I’ve just read a pithy and sensible article at Quilette on the subject of psychological and behavioral sex differences. The essay was written by David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, and it disputes the social-sciences orthodoxy that sees all such differences as social constructions, remediable (as if remediation were actually a thing to be desired) by aggressive early-childhood intervention by pious busybodies. (As I have noted elsewhere, those who seek to eliminate all such differences are accelerants to the destructive action of entropy against the natural order — and that which promotes and assists entropy can justifiably be considered “bad”.)
Professor Geary notes that the idea that these sex differences in humans are mere cultural artifacts must account for the fact that they seem to occur not only in all human cultures (I’ll note that they are mentioned in Donald Brown’s tally of human universals), but also in many other species as well. That males are more competitive and “agentic” is a deep adaptation to male superfluity in reproduction, whereas females constitute a limited (and limiting) resource. (The essay mentions rats, chimps, kangaroos, seals, and sheep as documented examples.)
Professor Geary concludes:
As far as I know, there are no gender role beliefs in any of these species and yet their young engage in sex-typical behaviors that presage reproductive activities in adulthood. Early engagement in these behaviors helps the young to prepare for the sex-specific rigors of adulthood, including more agentic activities for males and more communal ones for females.
As with these myriad species, children create their own worlds based in part on the sex-typed demands faced by our ancestors. These demands included a higher frequency of agentic activities of our male ancestors—including male-on-male violence to achieve social influence and resource control—and a higher frequency of communal activities of our female ancestors. As in other species, the influence of prenatal and early postnatal exposure to sex hormones results in biases in children’s agentic (e.g., play fighting) and communal (e.g., play parenting) play and the associated behaviors and skills are refined as children develop in same-sex communities with their peers.
As any parent knows, these sex differences are not the consequence of a parental imposition of stereotyped expectations on children. Nor can these differences be immutably altered by the edicts of gender role theorists or policy scolds working in central governments.
Read the whole thing here.
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Professor Geary is an interesting fellow, the co-author of an influential study that’s received a lot of attention (Charles Murray mentions it in his Human Diversity, I believe). He makes a paradoxical argument, that it’s actually in egalitarian countries where women are less interested in pursuing STEM subjects (especially the “harder” less communal ones like programming) because there are more opportunity costs. One might be sacrificing the ability to have children in the U.S. by a disproportionate focus on career for instance, whereas a woman in Algeria might need to become a doctor to make ends meet for a family.
Not going to get many hits to this one with no title of the post.
On the topic of sex differences:
https://atavisionary.com/free-book-smart-and-sexy-the-evolutionary-origins-and-biological-underpinnings-of-cognitive-differences-between-the-sexes/
Hi Atavisionary,
Yes, I forgot to add a title! Careless of me. Thanks.