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[QUOTE=Bloodthroe] Well I have learned that there are differences in the human bodies and brains between genders. [/QUOTE]
Yes we all know the little (but important) difference between man and woman. As I discussed with CE there is a difference in the brains anatomy, but is there also a difference in the physiology??

[QUOTE=Bloodthroe] Men are supposed to naturally have twice as much upper body strength. [/QUOTE]
But this is NOT because a difference in the anatomy (histology) of man and woman. They have the same anatomy of the muscel, but the man have (often) more muscelcells.

[QUOTE=Bloodthroe] As far as the brain, women show more tolerance to pain. While men are stronger mentally. [/QUOTE]

I don't know were you have this from

[QUOTE=Morril]I don't know were you have this from [/QUOTE]Well I remember learning that in school and seeing a video. WHEN LEARNING ABOUT THE BRAIN!!! Thing is I have a very good memory... sorry.

edit- as what I meant by stronger mentally is men get higher scores on math tests and other subjects. While women have their strengths, like that better socially thing I mentioned.

[QUOTE=Bloodthroe] As far as the brain, women show more tolerance to pain. While men are stronger mentally... [/QUOTE]
Ok - what I meant was: You must be joking.
And btw: if a woman is more tolerant to pain, doesn't that mean that she is mentally strong??
About your edit: I don't think it has ever been proved that men in general are better in math that woman

Even if men could be proven to be better at math in general than women it wouldn't mean that they are innately better at math than women, that would take further studies, and probably be even harder to prove. Whether they are or not could be nature, it could be nurture, it could be some mix of both.
edit: As for mental strength, that is so very vague. What do you mean by mental strength? Oh, nevermind I just saw your earlier post, ok so that's what you meant. There are many many ways in which a person can be mentally strong.
In fact in order to be truely skilled socialy a person has to be very intelligent about how they deal with others, and have a keen understanding of how other people function (i.e. be able to intelligently apply what they know about human psychology, and interaction), also a very strong understanding of language is important for socializing, and having good language skills certainly takes intelligence. So math is far from the only indicator of mental strength.

I was talking about which parts of our brains we use better.

[QUOTE=Morril]But I find it interesting WHY there is that difference. Because human organs construction (anatomy) is most often related to function (physiology). Allmost all organs in the human have the same function (physiology) in man and woman, and also have the same construction (anatomy) - the only diiference is the size of the organs. F.eks the heart and lungs are identical for man or woman, and have same functions. This means same anatomy and same physiology. If man and woman have a little difference in the anatomy of the brain I find it logically that there also must be a little difference in the physiology (function) - even if we haven't found it yet...[/QUOTE]

As I see it, we have the following alternatives:

1. The anatomical differences make a functional difference that we don't know about and cannot measure (yet).

A noteworthy perspective on this option is like a famous professor in psychology said recently: If a difference is so small so we can't detect it even with the quite sophisticated tests and anaysis we have today - is it really a meaningful difference? In other words, the rather few cognitive, emotional and social function differences we see between men and women that cannot be explained by sociocultural factors, may not make any difference for how people behave and function in their lives. Of course, there may be larger differences that we have not detected yet, but I do think science have had plenty of time to observe human behaviour.

2. The anatomical differences makes a functional difference that we know of, but have not connected anatomy-function.

At group level, there are some known gender differences that cannot be attributed to sociocultural learning. In spatial rotation tests, males scores better than females on group level, and females with higher levels of androgens score better than females with lower androgen levels. Women have faster visual perception and faster visumotor reaction time. Women also score higher on tests of aritmethics and of verbal fluency. It is not known why or how these functions are mediated.
Young women score higher on sensation-seeking and novelty seeking personality traits (ie adventurous traits) than young men, but this difference becomes equal with age.
Thus, who knows - maybe those cognitive and emotional functions are mediated by neural systems that are associated with the corpus callusom and anterior commisure? However, like I stated above: a difference that is so small so you need samples of many hundred or thousand persons in each group in order to detect a statistically significant difference - does this difference really matter in real life where sociocultural learning determine so much more of our behaviour?

