
New approaches shed light on the magnitude of sex differences in personality - oli5679
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-sex-differences-in-personality-seriously/
======
dang
All: please focus on the specific information in the article and steer clear
of the ideological black holes in the neighborhood.

We've had enough generic flamewars. The enduring goal is curious conversation.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
datashow
One of the most important sentences in this article is "sex differences in
behavior are so pervasive in nearly every other species. It's just not
plausible that somehow male and female psychology evolved to be identical
despite the physiological differences and different reproductive roles across
human evolutionary history."

The point is, we not only have data of sex differences, we do have an
explanation for why those differences exist.

There is comprehensive book about this: Male, Female: The Evolution of Human
Sex Differences [https://www.amazon.com/Male-Female-Evolution-Differences-
Sec...](https://www.amazon.com/Male-Female-Evolution-Differences-Second-
ebook/dp/B00CD3O3BE/)

~~~
starpilot
When Julia Galef hosted a talk on gender-based brain differences, she and the
(female) guest scientist explicitly stated their Bayesian prior belief, _male
and female brains are different_ , for this reason. I can't believe how
political correctness and feminism have normalized a nigh-miraculous
coincidence, that male brain == female brain, while male body ≠ female body,
against the entire backdrop of evolutionary biology. It makes no sense.

~~~
MyHypatia
>> It makes no sense.

I think it makes a lot of sense. Of course there are differences between men
and women. This has been used to deny women entrance to universities, to take
out loans, to own property, vote, participate in politics, make laws, start
companies, become scientists and doctors, run marathons, and make many
substantial decisions about their lives. If these differences weren't
historically used as justification to deny people the ability to have control
over their lives, then yes it would be easier to talk about them. Given the
reality of how "focusing on differences" turns out for certain groups, it
makes sense why people push for a more complete conversation than just Male !=
Female.

I have never spoken to a single person who flat out denies that biological
differences and preferences exist between men and women. I think it is largely
an uncharitable summary of the view that "Men and women aren't as different as
society imposes through socialization." I don't think that most feminists
claim that men and women have no differences. I also don't think it is
politically incorrect to acknowledge that men and women are different and may
have different preferences, as long as it is not used in the context to
dismiss valid concerns about how women and men are treated socially,
politically, and economically.

~~~
username90
> I also don't think it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that men and
> women are different and may have different preferences, as long as it is not
> used in the context to dismiss valid concerns about how women and men are
> treated socially, politically, and economically.

Damore argued exactly for this but it still led to a shitstorm which
ultimately got him fired. This proves that these things are still extremely
politically incorrect.

~~~
ScottBurson
Ah, but I think Damore _did_ dismiss those valid concerns. Not explicitly, as
far as I recall, but implicitly, in choosing to feel victimized _as a man_ by
Google's personnel practices. Someone who had made a sincere effort to
understand how women are treated in tech (and indeed, in business generally)
would, I daresay, not have written as he did.

~~~
zozbot234
Damore didn't feel victimized by Google's personnel practices until _after_
those "practices" involved him being fired from Google. He argued that
policies that were purportedly intended to increase "fairness" in hiring were
in fact markedly unfair, ineffective at their presumed goal and reflective of
a growing political polarization within Google itself that was worrisome on
its own. It's quite common to express concerns about fairness and related
issues without feeling victimized personally.

------
jeffdavis
We need boldness when studying science but humility when applying it.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It can lead to prejudice or worse.
But the solution is not less knowledge, the solution is greater humility in
applying it.

So let's keep learning, but not let the latest findings justify things we know
are really wrong. As we learn yet more, it will add nuance and eventually
vindicate what we knew was right all along: respect people as individuals.

