In modern times, of course, there are laudable efforts to broadly define the genders, and so even basic biological characteristics aren’t necessarily distinct: I mean, it’s plain that you don’t need a penis to be a man (an old war veteran with a battle wound doesn’t stop being male), and the ability to deliver a baby isn’t intrinsic to womanhood (many women aren’t fertile, for various reasons). Is there any true biological determinant?
And then there’s behavior. Decades ago, there would have been consensus about certain traits or behaviors which, today, we reject: I.e. women can be athletic, or leaders, or courageous; and men can rear children, cook meals, and nurse people back to health.
Yet, the concept of masculine and feminine has persisted across cultures and across the years: so is there something intrinsic to each gender that we can identify, even if it’s just a propensity towards certain things?
The most concrete thing I can identify is that men and women have hormone differences, and that’s the best way to account for any other distinctions that arise. Men have more testosterone, so they tend towards being more muscular and more aggressive. Women have more estrogen so they tend towards being softer and more cooperative.
But that strikes me as too simple, and a bit naive. Men and women overlap on these traits as well.
Yet people can collectively distinguish between the genders with relative ease. So what, exactly, are the differences between men and women?
There are a very large number of traits that vary within the human population (or, for that matter, within the population of any species). The values of each of these traits, then, can be plotted in an n-dimensional space, where every individual occupies some position in that space according to their value for each varying trait. Plot the entire population of all humans in such a space, and you’ll get a cloud of points. That cloud is not spherical; it tends to be longer among some directions than others, due to some traits correlating with others. A principle axes analysis can point out which traits are correlated with others.
Sex is the name we give to one of the particularly high-ranking axes in this space. That is to say, there are a very large number of traits which are correlated in such a way that most people are close to one or another sub-clump in the space. The direction between those two sub-clumps is the gender axis. For instance, the people who are labeled “male” tend to have high testosterone, low estrogen, a penis, testicles, XY chromosomes, facial hair, higher height, higher strength, especially upper body strength, low-pitched voices, small breasts, etc., while the people who are labeled “female” tend to have the opposites of those traits. This does not mean that all men conform exactly to the standard of “male” (it’s a fuzzy cloud, after all), but most people are nonetheless significantly closer to one standard than to another.
You (and anyone else asking this kind of question) should specify whether you’re asking about SEX or GENDER. Because terms like “men” and “women” (and “male” and “female”) are not used the same way by everyone who is part of the discussion.
Me, I tend to use “male” and “female” to refer to physiological anatomy, and “man” “woman” “boy” “girl” and also “feminine” and “masculine” to refer to gender, which by definition, is social. Except to people who don’t regard gender as social. (As originally coined, though, that’s exactly what “gender” means: “the social obverse of sex”, the set of beliefs and associations connected to the sexes).
The difference between the genders “man” and “woman” are (again by definition) whatever people hold them to be. It’s what we believe about the differences between the sexes. Not just individually but in the aggregate, which means that you could be a person who thinks there’s effectively no difference between the sexes except for their plumbing, but that you still exist in a gendered society and are aware of those expectations and beliefs, and that how other folks think of such things DOES still affect you.
The difference between the sexes “male” and “female” are broadly the differences between what the XX genotype conjures up and what the XY genotype leads to, but that too is a generalization, as intersex people do exist.
There’s an enormous grey area where we do not know which differences are purely sex (i.e., hardwired) and which are gender (i.e., cultural and could be configured differently if culture were different). We CAN’T know because we don’t get to see things in a social vaccuum.
Within homo sapiens, as a rough rule of thumb, men are better athletes and women are more pro-social.
Pro-social = acting in ways that are beneficial to others and beneficial to society as a whole.
Here is an article that lists all the ways women are more pro-social than men. Women donate more money to charity, they are more likely to take care of a sick family member, they feel more empathy, they are less likely to commit violent crimes, less likely to abandon their kids, less likely to have mental illnesses that affect empathy like NPD and ASPD, etc.