3. The anatomical difference make a difference, but in other parts of the complex system our brain is, these differences are modulated so that in the end, there is no functional difference in effect.

For example, some studies have shown that women have a thicker corpus callosum (CC) than men. Studies also show that women have less lateralised language functions over the two hemispheres, ie language functions is mediated by both left and right cortex, whereas in right-handed males it is more mediated by the left hemisphere. Maybe the net effect of more lateralisation+more connections is the same as having the function more located to the same hemispere? Interestingly, many people with heritable left-handedness, also have language functions more lateralised regardless or whether they are male or female.

4. The anatomical differences only make a difference in certain situations, for instance under extreme conditions.

I take musicality as an example since that is one of the most heritable and genetically determined cognitive functions we know. Let's say we could measure musical ability from 1-100. You were born with musicality 95, I was born with musicality 80. Studies have shown that the factors who determine musical skills are encouragement from parents and teachers, hours of practice and innate talent. If you and I grow up under exactly the same conditions, we would be equally good at playing the violin. We can both play the same concertos. Not until we reach the final of the International Tchaikovsky competition, and we are assessed by the best experts in the world, there will be a noticable differerence in performace.

On the other hand, if you had an encouraging environment and practised 4 hours a day from 3-18 years of age, whereas I had a less encouraging environment and practised only 1 hours a day, you would win the competition whereas I wouldn't even have qualified even if my innate musical ability was higher than yours when we were born.

5. The anatomical differences makes no functional difference.

Who knows, maybe they don't. If you cut the CC as in "split brain" patients, it is amazing how little these patients differ from the normal population.

6. The anatomical difference develop as a consequence of the different behaviour girls and boys are taught.

...and thus it reflects a difference, but it is the effect and not the cause of a difference. The thinkness of the CC in small children are not different between boys and girls. So either it grows larger by learning, or by hormonal influence during puberty, or there is no gender difference (remember only some studies have found a CC gender difference, other studies have failed to replicated it).

[QUOTE=asurademon]I wish I could remember where I heard about that left brain, right brain thing, maybe it was anthropology or sociology class, or it could have just been some internet site.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Bloodthroe]Well I remember learning that in school and seeing a video. WHEN LEARNING ABOUT THE BRAIN!!! Thing is I have a very good memory... sorry.[/quote]

What level of education are you going through @Asurademon and @Bloodthroe? I have to say that I often find schools teach incorrect information, especially at primary and secondary level. (It usually gets better at university level.) This I think is mostly due to the fact that in basic education, you study so many subjects and you start from scratch, so everything must be simplified. Also, school textbooks (and teachers) are not updated in the same speed as knowledge is, so often what you learn in school is a reflection of the level of knowledge 30 years ago.

[QUOTE=Bloodthroe]As far as the brain, women show more tolerance to pain and have better social skills. While men are stronger physically and mentally and so on. [/quote]

Studies have show that at group level, women have a higher pain tolerence, yes. And men are physically stronger, yes, But that women have better social skills and men are stronger mentally are certainly not confirmed in studies, and if this is what your school teach you, you should question your teachers.

[quote="Bloodthroe]I believe that it's likely to be a society thing is why in the past the majority of gamers was greatly men and not women. Why else are games played by so many women today? No"]

Exactly - that's what I said too somewhere back on page 2. If you want to find the cause to a variable, ie gaming behaviour, that is changing quickly, then you must look for possible explanations among variables who are also changing, ie covariating.

[quote="Bloodthroe]edit- as what I meant by stronger mentally is men get higher scores on math tests and other subjects. While women have their strengths"]

Your teachers need to do some fresh reading on the topic, ít seems. Morril is right, it has not been demostrated that men have better math skills than women. At group level, women score higher than males in arithmetics tests. Or do you refer to school tests rather than scientific tests? In Sweden (and I think in the UK too), girls score higher than boys at school tests in all subjects. (This is of course not because girls are smarter than boys, there is no gender difference in intelligence. What it reflects is the result of an educational system that favours girls rather than boys. It is important though to distingush between school results and actual level of skill or talent.)