~~~
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
Just out of curiosity, what do you believe the applications are as presented
in the research?

~~~
rstuart4133
I don't know if it an application or not, but I've tried to use stuff I've
learnt from similar studies to attract more females to computing. It's a
purely selfish thing - I like working in mixed teams. It can be very difficult
to get a mixed small team when only 1 in 5 people are female.

One of the things you rapidly conclude is the things that SJW's tend to foam
at the mouth about things that probably don't matter. In particular the
general assumption women avoid male dominated occupations because they like
working with men is just as wrong as saying you don't find in men in child
care professions because they don't like working with women. Unfortunately
they don't like you saying that.

Worse, when you say the differences are real, and the best way to attract
women is probably to give them roles they like doing, they go ballistic as
your suggestions tend to undermine whatever justification they have for their
crusade. An example of such a proposal is since women tend to like working
with other people, we do have tasks that tend to focus on working with people
like help desks and finding business requirements and doing the design work is
a good idea. (But I admit that idea is just a wild guess from a man, and
really we need women to prod us in the right direction.)

Unfortunately, it's even worse than that. The loud, aggressive, chest thumping
way the SJW's seem to operate in when championing women's causes appear to me
to be the very antithesis of the way women prefer to interact. (I guess that's
no saying much - I can't say I like it either.) But in any case the irony is
bitter and hard to swallow. Here we have people claiming to be working to
attract more women to the profession, yet their action in pursuing that goal
seem to be almost deliberately calculated to drive them away.

Anyway, enough of the rant. To answer your question, the research is an
obvious starting point when you want to address gender inequality - whether it
be women in IT or men in teaching.

------
hereme888
Reading the books on the average anatomical differences between male and
female brains by Louann Brizendine, MD, the Scientific American article is
simply an obvious reality.

Scientists around the globe shouldn't fear political attacks due to the
current political climate and modern trends, nor should humanitarian
scientific publications allow unreasonable gender "studies" to be published,
which were shown to be scams.

~~~
10101011
Dr. Brizendine's books are hyperbolic pseudoscience.

I stopped taking "The Female Brain" seriously when I read the stuff about how
young men think about sex once a minute and young women think about it once
every couple of days. Both those numbers are pretty ridiculous :^)

And indeed, none of the papers she cited contain any evidence to support that
statement. Source:
[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003668.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003668.html)

~~~
hereme888
I don't think that article provides any reason to discredit her, or the
average differences in the size and density of different brain regions, which
is what I was referring to.

In fact, that article presumes that Dr. Brizendine's footnotes provide any
source for that particular statement you're concerned about, when in fact it
doesn't. Her book is clear in her footnotes to which of her statements they
apply, and none are cited to that.

~~~
10101011
Ah, so instead of bogus citations, she provided no citations at all. Glad we
cleared that up!

~~~
hereme888
Your skeptic attitude is baseless. Her book is not meant to be an academic
text. It's a casual read by an MD. You think an MD writing a casual book
should cite everything? Ridiculous.

~~~
10101011
She makes the very specific claim that "85 percent of twenty- to thirty-year-
old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds".

Given that she places this statement among others that ARE cited, it should
also be cited.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Consistent with prior research, the researchers found that the following
traits are most exaggerated among females when considered separately from the
rest of the gestalt: sensitivity, tender-mindedness, warmth, anxiety,
appreciation of beauty, and openness to change. For males, the most
exaggerated traits were emotional stability, assertiveness/dominance,
dutifulness, conservatism, and conformity to social hierarchy and traditional
structure.

I am very skeptical of any claim that such vague and abstract behaviour
descriptions can be measured with accuracy. The cited studies are claimed to
have been conducted cross-culturally, but I really doubt that different
cultures would really assign the same meaning to these words. Even people
within the same culture would understand what "sensitivity" or "dutifulness"
means differently. For instance, if I like flowers, am I "sensitive"? If I cry
at weddings? If I cry at Game of Thrones? At MMA fights? [1]

_____________

[1] It's not a joke. I cried at the end of the Coleman-Emelianenko fight. When
they hug at the end, with Coleman's face a bloody mess? I cried my fucking
eyes out. Does that make me "sensitive"? "Appreciating of beauty"?

~~~
kingkawn
If women and men are these things it is because we have made ourselves this
way overtime. If we choose another way we will find our way there too.

~~~
autokad
some people thought (some still do) that, but so far research where men and
women where most free to do what they want, the differences become bigger -
not smaller.

