Men And Women Are More Alike Than They Are Different

Studies to the contrary don’t take socialization into account

Men are interested in objects, but women are interested in people and animals. That’s what a study I recently saw said. “That’s some really poorly done research right there,” I thought when I read it. All that indicates is how the people who were studied have been indoctrinated by their socialization. The results are essentially worthless.

Studies that have been done to try to account for socialization paint a very different picture — one where there are few innate differences, other than in body size and strength. The desire to put men and women into genderized boxes is a function of patriarchy. It doesn’t serve any positive purpose and it doesn’t reflect what other cultures, both in the present and the past, indicate about the flexibility of gender roles and norms.

The other day I wrote a story about the Na of China who have about as fundamentally different a culture from the West as is possible. It’s a society where family is centered around a matriarch, and everyone lives in the house of their mother or grandmother along with their brothers and sisters, as well as the children of the women. There is functionally no such thing as a father or a husband. Men and women have love relationships but never live together as spouses. Any children belong to the family of the woman and her matrilineal clan.

In this culture, women do the farming and a lot of the heavy physical work. Men build houses and tend to livestock. They are quite involved with childcare, although men help to raise their siblings, and the children of their sisters and cousins, rather than the ones they have a biological connection to. If the Na were studied using the same parameters, I’m going to bet that the results would come in quite differently. In that culture, men are geared towards animals, as well as people to a much higher degree than is perhaps common in the West.

As late as the 4th c BC many women in Egypt were the heads of their households, took part in business transactions, including contracts and litigation (sometimes against their own fathers or husbands). Men were reported to have stayed home to do the weaving. The goddess Isis, a central figure in the Egyptian religion of the time, was considered not only the inventor of agriculture, but also as a great physician, and the one who first established the laws of justice. This strongly influenced the way that women were perceived in that culture until patriarchy began to take hold.

One of the earliest archeologists of the pyramids of Egypt, Sir William Flinders Petrie, wrote in 1925 that, “In Egypt, all property went in the female line, the woman was the mistress of the house; and in early tales she is represented as having entire control over herself and the place.”

Once again, an entirely different culture, with different power structures and roles for men and women would undoubtedly produce a different result from the research study that concluded that men like objects and women like living things. The true innate differences between men and women seem to be primarily around average size and upper-body strength. Cognitive, emotional, and personality differences are much more pronounced between individuals than they are between men and women as groups.

In a 2005 meta-analysis of 46 studies conducted over the past 20 years, Janet Shibley Hyde, PhD concluded that males and females are more alike than different. “Furthermore, Hyde found that gender differences seem to depend on the context in which they were measured. In studies designed to eliminate gender norms, researchers demonstrated that gender roles and social context strongly determined a person’s actions. For example, after participants in one experiment were told that they would not be identified as male or female, nor did they wear any identification, none conformed to stereotypes about their sex when given the chance to be aggressive. In fact, they did the opposite of what would be expected — women were more aggressive and men were more passive.”

In Why Are Men So Much More Emotional Than Women? I concluded that even though some studies have shown men demonstrating a more pronounced response to emotional stimuli, I believe that the difference is more likely due to the fact that men are socialized to repress their vulnerable emotions. When emotions do come through, it is therefore in a more unregulated and unmodulated way. The only reason for mentioning the difference is to comment upon how typical male socialization disadvantages them.

One of the most destructive elements of a patriarchal system is the reliance on strict gender roles and the censure and punishment that is visited upon those who do not conform. Not only does this keep women and non-binary people from having a full range of choices, but it keeps men from having them also.

Individuals should be allowed to be whatever mix of stereotypically masculine and feminine traits that they actually are and to pursue whatever their interests and aptitudes allow for without artificial barriers or genderized boxes. Looking for ways to prove that men and women are biologically different in ways other than in the body is a crutch and a rather flimsy one at that.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.