However, the concept "mental strenght" needs to be clarified if we are to discuss it. I would define lots of cognitive functions and skills as involved in "mental strength", for instance coping abilities, stress tolerance and problem solving abilities.

I've been in college for a little over 3 years. A LOT of information is debatable that people get even in college, however professors are usually pretty good at making it clear when that's the case. Psychology for example, psychologists still debate how valid the theories of Freud, and others are. Certainly when it comes to differences and similarities between the genders, there's a LOT that's up for debate.
As forthat the left brain right brain thing, I'm now remembering where I heard it, it was actually some teacher back in highschool that first brought it up, so it wasn't in a college class, and I've looked for more information online, which I know the reliability of is debatable.

Not to be insulting, but C elegans are you telling me to trust you over my teachers and the documentaries I saw? I have no idea what your level of education is or where you get your information from. Where as where I learned it, they had tests and results. It's not like they just woke up one day and decided women were smarter then men or whatever. Mankind does know which areas of the brain effect our behavior and what not. You can look at this site and at the brain map to prove it. Alls I'm saying is that what I learned is that biologically a male and a female are able to use certain parts better then the other is to suit our survival.

Yes Bloodthroe, I am telling you to not to trust me as a person, but to trust scientific data over your teachers and over all popular information. Popular media and also popular science often gives distorted, tendentious and simplified views of things. The BBC site you linked to is nice for a young kid or uninterested layman, but the level of simplification is gross and actually partly incorrect. ("Consciousness emerges from our frontal cortex??? Come on!)

As for my level of education I am a neuroscientist, PhD in experimental neuroscience (I have two basic educations, licenced psychologist+MSc in psychology and BSc in neuroscience). My line of work is using neuroimaging to study neurotransmission in the living human brain. I work at a leading brain research lab. I also teach neuroscience and neuropsychology at both basic level and post graduate students at university. I get almost all of my information from Medline, the large international database that contains all published data in medical science from the 1960's until now. This database is used by all life scientists all over the world. To get online access to full articles, one must have an institution license, but abstracts (summaries of scientific articles) is available for everyone. You can find it here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi

The small pieces of information I don't get from the scientific primary literature*, I get from personal communication with colleagues for instance in discussions about work-in-progress, not yet published data.

*Primary literature is the first "official" record of scientific findings, including all original data. It is usually in the form of published articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. (Journals are ranked according to how influencial they are, and before you are allowed to publish, your work must be anonymously reviewed by independent experts in the field).
The primary literature is the only source where the scientific data is

Secondary literature is modified versions of information found in the primary literature. It may be compiled, interpreted and selected, and it is usually not written by the original researchers themselves. Examples of this is review articles, abstract collections and

Tertiary literature (sometimes secondary and tertiary is grouped together) is even further from the original research. Information may be combined, interpreted and simplified. Examples include school textbooks and encyclopedias.

Then there is the popular media...like ordinary newspapers, websites, books or what have you. At my uni we have this competition between labs "who is getting most absurdly distorted by popular media?" Brain transplantations, the gene for you-name-it-disease-that-doesn't-even-show-a-heritable-pattern has been found, the cure for you-name-it-media-construction-that-it-not-even-a-disease has been found...We and genetics share the lead in the competition so far

The site I listed was a simple brain map I searched for in a search engine to show the veiwers of this thread the basic parts of the brain. I realize it's not pinpoint and shows every little thing. Like I said it was just to show an example that the brain has many different parts and we basically know what parts of the brain effect what. Sorry if it was gross to you.

I'm still confused as to your opinion about the topic.