Which actually makes sense. if we are made up of influences from nature and
nurture and you remove one of those influences, differences in the other
becomes more clear. its not rocket science but somehow people are still
surprised by it.

~~~
Hasu
> Which actually makes sense. if we are made up of influences from nature and
> nurture and you remove one of those influences, differences in the other
> becomes more clear. its not rocket science but somehow people are still
> surprised by it.

It's not clear that differences in nurture are actually being removed, though.
Just because people are free to do what they want regardless of their sex,
does not mean that nurture has been removed as a variable. What people want
has very much to do with their experiences in life and how people have treated
them based on preconceived notions of what they 'should' do.

In more plain terms: from birth, males and females are treated differently and
live with different expectations. Teasing the effect of those differences out
from the effect of biological differences does not seem possible without
unethical controlled experiments that would involve raising a group of
children without any influence from adults who already have preconceived
notions and expectations of differences between sexes. You'd need computerized
parenting that treats all the children the same from birth, without exposure
to the culture and history of humanity. That would give us a better
understanding of inherent biological differences between the sexes, but it
would be horrifically unethical. I don't think we're anywhere close to being
capable of doing it technologically, not to mention the technological and
sociological challenges involved in having humans create something that could
raise human children without any of the human biases we all share.

I'm not saying I don't think there are inherent biological differences in
personality between the sexes, I'm saying they're inevitably conflated with
non-biological differences, and our science is nowhere near advanced enough to
reliably distinguish the true origin of any given difference we can detect.

------
johnny313
The author gets at the ecological fallacy [0] several times - the idea that
group characteristics are not always useful for prediction of individual
characteristics.

I wonder how much of the heat in this conversation generally comes from the
assumption that group level tendencies are prescriptive to individuals, though
in reality individuals can display a high level of variance within the group.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy)

~~~
starpilot
Is that really even a fallacy? In medicine, they infer your risk for certain
diseases based on age, race, gender, lifestyle habits etc. Individual risk
varies of course, but that doesn't mean that generalization is wholesale a
bankrupt concept. He never says group traits == individual traits, he states
15x "on average." Yes, there's Simpson's paradox as described in your
citation, but that doesn't mean averages, sigmas are useless as a whole. They
have to be applied carefully, which Kaufman addresses.

~~~
TulliusCicero
They generalize in that case because there usually isn't a way to know your
individual risk factor. I don't really see how that same principle applies to
personality, which is obviously much more visible.

------
causality0
I think we're quite lucky as a species, and from an egalitarian perspective,
that our genders and ethnicities are so similar to each other. The problems we
face today eradicating sexism and racism are nothing compared to a world in
which a human subspecies had evolved in isolation for two hundred thousand
years and ended up with an average IQ of 50, or if we had much more
significant sexual dimorphism and one sex was vastly more intelligent than the
other.

~~~
esotericn
Well, in some sense the question only makes sense within a narrow band.

If one group of humans (sex, race, whatever) were to be _vastly_ more
intelligent than the other, then we may well simply not care about the
question at all.

Consider animal welfare. We may care about the treatment of animals to some
extent, but the idea that a cow should, say, be able to become a computer
science major is laughable. It's not even on the radar.

~~~
causality0
True, but I mean vast differences on the sapient being scale. What if a human
subspecies was otherwise the same as us but had the life expectancy of a
chimp, about forty years at best? What if the difference was as small as a
thirty point difference in IQ?

~~~
catalogia
I'm not sure if you tried this, but your hypothetical is quite close to a real
category of people. Young adults with down syndrome (a chromosomal disorder)
have an average IQ of 50 and in developed countries typically live to only
50-60.

