and media that objectify women are all aimed at pleasing men. Women don’t generally feel up men on subway cars or hide in bushes looking through windows and all the other endless list of crap that men do to women.
Women regularly gush about meals they’ve had at some restaurant, often with them saying something like, “it was SOOOO good, oh my GOD!” and making vaguely sexual noises. I’ve never had a conservation like this with a man.
Men love slapstick humor. Women don’t generally like The Three Stooges or violent cartoons. Men relish seeing low status characters punished for their ineptitude. Women feel sorry for them.
Men are better at objectively judging a person’s physical characteristics. Women constantly put on “power/status” goggles.
Men are, for lack of a better term, more autistic. They like tinkering and understanding minute details of systems. Women prefer to look at the big picture.
Men talk down to women and constantly interrupt and don’t take them seriously, even so called feminist men. This is often less overt but expressed through body language and tone of voice. Even if the woman is an experienced professional. Women basically have to be 3x better than normal to command any sort of genuine respect.
Men become obsessed with something and focus their lives on it. If someone is performing an activity that blows your mind it’s probably a man who’s been doing it since he was eight.
Women hold grudges forever, especially against other women. Guys forgive and forget. To make a man hate you like a woman does you have to kill his dog or something.
Men are better at compartmentalizing. If they have a crappy day at work they can enjoy other activities. They can hate someone and still want to have sex with them. There’s little connection between the brain and the penis. For women, emotional attachment and sex have a strong connection.
Women look to marry up or at least make a lateral move. Men don’t care about that stuff as much.
Women seem like easier marks for scam artists, cults, and salesmen. This may be a cultural artifact of being taught to go along to get along, don’t make waves, etc.
Women are into following the rules, following the check list, standard protocol. Men are more likely to wing it. Either approach has their advantages and disadvantages.
I literally never thought about this before, but while the majority of women I know do not freak out around rodents, I do not know any men who do, and a know a few women who have. My French teacher in high school climbed on a chair when a mouse ran through our room.
My cats over the years have left me dead rodents, and half-rodents. I don’t freak out. I did freak out once, when I was pregnant, and it’s because intellectually I know that rodents carry toxoplasmosis, a parasite very dangerous to human fetuses. Now, I’ve had cats all my life, and was probably exposed a long time ago, meaning another exposure wouldn’t affect the fetus.
HOWEVER, it is remotely possible that women who naturally avoid rodents were more successful at having healthy offspring, not just because of toxoplasmosis, but other parasites they carry, and the fact that you really want to keep rodents away from small infants, because a rodent bite can be deadly to a small infant (it’s a size ratio thing). Obviously, not a terribly strong association, because it’s not that prevalent, but I can see it having some evolutionary basis. I’m not married to the idea-- I’d go either way with it-- like I said, it just now popped into my head.
I could happily live there, were it not for the mosquitos. I currently sell pest control, but I secretly side with the mice because they eat roaches. And I personally like them and only encourage them to go upstairs, where they will meet the Little Girls, when there are too many.
Okay, not quite. But I prefer the males because that means I only have one living under my old computer desk, tapping out his lovelorn tattoo, and I don’t have to kill anybody. ATM, he’s sharpening his teeth on the metal legs of my endtable.
My female humans enjoy how our horrid dogs dispatch any rodent that crosses their path. They are vicious. The humans and the dogs. None of them eat their prey; they just like to kill. :eek:
Eta: No, I do not sleep soundly. Why do you ask?
A history professor addressed this in a class at my alma mater: *“If two boys are fighting, they’ll be best friends the next day, but if two girls are fighting, then they’ll still be hating each other’s guts 20 years later.” *
My mother tells me whatever because “she just needs to tell someone” but when we try to tell her whatever, she tries to solve it. I think she’s not identical twins. I’ve met quite a few other people who did the same, both male and female.
I want to know how come RivkaChaya went to Mother Frauca’s class (seriously, that scene I mentioned before took place in the 10th grade French class!)
And I like marshmallow’s lists. Re. falling more for scammers, to me it seems as if, same as which sales tactics will work best varies by culture and target group, it happens the same with cons. The men I’ve known who would fall for “please help me” scams, genuinely trying to help that person rather than trying to take advantage of them, were also men who in other things were very get-along and followed instructions exactly as given. The men who made a point of “I am so ma-chow, I never do what I’m told exactly the way I’m told”… they just need different tactics.