[QUOTE=asurademon]I've been in college for a little over 3 years. A LOT of information is debatable that people get even in college, however professors are usually pretty good at making it clear when that's the case. Psychology for example, psychologists still debate how valid the theories of Freud, and others are. Certainly when it comes to differences and similarities between the genders, there's a LOT that's up for debate.
As forthat the left brain right brain thing, I'm now remembering where I heard it, it was actually some teacher back in highschool that first brought it up, so it wasn't in a college class, and I've looked for more information online, which I know the reliability of is debatable.[/QUOTE]

Correct information is hard currency It shouldn't be that way, but the problem is that politics, ideology, the media industry and many other factors makes it very difficult for all of us to obtain correct information. Another problem is that in fields such as brain functions, psychology and genetics, much is not known yet, which makes the fields open to all sorts of speculations.

When I was at uni, especially the first years, my education was full of teachers who wanted to spread their personal opinions to the students. Many teachers were good, but some were exactly like fanatic religious fundamentalists and used similar strategies to make the students agree with them. It's a scandal that such things can go on at university level, but it's the sad truth. I think the only way to collect reliable information of this type of topics is to go to the primary literature, and make a clear distinction between what raw data says, and what is yours and others personal interpretations, opinions and ideas.

@Bloodthroe: No, it is not at all gross to me, it is just important to me to point out that the BBC site is extremely simplified and partly incorrect. It is not correct that we know what parts of brain effect what. We do to some extent yes, but only in a very rudimentary way. Sure the frontal lobes are involved in consciousness, but so is the brainstem, the parietal lobes, the temporal lobes, the thalamus, the septum, the amygdala and many other structers. Not to even start naming all the different circuits that are hitherto known to be involved. Just to take one example.

What opinions of mine are you confused about? I'll do my best to clarify.

What is in a sense surprising is the tenaciousness with which this idea of Martian Men and Venusian Women keeps appearing in the everyday typing used by intelligent people. People who show very impressive skills development in a variety of areas, including logic, nonetheless accept severely flawed judgements confusing nature with nurture, based on either pop culture media or teaching materials that should never have been used.

Well, I don't intend to get involved in the discussion, I just wanna say thanks to Bloodthroe for the link - it was very interesting to read all these things in English, I picked up a couple of new words

[QUOTE=fable]What is in a sense surprising is the tenaciousness with which this idea of Martian Men and Venusian Women keeps appearing in the everyday typing used by intelligent people.[/QUOTE]

I would assume this must be due to what the sociologists have demonstrated regarding how people identify themselves. Second after species (human), our identification of ourselves as male or female, it the most fundamental for our self concept. This probably makes many people highly reluctant to change the predefinied norms of what is "male" or "female", since norm breaking behaviour is always punished by the group. Humans are very sensitive to social punishment, especially when it comes to areas that is perceived as basic, fundamental.

The whole society in the so called civilised world, is based on the core family as the smallest possible reproductive unit. The gender roles in our soceity is strongly associated with the core family concept. Since the media industry is always putting a strong pressure on creating images that are easy and quick to grasp, it is of course always best for their industry to use images that people are primed for, have a strong "pre cognition" of. So politics, social structure, religion, popular media and pop culture together with the inner notion that gender identity knits an image of gender roles that is automatically maintained and self reinforcing. I think people like it because it is familiar, not because it is correct. It also offers easy explanations to lots of things, and easy explanatory models are always more powerful and get more popular than a correct but complex explanatory model.

So politics, social structure, religion, popular media and pop culture together with the inner notion that gender identity knits an image of gender roles that is automatically maintained and self reinforcing. I think people like it because it is familiar, not because it is correct. It also offers easy explanations to lots of things, and easy explanatory models are always more powerful and get more popular than a correct but complex explanatory model.

Given, and understood before you stated it. Yet for all that, it still amazes me that people of considerable intelligence fail to see, as the cliche has it, outside the box, especially when they pride themselves on being (in many cases) free of superstition, influence by others, in short, utterly rational and supremely individual human beings. Presumably this very notion of being uninfluenced makes influence that much easier; and the person who claims to be free of all prejudice is just turning a blind eye to their own cultural values.