Men are better athletes. For one thing men have a larger body mass, meaning more skeletal muscle. But on top of that, men have more skeletal muscle per pound of bodyweight than women. A 160 pound man has more skeletal muscle than a 160 pound woman. But men are generally about 20% heavier than women too. Men have a higher VO2 max than women.
Then you have things like the variability hypothesis, that state that because eggs are more valuable to the survival of the species than sperm, that evolution takes more risk with male biology since you need virtually all women to mate to keep the species surviving, but you only need some of the men to mate. As a result men, are more likely to be at both the top and bottom ends of the bell curve for various traits. However I have no idea how much evidence there is for this, and its a controversial opinion.
In the discussions of statistics we have seen in this thread, I would like to make a case against stereotypes. And that may be a problem with the thread question as framed, because it only leads me to ask “which men and which women?”
Quoted because I don’t want this thought to get lost among all the statistics and analysis.
Perhaps not universally true, but its generally true. World records for men are generally better than world records for women across a wide range of athletic events. The article mentions that.
Øyvind Sandbakk, a professor of sports science at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the director of the Norwegian School of Elite Sports (NTG), has found together with colleagues that the gaps in the average performance between elite female and male athletes have tended to plateau at around 8–12% difference in world-record results in favour of men. The gap can be significantly smaller for ultra-endurance swimming and larger for sports involving substantial upper-body strength, the study found.
Also the article in question spends a lot of time discussing Penny Lee Dean who swam across the english channel. But world records for men swimming across the english channel are better than records for women. Penny Lee Dean swam the channel in 7:40. The current world record by a woman is 7:25 and the current world record for a man is 6:45
Unrelated, but another difference (again, theres both biological and cultural factors) is men score higher on social dominance orientation.
In my view men are better athletes for the simple reason that usually something is only called a “sport” if it’s something mostly men are interested in. It’s a specific example of a general trend of men being “superior” because the standards chosen to judge people are things that men just happen to be good at; like how strength and running speed usually make the cut but not lifespan, dexterity, flexibility or immune response.
So the result is that it’s not how well people perform that’s being judged, but how much like men they are; and it’s hardly a surprise than men are better at being men than women are.
Plenty, yes. It’s just not a neat line, which satisfies nobody since humans like their neat lines and categories.
As I see it this is another version of the old “lumpers versus splitters” debate, complicated by the fact that the label is emotionally important to people on one side, and some virulently bigoted politics on the other.
But yes, there’s definitely a “standard female model” and “standard male model” of human biology and psychology, even if many individual people don’t perfectly fit .
You can make that argument. But when it comes to physical prowess, men do have advantages.
Men have more skeletal muscle, more hemoglobin, a higher VO2 max, larger lung capacity, larger hearts, longer running strides, etc.
In sports that do not require any of that, men probably do not have much of an advantage. But most athletic activities do require those things.
As you mentioned, I believe women have stronger immune systems (and thats partly why they get more autoimmune diseases). If having a strong immune system was a sport, women would win. But yes, in sports that require flexibility like certain fields of gymnastics, women seem to do better.
Because if they don’t, then they probably don’t get called a sport. Because in practice the primary meaning of the term “sport” has historically been “things men like to compete in”. It’s about labeling.
Right. Any discussion like this has to spend a tremendous amount of time trying to separate what is culture from what is genetics. And then another load of time separating what is culture that has derived from genetics from what are true physiological differences. Woman, for most of history, were the sex that bore children because they had, generally, the organs that allowed for it. Childbearing and breastfeeding overwhelmingly created culture. Other physical differences, involving size and strength, were the next most important determiner of culture.
Once culture set up various markers for traits of males and females, digging beneath for behaviors, attitudes, or competencies were all biased by the assumptions that got dragged along. Most of those doing the digging down to today have been men because of these cultural assumptions. We’re just being to untangle the cultural components. The mountains of sexism that infest all modern cultures can’t be overturned rapidly, and many people don’t want to hear that culture is a factor at all and don’t want to hear from women trying to straighten them out.
