Gender inequality is associated with differences in the brains of women and men
pnas.org
pnas.org
"The LGBT community" is in and of itself a part of this weird usage of group terminology to muddy the waters. It's pretty much a political device invented for that purpose - if you don't support all you support none, which is clearly ridiculous.
For example, trans women not being permitted to compete in women's sports has exactly zero bearing on the life of gay men, and is actually in the interest of gay women.
The LGBT community is, in part, built on bonds of similar experiences of ostracism by the larger society.
In recent years, there have been some efforts to tie racial justice into the LGBT identity, but that has been controversial as there is less alignment around issues. Black and brown bands were added to the rainbow flag as part of this, and that was also controversial. The feeling was that that flag was not originally racially focused.
As phrased its…not, though.
Each of the L, G, B, and T (well, perhaps not the B in all cases) relies pretty centrally on there being a difference between men and women.
(Now, if you were to say, “‘men’ and ‘women’ are defined by gender externally ascribed on the basis of (at least notionally) immutable non-identity characteristics”, then that’s a different story, but that’s a lot different than “there are differences between men and women”.)
PS: This type of argument is called a Motte and Bailey. You provide two arguments, one weak and one strong then fall back to the strong argument when challenged.
My pet theory is that that the the differences are usually minor. But differentiating between men and women is deeply wired into out brains. Some people are self aware enough to realize that and others like yourself are not.
and systematic discriminatory can be quite traumatizing
Otherwise, you wouldn't have the ability to recall that experience. ^-^
you could say on is changes to the parameters of your brain
and the other are more fundamental changes
like trauma can cause brain damage which can show up on scans in similar form to physical caused brain damage....
I hope people are more willing to acknowledge the society selective forces that perpetuate every behavior we disagree with.
No, it does not.
The paper advances two potential reasons for the difference and selection is not one of them. Actually, genetics seem to have nothing to do with it. The two are: stress linked to the adverse environment and early disturbances in development.
"Overall, the observed association may result from exposure to an adverse environment and subsequent stress response throughout life. This would imply that sex differences in the thickness of those regions would be smaller in early development and increase during aging. This resonates with evidence highlighting the role of gender inequality in the higher prevalence of depression in girls which appears in adolescence (33)"
It's a good paper by the way. They are very careful with both their statistics and what they claim.
It does say the other part, which you wrote as adverse environment and I wrote as culture. Because the paper points out that there are environments/countries that aren't gender unequal, the entire basis of being able to do this study
To me, that basis then suggests that the unequal countries are perpetuating it far beyond culture, since people grow up and are available for mating based on some attributes over others, but you’re correct that the paper itself doesn’t go there and we dont have confirmation that the brain aspects are sex linked traits
Does we know what this difference does? If you waved a magic wand and turned an equal-country brain into an unequal-country brain, how would the person's behavior/feelings change?
As for me, I’m not sufficiently educated to evaluate a paper like this.
Instead, it's saying that gender inequality has been associated with effects on the brain. We are fairly confident that the environment you grow up can affect how your brain develops. It's not unreasonable that growing up in a society with gender inequality will have an effect on how the brain develops.
That's an interesting result, and worth discussing.
You should :)
> however what I am more interested in is how does the paper determine that mental inequality is influenced by exterior factors, instead of inherent gender differences causing exterior inequalities?
It's not looking at causality, just association, so it doesn't do what you're asking. What it does do is show that countries with more inequality have more brain differences between genders. You can make your own hypotheses about the causality, for instance, if it was inherit then why would the differences be less prevalent in countries with more equality? There is some discussion in the discussion part of the paper.
Maybe that's the causality? Chicken and the egg.
Alternatively, we get really good human models and simulate everything, sci-fi style.
One explanation for the gap in SAT scores I've seen is that women and minorities (except asians) perform worse because they expect to perform worse. Plausible to an extent sure but today it seems the science is jumping through all kinds of hoops to prove that genetics have an effect on every part of our body except the brain.
I'm not trying to deny that culture and nurture plays a big role, but we choose dog breeds based on personal traits, so why do we expect ourselves to be any different? It applies to all animals but us, nonsense if you ask me.
Where I live the second generation immigrants are more prone to crime than their parents were. What's the explanation for that?
Teachers give higher grades to girls than to boys with the same academic ability, according to a study published today in the British Journal of Sociology of Education.