[QUOTE=fable]Given, and understood before you stated it. Yet for all that, it still amazes me that people of considerable intelligence fail to see, as the cliche has it, outside the box, especially when they pride themselves on being (in many cases) free of superstition, influence by others, in short, utterly rational and supremely individual human beings.[/QUOTE]

I the the basic issue here is that humans are not rational. The idea that the human being is rational is a misconception, based on a variety of ideologies ranging from religion, philosophy, older sociology and other theoretical frameworks not based on actual studies of human behaviour but instead of opinion and inductive conclusions.

Studies of human behaviour in modern psychology all point in the same direction: humans do not behave rationally. Our concept of rationality stems from certain ideals that are not consistent with how humans make decision, make choices, form their value systems and opinions.

We are all irrational to certain degrees and within different fields - what areas a given person will be more or less irrational in, is dependent on many factors such as personality traits, sociocultural environment, education, etc. An area where most people in the Western world are irrational is choice of partner - we often choose a partner we fall in love with, although love in itself is not a product of rational thinking. We may fall in love with person A although person B would probably suit us better in the long run. We may meet people who fulfil all known critera for long lasting relationships, still we don't necessarily fall in love with them.

However, to a large extent people can actually choose what areas they will allow themselves to be irrational or not. The professor in psychology at my university is an extremely rational scientist in his 60's. He rides his bike in the traffic as if he was a racing cyclist. He very well knows that bikers are the largest group of head trauma patients in Stockholm. He knows that statistically, he is putting himself at great risk, and for a scientist also a minor cogntive decline will affect his work very negatively as opposed to if he had a risk-behaviour where other parts of the body where at the highest risk. (For instance, if he was skateboarding to work instead, he would risk wrist and arm injuries rather than head injuries). Still, he thinks it is worth the risk because going really fast with his bike gives him a kick and makes him happy. So it is a calculated risk that he has choosen to take.

Now, this guy is a leading professor in psychology, so his base of knowledge may make it easier for him to keep up a high self awareness and make counscious choices than the average person. However, I use him as an example because I'm convinced that everybody makes a lot of similar choices, although everybody is not fully aware of having made the choice. Regarding gender stereotypes, as with all stereotypes, we have to consider there is a lot of gain involved.

Whereas gender stereotyping gives an incorrect view of the world and serve as a barrier for understanding and knowing more about human behaviour, it also provides a guide for how you should and are expected to behave in different contexts and towards other people. The great thing with sweeping, overgeneralised models that you have learned during your upbringing, is that they serve as a guide you can lean back on without effort. Imagine how much time and energy you can save by using the already existing stereotypes not only as guideline for you own behaviour, but also for interpreting everybody else's behaviour! Since there are only 2 sexes, categorisation is very simple.

I think gender stereotyping can be compared to any other ideology that simplify people's lives. It works the same way as dogmatic religion or political views. Having this kind of stable framework also gives an illusion of safety and familiarity - you feel that you know, understand and recognise without needing to put a lot of time and energy into collecting and evaluating information. Instead, you can use that time and energy to other things.

So, in brief for everybody who didn't read my long post:
Summary: A long line of evidence support the view that humans being are not governed by rationality, but by other factors. Striving for a world view that is as objectively correct as possible is not desirable for most people. Instead, striving for a world view that fits your personal circumstances and characteristics is more desirable. It is in this context we have to view the maintainace of gender role stereotypes.