They used to be treated very poorly, sometimes exceedingly poorly. In the
modern era they are generally treated with more respect than they were
historically, despite almost everybody having lower expectations of them.

~~~
CuriouslyC
While people will take this as a sign of progress, I think realistically
people with downs or other significant handicaps were a much greater burden on
society in the past, and I think our current attitude of acceptance has more
to do with our increased ability to care for such people.

As cruel as it seems to us now, if you're struggling to survive and there's no
social safety net, infanticide or child abandonment start to become much more
attractive options in comparison with being burdened by taking care of a
dysfunctional human for the rest of your life.

------
luord
Another area where acknowledging sex personality differences is important is
in education.

In quite a few countries, young men are falling behind young women in pursuing
education (for whatever reason, it might just be that modern educational
systems are coincidentally better fit for "female" personalities); a teacher
who acknowledges these differences might be better prepared to teach boys and
encourage them better, or plan classes in ways that help both groups.

------
h0l0cube
I had the same thought reading this article as I did when reading Damore's
memo: to what end?

I'm not sold on the benefits purported by this article for talking about the
statistical variances between different cohorts for people, but I can see how
it's very capable of stoking prejudice in ways that are very harmful. The
article makes a vague attempt at balance by noting that individual differences
are more important than these statistical variances, but it's easy enough to
just leap-frog to this conclusion and just treat each other as human beings.

~~~
TulliusCicero
It's hard not to read this comment as, "I don't like the conclusion, so it'd
be better if we simply stayed ignorant of these facts."

Why do you need to be 'sold' on scientifically verified knowledge?

> The article makes a vague attempt at balance by noting that individual
> differences are more important than these statistical variances

This is not an "attempt at balance", because individual variance and group
averages are not competing ideas or opposing ideologies that must be balanced
against each other.

~~~
h0l0cube
> Why do you need to be 'sold' on scientifically verified knowledge?

Nothing wrong with scientific inquiry, but when such facts are placed in
context of, say, an internal memo at Google, or, an opinion piece in popular
scientific press, it has rhetorical impact. You have to wonder 'to what end'
they are hoping for with their exposition.

With the Google memo, did they hope to change hiring strategies? Would this
have had any real impact on the operations at Google? Did Damore feel that the
hiring strategies at the company were having any tangible negative outcomes...
if so, he didn't care to mention that. So why then?

Same with this article. What is the author's concern here? What is really lost
when we cease to generalize people's behavior by sex? The article gave no
compelling answers.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _it has rhetorical impact. You have to wonder 'to what end' they are hoping
> for with their exposition._

I think the difference between scientific mindset and political mindset is
that the former doesn't ask this question or consider it relevant.

> _With the Google memo, did they hope to change hiring strategies? Would this
> have had any real impact on the operations at Google?_

Yes, this was kind of the reason this memo was written - and remember, it was
written in response to _Google_ soliciting ideas on the topic.

> _Did Damore feel that the hiring strategies at the company were having any
> tangible negative outcomes... if so, he didn 't care to mention that. So why
> then?_

Did you read the memo? It's whole text was arguing that diversity efforts at
Google are misguided and harmful, and what should be done instead.

~~~
h0l0cube
> I think the difference between scientific mindset and political mindset

This article is a rhetorical play, for the average person to consider more
this point of view. It's arguments to do so were weak at best.

> Did you read the memo? It's whole text was arguing that diversity efforts at
> Google are misguided and harmful, and what should be done instead.

Did you? Because I don't recall him stating any actual harms, but speculation.
No even an anecdote to back his claims.

~~~
edanm
> Because I don't recall him stating any actual harms, but speculation. No
> even an anecdote to back his claims.

To be fair, the memo argued that the specific way Google goes about in trying
to increase diversity was not going to work, because the underlying
assumptions of the cause of the differences was wrong, and proposed specific
other ways to increase diversity.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/M9M84](http://archive.is/M9M84)

~~~
generalpass
Please consider using archive.md. There are many of us who have no access to
archive.is.

~~~
neonate
You mean because you use Cloudflare DNS?

Happy to go with archive.md.

~~~
generalpass
There are several DNS servers with the same problem and some other issues as
the project stated they expect archive.is to go away in the not so distant
future.

------
10101011
Any other female HN readers feel viscerally uncomfortable and discouraged
after reading this?

I get that people =/= averages, but I don't want to bet on myself being even
MORE of an outlier than the men who achieve what I want to (become a great
programmer, found a wildly successful startup...)