In the vast majority of cultures, men have been the ones to fight in wars. Different cultures didn’t all independently sit down and use their frontal cortexes to consciously decide men should go to war. What most likely happened is because female sex cells are more valuable to the survival of the species than male sex cells, that men would be the ones who fight wars since men are more disposable.
So people may say men are also sent to war because of the attributes I listed above. More skeletal muscle, higher VO2 max, lower levels of empathy, etc make them better soldiers. But those traits are probably an evolutionary byproduct of the fact that male sex cells are less valuable than female sex cells. A society with 100 women and 10 men can survive fine. A society with 100 men and 10 women will descend into anarchy and probably go extinct.
Then these biological underpinnings create a culture that encourages men to fall into the role society has prescribed for them.
biology and culture interplay in various ways.
FWIW I remember taking a gender studies class in college. They had a questionnaire that listed traits that were both masculine and feminine. When women took the test, they had scores all over the place (the test ranked in 5 categories from most feminine to most masculine). Women were in all 5 categories ranging from most masculine to most feminine, the men only fell into the most masculine 3 categories. The teacher pointed out that that always happens when that test is given. This was decades ago, maybe its different now since culture doesn’t constrain men to gender roles as much anymore.
Many years ago I attended a speech given by a doctor from the University of Chicago who was studying if there was a difference between women and men’s brains or if we are all basically the same brain but in a body of one gender or another.
Her conclusion was women and men are actually wired differently. Her method was studying people with traumatic brain injuries and finding people of both genders who had the same damage done to their brain. She found that women and men differed in the disability that came from the same brain injury.
How different is different? She was still working on that (obviously there are a lot of similarities too).
Yes. Men and women differ in as much as an order of magnitude in how much grey and white matter their brains use, with women’s brains using a much more distributed processing architecture. These days brain scans can monitor a brain in operation and see that directly and yes, it’s why brain trauma affects men and women differently.
It’s one reason why I’ve come to the conclusion that our conscious minds aren’t as important as we like to think. At least on the conscious level men and women appear to think much alike, and given how differently our brains operate that seems to imply that most of what our brains are actually doing isn’t reflected in the conscious mind at all.
I’ve come to agree with the hypothesis that the main purpose our conscious minds serve is as essentially a user interface for other people; a greatly simplified and standardized false front that other people can easily understand because most of our actual complexity and differences are hidden. Which among other things makes men and women appear to be much, much more similar than we actually are.
It appears to be somewhat of a grey (heh) area, but studies have suggested that the Corpus calossum, the nerve tract that connects the hemispheres of the brain, is typically larger and/or more efficient in females than in males. This may be a factor in the different responses to TBI.
(I have this far-less-than-half-baked theory that this could account for what is — or at least used to be — called “feminine intuition.” The idea is that females use the same cognitive processes as males, but use them so efficiently that they aren’t aware of them.)
It’s not really that eggs are more valuable to the survival of the species than sperm, it’s that they require more investment from the parent producing them, and this difference is even more exaggerated in mammals where the female must spend a fixed amount of time gestating the babies, and then feeding and caring for them after birth. This lopsided investment means female mammals can almost always find a mate and reproduce, and they get little benefit from finding multiple partners, so a low-risk strategy makes sense. Meanwhile male ones can easily end up not reproducing at all, and have the possibility of a bigger pay-off if successful, by finding multiple mates - so a higher-varience, higher-risk strategy makes sense.
AFAIK all the ‘built in’ differences between the sexes are the result of this root one.
ETA: It’s important to remember evolution does not care about the benefit to the species, but to the individual and the genes within them.
There are no hard and fast differences between men and women, just tendencies and statistical clusters. Leaving aside trans- vs. cis-men and women, there are women with XY chromosomes, for example (women with androgen insensitivity syndrome).
People like sharp categories, but nature doesn’t care about what people like.
So, OP, are you looking for general areas where men and women differ on average? Because I don’t know if you’ll find any strict ordering where all men are different from all women.
The average differences seem pretty obvious to me. For example, women wear dresses more often than men. Men tend to be taller. Women tend to have longer hair. Men go bald more often. And so on and so on. Is that what you’re after here?