rpg's male dominated

I agree with a great deal of what CElegans says. However this last post tends to emphasise the individual more than the other factors she and others have referred to in the past. I think we just don't have time to develop rational, thought out positions in every area. We accept a great deal we learned in early life and put more effort into particular aspects which become important for various reasons and through experience. It seems likely that the "truth" of gender is important to almost everyone so you would think this would be an area where rationality would be more widespread. This doesn't seem to be true. Gender steretypes are supported by a lot of institutions and this leads me to believe that there is a lot of economic and political advantage to maintaining them. Therefore the individual cannot easily act on the conclusions they reach, and no amount of effort can do much more than modify the societal concensus. Progress will take more than a couple of generations, and it is made harder because even research in the field seems to be quite gendered. For example in this country there is a lot of media attention for the views of those I call "neo-darwinists" for want of a better word. Much of this tries to relate gendered behaviour to presumed survival strategies in the distant past. As we cannot know what would be required in prehistoric times this seems disingenuous. It becomes positively dangerous when it is used to suggest that the changes in society should be geared to recognise and reinforce those "traits" in a world which bears no relation to the presumed conditions in which they developed.I think the truth is this alleged research is being used for political ends to support a particular agenda.
In view of the uncertainties in the scientific evidence to date, I would suggest that at this stage science has little to say about how we should live or organise society. In the end we all seem to me to be more similar than we are different, at least in our aspirations. I think it would be useful to start from there and to treat people as individuals. Even if there are average differences this won't tell you about any particular person, so what is the use of identifying them? It is seldom for the advancement of pure knowledge, though the researchers might themselves intend that.

Guys can I ask a favor: Can you use words that a Redneck can understand? I dont have all these fancy diplomas that say I understand very big words.

Fiona wrote:However this last post tends to emphasise the individual more than the other factors she and others have referred to in the past.

Yes. Whereas factors at the level of society are stronger determinants for gender stereotyping than individual factors are, I still think it's important to point out some individual factors that influence people's opinions. Whenever you see individual differences among people who share the same sociocultural context, you must address individual factors. If individual factors didn't play a role at all, then all people in the same context (for instance all middle-class 30-year olds in London) would share the same views. Thus, we can conclude that individual factors do play a part. People repond differently to the same environmental pressure.

Fiona]Gender steretypes are supported by a lot of institutions and this leads me to believe that there is a lot of economic and political advantage to maintaining them. <snip> For example in this country there is a lot of media attention for the views of those I call wrote:
I totally agree with this. Do you live in the US? The concept of quasi-biologically determined feminism comes from the US, and it's the worst kind of pseudoscience. It's also very popular in the UK, but in recent years the trend has spread throughout the rest of Europe.
The conclusions are pure speculation, most often by media but sometimes by the scientists themselves. A fresh example is a study of rats eating behaviour, that shows that when sugar was added to the food, female rats eat more sweet food that male rats. Conclusion in popular media: "Women's bodies are made for eating chocolate". Now, it should be noted that 1. Rats can store sugar as fat, which humans cannot. 2. Sugar is not the same as chocolate. 3. Rat's differ a lot from humans, and we can't readily generalise behaviours female rats to female humans.

It's getting increasingly difficult to get funding for science that do not include a "gender perspective". At my lab, we've had problems both with national (in Sweden) and international (such as NIH in the US and EU-funds in Europe) research grants institutions because we are doing research on human brain functioning and we are not interested in looking at differences between men and women. Researchers who investigate gender issues get more money than those who don't. That's how politics regulate science in a very fundamental way.

A very important issue though, is that let's assume that it is "evolutionary determined" that women have certain behaviours and men others. Does this mean it is desirable and that we should build society on this? Rape, murder and pedophilia is totally natural and "evolutionary determined". Does that mean we want to keep it?

In view of the uncertainties in the scientific evidence to date, I would suggest that at this stage science has little to say about how we should live or organise society.

Science aims to explain natural phenomena, without valuing. It is amoral - it can only offer explanations why things are a certain way and describe the mechanism behind this, but science has nothing to say about how things should or what is good for people. Such task are for moral philosophy and politics to find out. I do however think that scientific findings can contribute to some prerequisites when it comes to forming ideas of how humans should live and organise societies. For instance, the reason why I stressed the irrationality of the human being above, is that all current political ideologies in the western world assume rationality as a basis for human decision making. This is clearly not so, as demonstrated by a long line of modern research. Science can not tell us whether we should adapt our political systems to the fact that humans are not rational, or if we should make political and social systems where people can learn to be more rational, or some third or forth alternative - but science can point out that current political systems are based on the idea that the human species have characteristics they do no have, and thus, it may not be so surprising that a system based on an erranous prerequisite does not work out well.