Just want to get a sense of whether my reaction is normal. Bonus points if you
can tell me how the hell you cope with seeing stuff like this.

~~~
intarga
Your reaction is totally normal. I think it's because the discussion comes
from a male perspective, as given to an audience that is assumed to be male.

>Bonus points if you can tell me how the hell you cope with seeing stuff like
this.

I think the solution is simply not to engage with it. The topic is indeed
worth discussing, but only when women are given an equal part in the
conversation. As you can see by the fact that I'm commenting here though, I've
failed to take my own advice...

>but I don't want to bet on myself being even MORE of an outlier than the men
who achieve what I want to

FWIW I don't think you need to worry, I've yet to see any evidence that women
in tech are any less capable than men. Most of the discussion seems to revolve
around men trying to justify why we're underrepresented.

~~~
10101011
Thank you for your response - glad to know I'm not alone.

To address your last point, I meant "more of an outlier" in the mathematical
sense: if for a given trait that's beneficial to, eg, startup success (like
dominance or risk-taking), the distribution is overlapping bell curves with
similar SDs but a higher mean for men, then I am by definition less likely to
have a high level of that trait. Obviously a simplified model, but the article
seems to say it's a valid one.

Part of me says you're right and I shouldn't engage - the other part wants to
gather more data to reason about this properly, but worries I'll see stuff
that I'll wish I hadn't.

------
scythe
>Contrary to what one might expect, for all of these personality effects the
sex differences tend to be larger-- not smaller-- in more individualistic,
gender-egalitarian countries.

My working guess is that social dynamics in highly individualistic countries
tend to be more competitive, while less individualistic countries are more
ritualized -- arranged marriage being a prototypical example of collectivist
norms. It seems like a more competitive culture (on both friendly and romantic
levels) may lead to increased pressure to express gendered traits -- or it may
simply lead to higher levels of stress in social situations, which causes
unconscious influences to have more effect. But do these hypotheses fit the
Russia datum? I'm not sure.

------
jeffdavis
Are male and female humans more similar than our evolutionary predecessors? In
other words, is there some evolutionary pressure causing convergence between
the sexes?

The reason this question is interesting is because natural selection only
cares about the big picture (did the individual survive and reproduce or
not?), not the fine details (does the individual have empathy, take risks,
etc.). So, perhaps males and females are different in many fine details, but
evolution has forced us to have the same overall capabilities?

That, in turn, might explain how a man and woman might make different
decisions -- as long as both decisions seem likely to lead to survival and
reproduction -- even when their capabilities qualify them for either decision
equally.

------
camgunz
To be honest, this roll-up of current sex differences research doesn't
convince me of fundamental biological differences. If we had equivalent
cultures that were matriarchal to the degree that cultures like the US or
China (being super broad here) are, then that would be something. Looking at
patriarchal countries just says to me "we encourage these personality traits
in girls and women most everywhere", and I don't see any research
disentangling those. In fairness it's probably impossible, but I think that
critique should temper our expectations when it comes to research like this.

------
boxfire
As I read the article which hit a lot of my favorite stretches of measure and
the assumptions underlying inference I couldn't help but notice the only
instance of "trans" is transcendence in a footnote.

One can't help but wonder how do you factor the generational recursion these
traits have. We know how much some of these are due to our environmental
exposure, and how we are socially trained.

Transgender people are in the crux of this colossal attempt to define
personality by measure, and yet I literally do not see us mentioned even once.
I'd like to know where a set of my cohort follow in this D measure from their
assigned gender to their expression. Are nonbinaries truly in the middle?

What does this distance look like in settings where traits are conditionally
measured? E.G. how do highly empathetic men compare to highly empathetic
women?

These questions are salient to me because I am in the early stages of
transition myself and I find articles like this always lacking key details to
sate my curiosity.

------
etaioinshrdlu
This is part of the nature vs nurture debate that has been argued for
millennia. People try to decide which is more critical.

Politically on the left, I encounter hostility when mentioning innate
differences as an explanation for anything. (I always thought I leaned left
politically...) I now self censor myself and it feels horrible. Everything is
just attributed to deep cultural expectations and similar.

