Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This might be a dumb question, but one that immediately pops up for me.
I always wondered - if it's purely a social construct that boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls etc., then why in most stories about a girl trapped in a boy's body we hear her say "I wanted to play with girls" (contrary to society's expectations), "I wanted to play with dolls" etc.?
I googled it up just now - http://prospect.org/article/transgender-candidate
The story of Bindaya Rana (from Pakistani), who was born as a male:
"Bindiya Rana, one of Pakistan’s first transgender candidates [...] “I used to wear my sister’s clothes,” she said. “And use lipstick and powder and nail polish. I wanted to play with dolls and be in the kitchen.” Her parents disapproved when they found her in makeup, beating her."
It's a gaping hole in the theory that we are wired differently "as we grow up due to the different experiences and upbringing men and women are subject to".
If one's self-identified gender could be overriden so easily, there would me much less personal tragedies in this world.
Possibly because they identify themselves with other girls, and are more susceptible to the same influences? If society expects a certain gender as a whole to behave in a certain way, and an individual identifies with that gender, then it's not odd that it may be influenced as well.
Not that I have no idea if this is true or not, I just find that an unconvincing argument against the social construct theory.
If someone puts a theory forward, however, it's their job to come up with plausible answers for such doubts.
The one you suggested is possible, of course. How well substantiated it is though? Theories should include some evidence that supports the hypotheses they are based on.
For example, a genetic predisposition towards competition and physical activity could lead to a general preference for certain kinds of sports, even if those didn't exist for most of human evolution.
In case you haven't noticed, I'm talking out of my ass here, I have no idea if this is true, it just seems a reasonable possibility.
I've read for example that kids learn their beauty ideals from the people that surround them, but there is also a taboo to not fall in love with closely related people. For example researchers looked at people living in a Kibuz and found that there were hardly any love affairs among them.
I think of lipstick as just a human equivalent of a monkey with a big red butt (which is natural, but doesn't serve any purpose other than to let other monkeys know they're in heat).
They're human ways of drawing attention to sexuality. In our society we can't paint our genitals, so we paint another set of lips. Or our fingernails, etc.
When a child picks lipstick, however, they're not being sexual, just emulating adults. They same way they copy adults tone (ever heard a kid 'scold' another kid, the same way their parents would?) Most infant animals do that too.
You mean there might have been something else like nail polish, and people evolved a preference for that? But what would that have been? Some meshed up leaves people put on their finger nails?
Apparently there is something like a preference for being a woman, and using nail polish can be a proxy for that. But my point is that it is most likely learned that nail polish has something to do with being a woman. And the mechanism is not "I wish I was a woman so that I could use nail polish", it is more likely "I wish I could be a woman, and nail polish makes me feel like one".
Nevertheless, I am also not a biologist, just making things up. But I think some basic logic can be applied by everyone.
Lipstick -> red lips -> sexual symbol (looks similar to vaginal labia) -> more reproductive choice
But those are messages for the men, not for the woman who applies the lipstick. So is the desire basically to be sexually attractive like a woman? Or falling in love with one's reflection in the mirror?
Without that assumption, there is no contradiction in the "theory". Although it is also not a theory that can explain how people are made to feel like girls or boys. I don't think such a theory exists yet, or if it does, it has been silenced by political correctness.
Through this discussion I wonder if it is more about how you are being valued in society. For example nail polish and lipstick are used to enhance sexual attraction. So maybe it is a desire to be valued for sexual attractivity, rather than actions, power or wealth (or whatever, men are valued for different things in different environments, I suppose).
Just to show an example where some preference is not genetic, but there is a mechanism to pretty much hardwire it shortly after birth.
"Male and female brains showed few differences in connectivity up to the age of 13, but became more differentiated in 14- to 17-year-olds."
From UC Irvine: "The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050121100142.ht...
However, I'd like to point out that there apparently is a genetic difference in male and female bodies. While women can become very strong and develop "body builder" physiques, it's certainly not the norm (also not sure how much hormone pills play a role in the women who turn out like that).