Me, I think outcome = nature * nurture. It makes no sense to try to argue
which is more important when they are both directly proportional to outcome!

~~~
bsder
The problem is that generally people use these kinds of articles to
extrapolate from group to individual--and that's generally not a good idea.

 _Individuals_ break "typical" all the time.

If I'm interviewing you for a job, I shouldn't apply "group stereotype" as I'm
_specifically_ looking for your individual traits that break the norm. I don't
want the "average" from your group--I probably want someone far from it.

So the arrow from individual to aggregate group is generally strong. The
reverse arrow from aggregate group to individual, however, has nowhere near
the same strength.

~~~
travisoneill1
The article seems to say that the difference here is strong enough that you
can do that:

> To put this number in context, a D= 2.10 means a classification accuracy of
> 85%. In other words, their data suggests that the probability that a
> randomly picked individual will be correctly classified as male or female
> based on knowledge of their global personality profile is 85% (after
> correcting for the unreliability of the personality tests).

~~~
elyobo
The article suggests that you can do the opposite of that (use traits of the
individual to reasonably accurately infer that they're male or female).

The parent's concern is that, given you know someone is male or female, you
will make further assumptions about them based on their group membership
rather than their individual traits, something that is not supported by the
article.

> I am a strong believer that individual differences are more important than
> sex differences.

~~~
travisoneill1
But the only case where you would rely on group membership is if the
individual traits are unknown. Obviously generalization will never be as
accurate as individual knowledge. Why would anybody be worried that people
would act otherwise?

~~~
elyobo
Assuming things about individuals based on group membership is a key part of
racism, sexism, etc. Why would anybody be worried? Because people do it _all
the time_.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Stereotypes exist because there are statistical patterns in groups of people.
Those stereotypes are useful cognitive tools while they remain accurate. It
certainly isn't fair to people in those groups who don't fit the stereotype,
but as long as the stereotype accurately describes the majority, there's
nothing to be done about it.

Would you run up to a lion or a tiger in the wild and try to hug and kiss it?
I'm guessing you have a stereotype of big cats as dangerous predators, and
you'd steer well clear, even though there are countless friendly lions and
tigers in captivity that have never hurt anyone.

------
yters
I think we'd all handle difference in capability better if everyone believed
that all human beings had something fundamentally in common that made us all
equal in terms of human rights.

The subtext of all the resistance against demonstrating difference in
capability is that if some individual or group is more capable, then in our
Darwinian might makes right mentality that many seem to subconsciously adopt,
those of superior capability must rule tyrannically over those of inferior
ability.

On the other hand, with a Christian ethic of everyone created in the image of
God, and that those with superior ability have the noble duty to serve those
of lesser ability, then we would on the contrary seek to discover the full
spectrum of human differences and capabilities instead of hiding from it.

~~~
dwaltrip
This only works if the Christian god is real, which the majority of the world
finds not to be the case.

I think it may be possible to develop practices and communities that provide
similar benefits without the supernatural baggage, but it will take some work.
I've been looking a bit into spiritual naturalism lately (and related groups),
but it seems it is still quite early days for these movements.

~~~
yters
I liken it to the law of gravity: everyone falls down cliffs whether they
believe in gravity or not.

Similarly with the Christian ethic: it'll work regardless of whether everyone
believes the underlying rationale. In fact, that is what happened in the West,
its social construct is based on the Christian ethic, and continues to
function despite most of the West no longer believing the underlying reason.

~~~
dwaltrip
Ah ok, yeah I'm game with importing values and perspectives, which as you
state has already happened to a certain degree. It is a non-trivial process
through, and I do believe we need to build up a new shared foundation,
supporting layer, rituals, etc. that don't have the supernatural baggage.

~~~
yters
It isn't possible without the 'supernatural baggage'. You need a basis for why
humans are different, but if everything reduces to natural processes humans
are fundamentally the same thing as everything else.

------
dang
Url changed from
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/se...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/sex-
differences-in-personality-are-large-and-important.html), which points to
this.

------
pmarreck
Why has this sort of article become anathema?

~~~
Thriptic
Typically intent and ramifications. I don't think it's a problem to point out
that there are measured differences in the sexes; truth is truth if they've
got high quality data to back up assertions.

The danger is twofold. First, people forget that these are population level
trends and that it is bad reasoning to automatically assume every individual
in a given group conforms with these trends. Second, a lot of people believe
dumb and backward ideas about other groups, and they'll twist and cherry pick
the data to try to back up their biases without the nuance of presentation
shown here. In fact, most of the articles broaching this topic are doing so
from a position of malice rather than truth seeking; trying to justify some
sort of discrimination or poor treatment of another group.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Interesting phraseology there. Truth is truth ... unless it supports "dumb and
backwards ideas", in which case it's being twisted and/or cherry picked?

(I'm not picking on your viewpoint in particular; all sides do exactly the
same thing.)

~~~
Thriptic
Not at all. At the end of the day the truth is the truth regardless of whether
we like it or not. An idea isn't dumb or backward if it has proper validation.

The problem is that most people bringing this up are not doing so in an
intellectually rigorous way. They are coming to the table with a pre-existing
conclusion and then trying to fit data to support that conclusion. Both sides
do this in fact, and approach / intent matters because doing this creates bias
even if people try to stay neutral. That is a poor way to try to discover or
talk about the truth. That's what I mean to say.

------
silveroriole
Hmmm. Some of this seems dubious. What does “tough-minded” mean in the
Scientific American review? As for the personality guessing, isn’t there a
confounding factor that people are likely report and self-report women as more
“warm”, “sensitive,” “anxious”, “friendly” etc than men BECAUSE we culturally
think they are that? How often do you hear a man described as warm, sensitive
or anxious vs women?

~~~
kbutler
> How often do you hear a man described as warm, sensitive or anxious vs
> women?

Quite often.

Individuals do not conform to population averages.

------
chiefalchemist
I don't want to get off topic, but the use of averages always concerns me.
Averages tend to water down understanding and trigger misleading conclusion.

I'll have go back and revisit this article with more focus. But my initial
observation was "on average?"

~~~
TulliusCicero
How would you even discuss this topic without talking about averages? Short of
assuming every man and every woman are all clones, it sounds impossible to me.

~~~
chiefalchemist
What about the mean? Or the nature of the distribution. Average crushes
insights.

------
stephc_int13
There are differences between men and women, or boys and girls, on average,
but what's the point of studying them?

I am all for science and the search for truth, but when we study ourselves,
there are potential political implications.

And I am not talking only about sexual differences.

There is no need to classify human beings, because in the best case it will
only be accurate -on average- and mostly because the way society structures
itself is already integrating all the individual differences, we do not need
to reinforce that.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> " _I am all for science and the search for truth, but when we study
> ourselves, there are potential political implications._ "

" _Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn 't go away._"
\--Philip K. Dick

We can choose to stick our heads in the sand but whatever underlying reality
is out there remains there, continuing to operate. It's better to face the
truth, however painful it is, than to try to hide from it.

------
JacksonGariety
There are differences between the sexes, but they are not the ones described
here. These are gender differences. There's probably some fuzzy overlap, but
the article doesn't cover it.

~~~
larnmar
For statistical purposes, the number of people whose sex and “gender” are not
the same is negligible.

~~~
JacksonGariety
You seem to be thinking of the labels 'male' and 'female'; but I was referring
to 'sex' as biologically reproduced characteristics, and 'gender' as
sociologically reproduced characteristics. The labels are statistically
consistent, but the concepts are quite different. Sex is stored in our genes
whereas gender is stored in cultural artifacts.

~~~
macawfish
There are many possible hormonal modes and they are expressed dynamically, not
deterministically, even within the same body. Hormonal behavior can be
learned, it's not purely deterministic. People can be trained to habitually
perform certain kinds of behaviors and postures that may not feel natural, and
can grow into them, just as people can be trained, pressured, shamed: to carry
certain attitudes or use certain language, to eat certain foods, to exercise
certain muscles... but not others.

Nature and nurture are not clearly separable as biological and social
reductionists like to think. They intermingle in countless ways on multiple
scales. People exist on many spectrums, and are dynamic, not predetermined.

~~~
JacksonGariety
Totally agree. This is the "fuzzy overlap" to which I referred in my OP. I use
the word 'fuzzy' because we just don't know how nature and nurture affect each
other.