Of course from that it doesn't follow that differences in the brain are genetic, but imo it makes it seem possible. Clearly the physique is optimized for different ways of living, so why not the brain.
Women do better in high stress, high information volume situations, are able to make more intelligent choices when little or no data is available. Men are better with logic puzzles, but generally are poor listeners, and have poor soft skills. Women are better managers of people, Men, better managers of things.
Obviously, these are not universal truths, but there are certain roles I would prefer a woman candidate for, others I would prefer a man, I'm going to make a judgement on the person, but their gender is part of the experience package.
It's one thing to have useful heuristics and rules of thumb, but when it conflicts with official, blessed truths about "humans are all identical", it's important to be careful what you say and to whom. Especially in the workplace, where there can be real consequences for having the "wrong" points of view.
From the outside it looks like your comment could easily be translated as "women need to know their place", but with fancier words to make it look philosophical.
> "humans are all exactly identical, no questions asked"
No one asserts this, not even gender studies majors. What's problematic is asserting that gender differences should have any bearing on what a member of a particular gender is allowed to do.
Subscribing to stereotypes is what excludes a large number of extraordinarily talented women from either entering or finding work in the tech industry.
Being unable to sit still, wanting to run around - now treated as an illness Roughhousing - a normal male activity, is now a crime in schools.
Here is a good article making my point - http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/19/school-has-become-too-hosti...
http://www.amazon.com/The-WAR-AGAINST-BOYS-Misguided/dp/0684...
We all bring our particular preferences and biases to the table, so we need to do the best we can to be fair and reasonable to the candidates that come in front of us.
Two Candidates, identical qualifications, identical experience, both interview well, I'm going to go with my 'intuition' to make the final call, whatever it is that goes into that is between myself and my concience.
I was under the impression that this left brain/right brain theory had been debunked by functional imagery.
But I can't find any relevant studies I'd understand on Google Scholar right now so I might be wrong. And as I'm a layman take this with a grain (or more) of salt ;)
I do have a background in neuroscience (I did research on headache physiology a few years ago), but I'm not too familiar with functional imaging.
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[0] Handedness is a strange thing. The gene that governs it has two alleles. One is dominant, and causes right-handedness. The recissive one, doesn't necessarily cause left-handedness. Handedness is people with two recessive genes is random, roughly 50/50 (a bit less for each, since it can also make one ambidextrous).
The clockwise or counter-clockwise rotation of the main cowlick is also governed by the same gene, in the same fashion, AFAIK, independently (the dominant gene makes the cowlick turn clockwise).
Which can be hormonal, can be cultural, can be both.
I think we (or at least I!) know too little for any of this to be truly meaningful. But it's still interesting.
It's this attitude that leads to the sexism in our industry. Seeing this kind of bollocks upvoted on a regular basis is extremely disheartening.
Hey, people do the same with psychology and religion all the time.
I believe that it is the second case - which means you really shouldn't base decisions on the sex of person and brain "wiring" you believe she or he has.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/getting-in-a-tangl...
Significant portion: "... [O]ther experts have crunched the numbers and they state that although the differences are statistically significant, they are actually not substantive. And remember, these are average differences with a lot of overlap. It’s possible that my male brain is wired more like an average female brain than yours, even if you’re a woman."
While we're at it, lets go back to pi=3, like god intended.
Studies like the one in the article give us data points, but nowhere to draw any conclusions from.
Conclusions in things like this are very often 'just-so' stories, of the kind you hear from the Evo Psych nonsense-heads.
Almost every study purporting to show innate differences between males and females has been shown to lack rigor, blindness, or has drawn conclusions from imaginary sources based on pre-conceived notions not found in the data.
You can see those preconceived notions in this thread. Many of the comments have a very strong stench of "of course, we've known this all along, men and women are different, and it's unfortunate that only men are good at the things that pay a lot of money, but that's life". The latter part may not be stated directly, but anyone who has paid any attention to this kind of argument on the internet knows that it's heavily implied under a very thin surface in the majority of comments like this.
In which case it's worth remembering that hormonal levels vary dramatically for both men and women, and I'd expect that over a large sample size you'd see a fair amount of crossover.